He found Jack Radley on the step. In spite of having come in a carriage, which was waiting at the curb, the shoulders of his elegant coat were soaked dark with rain.
“Come in,” Pitt invited him, standing back and holding the door wide. “Is your driver all right out there?”
“I suggested he might go around to the kitchen. Hope you don’t mind,” Jack answered, standing in the hall and dripping onto the carpet. “But I won’t be long…I hope.”
“Send him around to the back door, and I’ll get Charlotte to give him a cup of tea, or better, cocoa,” Pitt directed him.
Jack obeyed. Pitt took the stairs two at a time to give the request to Charlotte. Five minutes later it was all accomplished. Pitt sat in his own chair while Jack stood with his back to the fire, warming himself.
“Of course, you’re coming to dinner Christmas Day,” Jack remarked, “but I wanted to speak to you privately.”
“What is it, Jack?” Pitt asked with a chill of apprehension.
Jack gave a very slight shrug. He was standing gracefully, but nothing in him was relaxed. All his body was as taut as the strings of a violin.
“You can let this investigation go for three days at least, can’t you?” He seemed about to add something more, then changed his mind.
“Is that what you wanted to know?” Pitt asked.
Jack faced him at last. “Yes, it is. This contract is more important than I can tell you. Just hold off this investigation of yours until it’s signed.”
“What has it to do with police corruption?” Pitt asked. He sat forward in his chair; there was no more relaxing possible.
“Nothing!” Jack moved from the fire into the center of the room, still too tense to sit down. “I don’t think police corruption comes into it, but I don’t know. I have no idea what happened, I just know that Alexander Duncannon is a very disturbed young man who has delusions as to his friend’s guilt or innocence. Thomas, this contract will help the lives of thousands of people, their families, and their towns. Don’t jeopardize it for the sake of a few days.”
Pitt looked back at Jack’s face, which reflected the earnestness with which he made the request. Pitt knew something of the magnitude of the contract, and he could imagine the hopes that rested on it. He had faced being out of work himself, his family cold, frightened, and hungry, and even without a home, when he had been thrown out of the police. It was moving to Special Branch that had saved him.
Jack must have seen the thought in his face. Perhaps he remembered it too. Emily would have known, and understood.
“This injustice has waited for two years,” Jack said. “Let it wait until the New Year now. Don’t go wakening ghosts just before Christmas. If there is anything to find, it will still be there in four or five days’ time.”
“I have to solve the case,” Pitt warned him. “It isn’t going to disappear on its own. Ednam and his men may have sent an innocent man to the gallows.”
“Is that really likely?” Jack’s eyebrows rose. “Alexander is nice enough, but for heaven’s sake, Thomas, he’s addicted to opium! There are times when he’s completely crazy! Frankly, according to Godfrey, he sees and hears things that aren’t there. Opium addiction is a terrible thing. I daresay it’ll kill him in the end.”
Pitt did not answer. Was that really all that was behind Alexander’s actions? The blind loyalty of an opium addict, the guilt because he escaped driving him relentlessly to try to excuse his friend? It would be easy enough to believe.
“Dylan Lezant was no better,” Jack went on, sensing Pitt’s doubts. “Another young man severely addicted and sinking further and further into a life of depravity. Godfrey says he went through periods of delirious hallucinations, being dreadfully ill, soaked in sweat. And then he would do something desperate to obtain money, and opium, and then, at least to the casual observer, be perfectly all right again. I’m afraid it is very easy to believe that if opium was involved-and the police say it was an illegal sale that they were intercepting-then his cravings could have driven him to kill, if he thought they were going to deny him his opium, which of course they would.”
As Jack said, it was easy to believe. In fact, it made more sense than anything else. Why was Pitt so willing to believe Alexander’s story? Pity? Or was it Alexander’s emotional pain, the trauma of being stretched between two worlds, neither of which really accepted him? Pitt himself could have ended in such a no-man’s-land when his father was convicted and sent to Australia.
Pitt’s bitterness could have consumed him then, and he could have turned to theft or violence, believing there was no justice. There had been times when that seemed to be true. It was Sir Arthur Desmond’s having taken him into the private schoolroom of his own son, to spur him on, to be a friend and a competitor, that had saved Pitt’s sense of perspective. That was why he had joined the police: to find the justice for others that had passed by his own family.
But he believed Alexander Duncannon’s pain was physical more than emotional, at least to begin with.
“The fact that Alexander might be totally deluded about what really happened that night doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe it himself,” he pointed out. “And if he did believe it, and his protests were never taken seriously, as far as he could see, then he could still have felt he had a grudge against Ednam and his men. I have to look into that, Jack. I can’t leave it alone.”
“Follow another line of inquiry, for the moment,” Jack argued, but he could see that Pitt was moved. “Please. Just over Christmas. The contract will be signed in a few days.”
Pitt hesitated.
“The creation of a free port in China will be worth a king’s ransom to Britain, if we lease it from them,” Jack said urgently. “That’s what this is, Thomas! Morally it will be something of a reparation to the Chinese for the wrongs of the Opium Wars-and God knows, there were wrongs!” He went on more eagerly, his face alight, “That’s why Abercorn is willing to work with Godfrey Duncannon, even though he loathes him, according to Emily. I’ve no idea why, but it doesn’t matter. Abercorn has huge interests in China, and Godfrey has the political and diplomatic weight to see this through. Please…don’t do something that could ruin Godfrey, for the sake of a few days!”
“Until after Christmas,” Pitt conceded.
“Thank you!” Jack held his hand out and clasped Pitt’s so strongly that for a moment Pitt had to concentrate not to wince from the power of it.
After Jack was gone, Charlotte returned to the sitting room, having instructed Minnie Maude to give the coachman hot tea with a dash of whisky in it, and two rather large mince pies.
She looked at Pitt’s face and saw both the relief in it and the shadow of a remaining anxiety. “Well?” she asked.
“Has Emily said anything to you about this contract Jack is working on with Godfrey Duncannon?”
“Yes,” she answered guardedly, waiting for him to explain. “Why? Is that what he came about?”
“Yes. I can see why it’s so important to him-to Britain. But I can’t let it go altogether…”
She looked at him gravely, but she did not ask anything of him.
“I can’t let it go,” he said quietly. “If Alexander is guilty of the bombing, it is because, in his eyes, the police were corrupt to the degree that they deliberately lied and manufactured evidence. They swore on oath in court that Dylan Lezant was guilty of murder, sending him to the gallows knowing that he was innocent. Then what exactly was Alexander guilty of? Taking the law into his own hands, when the law of the land had so terribly failed him.”
She said nothing, but the grief in her face was answer enough.
“Who else would do that, if this is proved?” he went on. “People wouldn’t trust the police. Who would want to help them, or give them simple information, or come to them when they were in trouble, attacked, and outnumbered?”
“I understand,” she said quietly at last. “Did you warn Jack?”