Long Spoon Lane: A Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Novel Read online

  Pitt knew what he was thinking. The Inner Circle was a web of secret alliances, promises, and loyalties between men who on the surface had no connection with one another. Outsiders did not know who they were, just that some people succeeded when others failed. Certain business deals went one way rather than another. Some men were promoted above rivals who had more skill. But if Wetron, now the head of what was left of the Circle, were making alliances with potential rivals from the most senior police command in the country, it was cause for anxiety.

  “Simbister?” Pitt said aloud.

  “And others, but him the most,” Tellman answered through a mouthful of sausage. “If it’s men from Cannon Street who are taking extortion money, it’ll be more than two or three. You won’t be able to count on anyone!”

  “I know.” Pitt felt a chill, even sitting in this warm room, and with the food inside him. “That’s why I need you, and someone you can trust, to arrest Jones, when I find him. I have to know if what the anarchists say is true.” He did not explain why. It was not only to find who killed Magnus Landsborough, it was far bigger than that. At issue was the whole morality of the force they had both served and believed in all their working lives.

  Tellman nodded, then finished the last of his meal without pleasure. The silence stretched on after they had swallowed their final mouthful and the tea in the pot was getting cold.

  The hurt was naked in Tellman’s thin face. He came from a poor but fiercely respectable family. His father had worked all the hours he was awake in order to keep them clothed and fed. His mother was energetic, angry, and scrupulously fair, and loved them with a defensiveness that bordered on violence. She scolded them for laziness, deviousness, too much laughter, for telling lies or minding other people’s business. But let anyone else find fault with her children, and they’d have their ears burned by her defense. Their achievements were considered to be no more than their duty to perform while their faults were addressed with a whirlwind of discipline. She loved them all, but she was proudest of Samuel, because he fought for what was right. She embarrassed him furiously by holding him up as an example to his younger siblings, and yet next to Gracie’s approval, hers mattered more to him than anyone else’s.

  To see his own force tainted cut him to the bone, perhaps even more than it did for Pitt.

  “I want to know too,” he said quietly. “I have to. If it’s in our patch as well, our men taking protection money, then it’s down to me to stop it. If I don’t, then I’m part of it too.” He stared at Pitt, defying him to argue.

  “Be careful!” Pitt warned impulsively, knowing how easily Tellman could be falsely disgraced, or even killed.

  Police officers were sometimes killed in the line of duty. It would be a hero’s death. Wetron himself would eulogize him. Pitt would be helpless to prove otherwise. And he realized with a tightening of his stomach, a weight inside him, that in spite of Tellman’s belligerence, his odd, stiff vulnerability, his prejudices and his doggedness, Pitt liked him more than anyone else outside his own family. It would be more than guilt for involving him that he would suffer, it would be a loneliness, a searing and permanent loss.

  In the morning, Pitt went to Narraway, who was sitting in his office, a pile of papers on the table in front of him, a pen in his hand.

  “Yes,” he said abruptly, looking up as Pitt closed the door.

  Pitt sat down without being asked to. It was the first time he had done so. He was still very aware of Narraway being his superior, and while his position was not officially insecure anymore, the feeling of uncertainty had never left him.

  “I looked around yesterday at the corruption Welling and Carmody are accusing the police of,” he said bluntly. “I wanted to prove them wrong.”

  “And you didn’t,” Narraway replied, still holding the pen.

  Pitt was jolted. “You know!” He felt oddly betrayed that Narraway had not spoken of the charge of corruption, as if he did not trust him to be loyal to his principles above his past associations.

  Narraway gazed at him steadily. His face was tense, deeply lined in the sunlight that came in through the window to his left. His eyes were nearly black. His hair had once been just as dark, but now it was liberally streaked with gray at the temples.

  “No, Pitt, I did not know,” Narraway replied wearily. “I can see it in you. You signal the magnitude of it like a ship’s beacon.” He smiled bleakly. “What is it? A little fencing of stolen goods, a blind eye here and there, favor for favor?”

