Anne Perry - Southampton Row

Tellman looked at him, glaring. “Where else would I be?” he challenged. “It was my fault! I told you to go to Teddington! You’d never have heard of Wray if it weren’t for me!” His face was filled with anguish, his body rigid, his eyes hot.

Pitt saw with a rush of surprise that Tellman really did blame himself for what had happened. He was scalded with a shame too deep to find words. At another time, if Pitt were hurting even a little less himself, he would have been moved by Tellman’s loyalty, but now his own fear was too deep. It all stemmed back to his evidence before Whitechapel. If only he hadn’t been so sure of himself, so pigheaded in giving evidence because he wanted his idea of justice served!

He had been right, of course, but that was not going to help now.

“Who told you about Francis Wray?” Cornwallis asked Tellman. “And for heaven’s sake sit down. We’re standing around as if we were at the graveside. The battle is not over yet.”

Pitt wanted to believe that, but there was no rational hope that he could grasp.

“Superintendent Wetron,” Tellman answered. He glanced at Pitt.

“Why?” Cornwallis persisted. “What reason did he give? Who suggested Wray to him? He didn’t know him himself, so who told him about Wray? Who made the connection between Wray and the unknown man who visited Maude Lamont?”

Absentmindedly, Pitt thought how Cornwallis had grown in his knowledge of detection. He looked at Tellman.

“He never said,” Tellman replied, his eyes widening. “I did ask him, but somehow he never really answered. Voisey? It must have been.” There was a thin thread of hope in his voice. “All the information about Wray came from Superintendent Wetron, so far as I know.” His mouth tightened. “But if he believes in Voisey, or. . or maybe he is Inner Circle himself?” He said it with disbelief, as if even now the thought of his superior’s being one of that terrible society was too monstrous to be more than a bad idea, something to be said and discarded.

Pitt thought of Vespasia. “When we disgraced Voisey we may have fractured the Inner Circle,” he said, looking from Cornwallis to Tellman and back again. Tellman knew all about the Whitechapel matter; Cornwallis knew something, but there were still large gaps in his knowledge, although even as Pitt watched him he saw his understanding leap forward. He asked no questions.

“Fractured?” Tellman said slowly. “You mean like in two parts?”

“At least,” Pitt answered.

“Voisey and someone else?” Cornwallis’s eyebrows rose. Wetron?”

Tellman’s sense of decency was outraged. “Oh no! He’s a policeman!” But even as he protested he was entertaining the idea. He shook his head, pushing it away. “A small member, maybe. People do, to get on, but. .”

Cornwallis chewed his lip. “It would make a lot of sense. Someone with a great deal of power, a very great deal, had you dismissed from Bow Street a second time,” he said to Pitt. “Perhaps it was Wetron? After all, he was the one who took charge from you. Superintendent of Bow Street is a very nice place for the head of the Inner Circle.” He looked rueful, even for an instant aware of fear. “There’ll be no end to his ambition.”

No one laughed, and no one denied it.

“He’s an ambitious man,” Tellman said very seriously.

Cornwallis leaned forward a little across the table. “Could they be rivals?”

Almost as if he had spoken it aloud, Pitt knew what he was thinking. It was the first spark of real hope, wild as it was. “Use it?” he asked, almost afraid to put words to it.

Cornwallis nodded very slowly.

Tellman stared at them, his face pale. “One against the other?”

“Can you think of anything else?” Cornwallis asked him. “Wetron is ambitious. If he thinks he can challenge Voisey for leadership of half the Inner Circle, and I think we can assume he is the one who led the breakaway, if not at first, then at least by the time it achieved its independence, then he is very ambitious indeed. And he cannot be fool enough to think Voisey will forgive him for it. He will have to live the rest of his life watching his back. If you know you have an enemy, better make a preemptive strike. If you believe you can do it effectively, finish your man.”

“How?” Pitt asked. “Tie Voisey in to the Southampton Row murder?” The idea strengthened as he was speaking. “There must be a continuous connection: Voisey goes to Maude Lamont with social connections, money, whatever it is she wants, and in return she blackmails certain of her clients to speak out against Voisey’s opponent in the election, Aubrey Serracold. Which in turn helps Voisey.”

“Ties up,” Tellman agreed. “Voisey to Maude Lamont to her clients, who do what she tells them, which helps Voisey. But we can’t prove it! Maude Lamont was the link, and she’s dead.” He took in a deep breath. “Just a minute! Did the blackmail stop? Did they stop helping Voisey?” That question was asked of Pitt.

“No,” he said. “No. So Maude didn’t do the blackmailing, she just provided the information as to where they were vulnerable.” Then the chill returned. “But we found no connection to Voisey. We searched all her papers, letters, diaries, banking accounts, everything. There is no trace of a link between them. But then he wouldn’t leave one. He’s far too clever for that. For a start, she could have used it herself!”

“You are looking at the wrong enemy,” Cornwallis said with a rising note of excitement in his voice. It was almost as if he was reliving one of his battles at sea, lining up the opposing ship to fire the broadside that would hole her below the waterline. “Wetron! We shouldn’t aim at either one, but make them attack each other.”

Tellman scowled. “How?”

Pitt felt a leap of triumph again and turned to stifle it in case it flared up out of control, and the darkness afterwards was too deep to bear.

“Wetron is an ambitious man,” Cornwallis said again, but this time with a new intensity. “If he could solve the Southampton Row murder in a spectacular way, personally taking the credit for it, it would enhance his position, make him strong enough no one could challenge him in Bow Street, and perhaps build a rung higher in the ladder.”

The next major step up would be Cornwallis’s own job. Pitt felt a tug of emotion that Cornwallis could not have been unaware of such a risk, and yet looking at him leaning his elbows on the kitchen table, there was not a shadow of hesitation in him.

“Find Cartouche!” Cornwallis said. “If it was Wetron who worked out who he was, and trapped him, and forced from him the secret of the blackmail, perhaps even to implicate Voisey-which might be possible with Rose Serracold being one of the other victims and Kingsley the third.”

“Dangerous. .” Pitt warned, but the blood was beginning to beat in his pulses and he felt alive again, quickened inside, and something like hope at the edge of his mind.

Cornwallis smiled very slightly, more a baring of the teeth. “He used Wray. Let us use him again. The poor man is beyond being hurt anymore. Even his reputation is ruined if they bring in a verdict of suicide. His life will be rendered almost meaningless in the sense he valued.”

A black rage hardened in Pitt at that thought. “Yes, I should very much like to use Wray,” he said between clenched jaws. “No one knows what I said to him, or he to me. And since I cannot prove I did not threaten him, neither can they deny anything I say he told me!” He too leaned forward across the table. “He had no idea who Cartouche was, but no one else knows that. What if I say that he did, and he told me, and that it was Cartouche’s identity which so distressed him?” His mind was racing now. “And that Maude herself knew, in spite of all his precautions? And she left a note of it somewhere hidden in her papers? We searched the house, but we did not understand what we saw. Now, with Wray’s information, we will. .”