Long Spoon Lane (24 page)

“I know,” Pitt admitted. It hurt and he was very aware of it.

“What about Voisey? What is his part in this?”

“Anything he can to curb the police bill, particularly the part about questioning servants in secret. He should know enough through his old Inner Circle days to frighten a few people.”

Narraway regarded him soberly. “Any information would be in the hands of people like Wetron, anyway. He wouldn’t use it to destroy his own. The Inner Circle has never turned on one another, except Voisey and Wetron, and Wetron will make damn sure that never happens again. Anyone who even thinks of such a thing will be torn to bits by the others. They survive through loyalty. You should have known that, Pitt.”

“I do,” Pitt replied, sitting down in the chair opposite him. “Do you think that any policeman who is given the power by the act of Parliament is going to pass it on to his superior, then quietly forget it? Most of them are honorable, but corruption begets corruption.” He heard the bitterness he felt very clearly in his voice. “That’s what I hate about it most, the contagion of it. Men who could have been good become tainted, and the more of it there is the harder it is to survive without being touched by it. If you give people power, sooner or later they are tempted to abuse it. It takes a very strong man not to, a man wise enough to see its price, brave enough to go against the tide, and he can pay dearly for it.”

Narraway’s face darkened and he sat up in his chair, no longer at any kind of ease. “Be careful of whoever is behind the extortion,” he warned. “Remember, you play by rules, they don’t.”

Pitt knew Narraway was worried for him, but the warning still irritated him. “You sound like Voisey.”

Narraway shot upright, scraping the legs of his chair on the floor. “For God’s sake! You didn’t tell him—”

“Of course I didn’t!” Pitt said tartly. “I told him about Piers Denoon, nothing else. He patronizes me, as if I know nothing about crime. You’d think I was a country parson!”

“I’ve known a few country parsons. One of them in particular was more familiar with the ugly side of human cruelty and greed than anyone else I’ve met. He saw them when they were very small sins, but he recognized the hunger for dominion over others, the use of belittlements, countless small humiliations that destroy belief.” He stopped suddenly, as if recalling himself to the present. “Get on with it, Pitt. Find out exactly what is happening in this anarchist group.”

“Yes, sir. Have you learned anything that I ought to know?”

A ghost of quite real humor flickered in Narraway’s eyes. “Are you asking me to report to you, Pitt?”

Pitt weighed his chances of getting away with candor. He chose to risk it. “Yes, sir, it might be helpful.”

Narraway’s eyebrows rose. “So far the likelihood of the Inner Circle being penetrated by any European power is extremely slight,” he said. “However, there are certain men high in finance whose interests might not coincide with England’s. You do not need to know more than that. Attend to the police corruption. It endangers us all.”

Pitt found Welling in a cell in Newgate Prison. He looked cold in spite of the fact that it was quite a pleasant day outside. The stone seemed to hold a dampness that ate into the flesh and touched the bones. His face was even paler and his hair more unkempt than last time. He sat on the cot, his shoulders hunched.

“What do you want?” he asked as Pitt came in and the warden closed the door behind him with the clang of iron on stone. “I told you before, I’m giving you no names and no places. Don’t you believe me?”

“I believe that you mean what you say,” Pitt answered. The air was stale in here. There was only one man living in it, yet it had the odor of many men, as if it had never been washed, or had clean air blown through it. The heaviness added to the sense of chill.

“So why are you wasting your time here? You haven’t any idea who shot Magnus, have you?” Welling said with a sneer curling his lip. “Except it was the police, and you won’t admit that! You’re helpless.”

“If it was someone in the police, I’d like to know who,” Pitt responded.

“What difference does it make? You aren’t going to do anything about it.”

“Don’t you want to know who it was?”

Welling slid a little farther down in the cot, his arms folded tight across his chest. “What for? They’re all the same to me. And Magnus will be just as dead, and there’ll still be no justice. I don’t care a damn who.”

Pitt felt the man’s anger and fear as if there had been a drop in temperature in the air. It made him angry as well, for the futility of it and the blindness, but it also stirred a pity. He had known something very close to it when, as a child, his father had been accused falsely of poaching, a form of theft taken very seriously then. He could not prove his innocence. He had been deported, and Pitt had never seen him again.

