And of course there was also the unfairness of telling people more than they needed to know. Secrets slipped could cost another man’s life. Each man’s own secrets were enough to carry.
“You’re right,” he conceded. “We’ll work with what we have, and then ask questions to fill in the blanks, if there are any. Send Blake for a pot of tea.”
It took the whole of the day before they were satisfied that as close as it was possible to tell, they hadn’t found any incidents that deviated from familiar patterns. They saw no new or unexplained behaviors among the groups already known to exist in London. No one had suddenly made contact with lots of people; there were no unusual meetings, no more travel than normal.
It was not a profitless exercise, however, because several things emerged. There was some old information that could be discarded and a few new ideas noted to follow up on.
“Next job is to look more thoroughly at the victims,” Pitt said wearily, when they finally locked all the papers and notes away.
“Don’t think Ednam’s going to make it,” Stoker said quietly. “If you need to see him again I think it’s too late. He’s slipped into a coma. The nurse said they’d do everything they could for him, but he’s not responding. Maybe there’s worse inside him than they know. Bossiney’s holding his own, but those burns aren’t going to heal much. The scars’ll be there forever-poor devil. Yarcombe’s very quiet, but his fever’s down, and the stump of his arm is healing.”
Pitt said nothing. He had thought Ednam would make it, and maybe Yarcombe would not. But Ednam was older, and he had been more seriously burned. The shock to his body must have been worse than Pitt had appreciated. He had not particularly liked the man, but he knew nothing to his discredit. If he died there was going to be a whole new outcry against the bomber. No doubt Abercorn, and men like him, would climb on the bandwagon to call for more and swifter action.
Could one man have planned this bombing and carried it out? Yes, if he was careful and clever.
Pitt tidied up, read the last reports, then an hour later he locked up the office and walked out into the wind and the rain. The ice was gone from the pavements and they were awash from the downpour. If the wind blew the clouds away it would freeze hard by morning, lethal as oiled glass.
The lamps had been lit long ago and shone like fitful moons in a long loop around the curve of the street. It was wet and bitter, yet it had its own kind of beauty, man’s beacon masts into an unknown distance. As he passed each one and left it behind him the next one loomed into sight.
He wished he could see further ahead in the case. Perhaps he was not investigating the victims carefully enough? Were they just faceless police as far as the bomber was concerned? Did he regard all police as tokens of a government, an order he hated? Could the whole abomination be something to divert Special Branch’s attention from a different attack? Something more long-lasting, more deeply injurious to the country?
Was it a practice run for a larger attack on an iconic building such as the Houses of Parliament, or even Buckingham Palace? Whitehall? Or in another country altogether? Tomorrow he would have Stoker contact all the foreign officials they knew and see if anything tied in with French or Spanish plots.
He turned the corner but kept on walking. He was stiff after sitting all day bent over papers. The cold air cleared his head and the rain was easing off.
He splashed through another puddle at the edge of the road as he crossed it, his mind whirling with unanswered questions.
Was this a matter of terrorism at all, or just a particularly horrible murder? Was one of the men an intended victim and the others were killed collaterally, just to mask the motive for the one? What kind of a lunatic bombs five men to be sure of injuring one?
Maybe he lacked the perception and the overall vision and experience to figure this out, the type of experience that Narraway had had. That had been his fear all day-that he was in a job too big for him. He was a policeman, a detective who had solved complex and fearful murders. But he was not a politician, a spymaster, a man who instinctively understood treason and betrayal, as Narraway had.
Had someone slowly and carefully infiltrated Special Branch so Pitt could be misled, blinded by what he thought was his own understanding? He wished he could believe that was impossible.
When he finally stopped a hansom and requested it to take him to Keppel Street, he was so tired he was afraid he might go to sleep in the cab and have to be roused. He climbed in and sat back gratefully, but his mind would not leave the subject alone.
He arrived home, took off his wet coat, hat, and boots and was very soon sitting beside the fire with a slice of bacon-and-egg pie and a second cup of tea. Still he could not let go of the knots in his shoulders, or the need to keep on trying to unravel tangles in his mind.
This was one case he could discuss with Charlotte because it was totally public anyway. It was talked of on every street corner by everyone from messenger boys to washerwomen, and probably over every garden fence, and over glasses of whisky at every gentlemen’s club.
It was she who broached the subject.
“Gracie came to see me,” she remarked. “She’s going to have another child.”
He smiled. It was the first good news he had heard since the bombing. “Excellent! Can I congratulate Tellman, or am I not supposed to know?”
“I would prefer that you didn’t, at least not just yet,” she said gravely. “That wasn’t what she came about.”
“Oh…what was it?” The warmth inside him drained away.
“She’s afraid for Samuel. He’s such an idealist she thinks it’s going to hurt him very much if he discovers real corruption in the police,” she answered. The gas lamps shed a warmth over her face, a softness, but it did not hide the anxiety in her eyes. She did not need to put into words her need for a reply, or that comfort would be a denial, not a help.
“I know,” he admitted. “But there’s nothing we can do but look more thoroughly. We’ve exhausted every avenue regarding known anarchists. If there’s an unknown group then that’s what they are: unknown to us, invisible. We’ve pieced together every fragment of information we have.” He would not tell her about the sources, the informers, domestic and foreign, or his own men long embedded in anarchist cells. “Which is a great deal. There are no incidents unconnected, nothing that suggests a movement we don’t know about.” He said that with a degree of confidence.
But she knew him too well. “So if it is anarchists, then there is a movement that has managed to remain invisible.” She spoke the fear aloud: “And you think Victor would have seen it?” Charlotte had learned a little more tact over the years, but she could still cut with surgical precision when she wanted to. She met his eyes without a flicker. “Have you got rid of all the men in Special Branch that he had? Isn’t there someone left that you can be absolutely sure of?”
Did she really think that of him? “No! Of course not!” he said a little sharply. “I haven’t got rid of any of them. Two left: one for injury, the other because he retired. He was nearly seventy! A very wise man, and I was sorry to lose him.”
She smiled quickly. “Then why would they suddenly miss something as important as a new movement in anarchy, or nihilism, or general desire for social change?”
“They wouldn’t,” he agreed, moving in the chair to ease his locked muscles. “Of course they wouldn’t.” He didn’t want her to realize how irrational he had been, how far he had allowed the anxiety to eat into him, so he did not admit how much he had needed that sharp restoration of sanity.