Long Spoon Lane (42 page)

“I thought you would wish to know,” Pitt replied. “We now have sufficient evidence to arrest the man who killed your son.”

Landsborough turned to Cordelia who let out a gasp, her face flooding with relief.

“Thank you!” she said with a crack in her voice. “It…it has been very hard waiting.”

Landsborough kept his composure with difficulty. “I am deeply obliged to you, Pitt. It is a great burden lifted, especially among so much bad news. I see from the afternoon papers that Sir Charles Voisey is dead.” His face looked pinched as he said it, the disappointment in his eyes profound. He looked at Pitt, desperate for some shred of hope to defeat the bill. His son was dead and the liberal, tolerant, enlightened world he loved seemed about to be submerged in a tide of corrupt tyranny. He knew of no way to fight it, let alone to win.

There was one last, terrible blow Pitt could not prevent. He could not even deliver it now, in front of Denoon. Wetron was too clever and too deadly a foe.

“Yes,” Pitt said. “It appears that he was corrupted in a way we had no idea of.”

“The newspapers are full of it,” Landsborough agreed with acute distaste. “Superintendent Wetron is the hero.”

“He’s a good man,” Denoon said sharply. “We owe him a great deal. He acted with supreme courage and decision. I admire a man who has the forthrightness of his convictions and goes to face the enemy himself, instead of sending his juniors to do it.” He smiled bleakly. “Good thing he did. A lesser man might have ended in arresting Voisey, with injuries to everyone, and then a messy trial with a lot of scandal coming out. This way he’s unmasked Simbister and gotten rid of Voisey as swiftly and surgically as possible. We can begin to recover. Get rid of the corruption and suppress the anarchy.”

Cordelia looked at him icily. “Mr. Pitt came to tell us that he is about to arrest the man who murdered Magnus, Edward, not to praise Wetron for shooting Sir Charles Voisey, much as we may have disagreed with him politically.”

“I didn’t disagree with him politically,” Enid said, staring at Cordelia. “Personally I thought he was a fearful man, cruel and greedy and careless of people’s welfare, but I thought politically he was absolutely right.”

“For heaven’s sake, Enid, you don’t know what you are talking about!” Denoon retorted. “He was against the Police Bill! Now we know why; he was totally corrupt, and he had corrupted Simbister as well.”

“That isn’t the reason,” she argued.

Denoon’s face was dark with anger.

“Of course it is. He couldn’t afford to have the police investigated, he was in it up to his neck.” He turned to Pitt. “Isn’t that what you’ve come to say?”

“Were you investigating the police corruption?” Landsborough asked Pitt.

“Yes,” Pitt replied. “And it didn’t at any point implicate Sir Charles Voisey.”

“Then you are incompetent,” Denoon snapped back. “Superintendent Wetron’s evidence shows that Voisey was in it, in fact he was behind it. If you were any good at your job you would have known, and proved it, not had to have Wetron do it for you.”

Sheridan Landsborough froze. “Edward, Mr. Pitt is a guest in my home,” he said stiffly. “And as such you will treat him with courtesy, or if that is beyond you, then at least with civility. He has come here to tell me he is about to arrest the man who murdered my son. Will you at least respect my wife’s feelings, and mine, if you cannot respect the fact that you also are a guest here, even if you are family.” He invested the last word with such a desperate irony that Pitt had a sudden, agonizing certainty that Landsborough knew the truth about Magnus’s birth.

Denoon saw Pitt’s face and flushed scarlet. There was rage, and now fear as well in his eyes.

Cordelia glared at her husband, but she also said nothing.

Enid stood with her head high, eyes direct.

“I apologize for my husband’s lack of manners,” she said very clearly to Pitt. “I wish I could think of a reasonable excuse, but I cannot. Would you be good enough, in spite of our lack of grace, to tell us what you have observed. Sheridan, at last, would like to know. He loved Magnus deeply, and did all he could to bring him back from the path of anarchy.”

Pitt found her compassion almost unbearable. It even raced through his mind to wonder if there was any way at all that he could spare her from her own son’s arrest, and almost certainly his trial and death.

“Well?” Cordelia broke the silence.

There was nothing Pitt could do. It was not the first time he had hated catching someone, and many he had understood better than Piers Denoon.

“It is one of the other anarchists,” he said in answer. “I am not sure if I can arrest him, but I am going to do all I can. I regret it, very much. I wish I could say it was Voisey, and put an end to it, but I can’t.”

“Why on earth would you wish that?” Cordelia demanded. “We all want whoever it was! Go and arrest him. Don’t waste time standing here. Tell us when it is done.”

Pitt felt a flicker of anger at her bluntness. It passed in an instant. “I regret it because it was someone Magnus knew and trusted,” he answered. “Possibly even cared for. I am not telling you until I arrest him, because if I do, I may cause unnecessary pain, and make a charge I cannot prove. One way or another, I believe it will be over by this time tomorrow. Good day.”

Landsborough went with him to the door, and just short of it he stopped.

“Is it true, Pitt? Do you know who it was?” he said urgently.

“There seems to be only one possible answer,” Pitt replied.

“But you needed something from us, which is why you came.”

“You went after Magnus and tried to dissuade him?” Pitt made it a question, although he knew the answer.

Landsborough’s face tightened, bleak with misery and a drowning sense of failure. “Yes.”

Pitt felt brutal, as if he were cutting a man apart while he was still alive. Apologizing would only make it worse.

