Bethlehem Road (9 page)

The business in Birmingham from which Hamilton drew most of his income was merely a matter of inherited shares, and unremarkable in any way Pitt could discover.

Barclay Hamilton owned a very pleasant house in Chelsea and was reputed to be quiet, a little melancholy, but perfectly respectable. No one had ill to speak of him, and his financial affairs were in excellent order. He was a highly eligible young man at whom many young ladies of fine family had set their caps, without success. But nothing was said, even in a whisper, to his discredit.

Nor had the cold breath of scandal ever touched Amethyst Hamilton. She did not overspend on gowns or jewelry, she ran her house with skill but without extravagance, she entertained generously in her husband’s interest. She had many friendships, but none of a closeness that caused even the most critical to make comment that was worth Pitt’s time to consider.

A more thorough investigation of Hamilton’s political career, the account of which Pitt spent many hours reading and rereading, produced no injustices so glaring as to have provoked anything like murder. He had been the object of envy perhaps, of resentment that favors had been unequally given, but all this was a part of a hundred other political lives as well. He appeared to have taken no remarkable stand on any issue that could single him out as the object of violent feeling. He was a competent man, both liked and respected, but not marked for that greatness which inspires passion.

In the meantime Micah Drummond had as many of his force as he could spare in pursuit of every known band of anarchists or pseudo-revolutionaries who might have used such a means to further their cause. He spoke to senior officers in many other police districts of London, and even to the Foreign Office to see if they were acquainted with any other nation or power who might have had an interest in the death of a member of Parliament. Eventually he gave what he had to Pitt and told him to try his own sources in the underworld and its fringes, to see if he could pick up any whispers.

Pitt read the reports and discarded three quarters of them. The constables had done their job thoroughly, and their own informant had exhausted everything likely to produce any information of use. Of the last quarter he chose the few he could follow through fences, petty thieves, or small-time forgers who owed him a favor, or who were seeking some advantage.

He changed out of his own clothes, removed the beautiful boots Emily had given him, and got into some shapeless trousers and a jacket so old and rimed with dirt he could pass without comment in the poorest of tenements or rookeries, the grimmest of East End docks or public houses. Then he went out, took a cab for two miles eastward and got out just short of the Whitechapel Road.

In the next three hours he spoke to half a dozen petty criminals, always moving eastward towards Mile End, and then south to the river and Wapping. He had a thick sandwich and glass of rough cider in a public house overlooking the water and then set off again deeper into the slums and narrow, fetid streets within sound and smell of the Thames, looking towards Limehouse Reach. At last, in the late afternoon, he had enough information to trade for what he wanted.

He found the right man up crooked stairs, damp with the rot of ages, a thousand yards from the pier stakes where once they had tied pirates and let the tide rise to drown them. He stopped at a doorway and knocked on the warped panels.

After several minutes it was opened a crack and there was a rumbling growl with a high-pitched menace at the back of it—a dog who would attack at the slightest misstep. Pitt looked down and saw the beast’s head, a white blur in the shadows, a piglike cross between a bull terrier and a setter.

The door swung a little wider to show yellow oil light behind and a squat man with a thick neck and pale bristly hair cut in the “terrier crop” of one recently in prison. His face was ruddy and his eyebrows so pale they seemed colorless, almost translucent. It was not until he pulled the door fully open that Pitt saw he had a wooden leg below a fat thigh cut off above the knee. He knew he had the right man.

Pitt eyed the dog which stood between them. “Deacon Stafford?” he asked.

“Yeah—’oo’re yer? Wotcher want? I dunno yer.” He surveyed Pitt up and down, then looked at his hands. “Yer a crusher out o’ twig!”

So his disguise was far less effective than he had thought. He must remember his fingernails next time.

“Thin Jimmy said you might be helpful,” Pitt said quietly. “I have certain information you would find useful.”

“Thin Jimmy ... Well, come in. I in’t standin’ ’ere; I got a bad leg.”

