Southampton Row (28 page)

“Yes, I have. But I still do not think he is guilty of having killed Maude Lamont.”

“You do not want to think it. What can I do to help you, more than simply listen?”

“I must discover who killed Maude Lamont, even though that is really Tellman’s job, because the people she blackmailed are part of the effort to discredit Serracold . . .”

Sadness and anger filled her eyes. “They have already succeeded, with the poor man’s own help. You will have to perform a miracle if you are to rescue him now.” Then she brightened. “Unless, of course, you can demonstrate that Voisey had a hand in it. If he obtained her murder . . .” She stopped. “I think that would be good fortune beyond our reach. He would not be so foolish. Above all, he is clever. But he will be behind the blackmail; it just depends how far behind! Can you prove that?”

He leaned forward a little. “I may be able to.” He saw her eyes shine, and he knew she was thinking of Mario Corena again. She could not weep. She had already shed all her tears for him, first in Rome in ‘48, then here in London only a few weeks ago. But the loss was still raw. Perhaps it always would be. “I need to know why Kingsley was being blackmailed,” he went on. “I think it was to do with the death of his son.” Briefly, he told her what he had learned, first about Kingsley himself and his part in the Zulu Wars, and then the ambush at Mfolozi, so soon after the heroism of Rorke’s Drift.

“I see,” she said when he had finished. “It is very hard to follow in the steps of a father or brother who has succeeded in the eyes of the world, most especially in the world of military courage. Many young men have thrown away their lives rather than be thought to fail in what was expected of them.” There was a weight of sadness in her voice, and memory sharp and painful in her eyes. Perhaps she was thinking of the Crimea, of Balaclava, and the Alma, or of Rorke’s Drift, Isandlwana, or the Indian Mutiny and God knew how many other wars and losses. Her memory might even have stretched back as far as her girlhood, and Waterloo.

“Aunt Vespasia . . . ?”

She brought herself back to the present with a jolt. “Of course,” she agreed. “It will not be too difficult for me to learn from one friend or another what really happened to young Kingsley at Mfolozi, but I think it hardly matters, except to his father. No doubt what was used to blackmail him was the possibility of a coward’s death. It did not have to be the fact. It is not only the wicked who run where no man pursues, it is also the vulnerable, those who care more than they are able to govern, and who have raw wounds they cannot defend.”

Pitt thought of Kingsley’s bent shoulders and the haggard lines of his face. It took a particular kind of sadism to torture a man in such a way for one’s own profit. For a moment he hated Voisey with a passion that would have exploded in physical violence, had he been there to lash out at.

“Of course it may be that the incident of his death is so blurred that the truth cannot be known, or a lie dismissed,” Vespasia went on. “But I shall do all I can to find out, and if it is of any ease at all, I shall inform General Kingsley of it.”

“Thank you.”

“Which is not a great deal of use in tying the blackmail to Voisey,” she continued with a trace of anger. “What hope have you of discovering the identity of this third person? I assume you know it is a man? You refer to him as ‘he.’ ”

“Yes. It is a man of late middle years, fair or gray hair, average height and build. He seems to be well educated.”

“Your theologian,” she said unhappily. “If he went to a spirit medium with the intent of proving her a fraud and unmasking her in front of her clients, that would not please Voisey very much. I think we may assume he could retaliate, perhaps with extreme pressure.”

That was impossible to argue against. Pitt remembered the look in Voisey’s eyes as they had passed each other in the House of Commons. Voisey forgot nothing and forgave nothing. Again Pitt found himself sitting in the light of the sun, and cold inside.

Vespasia was frowning.

“What is it?” he asked.

Her silver-gray eyes were troubled, her body not merely straight-backed with the disciplined posture of decades of self-control, but her shoulders stiff with an inner tension.

“I have given it much thought, Thomas, and I still do not understand why you were dismissed a second time from command of Bow Street . . .”

“Voisey!” he said with a bitterness that startled him. He had thought himself in control of his anger, his burning sense of injustice on the subject, but now it came back in a drowning wave.

