Bluegate Fields (31 page)

“Disappeared? What do you mean ‘disappeared’? People of that sort are always coming and going—jetsam, scum of society, always drifting from one place to another. Lucky we caught them when we did, or maybe we wouldn’t have got their testimony. Don’t talk rubbish, man. They haven’t disappeared like a decent citizen might. They’ve just gone from one whorehouse to another. Means nothing—nothing at all. Do you hear me?”

Since he was shouting at the top of his voice, the question was redundant.

“Of course I can hear you, sir,” Pitt answered, stonefaced.

Athelstan flushed crimson with anger.

“Stand still when I’m talking to you! Now I hear you’ve been to see Jerome—not only once, but twice! What for, that’s what I should like to know—what for? We don’t need a confession now. The man’s been proved guilty. Jury of his peers—that’s the law of the land.” He swung his arms around, crossing them in front of him in a scissor-like motion. “The thing is finished. The Metropolitan Police Force pays you to catch criminals, Pitt, and, if you can, to prevent crime in the first place. It does not pay you to defend them, or to try and discredit the law courts and their verdicts! Now if you can’t do that job properly, as you’re told, then you’d better leave the force and find something you can do. Do you understand me?”

“No, sir, I don’t!” Pitt stood stiff as a ramrod. “Are you telling me that I’m to do only exactly what I’m told, without following my own intelligence or my own suspicions—or else I’ll be dismissed?”

“Don’t be so damn stupid!” Athelstan slammed the desk with his hand. “Of course I’m not! You’re a detective—but not on any damn case you like! I am telling you, Pitt, that if you don’t leave the Jerome business alone, I’ll put you back to walking the beat as a constable—and I can do it, I promise you.”

“Why?” Pitt faced him, demanding an explanation, trying to back him into saying something indefensible. “I haven’t seen any witnesses. I haven’t been near the Waybournes or the Swynfords. But why shouldn’t I talk to Abigail Winters or Albie Frobisher, or visit Jerome? What do you think anyone is going to say that can matter now? What can they change? Who’s going to say something different?”

“Nobody! Nobody at all! But you’re stirring up a lot of ill-feeling. You’re making people doubt, making them think there’s something being hidden, something nasty and dirty, still secret. And that amounts to slander!”

“Like what, for instance—what is there still to find out?”

“I don’t know! Dear God—how should I know what’s in your twisted mind? You’re obsessed! But I’m telling you, Pitt, I’ll break you if you take one more step in this case. It’s closed. We’ve got the man who is guilty. The courts have tried him and sentenced him. You have no right to question their decision or cast doubts on it! You are undermining the law, and I won’t have it!”

“I’m not undermining the law!” Pitt said derisively. “I’m trying to make sure we’ve got all the evidence, to make sure we don’t make mistakes—”

“We haven’t made any mistakes!” Athelstan’s face was purple and there was a muscle jumping in his jowl. “We found the evidence, the courts decide, and it’s not part of your job to sit in judgment. Now get out and find this arsonist, and take care of whatever else there is on your desk. If I have to call you back up here over Maurice Jerome, or anything to do with that case, anything whatsoever, I’ll see you back as a constable. Right now, Pitt!” He flung out his arm and pointed at the door. “Out!”

There was no point in arguing. “Yes, sir,” Pitt said wearily. “I’m going.”

Before the end of the week, Pitt knew why he had not been able to find Albie. The news came as a courtesy from the Deptford police station. It was just a simple message that a body that had been pulled out of the river might be Albie, and if it was of any interest to Pitt, he was welcome to come and look at it.

He went. After all, Albie Frobisher was involved in one of his cases, or had been. That he had been pulled out of the water at Deptford did not mean that that was where he had gone in—far more likely Bluegate Fields, where Pitt had last seen him.

He did not tell anyone where he was going. He said simply that the Deptford station had sent a message for him, a possible identification of a corpse. That was reasonable enough, and happened all the time, men from one station assisting another.

It was one of those hard, glittering days when the east wind comes off the Channel like a whip, lashing the skin, stinging the eyes. Pitt pulled his collar higher, his muffler tighter around his throat, then jammed his hat down so the wind did not catch it under the brim and snatch it off.

The cab ran smartly along the streets, horses’ hooves ringing on the ice-cold stones, the cabby bundled so high in clothes he could hardly see. When they stopped at the Deptford police station, Pitt got out, already stiff with cold from sitting still. He paid the cabbie and dismissed him. He might be a long time; he wanted to know far more than the identity—if this was indeed Albie.

