Anne Perry - [Thomas Pitt 05]

by Bluegate Fields

  Pitt was inclined to agree. He nodded at the constable and shuddered in sympathy.

  “Fancy keeping a morgue, do you?”

  “Well, they’d ’ave to be less trouble ’n the live ones.” The constable was a philosopher. “And don’t need no feedin’!” He led the way through a narrow corridor whistling with drafts, down some stone steps, and up into a bare room where a sheet covered a lumpy outline on a wooden table.

  “There you are, sir. ’E the one wot you knows?”

  Pitt pulled the sheet off the head and looked down. The river had made its mark. There was mud and a little slimy weed on the hair, the skin was smudged, but it was Albie Frobisher.

  He looked farther down, at the neck. There was no need to ask how he had died; there were finger marks, bruised and dark, on the flesh. He had probably been dead before he hit the water. Pitt moved the sheet off the rest of him, automatically. He would be careless to overlook anything else, if there was anything.

  The body was even thinner than he had expected, younger than it had seemed with clothes on. The bones were so slight and the skin still had the blemishless, translucent quality of childhood. Perhaps that had been part of his stock in trade, his success.

  “Is that ’im?” the constable said from just behind him.

  “Yes.” Pitt put the sheet back over him. “Yes, that’s Albie Frobisher. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Not much to know,” the constable said grimly. “We get ’em out of the river every week, sometimes every day in the winter. Some of ’em we recognize, a lot we never know. You finished ’ere?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Then come back and ’ave that cup o’ tea.” He led the way back to the potbellied stove and the kettle. They both sat down with steaming mugs.

  “He was strangled,” Pitt said unnecessarily. “You’ll be treating it as murder?”

  “Oh, yes.” The constable pulled a face. “Not that I suppose it’ll make much difference. ’Oo knows ’oo killed the poor little beggar? Could ’ave bin anyone, couldn’t it? ’Oo was ’e anyway?”

  “Albert Frobisher,” Pitt replied, aware of the irony of such a name. “At least that’s how we knew him. He was a male prostitute.”

  “Oh—the one wot gave evidence in the Waybourne case—poor little swine. Didn’t last long, did ’e? Killed to do with that, was ’e?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well—” The constable finished the last of his tea and set the mug down. “Could ’ave bin, couldn’t it? Then again, in that sort o’ trade you can get killed for lots o’ different reasons. All comes to the same in the end, don’t it? Want ’im, I suppose? Shall I send ’im up to your station?”

  “Yes, please.” Pitt stood up. “We’d better tidy it up. It may have nothing to do with the Waybourne case, but he comes from Bluegate Fields anyway. Thanks for the tea.” He handed the mug back.

  “Welcome, sir, I’m sure. I’ll send ’im along as soon as my sergeant gives the word. It’ll be this afternoon, though. No point in ’anging around.”

  “Thank you. Good day, Constable.”

  “ ’Day, sir.”

  Pitt walked toward the shining stretch of the river. It was slack tide, and the black slime of the embankment smelled acrid. The wind rippled the surface and caught tiny white shreds of spray up against slow-moving barges. They were going up the river to the Pool of London and the docks. Pitt wondered where they had come from, those shrouded cargoes. Could be anywhere on earth: the deserts of Africa, the wastes north of Hudson Bay where it was winter six months long, the jungles of India, or the reefs of the Caribbean. And that was without even going outside the Empire. He remembered seeing the map of the world, with British possessions all in red—seemed to be every second country. They said the sun never set on the Empire.

  And this city was the heart of it all. London was where your Queen lived, whether you were in the Sudan or the Cape of Good Hope, Tasmania, Barbados, the Yukon, or Katmandu.

  Did a boy like Albie ever know that he lived in the heart of such a world? Did the inhabitants of those teeming, rotten slums behind the proud streets ever conceive in their wildest drunken or opium-scented dreams of the wealth they were part of? All that immense might—and they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, even begin on the disease at home.