“No,” she said, half under her breath. “No matter how much he may hate you, Thomas, he will never act against his own interest. That is his greatest strength. His head always governs his heart.” She stared straight ahead of her. “And it is not in his interest to have you in Special Branch, which is where he must have known you would go if dismissed from Bow Street again. In the police, unless he commits a crime, you have no jurisdiction in his affairs. If you involve yourself with him he can charge you with harassment and have you disciplined. But in Special Branch your duties are far more fluid. Special Branch is secret, not answerable to the public.” She turned to look at him. “Always keep your enemies where you can see them. He is not fool enough to forget that.”

“Then why would he do it?” he asked, confused by her logic.

“Perhaps it was not Voisey?” she said very carefully.

“Then who?” he asked. “Who else but the Inner Circle would have the power to go behind the Queen’s back and undo what she had done?” The thought was dark and frightening. He knew of no one else he had offended, and certainly no other secret societies with such tentacles winding into the heart of government.

“Thomas, how hard have you thought about the effect on the Inner Circle of Voisey’s knighthood, and the reason for it?” Vespasia asked.

“I hope it shattered his leadership,” he said honestly. He tried to swallow down his anger and the gall of disappointment inside him. “It hurts that it hasn’t.”

“Few of them are idealists,” she replied ruefully. “But have you considered that it might have fractured the power within the Circle? A rival leader who has arisen may have taken with him sufficient of the old Circle to form a new one.”

Pitt had not thought of it, and as the idea ballooned in his mind he saw all sorts of possibilities, dangerous to England but also exquisitely dangerous to Voisey himself. Voisey would know who the rival leader was, but would he ever be certain whose loyalty was where?

Vespasia saw all these thoughts in Pitt’s face. “Don’t rejoice yet,” she warned. “If I am right, then the rival is powerful, too, and no more a friend of yours than Voisey. It is not always true that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Is it not possible that it was he who removed you again from Bow Street, either because he believes you will be more of a thorn in Voisey’s flesh in Special Branch, possibly in time even destroy Voisey for him? Or else it matters to him to have Superintendent Wetron in charge of Bow Street rather than you?”

“Wetron in the Inner Circle?”

“Why not?”

There was no reason why not. The deeper it sank into his mind the more it clarified into a picture he could not disbelieve. There was an exhilaration to it, a beating of the blood as at the knowledge of danger, but there was fear as well. An open battle between the two leaders of the Inner Circle might leave many other victims in its wake.

He was still considering the implications of this when the maid appeared at the door looking alarmed.

“Yes?” Vespasia asked.

“M’lady, there’s a Mr. Narraway to see Mr. Pitt. He said he would wait, but that I was to interrupt you.” She did not apologize in words, but it was there in her gestures and her voice.

“Indeed?” Vespasia sat very straight. “Then you had better ask him to come in.”

“Yes, m’lady.” She dropped the very slightest curtsy and withdrew to obey.

Pitt met Vespasia’s eyes. A hundred ideas flashed between them, all wordless, all touched with fear.

Narraway appeared a moment later. His face was bleak with misery and defeat. It dragged his shoulders in spite of the fact that he stood straight.

Pitt climbed to his feet very slowly, finding his legs shaking. His mind whirled with thoughts of horror; the most hideous and persistent, crowding all the rest, was that something had happened to Charlotte. His lips were dry, and when he tried to speak his voice caught in his throat.

“Good morning, Mr. Narraway,” Vespasia said coolly. “Please sit down and inform us what it is that brings you personally to speak to Thomas in my house.”

He remained standing. “I am sorry, Lady Vespasia,” he said very softly, merely glancing at her before turning to Pitt. “Francis Wray was found dead this morning.”

For a moment Pitt could not grasp it. He was light-headed, his senses swimming. It was nothing to do with Charlotte. She was safe. It was all right! The horror had not happened. He was almost afraid he was going to laugh out of sheer hysteria of relief. It cost him an intense effort to control himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said aloud. He meant it, at least in part. He had liked Wray. But considering the depth of grief that Wray had been in, perhaps death was not a hard thing but a reunion?

Nothing changed in Narraway’s face, except a tiny twitch of muscle near his mouth. “It appears to have been suicide,” he said harshly. “It seems he took poison some time yesterday evening. His maid found him this morning.”

