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  The prosecution looked puzzled, caught off guard, but it was not prudent for him to speak now and he knew it. He sat back in his seat, biting his lip.

  “And was your dress in disarray, sir?” the Q.C. asked Osmar.

  “Of course not!” Osmar said sententiously. “I am not a tidy man, as you may observe—” There was a titter around the room. “I had been searching my pockets for a note which I had mislaid,” Osmar went on. “I am afraid I was somewhat hasty in my efforts, and may well have looked in disarray when I was accosted by the constables, but I was untidy, not more—and that is not yet a crime against anything but good taste.”

  The prosecution pulled a face of disbelief, the Q.C. smiled and Beulah Giles kept her face in a sober expression with obvious difficulty. For the first time Carswell looked faintly uncomfortable.

  “And did you explain this to the constables, Mr. Osmar?” the Q.C. inquired, his eyes wide, his voice eminently reasonable.

  “I attempted to.” Osmar looked hurt. “I told them who I was, sir.” At this his shoulders straightened even further back and his chin lifted. “I am not unknown in certain circles—I have a reputation, and many years of honorable service to my Queen and country.”

  “Indeed,” the Q.C. said hastily. “But the constables would not listen to you?”

  “Not a word,” Osmar said with an acute sense of injury. “They were very rough with me, which is objectionable enough, but what I cannot forgive is the appalling way in which they treated Miss Giles, a young woman of respectable family and unspotted reputation.”

  Someone in the crowd shifted noisily. Beulah Giles colored and Osmar’s face darkened.

  “Forgive me, Mr. Osmar,” the Q.C. said with a very slight smile. “But we have only your word for this—this order of things—so different from the account given to us by Constables Crombie and Allardyce.”

  “Ha!” Osmar’s voice quivered and his cheeks puffed out. “That is not true, sir; not true at all. There was another witness—a man who was only a short distance away. He saw it all, because he observed that in my distress when I was arrested, I left behind the attaché case which I had with me. He picked it up and at a later hour he went to the police station and turned it in, so that I might reclaim it.”

  There was an audible sucking in of breath around the room.

  “He was close enough to observe this?” The Q.C. feigned amazement. “And why did the police not call him as a witness here, now?”

  Osmar assumed an expression of injured innocence, his little eyes wide open.

  “I can give no answer to that, sir, which is not critical. It would be better that they answered for themselves.”

  “If they can.” The Q.C.’s voice was now unctuous. He turned to Carswell. “My lord, I respectfully submit that the police have been negligent in their duty; they have not called a witness to the event who could perhaps have cleared my client. Now he cannot be called because there is no record of his name or whereabouts. Therefore I request that the case be dismissed and my client leave without a stain on his character.”

  Constable Crombie swiveled to stare in consternation at Constable Allardyce, and the prosecution half rose from his seat, but Carswell stopped them all with an imperious gesture.

  “Your request is granted, Mr. Greer. The case is dismissed.” And he banged his gavel on its rest to indicate the end of the matter.

  Pitt was dumbfounded. They had not even called Beulah Giles. There had been no opportunity to question her, and she must surely be the best witness of all. It was an extraordinary procedure, and Osmar had got away with it. Certainly it was a trivial offense, causing embarrassment at the most. No one was injured or robbed, and in the circumstances very probably no one had even been discomfited, as there appeared to have been no other passersby at the time. But that was not the issue. The police had been made to look foolish and ineffectual, and Osmar had defied the law.

  And perhaps most serious of all as far as Pitt was concerned, Carswell had behaved unaccountably. Only the crowd was satisfied, and that not because they were partisan in the case, simply that they had been thoroughly and unexpectedly entertained.

  On the way out Pitt passed the two constables looking confused and angry. He caught Crombie’s eye and the unspoken message of understanding flashed between them. Neither knew the reason for such acts, but both shared the emotions.

  The Q.C. strode along the passage, gown tails flapping, features composed in lines of deep thought. He no longer had the oozing satisfaction he had had in the courtroom. Either his own feelings were mixed, or else his attention was already upon the next case. Horatio Osmar was nowhere to be seen, nor the handsome Miss Giles.

