“Alexander’s guilty,” Pitt said quietly. “But I think you already know that as well as I do. Isn’t that why you asked me to delay arresting him until the contract is signed?”
“Yes. But my fear is that it goes deeper than that; I’m not sure how. Abercorn is championing the dead police as the victims of anarchy and lawlessness. He’s calling for revenge on those who were attacking the very defense against crime that everyone relied on. Some of his most outspoken remarks even suggest that to fail in support for the law, and those who represent it, is to invite anarchy, even to give support to revolution.
“In one article he says that the specific duty of Special Branch is to safeguard the security of the Crown and the nation,” Jack continued. “He asks if you are involved in the Lancaster Gate bombing case precisely because, through attacking the police and insidiously by speaking of corruption, there is a thinly veiled prologue to revolution by violence. He likens it to the revolution that all but destroyed France in 1789.”
“For heaven’s sake-” Pitt began.
But Jack overrode him. “The fact that we are now at the beginning of the last year of this century was not lost on most of his readers,” he added. “There are more than enough eccentrics, even lunatics, predicting the end of the world, without men otherwise respected adding to the hysteria. Be realistic, Thomas. Men don’t invest fortunes if they don’t expect to gain something, either even more money, or value of some other sort. Are you sure Alexander committed this atrocity? Absolutely sure…and on his own?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Why? Because he’s dissolute, and addicted to opium?” Jack leaned forward earnestly. “He lost his way-no one is arguing that-but he’s a decent man, underneath the eccentricity and the pain. Perhaps he got in with some bad people. Godfrey says Lezant was a pretty good rotter. Considering what happened to him, that much seems unarguable. He must have been off his head with the opium, or why else would he have shot a completely innocent passerby?”
“Is that what Godfrey Duncannon says?” Pitt was curious. He had not spoken to Alexander’s father, nor did he intend to, on that subject. “Easiest thing to blame the friend,” he agreed. “I might do the same, if it were my son. It’s not what Alexander himself says.”
Jack shook his head sharply. “For heaven’s sake, Thomas! He’s lonely, shut out of the sort of career and society he would have had if he were able to follow in his father’s steps. Unfortunately he fell in with a really bad one in young Lezant.”
There was some truth in what Jack said, but only a little, and even that was irrelevant now.
“Whether Lezant was guilty or not doesn’t change anything if Alexander set the bomb in Lancaster Gate,” Pitt pointed out. “Yes, he is young and quixotic. He was over-loyal. He refuses to believe that Lezant was guilty. Have you considered the possibility that he was actually there, and he saw what happened? Maybe he isn’t guessing. Perhaps he knows that Lezant wasn’t guilty. Then trying to save him wasn’t quixotic. It was simply the decent thing to do.”
“Lezant was tried and convicted,” Jack argued.
“And juries are infallible?”
“Do you think this one was wrong? Come on, Thomas! Five police, all lying? Two opium addicts, one of whom probably wasn’t even there! Who do you believe?”
“There is police corruption, Jack, and it’s a lot deeper than I thought.”
“To the level of shooting a bystander, then lying to get another man hanged for it?” Jack said with open disbelief.
“Yes, it looks that way,” Pitt replied. Then a sudden weariness overtook him, filling him with grief. “It’s more than that, Jack, it’s a creeping dishonesty. This didn’t happen suddenly. Good men don’t turn bad overnight. There were small thefts, a few shillings here and there: lies to cover a man’s incompetence, absence without explanation, being drunk on duty, losing evidence, threatening a witness, turning a blind eye when it suited them, using more violence than necessary to arrest someone or get a statement. None of them alone is terrible, but added up, they are. And, in this case, it looks as if someone lost his self-control, panicked, and then found he’d shot Tyndale, the passerby. The only way out of it was to arrest Lezant, put the gun next to him, and say that Tyndale either was the dealer or Lezant thought he was.”
“Why the hell would Lezant shoot his own dealer?” Jack asked.
“He wouldn’t. He didn’t,” Pitt agreed.
“Where was Alexander?”
“They both ran for it, he was faster and got away. Or perhaps Lezant deliberately covered for him. It would explain even more powerfully why Alexander is willing to pay such a high price to clear Lezant’s name. From all I can find, he tried to his wits’ end to clear Lezant at the time. Nobody believed that Alexander was even there.” He disliked what he said next, but he still said it. “I don’t think Lezant’s father was anyone of note. Godfrey Duncannon certainly is. Perhaps no one wanted to lay the blame at that door, if they could find an easier one. Alexander would hate him for that.”
A sudden tightness filled Jack’s face, then with an effort he dismissed it. “I…don’t know,” he confessed, the conviction suddenly seeping out of him.
But it was too late. “Yes, you do,” Pitt told him. “I’ve watched Alexander’s face when his father’s name is mentioned. He may well suspect that he got off because of his father’s name, even if Godfrey never actually said anything. If you’re powerful enough, you don’t have to.”
There were several conflicting emotions in Jack’s face. A momentary tenderness was replaced by anger, then guilt. Was he thinking of his daughter, Evangeline, so like Emily, so quick, so admiring of her father? What would Jack do to save her, if he had to?
What would Pitt do to save his children? How can you ever know, unless you are tested?
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Pitt said gravely. “Alexander wants a trial. He’s dying and he knows it. That’s why he did all this. It’s not revenge; it’s to force us to look at Lezant’s case again. I have to arrest him.”
Jack’s face was racked with pity, but he did not change his mind.
“I understand that, Thomas, but it doesn’t change my fear that Abercorn has something planned against Godfrey. He might even try to implicate him in the bombings…I don’t know. I’ve tried to find out more about him, but I can’t discern anything except a hardworking mother, no apparent father. Birth certificate simply says ‘deceased.’ He looks to be illegitimate, but that’s irrelevant. From what little I can learn, his mother was a decent enough woman who may have anticipated marriage and then had the misfortune for her would-be husband to be killed just before the wedding. I don’t want to crucify her for that, for God’s sake. Half the aristocracy sleeps around where they shouldn’t. And believe me, I know that. I’ve been to enough country house weekends. Lots of lordships’ children are not who they think they are.”
Pitt looked at Jack’s face, the humor in it, and behind the charm, the deep anxiety, almost fear.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” he promised. “Narraway might know something personally. There’s a lot that isn’t committed to paper.”
The tight muscles loosened and Jack suddenly sat easily in his chair. “Thank you,” he sighed. “I…appreciate that. If it turns out to be nothing, I apologize.”
Pitt smiled back at him. He did not think it would be “nothing.”
Pitt got up early the next morning and had a snatched breakfast in the kitchen while Minnie Maude prepared for the day. She had already cleaned out the stove, boiled the kettle for him, and stirred the porridge. Now she was encouraging the old embers to catch the new coal and burn up so she could cook for the rest of the family.
He thanked her and ate the porridge quickly. He would far rather have stayed and eaten properly, with the rest of the family. Stoker had been on watch all night, but there was no guarantee that Alexander would remain at his parents’ home, where he was currently staying, beyond eight or nine o’clock.