Pentecost Alley (18 page)

Perhaps Emily was the one to ask. She moved in society and might hear whispers which would at least tell him in which direction to look. Jack would not be pleased that she should be given even the slightest encouragement to meddle again. But all Pitt wanted was information.

He thought of Helliwell and Thirlstone. They were the ones who would know Finlay best, but they would close ranks, as they had begun to already. It was part of the creed of a gentleman that he did not betray his friends. Loyalty was the first prerequisite. Pitt was an outsider. They would never speak ill of Finlay to him, no matter what they thought privately, or possibly even knew.

At the Foreign Office he went in and gave the name of the man with whom he had made his first appointment. He was shown upstairs and along a wide, gracious corridor into an outer office where he was obliged to wait for nearly a quarter of an hour.

Eventually a handsome gray-haired man came in, his face composed, his dress faultless. He closed the door behind him.

The room was charming. A French Impressionist painting, all sunlight and shadows, hung on one of the paneled walls. There was a tree beyond the window.

“Do sit down, Superintendent Pitt. I’m so sorry for having kept you waiting, but you explained your errand in your letter, and I wished to have ready for you all the information you could possibly find useful.” He looked at Pitt pointedly. “I do hope you will be able to clear up this matter quickly. Most unfortunate.”

Pitt sat down, as if he had every intention of remaining for some time.

“Thank you, Mr. Grainger. I hope so too.” He crossed his legs and waited for Grainger to sit also.

He did so reluctantly, towards the edge of his chair.

“I don’t know what I can tell you of relevance,” he said, frowning. “Mr. FitzJames has never given cause for anxiety as to his private life. Of course, before considering him for an ambassadorial post it would be most satisfactory if he were to make a fortunate marriage.” He shrugged very slightly. “But no doubt he will. He is young….”

“Thirty-three,” Pitt pointed out.

“Quite. A good age to consider such a step. And he is most eligible. What has any of this to do with your investigation?”

“You are considering him for an ambassadorial appointment?”

Grainger hesitated, unwilling to commit himself when he was beginning to sense the possibility of something embarrassing.

“You are not?” Pitt concluded. “You have found him not entirely suitable after all?”

“I did not say that,” Grainger replied tartly, stung to be so bluntly interpreted. “I really do not wish to discuss it with you so freely. It is a highly confidential matter.”

Pitt did not move. “If you considered him, Mr. Grainger,” Pitt went on, “then you will have made your own enquiries into his personal life.” He made it a statement, not a question. “I realize your findings are confidential, but it would be a great deal pleasanter for Mr. FitzJames if I were to learn what I need from you, who enquired for the most honorable of reasons, rather than on my own behalf, when I am investigating a particularly sordid murder in Whitechapel.”

“You make your point, Mr. Pitt,” Grainger said with a sudden tightening of his face. “I should be reluctant to have you do that, for the embarrassment to his family and for the shadow it would cast on his career … which I am sure you understand?”

“Of course. That is why I came to you.”

“Very well.” Grainger began resignedly. “Six or seven years ago he was a very raw and arrogant young man who took his pleasures wherever he wished. He drove far too fast. His father had bought him a very fine pair of horses, which he raced against other young men, frequently in the public streets.” He stared at Pitt with cold, blue eyes. “But no one was ever seriously hurt, and it is something many rich young men do. Hardly a matter for comment.” He made a steeple of his fingers. “He gambled, but always paid his debts—or his father did. Anyway, he left no dishonor, no one with ill feeling. And he certainly never cheated, which of course would be unforgivable.”

“I assumed that,” Pitt agreed with a smile. “What about women?”

“He flirted, naturally, but I never heard that anyone had cause for offense. Left a few broken hearts, and was occasionally disappointed himself. At one time his name was linked with one of Rutland’s daughters, I believe, but nothing came of it. But there was no talk, nothing against either of them. I daresay she just received a better offer.”

“Altogether a faultless young man,” Pitt said a trifle sarcastically.