  Pitt had another half hour to wait around the corridors before Carswell retired to his chambers and Pitt was able to see him.

  “Yes Mr. Pitt?” he said, looking up from his desk, his face furrowed with mild irritation. Obviously he had considered the matter concluded at their last interview, and had no wish to have to turn his mind to it now. “I am afraid I must ask you to be brief,” he went on. “I have many other affairs that require my time.”

  “Then I will proceed immediately,” Pitt said very quietly. He hated this, but it was inescapable. “Are you sure you would not care to tell me where you were on the night William Weems was murdered?”

  Carswell’s face darkened, and his voice had an edge to it. “I am quite sure. I do not require to account for myself, sir. I did not know the man or have any dealings with him whatever. I have no idea who killed him, nor, beyond my civic duty, do I care. Now if that is all, please attend to your calling, and leave me to mine.”

  “Weems was also a blackmailer.” Pitt stood perfectly still.

  “Indeed? How unpleasant.” A look of distaste crossed Cars well’s face, but there was no start of anxiety or sudden fear. “I grieve for his death still less,” he said tersely. “But I did not know him, sir. I have already said so, and do not intend to waste my valuable time repeating it to you. You may believe me or not, as you choose, but since it is the truth, you will not find proof of anything different. Now if you please, prosecute your inquiries somewhere else!”

  “Are you quite sure you do not care to tell me where you were that night?”

  Carswell half rose from his seat, his face deep pink.

  “I do not, sir! Now do you leave like a gentleman, or do I summon the ushers and remove you like a felon?”

  Pitt sighed and took a deep breath. He did not dislike Carswell, and he hated having to do this to him.

  “Perhaps Miss Hilliard was acquainted with him, and gave your name as collateral for a loan?” he suggested quietly and very levelly. “Neither she nor her brother are in such fortunate circumstances—”

  Carsweirs face went white as the blood fled from it, and then blushed scarlet again, and his legs seemed to fold under him. He collapsed back into his chair and stared helplessly, unable to clear his thoughts or muster any argument to deny.

  “Did Miss Hilliard know Weems?” Pitt repeated, not because he thought Theophania Hilliard guilty of murder for an instant, but he did not want to prejudice Carswell’s answers by suggesting them in the form of his questions.

  “No! No—” Carswell’s voice sank again. “No, of course not. It is—” He took a deep, shuddering breath and let it go. “It is I—it—” He looked up at Pitt, his eyes anguished. “I did not kill Weems.” He pushed the words between his teeth. “I had no occasion to. Before God, I swear to you, I never knew the man, and I was not there that night!”

  “What is your relationship with Miss Hilliard, sir?”

  Carswell seemed to hunch inside himself, almost to grow smaller in his chair.

  “She is—she is—my mistress.” It was so hard for him to say it came out in a whisper.

  Was there any point in asking if Weems was blackmailing him? The cause for it was only too obvious. And what would a denial be worth? It would surely be instinctive, a man protecting himself, denying guilt aut
omatically.

  “And Weems knew?”

  Carswell’s face tightened.

  “I am saying nothing more, except that I did not kill him. And if you have any humanity in you, any justice at all, you will not involve Miss Hilliard. She knows nothing whatever of any part of it—please—” The word was almost strangled in his throat. It was a measure of his distress that he could bring himself to speak it at all. His hands were clenched on the desk top and his body looked hunched and beaten.

  “Miss Hilliard is under no suspicion,” Pitt said before he considered the wisdom of telling him. “It is not a crime a woman might have committed, nor is there anything to connect Miss Hilliard with Weems.” Then to salvage something of his advantage, “It was your name we found on his books.”

  Carswell sat back in his chair, pale, tired, his body slowly relaxing into limpness. He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps even thanks, then changed his mind and closed it again.

  Pitt inclined his head in a small bow, and excused himself. There was nothing more to say and it was a pointless cruelty to stand and watch the man’s embarrassment. He would learn nothing new from it. He would like to have asked him why on earth he had ruled as he had on the case of Horatio Osmar, but that was a privileged decision which Pitt had no authority to investigate. There were no grounds to suppose it was corrupt, only eccentric and inexplicable.

