Stoker’s hand on the desk clenched into a fist. “You mean you think there’s more than one?”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” Stoker pushed his hand through his hair, scraping it back off his forehead. “God help me, I don’t know. And there’s no time to find out. It could take us weeks.”
“It’s going to have to take us a lot less than that,” Pitt replied, pulling out the hard-backed chair opposite the desk and sitting on it. “In fact we must make a decision by the end of today.”
Stoker’s jaw dropped. “And if we’re wrong?”
“We mustn’t be,” Pitt told him. “Unless you want a new republic born in murder, and living in fear. We’ll start with who set up the fraud that got rid of Narraway and made it all connect up with Ireland, so he would be in an Irish prison when all this happened.”
Stoker took a deep breath. “Yes, sir. Then we’d better get started. And I’m sorry to say this, but we’ll have to consider whoever Gower worked with as well, because getting you out of the way has to be part of it.”
“Of course it has,” Pitt agreed. “But Gower worked with me, and I reported to Narraway.”
“That’s the way it looked to all of us,” Stoker agreed. “But it can’t be what it was. I’ll get his records from the officer who keeps all the personal stuff. We’ll have to know who he worked with before you. You don’t happen to know, do you?”
“I know what he said,” Pitt replied with a twisted smile. “I’d like to know rather more than that. I think we’d better take as close a look as we can at everyone.”
They spent the rest of the day going through all the records they could find going back a year or more, having to be discreet as to why.
“What are you looking for, sir?” one man asked helpfully. “Perhaps I can find it. I know the records pretty well.”
Pitt had his answer prepared. “It’s a pretty serious thing that we were caught out by Narraway,” he replied grimly. “I want to be sure, beyond any doubt at all, that there’s nothing else of that kind, in fact nothing at all that can catch us out again.”
The man swallowed, his eyes wide. “There won’t be, sir.”
“That’s what we thought before,” Pitt told him. “I don’t want to leave it to trust—I want to know.”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Can I help … or …” He bit his lip. “I see, sir. Of course you can’t trust any of us.”
Pitt gave him a bleak smile. “I don’t mind your help, Wilson. I need to trust all of you, and equally you need to trust me. It was Narraway who embezzled the money, after all, not one of the juniors here. But I have to know who helped him, if anyone, and who else might have had similar ideas.”
Wilson straightened up. “Yes, sir. Is anyone else allowed to know?”
“Not at the moment.” Pitt was taking a chance, but time was growing short, and if he caught Wilson in a lie, it would at least tell him something. In fact perhaps fear would be a better ally than discretion, as long as that too was used secretly.
He loathed this. At least in the police he had always known that his colleagues were on the same side as he. He had not realized then how infinitely valuable that was. He had taken it for granted.
By the middle of the afternoon, they had found the connection between Gower and Austwick. They discovered it more by luck than deduction.
“Here,” Stoker held out a piece of paper with a note scrawled across the bottom.
Pitt read it. It was a memorandum of one man, written to himself, saying that he must see Austwick at a gentlemen’s club, and report a fact to him.
“Does this matter?” he asked, puzzled. “It’s nothing to do with socialists or any kind of violence or change, it’s just an observation of someone that turned out to be irrelevant.”
“Yes, sir,” Stoker agreed. “But it’s this.” He handed another note with something written on the bottom in the same hand. Gave the message on Hibbert to Gower to pass on to Austwick at the Hyde Club. Matter settled.
The place was a small, very select gentlemen’s club in the West End of London. He looked up at Stoker. “How the devil did Gower get to be a member of the Hyde Club?”
“I looked at that, sir. Austwick recommended him. And that means that he must know him pretty well.”
“Then we’ll look a lot more closely at all the cases Gower’s worked on, and Austwick as well,” Pitt replied.
“But we already know they’re connected,” Stoker pointed out.
“And who else?” Pitt asked. “There are more than two of them. But with this we’ve got a better place to start. Keep working. We can’t afford even one oversight.”
Silently Stoker obeyed. He concentrated on Gower while Pitt looked at every record he could find of Austwick.
By nine o’clock in the evening they were both exhausted. Pitt’s head thumped and his eyes felt hot and gritty. He knew Stoker must feel the same. There was little time left.
Pitt put down the piece of paper he had been reading until the writing on it had blurred in front of his vision.
“Any conclusions?” he asked.
“Some of these letters, sir, make me think Sir Gerald Croxdale was just about on to him. He was pretty close to putting it together,” Stoker replied. “I think that might be what made Austwick hurry it all up and act when he did. By getting rid of Narraway he shook everybody pretty badly. Took the attention away from himself.”
“And also put him in charge,” Pitt added. “It wasn’t for long, but maybe it was long enough.” The last paper he had read was a memorandum from Austwick to Croxdale, but it was a different thought that was in his mind.
Stoker was waiting.
“Do you think Austwick is the leader?” he asked. “Is he actually a great deal cleverer than we thought? Or at any rate, than I thought?”
Stoker looked unhappy. “I don’t think so, sir. It seems to me like he’s not making the decisions. I’ve read a lot of Mr. Narraway’s letters, and they’re not like this. He doesn’t suggest, he just tells you. And it isn’t that he’s any less of a gentleman, just that he knows he’s in charge, and he expects you to know it too. Maybe that wasn’t how he spoke to you, but it’s how he did to the rest of us. No hesitation. You ask, you get your answer. I reckon that Austwick’s asking someone else first.”
That was exactly the impression Pitt had had: a hesitation, as if checking with the man in control of the master plan.
But if Croxdale was almost on to him, why was Narraway not?
“Who can we trust?” he asked aloud. “We have to take a small force, no more than a couple of dozen men at the very most. Any more than that and we’ll alert them. They’ll have people watching for exactly that.”
Stoker wrote a list on a piece of paper and passed it across. “These I’m sure of,” he said quietly.
Pitt read it, crossed out three, and put in two more. “Now we must tell Croxdale and have Austwick arrested.” He stood up and felt his muscles momentarily lock. He had forgotten how long he had been sitting, shoulders bent, reading paper after paper.
“Yes, sir. I suppose we have to?”
“We need an armed force, Stoker. We can’t go and storm the queen’s residence, whatever the reason, without the minister’s approval. Don’t worry, we’ve got a good enough case here.” He picked up a small leather satchel and put into it the pages vital to the conclusions they had reached. “Come on.”
————
AT OSBORNE, CHARLOTTE, VESPASIA, and Narraway were kept in the same comfortable sitting room with the queen. One terrified lady’s maid was permitted to come and go in order to attend to the queen’s wishes. They were given food by one of the men who kept them prisoner, and watched as they availed themselves of the necessary facilities for personal relief.