He concentrated on the present. “How many policemen did he know?” he asked, controlling his voice with an effort.

“What?” Welling was startled.

Pitt repeated the question.

“None!” Welling said angrily. “The police are liars, corrupt oppressors, and thieves from the poor. Why would you ask such a stupid question?”

“Then why would a policeman kill Magnus?” Pitt asked.

“Because we know them for what they are! Are you stupid?” Welling snarled.

“Yes, it seems you do,” Pitt agreed. “So why kill Magnus and leave you and Carmody alive? Or was Magnus the only one who was any danger to them?”

It was a second or two before Welling realized what he meant, then his face flooded scarlet with outrage. “How dare you? You filthy—” He stopped equally abruptly. Suddenly, like someone opening the door into a lighted room, he understood what Pitt was saying.

“Exactly,” Pitt nodded. “Magnus was killed for a personal reason, not because he was an anarchist, you agree?”

Welling swallowed, his throat jerking. “Yes…” he said hoarsely. “But who would do that?”

“I don’t know. Let’s start with why.”

Welling was staring at him as if he had seen a new horror, something that had never occurred to him before.

Pitt began to think, with surprise and a thread of pity, how naive these young men were. They spent their passion hating an enemy that was formed of a whole class of people, impersonal, without individual names or faces, personalities, lives. It was easy, in comparison. But when they were obliged to consider being hated for themselves, fiercely enough to kill, Welling, at least, was appalled.

“Did anyone want to take Magnus’s place as leader?” he asked aloud.

“Of course not!” Welling was disgusted by the thought, it was clear in his wide eyes and twisted mouth. “That’s your kind of belief, not ours. We don’t want a morality where one person has to obey another, regardless of what their conscience dictates. We’re not looking for power. The very idea of it is corrupt.”

“Someone took a gun, hid behind a door, and shot Magnus in the back of the head,” Pitt reminded him. “I don’t know whether I would call that corrupt, precisely. But it is certainly against my law. Is it all right with yours? Or your lack of it?”

“No, of course it isn’t! It’s vile,” Welling spat. “It’s not only brutal, it’s cowardly.”

“It suggests he didn’t want to be seen,” Pitt amended. “Perhaps if you had seen him, you would have known his face.”

Welling gulped again. “Maybe.”

“We’re back to someone Magnus knows,” Pitt went on. “Not only that, but someone who knew where you would run to after the Myrdle Street bombing. We didn’t know that. Who did?”

Welling stared at him, blinking slowly.

“Other anarchist groups?” Pitt asked.

“Why would they want to kill Magnus?” Welling said miserably. “We all want the same thing!”

“Do you? Is there only one kind of chaos? Perhaps they think there are several.”

“We don’t want chaos! You are ignorant…a stupid man!” Welling was growing increasingly annoyed, sitting upright again. “One minute you sound as if you can think and have some shred of understanding, then the next you go and say something so bigoted, so crass, you betray everything in you that would be worthwhile. Anarchy isn’t about chaos, or violence.” He chopped his hand in the air. He leaned forward towards Pitt, his eyes burning. “Anarchy is about getting rid of tyranny so all men can be free and be their better selves. Wise men, whole men, should be able to grow, become the best in themselves.” His voice rose in enthusiasm. “Evolve into free men, away from the petty rules imposed by laws, courts, governments, the armies of small men who enslave the mind. There is only one true law: that of reason and the universal brotherhood of humanity. All else is a fear of imprisonment, an unrighteous dominion of one man over another. Let us all be equal, and free.”

Pitt thought for a moment. “If you want an equal gift, then you must be prepared to pay an equal price,” he said at last. “And I don’t think all men are prepared. Some are lazy, and some are greedy. If there are no laws, and no one to enforce them, who will protect the weak?”

“You don’t understand!” Welling accused.

Pitt leaned against the stone wall. “Explain it to me.”

“Without oppression, we wouldn’t need to protect the weak,” Welling said at last. “No one would harm them.”

“Except people who hid behind doorways and shot them in the back of the head.”

Welling was very pale. “That wasn’t one of us!”

“Yes it was.”

