“Oh dear.” She shook her head very slightly.
“One of them killed her,” he continued. “Rose Serracold, General Kingsley, or the man denoted in her diary by a cartouche, a little drawing rather like a reversed small f with a semicircle over the top of it.”
“How curious. And have you any idea who he may be?”
“Superintendent Wetron believes he is an elderly professor of theology who lives in Teddington.”
Her eyes widened. “Why? That seems a very perverse thing for a religious man to do. Was he seeking to expose her as a fraud?”
“I don’t know. But I . . .” He hesitated, not sure how to explain either his feelings or his actions. “I really don’t believe it was he, but I am not certain. He recently lost his wife and is deeply grieved. He has a passion against spirit mediums. He believes they are evil, and acting contrary to the commandments of God.”
“And you are afraid that this man, deranged by his grief, may have taken it into his head to finish her intervention permanently?” she concluded. “Oh, Thomas, my dear, you are too softhearted for your profession. Sometimes very good men can make the most terrible mistakes, and bring untold misery while convinced they are bent upon the work of God. Not all the inquisitors of Spain were cruel or narrow-minded men, you know. Some truly believed they were saving the souls of those in their charge. They would be astounded if they knew how we perceived them now.” She shook her head. “Sometimes we see the world so differently from each other you would swear we could not possibly be speaking of the same existence. Have you never asked half a dozen witnesses to an event in the street, even the description of a person, and received such conflicting answers, told in all sincerity, that they cancel each other out entirely?”
“Yes, I have. But I still do not think he is guilty of having killed Maude Lamont.”
“You do not want to think it. What can I do to help you, more than simply listen?”
“I must discover who killed Maude Lamont, even though that is really Tellman’s job, because the people she blackmailed are part of the effort to discredit Serracold . . .”
Sadness and anger filled her eyes. “They have already succeeded, with the poor man’s own help. You will have to perform a miracle if you are to rescue him now.” Then she brightened. “Unless, of course, you can demonstrate that Voisey had a hand in it. If he obtained her murder . . .” She stopped. “I think that would be good fortune beyond our reach. He would not be so foolish. Above all, he is clever. But he will be behind the blackmail; it just depends how far behind! Can you prove that?”
He leaned forward a little. “I may be able to.” He saw her eyes shine, and he knew she was thinking of Mario Corena again. She could not weep. She had already shed all her tears for him, first in Rome in ‘48, then here in London only a few weeks ago. But the loss was still raw. Perhaps it always would be. “I need to know why Kingsley was being blackmailed,” he went on. “I think it was to do with the death of his son.” Briefly, he told her what he had learned, first about Kingsley himself and his part in the Zulu Wars, and then the ambush at Mfolozi, so soon after the heroism of Rorke’s Drift.
“I see,” she said when he had finished. “It is very hard to follow in the steps of a father or brother who has succeeded in the eyes of the world, most especially in the world of military courage. Many young men have thrown away their lives rather than be thought to fail in what was expected of them.” There was a weight of sadness in her voice, and memory sharp and painful in her eyes. Perhaps she was thinking of the Crimea, of Balaclava, and the Alma, or of Rorke’s Drift, Isandlwana, or the Indian Mutiny and God knew how many other wars and losses. Her memory might even have stretched back as far as her girlhood, and Waterloo.
“Aunt Vespasia . . . ?”
She brought herself back to the present with a jolt. “Of course,” she agreed. “It will not be too difficult for me to learn from one friend or another what really happened to young Kingsley at Mfolozi, but I think it hardly matters, except to his father. No doubt what was used to blackmail him was the possibility of a coward’s death. It did not have to be the fact. It is not only the wicked who run where no man pursues, it is also the vulnerable, those who care more than they are able to govern, and who have raw wounds they cannot defend.”
Pitt thought of Kingsley’s bent shoulders and the haggard lines of his face. It took a particular kind of sadism to torture a man in such a way for one’s own profit. For a moment he hated Voisey with a passion that would have exploded in physical violence, had he been there to lash out at.
“Of course it may be that the incident of his death is so blurred that the truth cannot be known, or a lie dismissed,” Vespasia went on. “But I shall do all I can to find out, and if it is of any ease at all, I shall inform General Kingsley of it.”
“Thank you.”
“Which is not a great deal of use in tying the blackmail to Voisey,” she continued with a trace of anger. “What hope have you of discovering the identity of this third person? I assume you know it is a man? You refer to him as ‘he.’ ”
“Yes. It is a man of late middle years, fair or gray hair, average height and build. He seems to be well educated.”
“Your theologian,” she said unhappily. “If he went to a spirit medium with the intent of proving her a fraud and unmasking her in front of her clients, that would not please Voisey very much. I think we may assume he could retaliate, perhaps with extreme pressure.”
That was impossible to argue against. Pitt remembered the look in Voisey’s eyes as they had passed each other in the House of Commons. Voisey forgot nothing and forgave nothing. Again Pitt found himself sitting in the light of the sun, and cold inside.
Vespasia was frowning.
“What is it?” he asked.
Her silver-gray eyes were troubled, her body not merely straight-backed with the disciplined posture of decades of self-control, but her shoulders stiff with an inner tension.
“I have given it much thought, Thomas, and I still do not understand why you were dismissed a second time from command of Bow Street . . .”
“Voisey!” he said with a bitterness that startled him. He had thought himself in control of his anger, his burning sense of injustice on the subject, but now it came back in a drowning wave.
“No,” she said, half under her breath. “No matter how much he may hate you, Thomas, he will never act against his own interest. That is his greatest strength. His head always governs his heart.” She stared straight ahead of her. “And it is not in his interest to have you in Special Branch, which is where he must have known you would go if dismissed from Bow Street again. In the police, unless he commits a crime, you have no jurisdiction in his affairs. If you involve yourself with him he can charge you with harassment and have you disciplined. But in Special Branch your duties are far more fluid. Special Branch is secret, not answerable to the public.” She turned to look at him. “Always keep your enemies where you can see them. He is not fool enough to forget that.”
“Then why would he do it?” he asked, confused by her logic.
“Perhaps it was not Voisey?” she said very carefully.
“Then who?” he asked. “Who else but the Inner Circle would have the power to go behind the Queen’s back and undo what she had done?” The thought was dark and frightening. He knew of no one else he had offended, and certainly no other secret societies with such tentacles winding into the heart of government.
“Thomas, how hard have you thought about the effect on the Inner Circle of Voisey’s knighthood, and the reason for it?” Vespasia asked.
“I hope it shattered his leadership,” he said honestly. He tried to swallow down his anger and the gall of disappointment inside him. “It hurts that it hasn’t.”