Anne Perry - [Thomas Pitt 05]

by Bluegate Fields

  Pitt sighed. “Of course not. But I’ll be back. And if you’ve done anything to send Albie away, or any harm has come to him, I’ll have you down to Coldbath Fields quicker than your rotten little feet’ll touch the ground!”

  “Fancy ’im, then, do yer?” The old man’s face split in a dirty grin, and he seized the chance to kick Pitt’s foot out of the doorway and slam the door shut.

  There was nothing else to do but go back to the police station. Pitt was already late, and he had no business being here.

  Gillivray was jubilant about the arsonist, and it was a quarter of an hour before he bothered to ask Pitt what had taken him so long.

  Pitt did not want to reply directly with the truth.

  “What else do you know about Albie Frobisher?” he asked instead.

  “What?” Gillivray frowned as though momentarily the name made no sense to him.

  “Albie Frobisher,” Pitt repeated. “What else do you know about him?”

  “Else than what?” Gillivray said irritably. “He’s a male prostitute, that’s all. What else is there? Why should we care? We can’t arrest all the homosexuals in the city or we’d do nothing else. Anyway, you’d have to prove it, and how could you do that without dragging in their customers?”

  “And what’s wrong with dragging in their customers?” Pitt asked bluntly. “They are at least as guilty, maybe more so. They’re not doing it to live.”

  “Are you saying prostitution is all right, Mr. Pitt?” Gillivray was shocked.

  Usually hypocrisy enraged Pitt. This time, because it was so totally unconscious, it overwhelmed him with hopelessness.

  “Of course I’m not,” he said wearily. “But I can understand how it has come about, at least for many people. Are you condoning those who use prostitutes, even boys?”

  “No!” Gillivray was affronted; the idea was appalling. Then the natural corollary of his own previous statement occurred to him. “Well—I mean—”

  “Yes?” Pitt asked patiently.

  “It’s impractical,” Gillivray blushed as he said it. “The men who use people like Albie Frobisher have money—they’re probably gentlemen. We can’t go around arresting men of that sort for something obscene like perversion! Think what would happen.”

  There was no need for Pitt to comment; he knew the expression on his face spoke for him.

  “Lots of men have all sorts of—of perverted tastes.” Gillivray’s cheeks were scarlet now. “We can’t go meddling into everyone’s affairs. What’s done privately, as long as no one is forced, is—” He took a breath and let it out heavily. “Well, it’s best left alone! We should concern ourselves with crimes, with frauds, robberies, attacks, and things like that—where someone’s been offended. What a gentleman chooses to do in his bedroom is his own business, and if it’s against the law of God—like adultery—still best leave it to God to punish!”

  Pitt smiled and looked at the window and the rain running down it, and at the gloomy street beyond.

  “Unless, of course, it’s Jerome!”

  “Jerome wasn’t prosecuted for unnatural practices,” Gillivray said quickly. “He was charged with murder!”

  “Are you saying that if he hadn’t killed Arthur, you would have turned a blind eye to the other?” Pitt asked incredulously. Then suddenly, almost like an afterthought, he realized that Gillivray had said Jerome was charged with murder, not that he was guilty of it. Was that merely a clumsy choice of words, or an unintentional sign of some thread of doubt that ran through his mind?

  “If he hadn’t killed him, I don’t suppose anyone would have known!” Gillivray had the perfect, reasoned answer ready.

  Pitt gave no argument; that was almost certainly true. And of course if there had been no murder, Anstey Waybourne would certainly not have prosecuted. What man in his right mind exposes his son to such a scandal? He would simply have discharged Jerome without a character reference, and let that be vengeance enough. Hint, innuendo that Jerome’s morals were unsatisfactory, without any specific charge, would have ruined his career, and Arthur’s name would never have entered into it.

  “Anyway,” Gillivray continued, “it’s all over now and you’ll only cause a lot of unnecessary trouble if you keep on about it. I don’t know anything else about Albie Frobisher, and I don’t choose to. Neither will you, if you know what’s good for you—with respect, sir!”

  “Do you believe Jerome killed Arthur Waybourne?” Pitt said suddenly, surprising even himself with such a naively blunt question.

  Gillivray’s blue eyes were hot, curiously glazed with some discomfort inside him.

  “I’m not the jury, Mr. Pitt, and it’s not my job to decide a man’s guilt or his innocence. I don’t know. All things considered, it seems like it. And, more important, the law of the land says so, and I accept that.”

  “I see.” There was nothing else to say. He let the subject die, and turned back to the arson.

  Twice more, Pitt managed to find himself in Bluegate Fields, in the neighborhood of Albie Frobisher’s rooming house, but Albie had still not returned. When he called the third time, a boy even younger than Albie, with cynical, curious eyes, opened the door and invited him in. The room had been re-let. Albie was already replaced as if he had never existed. After all, why allow perfectly good premises to stand idle when they could be made to earn?

  He made discreet inquiries at one or two other stations in similar areas—Seven Dials, Whitechapel, Mile End, St. Giles, the Devil’s Acre—but no one had heard of Albie moving in. That in itself did not mean a lot. There were thousands of beggars, prostitutes, petty thieves drifting from one area to another. Most of them died young, but in the sea of humanity they were no more missed than one wave in an ocean, and no more distinguishable. One knew occasional names or faces, because their owners gave information, provided steady leaks from the underworld that made most police detection possible, but the vast majority stayed brief and anonymous.