  “Worse than that,” Pitt replied, thinking of the landlady at the Ten Bells. “Intimidation on a large scale, regular collection of part of the takings from more or less honest businesses.”

  Narraway looked somber. “Not our job. And hardly enough to provoke a man like Magnus Landsborough to anarchy. But I’ll speak to the commissioner. Looks as if he has a little housecleaning to do. I’m sorry. It’s unpleasant to find corruption in your own patch.” He looked down at his papers again, then, when Pitt did not move, he raised his eyes. “Is that why Myrdle Street was bombed?”

  “Yes. Man from the Cannon Street station—named Grover—lived in one of the houses. Carmody said he was connected to the extortion. Have you found a link between Landsborough and any foreign anarchists?”

  “No. We know where the most active anarchists are, and the most competent.” His mouth twisted wryly. “The incompetent ones blew themselves up and are either in hospital or dead. As far as I can tell, Landsborough had no European connections. If Welling and Carmody are examples of his recruitment, they are naive social reformers who haven’t the patience to do it through the usual ways, and imagine that if they destroy the system, they can build a better one in its place. Which is patently absurd, but without the bombs, we might consider them saints.”

  Pitt studied him, trying to measure the emotion lying behind his words. Was there pity there, a mourning for the tortured innocence that had driven those young men to rage at injustice and dream of changing it? Or was he simply making a professional judgment so he could act accordingly, and perhaps weigh Pitt a little more closely at the same time?”

  “That isn’t what bothers me,” Pitt told him, and was rewarded to see a flicker of surprise in Narraway’s face. “I went to see Samuel Tellman yesterday evening. In his own rooms, not Bow Street,” he added quickly, seeing Narraway’s sharpened gaze. “I told him about Grover, and Carmody’s accusations, and what I had found.”

  “Don’t dance around it, Pitt!” Narraway snapped.

  “Tellman believed it,” Pitt said. “Without proof. And he knows it must go higher.”

  “That’s obvious,” Narraway retorted curtly. “What is your point?”

  Pitt felt his body tighten. He loathed having to tell anyone this, and Narraway was not making it easier. “Tellman says Wetron is making alliances with men who would normally be his rivals for promotion. Specifically, with Simbister of Cannon Street.”

  Narraway let out his breath slowly. “I see. Is Simbister in the Inner Circle?”

  “I don’t know. But if he isn’t now, I imagine he soon will be.”

  “And Wetron’s purpose in this?” Narraway’s fingers were gripping his pen and he moved it up and down very slowly, but with a tension as if he would not be able to stop.

  “Power,” Pitt answered simply. “Always power.”

  “Using Simbister?” Narraway’s voice rose very slightly. He found it hard to believe.

  “It seems so.”

  “How is a corrupt police force in his interest?” Narraway questioned. “If he wants to be commissioner, he needs to be seen to be not only highly competent but also above suspicion. If he isn’t, Parliament won’t sustain him, even if he’s as rich as Croesus. Men in power want stability; above all they want the streets safe. If property isn’t safe, the voters are unhappy.” There was a faint challenge in his face, as if he expected Pitt to argue with him.

  “I don’t know,” Pitt admitted. “Are you prepared to take the chanc
e that he isn’t?”

  Narraway did not bother to answer. “What did you ask Tellman to do?”

  Pitt hesitated. He had not wanted to tell Narraway about his plan to have Jones the Pocket arrested, and then take his place, but perhaps he should have realized he would have to. Now it was unavoidable. He did so as briefly as possible. There was no need to explain why he needed Tellman’s help. Special Branch had no power of arrest themselves, and he could hardly trust any man from Cannon Street.

  “Be careful, Pitt,” Narraway said with surprising urgency. All the irony was gone from his face now. He leaned forward a little in his chair, all pretense of interest in his papers forgotten. “You don’t know who is involved, or how many. It’s not just greed you have to consider; it’s old loyalties. God knows, you should understand that!”

  “I know,” Pitt said quietly.

