Drummond stared into the distance.
“I’m sorry.” Pitt straightened up. “I have to go back to Farriers’ Lane.”
“What?” Drummond looked up at him sharply.
“If it isn’t Juniper Stafford or Pryce, then I have to go back to Farriers’ Lane,” Pitt repeated. “It was someone he saw that day, because the flask was all right when Livesey and his luncheon companion drank from it. Which leaves only those involved in the case.”
“But we’ve been over that,” Drummond argued. “Everything we’ve looked at still leads to Godman being guilty, and if he was, why should anyone kill Stafford because he wanted to open up the case again? And there is no proof that he did want to. Livesey said he didn’t.”
“Livesey said he had no knowledge that he did,” Pitt corrected. “I accept Livesey believes the case is closed, but that does not mean Stafford found nothing that day. He may well have wished to keep it to himself until he had proof.”
“Of what?” Drummond demanded exasperatedly. “That someone other than Godman killed Blaine? Who, for heaven’s sake? Fielding? There’s no evidence. There wasn’t at the time and can you think of what anyone, let alone Stafford, could find now?”
“I don’t know,” Pitt admitted. “But I want to reinvestigate the entire case. I have to, if I am going to find out who killed Stafford.”
Drummond sighed. “Then I suppose you had better do it.”
“With your authority? Lambert won’t like it.”
“Of course he won’t. Would you?”
“No. But once I had wondered whether I was wrong in the first place, I would have to know.”
“Would you?” Drummond said wryly. He moved away from the fire towards his desk. “Yes, of course with my authority, but you’ll still have to be diplomatic if you hope to achieve anything. It is not only Lambert who will not like it! You are treading on a lot of toes. The assistant commissioner has been onto me to get the murder of Stafford solved as quickly as possible, and to do it without raking up the Farriers’ Lane case and causing a lot of public unease and questioning of the original verdict. There are enough people trying to cause unrest as it is. We mustn’t give them the ammunition to undermine the law any further. The Whitechapel murders did the police a lot of harm, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Pitt agreed quietly. He was very well aware of the resignations that matter had caused, and the questions in the Houses of Parliament, the public resentment of a police force paid for from taxes. There were still many people, some of considerable influence, who believed that a police force was a bad idea and would willingly have gone back to sheriffs and the Bow Street runners.
“And the Home Secretary has been down as well,” Drummond went on, looking at Pitt and chewing his lip. “He doesn’t want a lot of scandal.”
Pitt thought of the Inner Circle, but he said nothing. Drummond was as helpless as he was to fight against that. They might guess who belonged; they would not know unless favors were called for, and then it was too late.
“For God’s sake be careful, Pitt,” Drummond said urgently. “Be sure you are right!”
“Yes sir,” Pitt agreed obediently, rising to his feet. “Thank you.”
Pitt found Lambert early in the morning, still looking a little sleepy and far from pleased to see him.
“I can’t tell you anything more,” he said before Pitt asked.
“I assumed if you knew anything you would have said so at the time,” Pitt replied. He hoped he sounded casual, not condescending, but the thought flickered through his mind to wonder if Lambert were of the Inner Circle as well. But regardless, he hated checking another man’s work as if he expected to find an error of such magnitude, but he felt no alternative. He looked at Lambert’s rumpled, angry face. In his place he would have resented it, but as he had told Drummond, he would also have wanted to know. The uncertainty would have been worse, the lying awake at night turning it over and over in his mind till every mistake possible seemed real and guilt marred everything, confidence waned, all other decisions seemed flawed.
He looked at Lambert again, sitting uncomfortably in his chair. “Don’t you need to know?” he said frankly.
“I do know.” Lambert avoided his eyes. “The evidence was conclusive. I have enough present-day cases without investigating past ones that are closed.” He looked up, guilt and anger in his face. “We were a trifle hasty in the way we handled it, I give you that. I wouldn’t say every decision is the one I would make if I had it to do again, with more time for judgments, and nobody hounding me day and night for an arrest. But then I daresay you’d conduct a few of your cases differently if you had a second chance. Beginning with the Highgate case.”
“I would,” Pitt said quietly, remembering the second death with a sick unhappiness. “But I still intend to go over the Farriers’ Lane case. I don’t want to do it without you, but I will if you force me.” He met Lambert’s unhappy eyes. “If you are certain you were essentially correct, all I can do is prove that.” He leaned forward. “For heaven’s sake, man, I’m not trying to find fault with your procedure! All I want is to make sure of the facts. I know what it is like to work under pressure with the newspapers demanding an arrest in every issue, people shouting at you in the streets, the assistant commissioner breathing heavily and sending for reports every day, and the Home Secretary facing questions in the House of Commons.”
“Not like this case, you don’t,” Lambert said bitterly, but he looked slightly mollified.
“May I see the files and ask Paterson to help me find the witnesses again?” Pitt asked.
“You can speak to Paterson, but I can’t spare him to go ’round with you. He’ll tell you what he remembers. You’ll get the names from the files, and where they are now you’ll just have to find out. Not that it will do you any good,” he added, rising to his feet. “You’ll never find the layabouts who saw him come out of the lane. They’re probably half of them dead by now. The doorman’ll just say the same, and the urchin, who is the only one who really saw him, is totally unreliable, even if you can get hold of him. Still, the flower seller’s all right, and I’ll get Paterson for you.”
“Thank you,” Pitt accepted.
Lambert went to the door and pulled it open. He called for a sergeant and told him to fetch the files on the Farriers’ Lane case, then he came back into the room, looking at Pitt with a frown.
“If you find anything—I’d like you to tell me.”
“Of course.”
The sergeant came in before any further speech was necessary, and Pitt thanked him and took the files away to read in the small room Lambert had provided.
He had read Joshua Fielding’s statement, and Tamar Macaulay’s, and was halfway through the theater doorman’s when Sergeant Paterson came in. He looked anxious but there was no anger yet in him, no sense of having been offended.
“You want to see me, sir?”
“Yes, please.” Pitt indicated the chair opposite him and Paterson sat on it reluctantly, his face still full of questioning.
“Tell me again everything you remember of the Farriers’ Lane case,” Pitt asked him. “Begin with the first you heard of it.”
Paterson sighed very slightly and began.
“I was on duty early. A constable sent a message that the blacksmith’s boy in the Farriers’ Lane smithy had found a dreadful corpse in his yard, so I was sent straight ’round to see what was what.” His eyes were on Pitt’s face. “Sometimes we get reports like that, and it turns out to be a drunk, or someone died natural. I went straightaway, and found P.C. Madsen standing at the entrance to Farriers’ Lane, white as a sheet and looking fit to be buried hisself.”