  “What?” Micah Drummond was incredulous. “Carswell dismissed it?”

  “Yes sir,” Pitt agreed, standing in Drummond’s office in the sun. “He threw it out. Allardyce and Crombie could hardly believe it.”

  “Did you say Horatio Osmar?” Drummond said more thoughtfully. “Wasn’t he a junior minister in the government a few years ago?”

  “I believe so, but does that make it any better?” Pitt was ready to be angry at the abuse of privilege.

  Drummond smiled with a small lift of his shoulders.

  “None at all, but it may explain Cars well’s behavior—”

  “Not to me,” Pitt said hotly. “If that is the sort of justice he dispenses then he is not the man I thought him, nor is he fit to sit on the bench.”

  Drummond’s eyes widened. “A forceful opinion, Pitt.”

  Pitt felt his face color. He admired Drummond and was suddenly aware he had exceeded his position and breached the social gap which lay between them in criticizing a man out of his own class, and in Drummond’s.

  “I apologize,” he said huskily. “I should not have expressed it.”

  Drummond’s face relaxed into genuine humor.

  “I like your choice of words, Pitt, there is a nice difference between that and saying that you were mistaken in your estimate.” He moved from behind the desk. “I am inclined to agree with you, if that were the case, but I meant that Carswell and Osmar may have associates in common who may well have—” He hesitated, again uncomfortable, seeking to explain something which seemed to embarrass him. Pitt was suddenly reminded of the emotion he had felt riding beside him through the darkness in the hansom to see Lord Byam the first time.

  Pitt waited. The silence lay in the bright air. Outside someone dropped a wooden crate on the pavement, and in the distance a coster cried his wares, the sound coming clearly through the open window.

  “—have reminded him of friendship,” Drummond finished, “of obligation.”

  “I see,” Pitt said quietly, although he did not. It was a cloudy mass of possibilities, none of them hard-edged, all confused in the darkness of social pressures, debts of money, favor, the whisper of corruption, however politely phrased, and behind it all blackmail, and the ugly body of William Weems.

  Drummond pushed his hand into his pocket and looked miserable.

  “I suppose this mistress business is an excellent motive for murder, poor devil,” he said resignedly. “What about the other names on Weems’s list? Have you looked at them yet?”

  “No sir.” Pitt felt his heart sink. “One of them is on the force—”

  Drummond’s face paled. “Oh God! Are you sure?”

  “I suppose there is a remote hope it is someone else by the same name,” Pitt said without any hope at all.

  Drummond stared at the floor. “Well I suppose you’d better do it. What about the gun?” He looked up. “Have you found that yet? You said the one there—what was it?”

  “A hackbut,” Pitt replied. “Ornamental, on the wall.”

  “You said it wasn’t in working order?”

  “It isn’t. It wouldn’t have killed him, but it must have been something like it, muzzle loaded and with a wide barrel, to accommodate the coins.”

  Drummond winced. “I suppose you’ve got the local police looking for it? Yes, of course. Sorry. Well you’d better learn what you can about the others on the list. It gets uglier as it goes on.”

  “Yes,” Pitt agreed. “I’m afraid it does.”

  5

  CHARLOTTE SAT at the dinner table at the Hotel Metropole opposite Emily and felt an immense satisfaction. Tonight was going to be marvelous. She had on her very best gown, a gift from Emily and Jack for her help over the last two weeks, and she was quite sure she looked splendid. She had paraded before the mirror enchanted by the grand lady she saw reflected in it, a magical change from the woman she ordinarily saw. This creature was perfectly corsetted to the ultimate shape, her shoulders were creamy white above the Venetian red of the satin fabric, cut in a style up to the very minute, with the new, slender skirt, and hardly any bustle. It was so new it was almost ahead of the mode. Her hair was piled up in a shining crown, and her face was radiant with the contemplation of the evening. They were dining in the most elegant of places, then going to the opera, to Lohengrin, no less, the greatest draw of the season. Personally she would have preferred something Italian, but this was the “in” thing this year, and who would quarrel with that on such a night? After all, it was still part of Jack’s campaign, and as such a duty.