“Did you see two men, one with pale skin and red hair, the other thin with a mass of dark hair, curling?”

“Yes?” Landsborough was confused.

“They said they were friends of Magnus’s. Is that true?”

“Yes. I saw them with him several times. They seemed to be quite…close. Does it matter now?”

“Yes. I want to use them to catch the man who killed him.” Pitt felt guilty that he could not warn Landsborough of the fearful pain to come. But he was so close to his sister that he might very easily betray the truth to her, even if he did not mean to. He might even do it intentionally, to save her some tiny portion of the grief. In fact, Pitt was almost certain he would do so. It was his nature. “Thank you,” he added. “I thought they were telling the truth, but if they were involved, they would lie.”

Landsborough frowned. “You said it was someone he trusted,” he pointed out.

“It was. But it couldn’t have been either of them. We know where they were standing at the time. Thank you, Lord Landsborough. Now I must go and do what I have to.” It seemed absurd to say “good day.” He gave a brief smile and left.

He went straight to the prison where Welling and Carmody were being held. He told the jailer to put them in the same cell, then he went in himself.

Both men stared at him. The change had disconcerted them and they were afraid of what it might mean. It was as he had intended, but only part of his reason for doing it. He had a plan to trick Denoon, and hoped that he could be driven to testify against Wetron in order to save himself. At the very least he might betray himself in a way that would give Pitt a wedge to drive into the smallest crack, and eventually begin Wetron’s destruction.

Welling and Carmody were staring at him and waiting.

“I want you to give a message to Piers Denoon,” he said bluntly.

There was a sneer on Welling’s face. “You mean like, post a letter?” he said sarcastically. “Post it yourself.”

“I mean like go and find him,” Pitt replied.

“Oh yeah? And then come back obediently to prison, so you can lock me away for the rest of my life?” His look said that he would like to have wished Pitt in hell, but did not dare say so, in case Pitt revoked the few privileges he had, or even his promise not to charge him with Magnus’s death.

“You know,” Pitt said coolly, “if you would be quiet and let me put the offer to you, you might find it was a much better one than you seem determined to frame for yourself.”

“Be quiet!” Carmody snapped at Welling. “Yes, Mr. Pitt?”

Pitt acknowledged it with a tight smile. “I want one of you to go and find Piers Denoon and persuade him to go home. Choose whatever manner you know will work. He shot Magnus, and I can’t let him get away with that.” He saw the emotion in their faces, the anger and the hurt. “And if that is not sufficient for you,” he went on, “he also helped finance the dynamite that blew up the houses in Scarborough Street that killed eight people and injured many more, for which anarchists in general are being blamed.”

“Why would he kill Magnus?” Welling said doubtfully. “They were cousins, family!”

“Because he was being blackmailed into it,” Pitt replied with the truth. “He may not even have wanted to be involved with anarchists at all, but he had no choice. He committed a rape three years ago. I’ve seen his confession to it, and the supporting statements. The police kept them, and used them to force him to do what they wanted.”

Carmody used an obscene word about the police, his face twisted with revulsion and hatred.

“He still shot Magnus, rather than face his own punishment,” Pitt reminded him.

“It seems like a betrayal.” Carmody bit his lip.

“Of whom?” Pitt asked. “Piers? Or Magnus?”

“What if we don’t come back, whichever one of us goes?” Welling asked.

“I don’t expect you to come back,” Pitt replied with a very slight smile. “If you do what we agree, the other one goes free as well. If you don’t, then he stays here and faces the charges on the Myrdle Street bombing. And considering how many people were killed in Scarborough Street, I don’t think juries feel good about bombers at the moment.” He added that because he could not afford to lose, nor could he tell them all that could be won or lost on their decision.

“I’ll go,” Welling said with decision.

Pitt looked at him, then at Carmody. “No,” he said flatly. “Carmody will go. Do it straightaway. If you fail, Welling pays the price, and I’ll make very sure indeed that Kydd knows about it.”

Welling jerked his head up, his eyes sharp.

Pitt smiled. “You thought I didn’t know Kydd?”

Welling let out his breath silently.

“Are you coming?” Pitt said to Carmody.

Carmody straightened up. “Yes…sir. Yes, I’m coming.”

It was a long and miserable wait, watching the house, not only because of the time involved, or the possibility that Carmody would fail, but that he deliberately might not even try. Pitt had threatened to charge Welling if that were so, but he was reluctant actually to do it. There was an injustice in punishing one man for another’s weakness or cowardice that he found repellent. Worse than either of these was the knowledge of what success would mean: the arrest of Piers Denoon in his home, in front of his father. It was the only way to turn Edward Denoon against Wetron. It was not Edward Denoon’s feelings Pitt cared about—he was not proud of the pleasure he would take in inflicting some injury on such an arrogant man, one who might even take over Wetron’s leadership of the Inner Circle, if he were not prevented. But he grieved already for Enid, and for Landsborough, even as he stood stiff in the areaway of the house opposite, Tellman beside him. The latter was off-duty, but Pitt still needed a policeman there to make an arrest possible. Besides, Tellman deserved to be here.

Narraway himself had taken his turn, and was now waiting only a hundred feet away.

It was after six. The morning was bright with a slight wind coming up from the direction of the river when Pitt realized with a jolt that Tellman was poking him in the side.

“That’s him!” Tellman whispered as a deliveryman with a bag on his arm went quickly down the areaway steps of the Denoon house. Instead of knocking on the scullery door, he let himself in.