  “Do you?” It was a challenge. “And any association with you will make Tellman a marked man. I assume you realize that? Wetron is nobody’s fool, least of all yours. You gave him the chance to destroy Voisey and take over leadership of the Inner Circle, but he knows you are its most powerful and most successful enemy. He won’t ever forget that, and neither must you.”

  Pitt felt cold. He had known it already, but here in this quiet room it seemed more real. He had been careful to go to Tellman’s rooms to see him, and at dusk when the streets were busy and half-lit. There was no one else he could trust, especially at Bow Street. War does not allow you to spare your friends and send only strangers into battle.

  “I know that,” he said aloud. “And so does he.”

  “Then get on with it,” Narraway said quietly. “I want to know who was behind this bombing. Was Landsborough the leader? Where did the money come from for the bombs? And above all, now that Landsborough’s dead, who’s the new leader? By the way, who did kill Landsborough?”

  “I don’t know,” Pitt replied. “Carmody and Welling behave as if they believe it was one of us, which suggests it was someone they don’t know. A rival anarchist? One of Simbister’s men?”

  “Which means one of Wetron’s?” Narraway said almost under his breath. “Find out, Pitt. I want to know.”

  Pitt spent the rest of the day in the bombed-out ruins of Myrdle Street. He made several more inquiries about Grover, but no one was willing to say much about him beyond verifying that he had lived in the center house, and of course was now homeless, as were they all. Yes, he was a policeman. Their faces had closed expressions, defensive, and he thought also that there was fear. No one spoke ill of him, but there was a coldness in their eyes, without sympathy. It tended to confirm rather than disprove what Carmody had said.

  Deep in thought, walking along the Thames Embankment, he was pleasantly half-aware of the steamboats on the river, which were crowded with people enjoying themselves, wearing hats with streamers and waving to the shore. There was a band playing somewhere just beyond the curve where he could not see them. Street peddlers were selling lemonade, ham sandwiches, and various kinds of sweets. It was all exactly as London should be late on a summer afternoon. The breeze carried the smell of salt with the incoming tide, the sounds of laughter, music, horses’ hooves on the cobbles, and the faint, background surge of water.

  “Good evening, Pitt. All looks very normal, doesn’t it.”

  Pitt stopped abruptly. He knew the voice even before he turned. Charles Voisey, knighted by the Queen for his extraordinary personal courage in killing Mario Corena and saving the throne of England from one of Europe’s most passionate and radical republicans. Now he was a member of Parliament as well.

  What Her Majesty did not and would never know was that Voisey had then been the head of the Inner Circle, on the point of achieving his ambition to overthrow the monarchy and become the first president of a republican Britain.

  However, it was Mario Corena who had precipitated that act intentionally, forcing Voisey into killing him in order to save his own life. It had offered Pitt the chance to make Voisey seem the savior of the throne, and thus the betrayer of his own followers. For that Voisey would never forgive him, even though he had crossed sides brilliantly, almost without hesitation, using his newfound status as royal favorite to stand for Parliament, and win. Power was the prize. Only the Inner Circle had ever known his republican goal. To everyone else he was a brave, resourceful, and loyal man.

  Now Pitt looked at him standing on the footpath, smiling. He remembered his face vividly, as if he had seen him only minutes ago. He was distinguished but far from handsome. His pasty skin splashed with freckles, his long nose a trifle crooked. But as always, his eyes shone with brilliant intelligence, and he also seemed mildly amused.

  “Good evening, Sir Charles,” Pitt replied, surprised to find his breath catching in his throat. This meeting could not be by chance.

  “You are not an easy man to find,” Voisey continued, and as Pitt started to move again, he fell into step beside him, the breeze in their faces. “I imagine the bombing in Myrdle Street has you considerably exercised.”

  “Did you follow me along the embankment to say that?” Pitt asked a little testily.