  Emily was dressed in her favorite delicate water green. She was feeling a great deal better and looked as lovely as an early flower with her fair hair and alabaster skin. Certainly she could have done with a trifle more color, but an attempt to lend it artificially had looked so awful they had both laughed heartily, and Emily had scrubbed it off. The Ashworth diamonds at her ears and around her neck would lend all the sparkle her uncertain health might lack, and she was determined to enjoy herself.

  Jack sat next to her, looking at her every few minutes in concern. But far more extraordinary than that, Pitt was present, dressed after considerable argument, and a mighty victory for Charlotte, in a borrowed dinner suit which really fitted remarkably well. Charlotte thought privately this was due to some clever and exceedingly tactful planning on Jack’s part. Pitt was sitting a trifle uncomfortably, now and again running his hand around inside his collar, and stretching his arms as if his cuffs were riding up, but he was smiling, and even when no one was looking at him, still appeared remarkably pleased with himself.

  That might have been due at least in part to another occupant of the table—not Lord Anstiss, sitting playing with his fork and a mouthful of smoked salmon, his concentration on his plate, his face wreathed in mild anticipation, but Great-Aunt Vespasia, her hair pale silver, wound on her head like a coronet, the light shining through it, her eyes bright with humor, a tiny smile on her lips as she looked at Charlotte, then at Pitt. In fact as she watched Pitt ease his shoulders again in his jacket her smile widened and the affection in it was plain, as most definitely was the amusement.

  The waiters came and served the next course, and Lord Anstiss resumed his extraordinary tale of courtly romance about Edward Heneage Dering who in 1859 had fallen in love with Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen.

  He had gone to her aunt, Lady Chatterton, a woman quite naturally old enough to be his mother, and somehow so mishandled his request for Rebecca’s hand that the aunt had assumed the offer intended for herself, and accepted it forthwith. He had been too much the gentleman to disabuse her of her illu
sion.

  “In 1865 all three were received into the Catholic church,” he went on with a wry smile. “And two years after that Rebecca Orpen married a friend of Dering’s named Marmion Edward Ferrars, also a Catholic.”

  Charlotte was fascinated. Had she known him better she would have challenged the truth of this odd story, as it was she had to content herself with a hasty glance at Aunt Vespasia, who nodded imperceptibly.

  Anstiss saw the look, but his face registered only amusement.

  “Indeed,” he said with relish, “they all four settled in Ferrars’s home at Baddesley Clinton, a marvelously isolated house in Warwickshire, with a moat.”

  Pitt coughed but Anstiss took no exception to it as a comment. In fact their incredulity seemed to be precisely the reaction he desired. He looked to Vespasia for confirmation, which she readily gave.

  “Ferrars had no money to speak of.” Anstiss picked delicately at his food. “And Dering had a great deal, so he paid off the mortgage, restored the local church and they all four settled down together to devote their lives to good works—and philosophy and sitting reading Tennyson together in the evenings. Dering wrote bad novels; Ferrars, who believed, quite correctly, that he resembled Charles I, dressed and cut his beard accordingly; Rebecca painted rather good water-color portraits of them all.

  “Lady Chatterton—she still called herself that—died in ’seventy-six. Marmion Ferrars died in ’eighty-four, and the year after Dering at last married Rebecca, where they still live—one presumes happily ever after.”

  “Absolutely marvelous,” Emily said with delight. “And you swear it is true.”

  “In every particular,” he said, meeting her eyes with unfeigned amusement. “There have been a great many people devoted to the romantic ideal, artists, poets, painters and dreamers. We are only now being taken over by the aesthete movement, which I suppose is a natural progression from extreme innocence to ostentatious ’experience.’”

  They continued speaking until the waiter brought the final course, then a trifle more hastily than would ordinarily have been the case, and still smiling, they repaired to their respective carriages and set out for Covent Garden and the opera.