“No it wasn’t!” Welling shouted. “Maybe it was the old man? There was an old man who accosted him several times in the street. He seemed to know him, and I saw them arguing. It was pretty fierce, but Magnus wouldn’t say who he was, or what it was about.”

“Old man?” Pitt demanded. “Describe him.”

Welling’s eyes widened. “You think he could have killed Magnus?” His face lit with hope. “Why would he? It was just a quarrel. Where would he get the gun? He was far too old to be an anarchist.”

Pitt smiled in spite of himself. “How old?”

“I don’t know. Sixty, or more? He was tall and thin. He had white hair.”

“And they quarreled?”

“Yes.”

“What was his manner like?”

Welling froze, understanding in his eyes. “Gentleman,” he said softly. “He wasn’t dressed like one, but his voice…”

“His father?” Pitt asked, wishing it were possible for Welling to deny it. He could not help thinking of his own son, and far in the future wondering how he would feel were Daniel to espouse some extremist politics that turned him towards crime. What would he do to try to save him from what he saw as wrong? How would he comfort Charlotte? How much would he blame himself for whatever had gone wrong? It was easy to put himself in Landsborough’s place.

Or was it? Had he been seeking to protect his son, or the political system he believed in himself? Or even the honor of his family, with all the comforts and privileges that gave him. His son would bring disgrace upon it?

That was a hideous thought, but honesty compelled him at least to consider it.

Welling looked at him. “Maybe. Magnus never said anything about it. But that old man wasn’t the only one. There was a younger man too, well set up.”

Pitt was puzzled. “And his voice?”

“No idea. He never spoke, that I knew of.”

“A rival anarchist?”

“Looked like a servant to me, sort of discreet but there,” Welling replied. Then his candor vanished. “I’m telling you nothing about any of us. Anarchists have that much loyalty.”

“So you have,” Pitt said with admiration in his voice. “It looks as if you are prepared to hang for each other.” He saw Welling’s skin pale. Perhaps he was more afraid than Carmody had been. Pitt continued. “You must be very sure that your ideals are the same. Which makes me wonder why one of you killed Magnus, and he did it from hiding.”

There was a sneer on Welling’s lips. “You can’t hang me for shooting Magnus. There’s no way even you can make it seem as if I did it. I was in the room when you got there, and nowhere near the door he was shot from. Everyone heard the man escape. Your own police heard him come down the back stairs, and let him go.” His voice wavered as the realization came that they could lie, even if only to cover the fact that they had made such an error. He gulped. It was clear in his eyes that he believed Pitt would do that, and the rest of them also. “I wouldn’t have killed him! You know that!”

“Yes, I do,” Pitt agreed. “At least not personally. But you might have connived at it. You are keen enough to protect whoever did, so it’s reasonable to suppose you are allies, or even that you paid him….” He saw the horror in Welling’s eyes, and in that moment knew his innocence. “But I was actually referring to the policeman in the street who was shot,” he finished.

“He wasn’t…dead…” Welling’s uncertainty was naked in his face.

Pitt refused the temptation to imply that he was. “No, but that was lucky. You still tried to kill him.”

“I…I…” Welling’s voice died away. There was no argument that mattered.

Pitt waited while he considered it. Imprisonment would be harder than Welling would have any idea of, but there was a finality about the rope.

“Are you a religious man?” Pitt asked suddenly.

Welling was startled. “What?”

“Are you a religious man?” Pitt repeated.

The sneer came back to Welling’s face, but it was more out of bravado than confidence. “You don’t have to believe in God to have a morality,” he said bitterly. “The Church has got the biggest hypocrites of the lot! Have you any idea how much they own? How many of them preach one thing, and do something quite different? They condemn people whose lives they don’t begin to understand, and—”

“I wasn’t thinking of morality,” Pitt cut across him. “I’ve no more time for hypocrites than you have. I was thinking of there being anything to hope for after death.”

Welling went as white as a sheet. Suddenly he found it hard to breathe.

“You’re a young man,” Pitt said more gently. “You don’t have to give up your life, or all you can do in it, the good things and the mistakes, if you help me find out who killed Magnus Landsborough, and prove it. It was a wrong thing to do, by your morality and mine. I have the authority to give you amnesty for the shooting of the policeman, or anything else, if you help.”