  “It was a preamble,” Voisey replied. “Perhaps unnecessary. It is the Myrdle Street bombing I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “If you are trying to recruit me into backing a drive to arm the police, you are wasting your time,” Pitt said curtly. “We have guns now, if we need to use them. And we don’t need any more authority to search people, or houses. It’s taken us decades to get even as much cooperation as we have; if we start being heavy-handed, we’ll lose it. The answer is no. In fact, I shall do whatever I can to fight against it.”

  “Will you?” Voisey turned half a step ahead to face him, his eyes wide.

  Pit was obliged to stop in order to answer. “Yes!”

  “No chance of you changing your mind, under pressure, for example?”

  “None at all. Were you intending to exert pressure on me?”

  “Not at all,” Voisey answered him with a very slight shrug. “On the contrary, I am very relieved to hear that you will not be changed, regardless of threats or pleas. I had expected as much of you, but it is still a relief.”

  “What do you want?” Pitt demanded impatiently.

  “To have a reasonable conversation,” Voisey said, dropping his voice and suddenly intensely serious. “There are issues of urgent importance upon which we agree. I am aware of things which possibly you are not.”

  “Since you are a member of Parliament, that is unarguable,” Pitt observed tartly. “But if you imagine that I will share Special Branch information with you, you are mistaken.”

  “Then be quiet and listen to me!” Voisey snapped, his temper suddenly giving way, his face flushed. “A member of Parliament called Tanqueray is going to propose a private bill to arm the London police and give them wider power of search and seizure. As things stand at the moment, he has a very good chance of getting it passed.”

  “It will set the police back years.” Pitt was appalled.

  “Probably,” Voisey agreed. “But there is something far more important than that.”

  Pitt did not bother to hide his impatience, but already a sharp needle of curiosity was pricking him. Voisey must want something, and he must want it very much to have swallowed his loathing of Pitt sufficiently to follow him and speak like this. “I’m listening,” he said.

  Voisey’s face was pale now, a small muscle ticking in his jaw. His eyes held Pitt’s as they stood facing each other on the pavement by the embankment in the wind and the late sun. They were oblivious of passersby, the laughter, the music, and the splash of the rising tide on the steps below them.

  “Wetron will use people’s fear to back the bill,” Voisey said quietly. “Every further outrage plays into his hands. He will allow crime to mount until no one feels safe: robbery, street attacks, arson, perhaps even more bombings. He wants people so afraid that they will be begging him to get weapons, new men, more power, anything
to make them feel safe again. And when he is given them he will quell crime almost overnight, and emerge the hero.”

  “And you want him stopped,” Pitt realized aloud, knowing how intensely Voisey must hate the man who had so brilliantly taken over the position from which he had been driven.

  “So do you,” Voisey said softly. “If he succeeds he will be one of the most powerful men in England. He will be the man who saved London from violence and chaos, who made it safe to walk the streets again, to sleep undisturbed in one’s own bed without fear of explosions, robbery, losing one’s home or one’s business. The commissioner’s office will be his for the asking.” His voice was thick with fury and loathing too powerful to conceal anymore. “And he will be in command of a private army of policemen, with guns and the power of search and seizure that will ensure no one dislodges him. He will continue to take tribute from organized crime, payment for being able to continue their extortion unmolested. If any ordinary man disobeys, or protests, he will be stopped in the street, or his house will be searched, and they will find he was in possession of stolen goods. Next thing he will be in prison, and his family destitute.”

  An open landau passed by on the road, young women in pale dresses, parasols aloft, laughing and calling out to friends going the opposite way.

  “No one will come to his aid,” Voisey continued, oblivious to them. “Because those with the power to will long since have been silenced. The police will not trust anyone because half of them will be Wetron’s anyhow, but no one will know which half. The government will look the other way, grateful for law and order. Is that what you want, Pitt? Or do you hate the idea as much as I do? It doesn’t matter what your reasons are.”

  Pitt’s mind raced. Was it possible? Wetron’s ambition knew no bounds, but had he really the imagination and the nerve to try something so appalling? He knew the answer even as the question formed in his mind. Of course he had.