Inside there was a potbellied stove burning, with a kettle on it, and a uniformed constable sat near the stove with a mug of tea in his hand. He recognized Pitt and stood up.

“Morning, Mr. Pitt, sir. You come to look at that corpse we got? Like a cup o’ tea first? Not a nice sight, and a wicked cold day, sir.”

“No, thanks—see it first, then I’d like one. Talk about it a bit—if it’s the bloke I know.”

“Poor little beggar.” The constable shook his head. “Still maybe ’e’s best out of it. Lived longer than some of ’em. We’ve still got ’im ’ere, out the back. No hurry for the morgue on a day like this.” He shivered. “Reckon as we could keep ’em froze right ’ere for a week!”

Pitt was inclined to agree. He nodded at the constable and shuddered in sympathy.

“Fancy keeping a morgue, do you?”

“Well, they’d ’ave to be less trouble ’n the live ones.” The constable was a philosopher. “And don’t need no feedin’!” He led the way through a narrow corridor whistling with drafts, down some stone steps, and up into a bare room where a sheet covered a lumpy outline on a wooden table.

“There you are, sir. ’E the one wot you knows?”

Pitt pulled the sheet off the head and looked down. The river had made its mark. There was mud and a little slimy weed on the hair, the skin was smudged, but it was Albie Frobisher.

He looked farther down, at the neck. There was no need to ask how he had died; there were finger marks, bruised and dark, on the flesh. He had probably been dead before he hit the water. Pitt moved the sheet off the rest of him, automatically. He would be careless to overlook anything else, if there was anything.

The body was even thinner than he had expected, younger than it had seemed with clothes on. The bones were so slight and the skin still had the blemishless, translucent quality of childhood. Perhaps that had been part of his stock in trade, his success.

“Is that ’im?” the constable said from just behind him.

“Yes.” Pitt put the sheet back over him. “Yes, that’s Albie Frobisher. Do you know anything about it?”

“Not much to know,” the constable said grimly. “We get ’em out of the river every week, sometimes every day in the winter. Some of ’em we recognize, a lot we never know. You finished ’ere?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Then come back and ’ave that cup o’ tea.” He led the way back to the potbellied stove and the kettle. They both sat down with steaming mugs.

“He was strangled,” Pitt said unnecessarily. “You’ll be treating it as murder?”

“Oh, yes.” The constable pulled a face. “Not that I suppose it’ll make much difference. ’Oo knows ’oo killed the poor little beggar? Could ’ave bin anyone, couldn’t it? ’Oo was ’e anyway?”

“Albert Frobisher,” Pitt replied, aware of the irony of such a name. “At least that’s how we knew him. He was a male prostitute.”

“Oh—the one wot gave evidence in the Waybourne case—poor little swine. Didn’t last long, did ’e? Killed to do with that, was ’e?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well—” The constable finished the last of his tea and set the mug down. “Could ’ave bin, couldn’t it? Then again, in that sort o’ trade you can get killed for lots o’ different reasons. All comes to the same in the end, don’t it? Want ’im, I suppose? Shall I send ’im up to your station?”

“Yes, please.” Pitt stood up. “We’d better tidy it up. It may have nothing to do with the Waybourne case, but he comes from Bluegate Fields anyway. Thanks for the tea.” He handed the mug back.

“Welcome, sir, I’m sure. I’ll send ’im along as soon as my sergeant gives the word. It’ll be this afternoon, though. No point in ’anging around.”

“Thank you. Good day, Constable.”

“ ’Day, sir.”

Pitt walked toward the shining stretch of the river. It was slack tide, and the black slime of the embankment smelled acrid. The wind rippled the surface and caught tiny white shreds of spray up against slow-moving barges. They were going up the river to the Pool of London and the docks. Pitt wondered where they had come from, those shrouded cargoes. Could be anywhere on earth: the deserts of Africa, the wastes north of Hudson Bay where it was winter six months long, the jungles of India, or the reefs of the Caribbean. And that was without even going outside the Empire. He remembered seeing the map of the world, with British possessions all in red—seemed to be every second country. They said the sun never set on the Empire.

And this city was the heart of it all. London was where your Queen lived, whether you were in the Sudan or the Cape of Good Hope, Tasmania, Barbados, the Yukon, or Katmandu.