  But Albie, like Abigail Winters, had disappeared.

  The next day, with no plan in his head, Pitt went back to Newgate Prison to see Maurice Jerome. As soon as he stepped through the gates, he was met by the familiar smell; it was as if he had been gone only a few moments since last time. Only a few moments since the vast, dripping walls had enclosed him.

  Jerome was sitting on the straw mattress in exactly the same position he’d been in when Pitt had left him. He was still shaven, but his face was grayer, his bones more visible through the skin, his nose more pinched. His shirt collar was still stiff and clean. That would be Eugenie!

  Suddenly, Pitt found his stomach heave at the whole slow, obscene affair. He had to swallow and breathe deeply to prevent himself from being sick.

  The turnkey slammed the door behind him. Jerome turned to look. Pitt was jarred by the intelligence in the man’s eyes; he had lately been thinking of him merely as an object, a victim. Jerome was as intelligent as Pitt himself, and immeasurably more so than his jailers. He knew what was going to happen; he was not some trapped animal, but a man with imagination and reason. He would probably die a hundred times before that final dawn. He would feel the rope, experience the pain in some form or other, every moment he could not concentrate enough to drive it out of his mind.

  Was there hope in his face?

  How incredibly stupid of Pitt to have come! How sadistic! Their eyes met and the hope vanished.

  “What do you want?” Jerome said coldly.

  Pitt did not know what he wanted. He had come only because time was short, and if he did not come soon, he could not come at all. Perhaps there was still a thought somewhere in his mind that Jerome would even now say something that would give him a new line to follow. To say so, to imply that there was any chance at all, would be a refinement of torture that was unforgivable.

  “What do you want?” Jerome repeated. “If you are hoping for a confession to ease your sleep, you are wasting your time. I did not kill Arthur Waybourne, nor did I have, or desire”—his no
strils widened with disgust—“any physical relationship with him, or either of the other boys.”

  Pitt sat down on the straw.

  “I don’t suppose you went to Abigail Winters either, or Albie Frobisher?” he asked.

  Jerome looked at him suspiciously, expecting sarcasm. It was not there.

  “No.”

  “Do you know why they lied?”

  “No.” His face twisted. “You believe me? Hardly makes any difference now, does it.” It was a statement, not a question. There was no lift in him, no lightness. Life had conspired against him, and he did not expect it to change now.

  His self-pity provoked Pitt.

  “No,” he said shortly. “It makes no difference. And I don’t know that I do believe you. But I went back to talk to the girl again. She’s disappeared. Then I went to look for Albie, and he’s disappeared too.”

  “Doesn’t make any difference,” Jerome replied, staring at the wet stones on the far side of the cell. “As long as those two boys keep up the lie that I tried to interfere with them.”

  “Why are they doing it?” Pitt asked frankly. “Why should they lie?”

  “Spite—what else?” Jerome’s voice was heavy with scorn; scorn for the boys because they had stooped to dishonesty from personal emotion, and for Pitt for his stupidity.

  “Why?” Pitt persisted. “Why did they hate you enough to say something like that if it’s not true? What did you do to them to cause such hatred?”

  “I tried to make them learn! I tried to teach them self-discipline, standards!”

  “What’s hateful about that? Wouldn’t their fathers do the same thing? Their entire world is governed by standards,” Pitt reasoned. “Self-discipline so rigid they’d endure physical pain rather than be seen to lose face. When I was a boy, I watched men of that class hide agony rather than admit they were hurt and be seen to drop out of a hunt. I remember a man who was terrified of horses, but would mount with a smile and ride all day, then come home and be sick all night with sheer relief that he was still alive. And he did it every year, rather than admit he hated it and let down his standards of what a gentleman should be.”

  Jerome sat in silence. It was the sort of idiotic courage he admired, and it galled him to see it in the class that had excluded him. His only defense against rejection was hatred.

  The question remained unanswered. He did not know why the boys should lie, and neither did Pitt. The trouble was Pitt did not believe they were lying, and yet when he was with Jerome he honestly did not believe Jerome was lying either. The thing was ridiculous!

  Pitt sat for another ten minutes in near silence, then shouted for the turnkey and took his leave. There was nothing else to say; pleasantries were an insult. There was no future, and it would be cruel to pretend there was. Whatever the truth, Pitt owed Jerome at least that decency.

  Athelstan was waiting for him at the police station the following morning. There was a constable standing by Pitt’s desk with orders that he report upstairs instantly.

  “Yes, sir?” Pitt inquired as soon as Athelstan’s voice shouted at him to come in.

  Athelstan was sitting behind his desk. He had not even lit a cigar and his face was mottled with the rage he had been obliged to suppress until Pitt arrived.

  “Who the hell told you you could go on visiting Jerome?” he demanded, rising from his chair to half straighten his legs and give himself more height.

  Pitt felt his back stiffen and the muscles grow tight across his scalp.

  “Didn’t know I needed permission,” he said coldly, “Never have done before.”

  “Don’t be impertinent with me, Pitt!” Athelstan stood straight up and leaned across the desk. “The case is closed! I told you that ten days ago, when the jury had brought in their verdict. It’s none of your business, and I ordered you to leave it alone then! Now I hear you’ve been poking around behind my back—trying to see witnesses! What in hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I haven’t spoken to any witnesses,” Pitt said truthfully, although it was not for the want of trying. “I can’t—they’ve disappeared!”

  “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 t
o 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!”