Pitt had heard Deacon’s story. His father had “got the boat” to Australia back when deportation was still a common punishment for petty robbery, and his mother had been sent with her three children to the workhouse. Young William Stafford had been set to work “picking oakum”—unraveling old rope—at the age of three. At six he had run away, and after begging and stealing till he was on the point of starvation, he had been picked up by a kidsman, a man who trained and ran a bunch of child thieves and pick-pockets, taking the largest portion of their profits, fencing them, and in return giving them food and protection. William had picked pockets successfully “cly faking,” then progressed to a higher form of the art, specializing in stealing from women—“fine-wiring.” After a spell in the Coldbath Fields jail, the damp had got into his bones and his fingers lost their nimbleness. He took to “flying the blue pigeon”—stealing roofing lead, most particularly from churches, which earned him his nickname. A bad fall on a freezing night had resulted in a splintered thigh, which became gangrenous, costing him his leg. Now he sat in this narrow room piled with furniture by the embers of a smoky fire and traded information and power.

Deacon offered Pitt a seat in the huge overstuffed chair opposite his own, a yard from the fire, and the dog waddled in and lay between them, watching Pitt with its pink piggy eyes.

“So wotcher got?” Deacon asked curiously. “Thin Jimmy knows me, ’e’s a downy little swine, but ’e don’ give me no flam—so don’ you neither, or yer’ll get a right dew-skitch afore yer leaves Lime’ouse.”

Pitt had no doubt that indeed he would be thrashed soundly if he gave Deacon any “flam.” Word for word, he passed on the information he had gleaned so carefully all day. Deacon looked satisfied; the light of a deep inner jubilation spread over his broad face, and his lips parted in a gummy smile.

“Right. So wotcher want from me, then? This in’t fer nuffin’!”

“Westminster Bridge murder,” Pitt replied candidly. “Anarchists? Irish Fenians? Revolutionaries? What do you hear?”

Deacon was surprised. “Nuffink! Least, o’ course I ’eard a bit! Ten years ago I’d ’a said ’Arry Parkin. Great one fer the anarchists, ’e were, but ’e were crapped in ’eighty-three. Three week in the saltbox, then the long drop fer ’im. ’E were never good fer nuffink but bug ’unting anyway, poor bastard.”

“They don’t hang people for robbing drunks,” Pitt pointed out.

“Killed some shofulman,” Deacon explained. “Paid ’im in fakement, an Parkin cracked ’is ’ead open. Stupid bastard!”

“Not much help,” Pitt said dryly. “Try a little harder.”

“I’ll ask Mary Murphy,” Deacon offered. “She’s an ’ore. Sails on ’er bottom—no pimp. She’ll ’ave ’eard if it’s the Fenians, but I reckon it in’t.”

“Anarchists?” Pitt pressed.

Deacon shook his head. “Nah! That in’t the way their minds goes. Stick a shiv in some geezer on Westminster Bridge! Wot good’d that do ’em? They’d go fer a bomb, summink showy. Loves bombs, they do. All talk, they are—never do nuffink so quiet.”

“Then what is the word down here?”

“Croaked by someone as ’ated ’im, personal like.” Deacon opened his little eyes wide. “In’t no flam—I makes me livin’ by blowin’, I’d be a muck snipe in a munf if I done that! In’t quick enough to thieve no more. I’d ’ave ter try a scaldrum dodge, an that in’t no way ter live!”

No, begging by fake or self-inflicted wounds would hardly fit Deacon’s sense of his own dignity.

“No,” Pitt agreed, standing slowly, keeping his eye on the dog. “Nor is sitting in lavender in some deadlurk the rest of your days.” It was a cant term for hiding from the police in an empty house.

Deacon understood the threat perfectly, nor did he appear to resent it: it was an expected part of trade.

“That murder in’t nuffink ter do wiv us in the East End,” he said with total candor. “Don’ do us no good. An’ we knows abaht anarchists and the like, because it pays us ter. I’ll keep an ear for yer, seein’ as yer gave me wot I wanted. But me best word to you is that it in’t nuffink revolutionary, yer’d best look to ’is own sort.”

“Or a random lunatic,” Pitt said grimly.

“Oh.” Deacon sighed deeply. “Well, there’s some o’ vem an’ all, but not from ’ere. We takes care o’ vem our own way. Look to ’is own sort, mister, vat’s wot I says. ’Is own sort.”

It was five days after Emily’s wedding and departure on the boat train for Paris that Pitt was awakened from his first early night since the murder by a loud and urgent knocking on his front door. He emerged slowly from the soft, sweet darkness of sleep into a realization that the thumping was no part of a dream but persisted into reality, demanding his attention.

“What is it?” Charlotte asked drowsily at his side. Funny how she could sleep through this noise, and yet if one of the children but whispered she was wide awake and up on her feet getting into her robe before he had struggled to consciousness.