  The barges were gone, the water shining silver in their wake, the flat light brilliant as the sun moved slowly westward. Some hours hence, the sky would redden, giving the pall-like clouds of the factories and docks the illusion of beauty before sunset.

  Pitt straightened up and started to walk. He must find a cab and get back to the station. Athelstan would have to allow him to investigate now. This was a new murder. It might have nothing to do with Jerome or Arthur Waybourne, but it was still a murder. And murder must be solved, if it can be.

  “No!” Athelstan shouted, rising to his feet. “Good God, Pitt! The boy was a prostitute! He catered to perverts! He was bound to end up either dead of some disease or murdered by a customer or a pimp or something. If we spent time on every dead prostitute, we’d need a force twice the size, and we’d still do nothing else. Do you know how many deaths there are in London every day?”

  “No, sir. Do they stop mattering once they get past a certain number?”

  Athelstan slammed his hand on the desk, sending papers flying.

  “God dammit, Pitt, I’ll have your rank for insubordination! Of course it matters! If there was any chance, or any reason, I’d investigate it right to the end. But murder of a prostitute is not uncommon. If you take up a trade like that, then you expect violence—and disease—and sooner or later you’ll get it!

  “I’m not sending my men out to comb the streets uselessly. We’ll never find out who killed Albie Frobisher. It could have been any one of a thousand people—ten thousand! Who knows who went into that house? Anyone! Anyone at all. Nobody sees them—that’s the nature of the place—and you bloody well know that as well as I do. I’m not wasting an inspector’s time, yours or anyone else’s, chasing after a hopeless case.

  “Now get out of here and find that arsonist! You know who he is—so arrest him before we have another fire! And if I hear you mention Maurice Jerome, the Waybournes, or anything else to do with it again, I’ll put you back on the beat—and that I swear—so help me, God!”

  Pitt said nothing more. He turned on his heel and walked out, leaving Athelstan still standing, his face crimson, his fists clenched on the desk.

  10

  CHARLOTTE WAS STUNNED when Pitt told her that Albie was dead; it was something she had not even considered, in spite of the terrifying number of deaths she had heard of among such people. Somehow it had not occurred to her that Albie, whose face and even something of his feelings she knew, would the within the space of her brief acquaintance with his life.

  “How?” she demanded furiously, caught by surprise as well as pain. “What happened to him?”

  Pitt looked tired; there were fine lines of strain on his face that she knew were not usually pronounced enough to see. He sat down heavily, close to the kitchen fire as though he had no warmth within.

  She controlled the words that flew to her lips, and forced herself to wait. There was a wound inside him. She knew it as she did when Jemima cried, wordlessly clinging to her, trusting her to understand what was beyond explaining.

  “He was murdered,” he said at last. “Strangled, and then put in the river.” His face twisted. “Irony in that, of a sort. All that water, dirty river water, not like Arthur Waybourne’s nice clean bath. They pulled him out at Deptford.”

  There was no point in making it worse. She pulled herself together and concentrated on the practical. After all, she consciously reminded herself, people like Albie died all over London all the time. The only difference with Albie was that they had perceived him as an individual; they knew he understood what he was as clearly as they did—surely even more so—and shared some of their disgust.

  “Are they going t
o let you investigate?” she asked. She was pleased with herself; her voice showed none of the struggle inside her, of her image of the wet body. “Or do the Deptford police want it? There is a station at Deptford, isn’t there?”

  Tired enough to sleep even crumpled where he sat, he looked up at her. But if she dropped the spoon she held, turned, and took him in her arms, she knew it would only make it worse. She would be treating it like a tragedy, and him like a child, instead of a man. She continued stirring the soup she was making.

  “Yes, there is,” he replied, unaware of her crowding thoughts. “And no, they don’t want it—they’ll send it to us. He lived in Bluegate Fields, and he was part of one of our cases. And no, we’re not going to investigate it. Athelstan says that if you are a prostitute, then murder is to be expected, and hardly to be remarked on. Certainly it is not worth police time to look into. It would be wasted. Customers kill people like that, or procurers do, or they die of disease. It happens every day. And God help us, he’s right.”

