Pentecost Alley tp-16 Page 14

  “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?”

  “I think so….”

  Jago’s eyebrows rose. “But you are not sure? That means you don’t have proof.”

  “I have a very strong indication, it just seems such a stupid thing to have done. I need a clearer picture of the man in order to believe it. I already have a picture of Ada.”

  Jago shook his head. “Well, Ada I could have helped you with. The man I doubt I know.” He picked up the broom and began to sweep the last area of the floor which still needed doing. “You don’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” Pitt conceded, sitting on the pew and crossing his legs. “You’re wrong. Y
ou do know the man, or at least you did.”

  Jago stopped, still standing with the broom in his hands, his shoulders back. He did not turn to look at Pitt.

  “You mean Finlay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of the badge? I told you, he could have lost that years ago.”

  “Possibly. But he didn’t leave it in Ada McKinley’s bed years ago, Reverend.”

  Jago said nothing. The unlikelihood of someone else’s having stolen the badge, or found it by accident, and chancing to have left it by the dead woman’s bed, and the cuff link also, lay unspoken between them. Jago continued sweeping the floor, carefully directing the dust and grit into a little pile. Pitt watched him. The sunlight slanted in through the windows in bright, dusty bars.

  “You knew him well a few years ago,” Pitt said at last. “Have you seen him at all since then?”

  “Very little.” Jago did not look up. “I don’t frequent the places he does. I never go to Mayfair or Whitehall, and he doesn’t come to Saint Mary’s.”

  “You don’t say that he doesn’t come to Whitechapel,” Pitt pointed out.

  Jago smiled. “That’s rather the matter at issue, isn’t it?”

  “Have you ever seen him here?”

  “No.”

  “Or heard that he was here?”

  Jago straightened up. “No, Superintendent. I have never heard of Finlay being here, nor have I reason to suppose that he has been.”

  Pitt believed him. Yet there was something in Jago’s attitude which disturbed him. There was a pain in him, an anxiety which was more than merely sadness for the violent death of someone he had known, however slightly. When he had first told him they had found Finlay’s badge he had looked like a man in a nightmare.

  He changed his approach. “What was Finlay like when you knew him?”

  Jago swept up the dust in a pan and set it aside before he answered, propping the broom up against the wall.

  “Younger, and very much more foolish, Superintendent. We all were. I am not proud of my behavior in those times. I was extremely selfish, I indulged my tastes whenever I could, with disregard for the consequences to others. It is not a time I look back on with any pleasure. I imagine it may well be the same for Finlay. One grows up. One cannot undo the selfishness of youth, but one can leave it behind, learn from its mistakes, and avoid too quick or too cruel a judgment on those who in their turn do likewise.”

  Pitt did not doubt his sincerity, but he also had the feeling it was a speech he had prepared in his mind for the time he should be asked.

  “You have told me a lot about yourself, Reverend, but not about Finlay FitzJames.”

  Jago shook his head very slightly.

  “There’s nothing to tell. We were all self-indulgent. If you are asking me if Finlay has also changed, grown up, then since I have not seen him above a couple of times in the last three years, I cannot answer you from my knowledge. I imagine so.”

  “I learned where to find you through his sister. Presumably you are still acquainted with her?” Pitt pressed.

  Jago laughed very slightly. “Tallulah? Yes, in a manner of speaking. She is still in that stage of selfishness and the all-consuming pursuit of pleasure that the members of the Hellfire Club indulged in six or seven years ago. She has yet to see the purpose of any other kind of existence.” He said no more in words, but the expression of weariness in his face, the slight tightness to his lips, showed vividly how little regard he had for her. It was as if he did not wish to despise her but could not help himself. He despised his own past life at the same time as he asked compassion for Finlay.

  Why? Was it a fear that Finlay had not, in fact, grown beyond it at all but, like Tallulah, still placed his pleasures above honor or responsibility?

  “Why has your friendship lapsed so completely?” Pitt asked as if he were no more than mildly curious.

  Jago did not move. He stared at Pitt without speaking. He drew in his breath as if to reply, then let it out again.

  Somewhere beyond the church a woman called out to a child and a dog scampered past the open door.

  Pitt waited.

  “I suppose … I suppose our paths just … diverged,” Jago said at last, his eyes wide and dark. He was saying something far less than the truth, and even as he did so he knew that Pitt knew it.

  Pitt did not bother to argue.

  “I admire your loyalty, Reverend,” he said very quietly. “But are you sure that it is as commendable as you think? What about your loyalty to Ada McKinley, who was one of your parishioners, whatever her trade? What about the other women like her? They may be whores, but if you have set yourself as their shepherd, don’t you also have a loyalty to the truth, and to the path you’ve chosen?”

  Jago’s face was white, the flesh seemed to be pulled tight as though by some desperate inner strain.

