That was something Lambert could do, send for the appropriate people Presumably Livesey had not done so. He turned to look at him.
“Do you—do you need a little help?” Livesey said, swallowing and stepping forward. “I …” He cleared his throat. “What would you like me to do?”
“I was going to ask you if you had called the medical examiner,” Pitt answered,
“No—no, I just sent the boy for the police. I thought …”
“Lambert can do that,” Pitt said quickly. “I can’t untie the rope, his weight will have pulled it tight. I’ll need a knife.”
“Er …” Livesey was beginning to look ill, as if his years had caught up with him. “I’ll go and see if the landlady has one. You’ll need to preserve the rope, I imagine. Evidence.”
“Thank you. Ask Lambert to send for the medical examiner, will you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” And as if escaping the room and its fearful burden, Livesey turned on his heel and went out of the door. A moment later Pitt heard his steps heavy in the passage outside, and then on the stairs.
Pitt went back and stood in the room until Livesey returned with the knife.
Livesey was too shaken to touch the corpse. His face was pale and there was sweat on his brow and lip and his hands were clumsy, as if he could no longer coordinate them. Pitt held the body up as far as he could to ease the weight. Livesey cut the rope, taking several seconds to saw it through, then Pitt felt the full weight of Paterson suddenly collapse on him.
Livesey swore, his voice choking, and together they laid the body on the floor.
“There’s nothing else to do here,” Pitt said quietly, moved by pity for Livesey, and anxiety in case he could not bear the horror any longer. “Come. We’ll wait for the medical examiner in the next room.”
Two hours later Pitt had questioned the landlady, now alternately shrieking with outrage and mute with fear, and then the other tenants, and learned nothing from any of them. The medical examiner had been and gone, taking the body with him in his mortuary van, the horse stamping and blowing as it caught the smell of fear from passersby. Livesey, still pink-faced and now suddenly cold, had excused himself. Pitt and Lambert stood on the landing outside the door, the keys in the lock.
Lambert shook his head.
“I don’t understand,” he said yet again. “What on earth could he have wanted to tell Livesey? Why not us? If not me, then you?” He took the keys out of the door and gave them to Pitt. In single file they went down the stairs.
The landlady was still standing in the hall, her face haggard and eyes blazing.
“Murder!” she said furiously. “In my very own ’ouse! I always said I never should ’ave ’ad police as lodgers! Never again! I’ll take my oath on that, never again!”
Lambert swung around on her, his face white, his eyes blazing.
“A young policeman is murdered in your house, and you’ve got the impertinence to blame him! Perhaps if he’d never come here then he’d be alive today. What sort of a house do you keep anyway?”
“ ’Ow dare you?” she shrieked, her cheeks scarlet with outrage. “Why you—”
“Come on.” Pitt took Lambert by the arm and half pulled him out, still turned towards the woman, wanting to fight. The rage and the grief in him needed to lash out at someone, lay blame where he could see and hear.
“Come on,” Pitt repeated urgently. “We’ve got a lot to do!”
Reluctantly Lambert went with him. Outside the sky was overcast and it had begun to rain. Passersby were huddled into themselves, collars up, faces averted from the driving cold.
“What?” Lambert demanded between his teeth. “Who murdered poor Paterson? We haven’t even found out who killed Judge Stafford! We don’t know why! Do you know, Pitt?” He dodged off the pavement into the running gutter, then back on again. “Have you even got an idea? And don’t tell me Godman wasn’t guilty—that doesn’t make any sense. If he wasn’t, why would anybody rake it all up now? They’ve got away with it. It was the perfect murder. Godman is hanged and the case is closed.”
“What else was Paterson working on?” Pitt asked, matching his pace to Lambert’s as they walked along Battersea Park Road to a place where they could find a hansom back to the station.
“An arson case. A couple of robberies,” Lambert answered. “Nothing much. Nothing anyone would kill him over. Garotte him in a dark alley, maybe; or stick a knife into him if he went to make an arrest. But not go to his house and string him up on a rope. It’s insane. It’s that damn Macaulay woman. She’s out on a rampage of revenge.” He stopped in his stride, turning to face Pitt, his eyes brilliant and wretched. “She’s insane! She’s coming after the people she holds to blame for her brother’s hanging!”
“She’s not doing it alone,” Pitt said, trying to keep calm. “No woman by herself strung up Paterson. He’s a big man and was in good health.”
“All right then,” Lambert snapped. “She had help. She’s a clever woman, beautiful, and has got that sort of personality. Some poor devil fell in love with her, and she’s got ’im so obsessed he helped her do that.” He was talking too fast and Pitt could hear the hysteria rising in his voice. “Or maybe ’e did it for her,” he went on. “Go and find him, Pitt. Prove it! Paterson was a good man. Far too good to die for the likes of her! You do that! Prove it!” And he snatched himself away from Pitt’s outstretched hand and strode along the wet pavement towards the Battersea Bridge, and the carriages and cabs clattering back and forth along it.
Pitt began the long and tedious job of investigating the murder of Constable Paterson. The medical examiner’s report said that death had been caused by strangulation brought about by hanging, exactly as it had appeared. He had died some time the previous evening; his guess was that it had been earlier rather than later.
As a matter of course Pitt checked where Judge Livesey had been at that time, and was not surprised to learn that he had attended a dinner given by several of his colleagues and had been observed by at least a score of people for all of the relevant time. Not that Pitt had for a moment thought he might have been guilty; it was simply a matter of routine to check.
His mind was far more taken up with wondering what Paterson could possibly have learned that he wished so desperately to communicate with the judge. Did it concern the Farriers’ Lane case, as they had instinctively supposed, or was it something quite different?
He left Lambert to pursue the physical evidence: the witnesses who might have seen someone going into the lodging house; where the rope had come from; any signs of an intruder, a footprint, a scrap of cloth; anything at all that indicated a struggle.
He himself went searching for meaning, motive for such an apparently senseless act. If it lay in a case Paterson had been working on currently, or in some part of his personal life, then it was Lambert who would have the background to find it. But if it lay in the Farriers’ Lane case, then it was only in pursuing that that the answer could be learned.
Had Paterson tried to contact anyone other than Judge Livesey? Might he have tried one of the other judges also? It was too late for Stafford, he was already dead. Sadler had retreated from all responsibility and would have given no answer. Boothroyd was too involved in his conspicuous philanthropy, his seeking for friends and influence, to have taken any part in such a wildly unpopular cause as reopening the Farriers’ Lane case.
That left Judge Oswyn, or perhaps the other lawyers in the case. Aaron Godman’s solicitor, and his barrister who had pleaded for him at the trial. Surely they would have been the natural people with whom to begin, if indeed there were anything new, anything that pointed to a different verdict, or an accomplice.
Why Livesey? Did he imagine him to have some integrity or power others did not?