“Suicide!” Pitt was appalled. He refused to believe it. He could not imagine Wray doing anything he would regard as so deeply against the will of the God in whom all his trust lay, the only pathway back to those he loved so intensely. “No . . . there has to be another answer!” he protested, his voice harsh and high.

Narraway looked impatient, as if a fearful anger lay only just under the surface of his control. “He left a message,” he said bitterly. “In a poem by Matthew Arnold.” And without waiting, he went on and quoted by heart:

Creep into thy narrow bed,

Creep, and let no more be said!

Vain thy onset! All stands fast.

Thou thyself must break at last.

Let the long contention cease!

Geese are swans, and swans are geese.

Let them have it how they will!

Those art tired; best be still.

Narraway’s eyes did not move from Pitt’s. “Close enough to a suicide note for most people,” he said softly. “And Voisey’s sister, Octavia Cavendish, who has been a friend of Wray’s for some time, called by to visit him just as you were leaving yesterday afternoon. She found him in a state of some distress; in her opinion, he had been weeping. You had made enquiries about him in the village.”

Pitt felt the blood drain from him. “He wept for his wife!” he protested, but he heard the note of despair in his voice. It was the truth, but it sounded like an excuse.

Narraway nodded very slowly, his mouth a thin, tight line.

“This is Voisey’s revenge,” Vespasia whispered. “He has not minded sacrificing an old man in order to blame Thomas for hounding him to his death.”

“I didn’t . . .” Pitt began, then stopped, seeing the look in her eyes. It was Wetron who had given him Wray’s name and suggested he was the man behind the cartouche. And according to Tellman, it was Wetron who had insisted Pitt go out again and follow up his first enquiry, or else he himself would send a force of men, surely knowing Pitt would go before he would allow that. Was he with Voisey, or against him? Or either way as it suited his own purposes?

Vespasia turned to Narraway. “What are you going to do?” she asked him, as if it were inconceivable he should do nothing.

Narraway looked beaten. “You are quite right, my lady, it is Voisey’s revenge, and it is exquisite. The newspapers will crucify Pitt. Francis Wray was deeply revered, even loved, by all who knew him. He had suffered many reverses of fortune with courage and dignity, first the loss of his children, then of his wife. Someone has already told the newspapers that Pitt suspected him of having consulted Maude Lamont and then having murdered her.”

“I did not!” Pitt said desperately.

“That is irrelevant now,” Narraway dismissed it. “You were trying to determine if he was Cartouche, and Cartouche is among the suspects. You are arguing the depth of the water in which you will drown. It is deep enough. What does it matter if it is two fathoms or thirty, or a hundred?”

“We had afternoon tea,” Pitt said, almost to himself. “With greengage jam. He hadn’t much of it left. It was an act of friendship that he shared it with me. We talked of love and loss. That was why he wept.”

“I doubt that is what Mrs. Cavendish will say,” Narraway replied. “And he was not Cartouche. Someone else has come forward to say exactly where Wray was on the evening of Maude Lamont’s last séance. He had a late supper with the local vicar and his wife.”

“I believe I already asked you, Mr. Narraway, what you intend to do about it?” Vespasia said a little more sharply.

He turned to look at her. “There is nothing I can do, Lady Vespasia. The newspapers will say what they wish, and I have no power over them. They believe that an innocent and bereaved old man has been hounded to death by an overzealous policeman. There is considerable evidence to that effect, and I cannot prove it false, even though I believe it is.” There was no conviction in his voice, just a flat despair. He looked at Pitt. “I hope you will be able to continue with your job, although it seems inevitable now that Voisey will win. If you need anyone to help you, other than Tellman, let me know.” He stopped, his face pinched with misery. “I’m sorry, Pitt. No one crosses the Inner Circle and wins for long . . . at least not yet.” He went to the door. “Good day, Lady Vespasia. I apologize for my intrusion.” And he left as easily as he had come.

Pitt was stunned. In a matter of a quarter of an hour his world had been shattered. Charlotte and the children were safe; Voisey had no idea where they were, but then possibly he had never tried to find out! His vengeance was subtler and more appropriate than simple violence. Pitt had ruined him in the eyes of the republicans. And in return he had ruined Pitt in the eyes of the people he served and who had once thought so well of him.