  “I do not know who killed Ada, Superintendent. I tell you before God, I do not. Nor do I have any reason to believe that Finlay was here in Whitechapel that night, or any other. If I did, I would tell you.” He took a deep breath. “As to my friendship with the FitzJames family, it lapsed because of a difference of opinion-of purpose, if you like. Finlay could not understand my taking this calling, nor my wish to devote my life to it. It is not something I could explain, except in terms he did not believe or respect. He thinks I am eccentric, as does his sister.”

  “Eccentric?”

  Jago laughed; this time there was real amusement in his voice. “Oh, not in any admirable sense! She admires the aesthetes, men like Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons, or Havelock Ellis, who are endlessly inventive, always saying or doing … or believing … something new. Their purpose is to shock and cause comment … and I suppose possibly also to make people think. They see me as an utterly different kind of eccentric. I am a bore … the only thing even their moral tolerance will not forgive. It is the one sin that cannot be overlooked.”

  Pitt searched, but he could see no self-pity in Jago’s face, no bitterness whatsoever. For him they had missed the real happiness, not he.

  And yet there was still the shadow behind his smile, the awareness of something he would not tell Pitt, something which was full of darkness and pain. Was it knowledge of Finlay FitzJames, or of himself? Or was it possibly one of the other members of the Hellfire Club, either the sensual Thirlstone or the self-satisfied Helliwell?

  “Are you still friendly with any of the other members of the Hellfire Club?” he asked suddenly.

  “What?” Jago seemed surprised. “Oh! No. No, I am afraid not. I see Thirlstone from time to time, but by chance, not design. I haven’t seen Helliwell in a couple of years. He’s done nicely for himself, I hear. Married and became respectable-and very well-off. It was what he always wished, once he had had his fling.”

  “What does Finlay want?”

  Jago smiled again, this time with patience. “I’m not sure if he knows. Probably to fulfill his father’s ambitions for him, without the hard work and the pressure which they must inevitably involve. I don’t think he really wants to be Foreign Secretary, still less Prime Minister. But then I suppose Augustus will die before it comes to that anyway, and he’ll be able to relax and be what he truly wants … if he can still remember what that is.” He stopped. “Maybe Tallulah will marry well and become a duchess, or a great countess. I doubt she has the intelligence to be a great political wife. That requires considerable skill and tact, and a profound understanding of the issues and of human nature, as well as fashion and etiquette and how to be entertaining. She hasn’t the discretion, for one thing.”

  “Might she not acquire it?” Pitt asked. “She’s still very young.”

  “There’s no good acquiring discretion once you’ve marred your own reputation, Superintendent. Society doesn’t forget. At least that’s not exactly true. It will to a certain extent if you are a man, but not if you are a woman. Depends what you do.” He leaned against the pew, relaxing a little at last.

  “I’ve known
young men to behave really badly, being drunk and extremely offensive, and their comrades will hold a trial and decide he is guilty of a breach of behavior which cannot be overlooked. Then he will be advised that he should volunteer for some foreign service, say in Africa, or India, for example, and not return.”

  Pitt stared at him, stunned.

  “And he will do so,” Jago finished. “Society will discipline its own. Some things are not accepted.” He stood upright. “Of course others are, sometimes things you or I might find abhorrent. It depends on how public the outrage is, and against whom. If you want me to say Finlay never visited a prostitute, I can’t. But then you know that already. If that were a crime, you could charge half the gentlemen in London. Where else are they to take their appetites? A decent woman would be ruined, and they themselves would not want her afterwards.”

  “I know that,” Pitt agreed. “Is that the issue?”

  “No,” Jago conceded, looking at Pitt thoughtfully. “But old Augustus has made a great many enemies, you know, people he used and threw away in his rise to power, people who lost because he won. There’s more than one family owes its misfortune to him, and a great house doesn’t forgive its ruin. There are a few political ambitions which would be helped along if it were known they had destroyed FitzJames. Power is cruel, Superintendent, and envy is crueler. Before you commit yourself to any action against Finlay, be sure it really was he who left the badge in Pentecost Alley and not one of his father’s enemies. I … I find it terribly difficult to believe it was the man I knew … and I knew him well then.”

  Pitt searched his face, trying to read in it the emotions behind his words, and saw too many conflicting currents, but through them all a certainty of gentleness, and even in his eyes a restraint from judgment.

  He rose to his feet.

  “Thank you, Reverend. I can’t say that you have helped me greatly, but then I shouldn’t have expected it.” He bade him good-bye and walked out into the hot street with its noise and traffic, its horses and scurrying people on foot, the clatter of hooves, voices and film of dirt. He felt an even deeper liking for Jago Jones than before, and a conviction that in some fundamental way, he was lying.