Anne Perry - Belgrave Square

She placed Pitt’s breakfast before him, without meeting his eyes. She was acutely conscious that she was standing in for her mistress, and she did not want to spoil it by presuming.

He thanked her, began to eat, and thanked her again. She really was quite a good cook and she had obviously tried very hard. The kitchen was warm in the sun, the light reflected off the china on the dresser and winked on the polished surfaces of the pans. The room smelled of bread, hot coals and clean linen.

When he had finished he rose, thanked Gracie again, and went out into the passage and to the front door. He put his boots on and collected his jacket. A button came off in his hand as he fastened it. He put it in his pocket along with a small penknife, a ball of string, a piece of sealing wax, several coins, two handkerchiefs and a box of matches, and went outside into the sun.

At the Clerkenwell station he was met by Innes, looking bright and very keen, which surprised him since he knew of nothing to pursue today but the people whose names appeared on Weems’s list of debtors. Perhaps Innes thought he was going to work on the men like the magistrate Addison Carswell, or Mr. Latimer, whoever he was, and the policeman Samuel Urban. He could not have looked forward with anything but dread to investigating Urban, but the other two might be more interesting. If that were so, Pitt would have to disabuse him very quickly. Handling such delicate areas was presumably also why Drummond had taken Pitt from his fraud case and put him onto this. There were not only Lord Byam’s feelings to be considered, but other people’s, especially if a member of the force was involved.

However before Pitt could approach the subject Innes made it unnecessary.

“Mornin’ sir,” he said, straightening to attention, his eyes wide, his face keen. “Doctor sent a message for us to come to the morgue. ’e’s found something as ’e’s never seen in ’is life before. Says it makes this a poetic kind of a murder.”

“Poetic,” Pitt said incredulously. “A grubby little usurer has his head shot off in Clerkenwell, and he thinks it’s poetic! Probably some poor debtor driven to despair couldn’t take it any more and his mind snapped, nothing more to lose. I don’t think I could face a doctor who sees poetry in that.”

Innes’s face fell.

“Oh I’m coming,” Pitt assured him quickly. “Then we’ll have to start going through the list and finding these poor devils. At least we can weed out those who can prove they were elsewhere.” As he was speaking he turned around and went out into the street again, Innes matching him pace for pace, stretching his legs to keep up.

“Would you take family’s word for it, sir?” he said doubtfully. “They’d stick together, natural. Wife’s word’s not much good. Any woman worth anythin’d say ’er man were at ’ome. an’ that’s where ’e’s most likely to be at that time o’ night. Unless ’E ’as night work.”

“Well that’d be something,” Pitt conceded. He knew he was going to hate this. It was painful enough to see the despair of poverty, the thin faces, the cramped, ill-drained houses, the undersized, sickly children, without having to pry into their fears and embarrassment, and maybe leave them terrified of a yet worse evil. “We’ll exclude some of them.”

“What about the big debtors, sir?” Innes asked, skipping off the pavement onto the roadway, dodging a dray cart and making a leap back onto the curb at the far side. “Are you goin’ ter see them?”

Pitt ducked under the huge dray horse’s head as it shied upward, and made a dive at the curb himself.

“Yes, when we’ve got a start on the others,” he replied, out of breath.

Innes grinned. “I guess as you in’t lookin’ forward to that much, askin’ nobs if they’re in debt ter a back street usurer, an’ please sir did yer shoot ’is ’ead orf?”

Pitt smiled in spite of himself. “No,” he said wryly. “I’m still hoping it won’t be necessary.”

Innes was saved from replying by the fact that they had reached the steps of the morgue. He fell behind Pitt and followed him up and inside. Again the smell of carbolic, wet stone and death met them, and involuntarily they both tightened their muscles and flared their nostrils very slightly, as if somehow one could close one’s nose against it, stop it from reaching the back of the throat.

The doctor was in a small room off the main hall, sitting behind a wooden table which was covered with odd sheets of paper.

“Ah!” he said as soon as he saw them. “You on the Clerkenwell shooting? Got something for you. Very rummy, this corpse of yours. Most poetic thing I ever saw, I swear.”

Innes pulled a face.

“Shot,” the doctor said unnecessarily. He was wearing a scruffy coat splashed with blood and acid, and his shirt was obviously laundered, but no one had bothered trying to remove the deep ingrained stains from it. Apparently he had recently left some more grisly work for this meeting. He was sitting facing them, a goose-quill pen in his hand.

“I know.” Pitt was confused. “We know he was shot. What we don’t know is with what gun. The only gun in his office was a hackbut, and it was broken.”

“Ah!” The doctor was increasingly pleased with himself. “What kind of bullets though-you don’t know that, now do you, eh?”

“We didn’t see any,” Pitt conceded. “Whatever it was made a terrible mess of him. But it was pretty close range. The hackbut could have done it, only the pin was filed down.”

“Wouldn’t have recognized it if you had,” the doctor said, now positively oozing satisfaction. “Wouldn’t have thought a thing of it. Most natural event in the world.”

“Would you be good enough to explain yourself?” Pitt said very levelly, sounding each word. “What have you got?”

“Oh-” The doctor caught his exaggerated patience and realized he had tempted them long enough. “This!” He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his handkerchief, and very carefully unfolded it to show a bright gold guinea.

For a moment Pitt did not understand.

“So you have a gold guinea-”

“I found it in your Mr. Weems’s brain,” the doctor said with relish. “Got another, pretty bent. That one must have hit a lot of bone. Gold isn’t very hard, you know. But this one’s in good shape. Queen Victoria, 1876, thirteen years old.” He pulled a face. “Your usurer, gentleman, was shot by a gun loaded with gold coin. Someone has a nice sense of irony.”

The room they were in was bare and functional. Their voices echoed slightly.

“Poetry,” Pitt agreed with a humor that had a dark chill to it, a crawling on the skin, and a clamminess.

“Shot with ’is own money?” Innes said with amazement. “Oh that’s black, that’s very black.”

“Wouldn’t have thought any of those poor beggars would have that much imagination,” the doctor said with a shrug. “But there it is. Straight out of his brain-with a pair of forceps. Swear to it on the Bible.”

Pitt imagined it with a shiver: the quiet room above Cyrus Street, the lamps burning, gas hissing gently in the brackets, the sound of hooves from the street below, Weems sitting at his desk implacable, yielding nothing, the shadowy figure with a huge barreled weapon loading it with gold-and the explosion of the shot, the side of Weems’s head blown apart.

“What happened to the other pieces?” he asked. “You aren’t saying two gold coins did all that damage, are you?”

“No-not possible,” the doctor agreed. “Must have been four or five at least. I can only think the man, whoever he was, picked up those that weren’t embedded too deep in flesh-if you can imagine that. Cold-blooded devil.”