“Door,” he said Wearily, reaching in the dark to find his jacket and trousers. It could only be for him, and he would be required to go somewhere out into the sharp night. He fumbled for his socks and found only one.

Charlotte sat up and felt around for a match to light the gas.

“Don’t,” he said softly. “It’s around here somewhere.”

She did not ask who it was at the door; she knew from experience it could only be a constable with some urgent news. She did not like it, but she accepted the fact that it was a part of his life. What she dreaded was the knock that might come when he was not here, and that the news would be that which she could not bear.

Pitt found his other sock, put it on, and stood up. He leaned over and kissed her, then tiptoed to the bedroom door and downstairs to find his boots and answer the summons.

He unlocked the front door and swung it open. There was a constable on the step, the streetlamp beyond lighting one side of his face.

“There’s been another one!” His words came out in a rush, relief that Pitt was there easing his lonely horror. “Mr. Drummond says as you’re to come right away. I got a cab, sir, if you’re ready.”

Pitt noticed the hansom standing a few doors along, horse restless, cabby sitting on his box with the reins in his hands, a blanket round his knees. The horse’s breath formed a thin cloud of vapor in the air.

“Another what?” Pitt was confused for a moment.

“Another member of Parliament, sir, with ’is throat cut an’ tied up to the lamppost on Westminster Bridge—just like the last one.”

For a moment Pitt was stunned. He had not expected it; he had been convinced by Deacon that it was a personal crime, motivated by fear or greed or some long-sought revenge. Now it seemed the only answer was the worst of all: a random lunatic was at work.

“Who is it?” he said aloud.

“Vyvyan Etheridge. Never ’eard of ’im meself,” the constable answered anxiously. “But then, I don’t know much abaht politicians, ’cept them as everyone knows.”

“We’d better go.” Pitt reached for his coat, gloves still in his pockets, and then closed the door and followed the constable along the damp pavement, the dew condensing on the walls, which gleamed in the gaslight. They climbed into the cab, and immediately it set off back towards the bridge.

Pitt wriggled round tucking in his shirttails under his coat. He should have put more clothes on; he was going to be cold.

“What else do you know?” he asked in the rattling darkness, bumping against the sides of the cab as they swung sharply round a corner. “What time is it?”

“It must be about quarter to midnight, sir,” the constable replied, hitching himself back into his seat more comfortably, only to be thrown out of it again as they swung the other way. “Poor soul was found just after eleven o’clock. ’Ouse sat late again. ’E was prob’ly killed on the way ’ome, like the other one. ’E lives off the Lambeth Palace Road, south side o’ the river again.”

“Anything else?”

“Not as I knows, sir.”

Pitt did not ask who had found the body; he preferred to make his own judgment when he got there. They careered through the spring night in silence, bumping against each other as the cab jolted and jarred round corners, righted itself again, and charged on.

They drew up at the far end of Westminster Bridge and Pitt scrambled out into the glare of the lamplight. A group of people stood frightened, at once fascinated and repelled. None of them was permitted to go, neither did anyone want to. Some horror kept them close to each other, as though they were unwilling to leave those who had shared the knowledge here in the pool of light, islanded amidst the shadows.

Micah Drummond’s lean figure was easily distinguished, and Pitt went to him. On the ground, laid in some semblance of decency, was the body of a man of late middle age, dressed in sober clothes of excellent quality, a silk hat beside him on the pavement. A white silk scarf had been cut with a knife, and lay a little to one side of his neck. It was soaked with blood, which also drenched his shirtfront, and there was a single fearful wound in his neck from one side right across to the other.

Pitt knelt and looked more closely. The face looked calm, as if he had not seen death coming. It was a narrow patrician face, not unpleasing, with a long nose, a good brow, the mouth perhaps a little lacking in humor but without cruelty. The man’s hair was silver, but still thick. There were fresh flowers pale in the buttonhole.

Pitt looked away and up at Drummond.

“Vyvyan Etheridge, M.P.,” Drummond said quietly. He looked haggard, his eyes hollow, his mouth pinched. Pitt felt a quick stab of pity for him. Tomorrow all London, from the scrubwoman to the Prime Minister, would be calling for a solution to these outrages, stunned that members of the establishment, whether loved or hated, men considered safe above all others, could be killed silently and unseen within a few hundred yards of the Houses of Parliament.