  She absorbed the news in silence. Abigail Winters had gone, and now Albie was murdered. Very soon, if they did not manage to find something new and radical enough to justify an appeal, Jerome would hang.

  And Athelstan had closed the murder of Albie as insoluble—and irrelevant.

  “Do you want some soup?” she asked without looking at him.

  “What?”

  “Do you want some soup? It’s hot.”

  He glanced down at his hands. He had not even realized how cold he was. She noticed the gesture and turned back to the stove to ladle out a bowlful without waiting. She handed it to him and he took it in silence.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, dishing out her own soup and sitting down opposite him. She was afraid—afraid he would defy Athelstan and go ahead with an inquiry on his own, and perhaps be demoted, or even dismissed. They would have no money coming in. She had never been poor in her life, not really poor. After Cater Street and her parents’ home, this was almost poverty—or so it had seemed the first year. Now she was used to it, and only thought about it as different when she visited Emily, and had to borrow clothes to go calling in. She had no idea what they would do if Pitt were to lose his job.

  But she was equally afraid that he would not fight Athelstan, that he would accept Albie’s death and disregard his own conscience because of her and the children, knowing their security depended on him. And Jerome would hang, and Eugenie would be alone. They would never know whether he had killed Arthur Waybourne, or if he had been telling the truth all the time and the murderer was someone else, someone still alive and still abusing young boys.

  And that too would lie between them like a cold ghost, a deceit, because they had been afraid to risk the price of uncovering the truth. Would he hold back from doing what he believed right because he would not ask her to pay the price—and ever afterward feel in his heart that she had robbed him of integrity?

  She kept her head down as she ate the soup so he could not read her thoughts in her eyes and base any judgment on them. She would be no part of this; he must do it alone.

  The soup was too hot; she put it aside and went back to the stove. Absentmindedly she stirred the potatoes and salted them for the third time.

  “Damn!” she said under her breath, and poured the water off quickly down the sink, filled up the pan again, and replaced it on the stove. Fortunately, she thought he was too preoccupied to ask her what on earth she was doing.

  “I’ll tell Deptford they can keep him,” he said at last. “I’ll say we don’t need him after all. But I’ll also tell them all I know about him, and hope they treat it as murder. After all, he lived in Bluegate Fields, but there’s nothing to say he was killed there. He could still have been in Deptford. What on earth are you doing with the potatoes, Charlotte?”

  “I’m boiling them!” she said tartly, keeping her back to him to hide the rush of warmth inside her, the pride—probably stupid. He was not going to let it go, and thank heaven, he was not going to defy Athelstan, at least not openly. “What did you think I was doing?”

  “Well, what did you pour all the water off for?” he asked.

  She swung around and held out the oven cloth and the pan lid.

  “Do you want to do it, then?” she demanded.

  He smiled slowly and slid farther down in the chair.

  “No, thank you—I couldn’t—I’ve no idea what you’re making!”

  She threw the cloth at him.

  But she was a good deal less light about it when she faced Emily across the porcelain-spread breakfast table the following morning.

  “Murdered!” she said sharply, taking the strawberry preserve from Emily’s hand. “Strangled and then put in the river. He could have gone all the way out to sea and nobody would ever have found him.”

  Emily took the preserve back.

  “You won’t like that—it’s too sweet for you. Have some marmalade. What are you going to do about it?”

  “You haven’t been listening!” Charlotte exploded, snatching the marmalade. “There isn’t anything we can do! Athelstan says prostitutes are murdered all the time, and it just has to be accepted! He says it as if it were a cold in the head or something.”

  Emily looked at her closely, her face sharp with interest.

  “You’re really angry about it, aren’t you?” she observed.

  Charlotte was ready to hit her; all the frustration and pity and hopelessness boiled up inside her. But the table was too wide to reach her, and she had the marmalade in her hand. She had to be content with a blistering look.