Grainger drew in a deep breath, keeping the irritation from his features with an obvious effort. “No, of course not. You know, Mr. Pitt, that that is not so, or I would merely have stated it and left you to your investigation. He frequented a good few houses of ill repute. He spent his share of time in the Haymarket and the surrounding areas, and a lot of nights a great deal more drunk than sober. His tastes were at times rather more lurid than one would wish, and his self-indulgence something better forgotten.” He leveled his stare at Pitt. “But it has been forgotten, Superintendent. I daresay as a young man you had a few episodes you would prefer were not raised again, and perhaps of which your wife remains ignorant? Of course you have. So have I.” He said it like a rehearsed speech, without a shadow of humor.

Pitt felt himself blush and it surprised him. There was nothing in his past which was shocking—simply clumsy and extremely selfish, things he would far rather Charlotte never knew. They would alter the way she saw him.

Could that really be all there was to Finlay FitzJames?

As if reading his thoughts, Grainger went on. “You understand, Superintendent? There are parts of all our lives which fate usually allows us to bury decently. It is only when some other circumstance arises which compels us to face examination that they can be raised again, for a few of us unfortunate enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong moment. Or, of course, to have enemies …?” He left it in the air, more than a suggestion, less than a statement, something Pitt could complete for himself more effectively in his own imagination.

He thought about it for a moment. Was it conceivable that Finlay, or his father, had enemies clever enough and unscrupulous enough to have planted Finlay’s badge at the scene of a murder? It would be an extraordinary coincidence.

He looked at Grainger’s smooth face. He was a
diplomat, used to thinking of death far away, in other countries, of other sorts of people whom he never saw. Perhaps to a man like him, dealing with men only as names and pieces of paper, such an enemy was not unimaginable.

There was a bird on the tree he could see through the window.

“Enemies who would murder a woman in order to embarrass FitzJames?” he said with heavy doubt in his voice.

“Not Finlay, perhaps,” Grainger conceded, “but his father. Augustus FitzJames is a very wealthy man, and he was ruthless in the early days of his climb. I agree that to murder someone simply to incriminate someone else is very extreme, but it is not impossible, Mr. Pitt, if hatred and ambition both run deep enough.” He held his hands apart, then put them together again gently. “It seems to me at least as likely as the probability that a man such as Finlay FitzJames, who has everything to lose and nothing whatever to gain, should visit a Whitechapel prostitute and murder her, Superintendent. I am sure you want to see justice done as much as I do, not only in the courts but in the broader sense as well. A reputation ruined, a promotion lost, cannot be set right again with an apology or a retraction. I imagine you are as aware of that as I?” He stared at Pitt with wide eyes and a very slight smile.

Pitt left the Foreign Office with new shadows in his mind. He lunched with Micah Drummond, then the two of them walked slowly up the Mall past ladies in beautiful dresses with narrow, almost nonexistent bustles; just a clever draping of the fabric. That was the fashion of the moment. Their sweeping hats added an impossible grace. Parasols were folded and used elegantly, almost like sticks. He was here to talk about Finlay FitzJames, but even so he could not help occasionally glancing sideways with admiration and a distinct pleasure.

Other men did the same, gentlemen in beautifully cut
suits and tall, shiny hats, soldiers in uniform, ribboned and medaled. There was laughter in the warm air, and faraway snatches on the breeze of a barrel organ, and children shouting in the park. Their feet made a slight crunch on the gravel.

“A ruthless man,” Micah Drummond said, using the same word Grainger had. He was speaking about Augustus FitzJames. “Of course he had enemies, Pitt, but hardly the sort who would frequent Whitechapel, or find themselves in a Pentecost Alley tenement. Most of them are his own age, for a start.”

“Elderly gentlemen use prostitutes as much as anyone else,” Pitt said with impatience. “And you must know that!”

“Of course I know it,” Drummond conceded, wrinkling his nose. He looked extremely well, not quite as thin as in the past, and his skin had the warmth of the sun on it. “But not in the Whitechapel area. Think about it, Pitt!” He raised his hat as he passed a lady who was apparently an acquaintance and then turned back to Pitt. “If the sort of man you are describing were to kill a prostitute in order to implicate FitzJames, he’d choose one of the better class of women, the sort he would use himself, around Windmill Street or the Haymarket. He wouldn’t enter into an area he didn’t know and where he’d be remembered as different.”