Did a boy like Albie ever know that he lived in the heart of such a world? Did the inhabitants of those teeming, rotten slums behind the proud streets ever conceive in their wildest drunken or opium-scented dreams of the wealth they were part of? All that immense might—and they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, even begin on the disease at home.

The barges were gone, the water shining silver in their wake, the flat light brilliant as the sun moved slowly westward. Some hours hence, the sky would redden, giving the pall-like clouds of the factories and docks the illusion of beauty before sunset.

Pitt straightened up and started to walk. He must find a cab and get back to the station. Athelstan would have to allow him to investigate now. This was a new murder. It might have nothing to do with Jerome or Arthur Waybourne, but it was still a murder. And murder must be solved, if it can be.

“No!” Athelstan shouted, rising to his feet. “Good God, Pitt! The boy was a prostitute! He catered to perverts! He was bound to end up either dead of some disease or murdered by a customer or a pimp or something. If we spent time on every dead prostitute, we’d need a force twice the size, and we’d still do nothing else. Do you know how many deaths there are in London every day?”

“No, sir. Do they stop mattering once they get past a certain number?”

Athelstan slammed his hand on the desk, sending papers flying.

“God dammit, Pitt, I’ll have your rank for insubordination! Of course it matters! If there was any chance, or any reason, I’d investigate it right to the end. But murder of a prostitute is not uncommon. If you take up a trade like that, then you expect violence—and disease—and sooner or later you’ll get it!

“I’m not sending my men out to comb the streets uselessly. We’ll never find out who killed Albie Frobisher. It could have been any one of a thousand people—ten thousand! Who knows who went into that house? Anyone! Anyone at all. Nobody sees them—that’s the nature of the place—and you bloody well know that as well as I do. I’m not wasting an inspector’s time, yours or anyone else’s, chasing after a hopeless case.

“Now get out of here and find that arsonist! You know who he is—so arrest him before we have another fire! And if I hear you mention Maurice Jerome, the Waybournes, or anything else to do with it again, I’ll put you back on the beat—and that I swear—so help me, God!”

Pitt said nothing more. He turned on his heel and walked out, leaving Athelstan still standing, his face crimson, his fists clenched on the desk.

C
HARLOTTE WAS STUNNED
when Pitt told her that Albie was dead; it was something she had not even considered, in spite of the terrifying number of deaths she had heard of among such people. Somehow it had not occurred to her that Albie, whose face and even something of his feelings she knew, would the within the space of her brief acquaintance with his life.

“How?” she demanded furiously, caught by surprise as well as pain. “What happened to him?”

Pitt looked tired; there were fine lines of strain on his face that she knew were not usually pronounced enough to see. He sat down heavily, close to the kitchen fire as though he had no warmth within.

She controlled the words that flew to her lips, and forced herself to wait. There was a wound inside him. She knew it as she did when Jemima cried, wordlessly clinging to her, trusting her to understand what was beyond explaining.

“He was murdered,” he said at last. “Strangled, and then put in the river.” His face twisted. “Irony in that, of a sort. All that water, dirty river water, not like Arthur Waybourne’s nice clean bath. They pulled him out at Deptford.”

There was no point in making it worse. She pulled herself together and concentrated on the practical. After all, she consciously reminded herself, people like Albie died all over London all the time. The only difference with Albie was that they had perceived him as an individual; they knew he understood what he was as clearly as they did—surely even more so—and shared some of their disgust.

“Are they going to let you investigate?” she asked. She was pleased with herself; her voice showed none of the struggle inside her, of her image of the wet body. “Or do the Deptford police want it? There is a station at Deptford, isn’t there?”

Tired enough to sleep even crumpled where he sat, he looked up at her. But if she dropped the spoon she held, turned, and took him in her arms, she knew it would only make it worse. She would be treating it like a tragedy, and him like a child, instead of a man. She continued stirring the soup she was making.

“Yes, there is,” he replied, unaware of her crowding thoughts. “And no, they don’t want it—they’ll send it to us. He lived in Bluegate Fields, and he was part of one of our cases. And no, we’re not going to investigate it. Athelstan says that if you are a prostitute, then murder is to be expected, and hardly to be remarked on. Certainly it is not worth police time to look into. It would be wasted. Customers kill people like that, or procurers do, or they die of disease. It happens every day. And God help us, he’s right.”