  Emily was quite unscathed. She bit into her toast and spoke with her mouth full.

  “We shall have to find out as much about it as we can,” she said in a businesslike manner.

  “I beg your pardon?” Charlotte was icy. She wanted to sting Emily into hurting as much as she did herself. “If you would care to swallow your food before attempting to speak, I might know what it is you are saying.”

  Emily looked at her impatiently.

  “The facts!” she enunciated clearly. “We must find out all the facts—then we can present them to the right people.”

  “What right people? The police don’t care who killed Albie! He is only one prostitute more or less, and what does that matter? And anyway we can’t get the facts. Even Thomas can’t get them. Use your head, Emily. Bluegate Fields is a slum, there are hundreds of thousands of slum people, and none of them will tell the police the truth about anything unless they have to.”

  “Not who killed Albie, stupid!” Emily was beginning to lose patience. “But how he died. That’s what matters! How old he was, what happened to him. He was strangled, you said, and dropped into the river like rubbish, then washed up at Deptford? And the police aren’t the people who matter, you told me that yourself.” She leaned forward eagerly, toast in the air. “But how about Callantha Swynford? How about Lady Waybourne? Don’t you see? If we can make them envision all that in their minds’ eye, all the obscenity and pathos, then we may draw them into our battle. Albie dead may be no use to Thomas, but he’s excellently useful to us. If you want to appeal to people’s emotions, the story of one person is far more effective than a catalogue of numbers. A thousand people suffering is much too hard to think of, but one is very easy.”

  At last Charlotte understood. Of course Emily was right; she had been stupid, allowing herself to wallow in emotion. She should have thought of it herself. She had allowed her feelings to blot out sense, and that was the ultimate uselessness. She must not let it happen again!

  “I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “You are quite right. That is definitely the right thing to do. I shall have to find out the details from Thomas. He didn’t really tell the a lot yesterday. I suppose he thought it would upset me.”

  Emily looked at her through her eyelashes. “I can’t imagine why,” she said sarcastically.

  Charlotte ignored the remark, and stood up. “Well, what are we going to do today? W
hat is Aunt Vespasia planning to do?” she said, tweaking her skirt to make it fall properly.

  Emily stood up, too, patted her lips with her napkin, and replaced it on the plate. She reached for the bell to summon the maid.

  “We are going to visit Mr. Carlisle, whom I find I like—you didn’t tell me how nice he was! From him I hope we shall learn some more facts—about rates of pay in sweatshops and things—so we know why young women cannot live on them and so take to the streets. Did you know that people who make matches get a disease that rots away their bones till half their faces are destroyed?”

  “Yes, I did. Thomas told me about it a long time ago. What about Aunt Vespasia?”

  “She is taking luncheon with an old friend, the Duchess of somewhere or other, but someone everybody listens to—I don’t think they dare ignore her! Apparently, she knows absolutely everyone, even the Queen, and hardly anybody knows the Queen these days, since Prince Albert died.”

  The maid came in, and Emily told her to order the carriage to be ready in half an hour; then she was to clear the table. No one would be home until late afternoon.

  “We shall take luncheon at Deptford,” Emily said, answering Charlotte’s look of surprise. “Or else we shall go without.” She surveyed Charlotte’s figure with a mixture of envy and distaste. “A little self-denial will not harm us in the least. And we shall inquire of the Deptford policemen as to the state of the body of Albie Frobisher. Perhaps we may even be permitted to see it.”

  “Emily! You can’t! Whatever reason could we give for such a bizarre thing? Ladies do not go to view the corpses of prostitutes pulled out of the river! They wouldn’t allow us.”

  “You will tell them who you are,” Emily replied, crossing the hall and beginning up the stairs so they could prepare their appearance for the day. “And I shall tell them who I am, and what my purpose is. I am collecting information on social conditions because it is desired that there should be reform.”

  “Is it?” Charlotte was not put off; it was merely a remark. “I thought it wasn’t. That is why we must excite people’s sympathy—and anger.”