“But he was remembered.” Pitt half turned towards him. “That’s just the point! Perhaps he was afraid he’d be recognized in his own haunts?”

“And when did he get the Hellfire Club badge?” Drummond added.

“I don’t know. Perhaps he got it by chance, and that gave him the idea?”

“Opportunism?” Drummond was skeptical.

“Perhaps,” Pitt agreed. “And maybe the chance to use the murder was opportunism as well?”

Drummond looked sideways at him, his long face full of wordless disbelief.

“Although,” Pitt conceded, “I’m listening to the evidence. It probably was Finlay. I daresay he has a vicious streak in him which he’s kept under control pretty well until now, and this time he went too far. He wouldn’t be the first well-bred man to enjoy hurting people and be willing to pay for his entertainment.” He took a deep breath. “Or the first to lose control and end in killing someone.”

A small black dog trundled past them, nose to the ground, tail high.

“No,” Drummond said sadly. “And I’m afraid it fits in with what little I know of him from my days in Bow Street.”

Pitt stopped abruptly.

Drummond put his hands in his pockets and continued walking, but more slowly.

Pitt increased his pace to catch up with him.

“We had to cover up one or two unpleasantries a few years ago,” Drummond went on. “Seven or eight years, almost. One incident was a brawl in one of the alleys off the Haymarket. Several young men had drunk too much and it ended in a very nasty affray. One of the women was fairly badly beaten.”

“You said one or two,” Pitt prompted.

“The other I recall was a fight with a pimp. He said FitzJames had asked for something unusual, and when it wasn’t given had refused to pay. Apparently he’d already had the regular services, and when she wouldn’t do whatever it was, he became very unpleasant. Unusually, the pimp came off quite badly. There was a knife, but both of them seem to have been cut with it. Not seriously.”

“But that was hushed up too?” Pitt was not sure whether he was surprised or not. The picture was becoming uglier, more into the pattern both he and Ewart feared.

“Well, there wasn’t a crime,” Drummond pointed out, touching his hat absentmindedly to another acquaintance passing by. “Unless you want to call disturbing the
peace a crime. It didn’t seem worth a prosecution. He’d have fought against it, and the pimp was hardly a good witness.”

“What was it FitzJames wanted the girl to do?” Pitt remembered the boots buttoned together in Pentecost Alley, the cold water and the garter around Ada McKinley’s arm. He assumed the broken fingers were a cruelty peculiar to this particular incident.

“I don’t know,” Drummond confessed.

“What was the pimp’s name?” Pitt went on. “What date was it? I can look it up in the records. You did keep a record, didn’t you?”

“No I didn’t.” Drummond looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, Pitt. I think I was a little more naive then.” He did not say any more about it, but they both knew the world of experience they had seen since then, the corruption and the ugliness of influence misused, the inner dishonesties.

They walked in silence for fifty yards, no sound but their feet on the gravel of the path.

“Do you remember his name?” Pitt asked at length.

Drummond sighed. “Yes. Percy Manker. But it won’t do any good. He died of an overdose of opium. The river police pulled him out of Limehouse Reach. I’m sorry.”

Pitt said nothing. They walked a little farther in the sun, then turned and retraced their steps. They did not speak any more about FitzJames, choosing instead to think of pleasanter things, domestic and family matters. Drummond asked after Charlotte, and told Pitt about his own wife’s happiness in their new home and the small businesses of daily life.

Pitt had no hope of learning anything of value about Finlay FitzJames from Helliwell or Thirlstone. He had thought he might persuade Jago Jones that truth, in this case, was a higher good than personal loyalty. Jones’s parishioners had the right to expect a certain loyalty from
him as well, and Ada had been a parishioner, in however loose a sense.

He found Jago alone in the church itself, the sunlight streaming in through the windows into bright patterns on the stone floor and across the worn pews. He turned in surprise when he saw Pitt walking up the aisle.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. Pitt knew he did not mean this occasion but the brief half hour he had spent at Ada’s funeral two days before.

He smiled. There was no answer to make.

“What brings you now?” Jago asked, walking down towards where a long-handled broom was resting against the first pew. “Do you know who killed Ada?”