“Do what you must, Alex,” she said gently. “But know that whatever happens, I love you.”
For a moment Alexander swayed and Pitt was afraid he was going to collapse. Then he straightened himself, but did not trust his voice. He touched his mother, brushing the side of her cheek with his finger, and then turned to Pitt. “I am ready.”
“Nonsense!” Duncannon interrupted. “You will do as I tell you, Alexander. You are in no state to represent yourself.” He gestured toward Pitt without looking at him. “This man is trying to say that you are guilty of the murder of three policemen. For God’s sake! Don’t you understand that if they find you guilty they’ll hang you!” He all but choked on the word, and he was struggling for breath.
Alexander raised delicate black eyebrows. “You mean like they hanged Dylan? Yes, I know that, Father. Perhaps I know more about it than you do. They assured me that actually when you get as far as having the rope around your neck, it’s quite quick. The only difference is that Dylan was innocent. I am not.”
“How dare you say that in front of your mother?” Duncannon’s voice was high with fury.
Pitt had seen it before. Rage was less painful than fear, and far easier to own.
For an instant Alexander’s face filled with scorn.
“You think I should protect her? From what? Reality? She’s always faced reality, Father. It’s you who doesn’t. She knew my back would never heal. She never said so, but she knew. She knew the time would come when I couldn’t take the pain and I’d go back to the opium. She sold her diamonds to get it for me. She believed me that Dylan was innocent. You can’t protect her from the truth now, and I don’t think you ever did!” Without waiting for his father to react, he moved away from the table and walked toward Pitt. He held out his hands, palms down, wrists very slightly exposed from his white shirt cuffs.
“That’s not necessary,” Pitt told him. “But it is very cold outside. I think you should have your butler bring your coat.”
Alexander made an attempt to smile. “?‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly,’?” he quoted, then he walked beside Pitt and into the hall. Not once did he look back.
It was late afternoon and already hastening toward dusk when Pitt was summoned to Bradshaw’s office. The lampposts were a curving chain of lights along the river’s edge and the wind was blowing hard from the east.
“What the hell are you playing at?” Bradshaw demanded the moment Pitt had closed the office door. “Release Duncannon immediately. If you have to say anything at all to the press, and avoid it if you can, tell them he was helping you with reference to an old case. Let them assume what they like. I’d have thought you’d have had the sense to realize that you cannot arrest him until this…this damned contract is agreed. It may well be no more than a few days. Whatever possessed you to do it today? And at his father’s home, for God’s sake.”
Pitt was tired and cold, and he had hated arresting Alexander. The young man had trusted him, perhaps for all the wrong reasons. Alexander was searching for justice, and he might well have had no idea what it was going to cost him. Pitt was not even sure if he was completely sane. Perhaps pain, the opium, and grief over the friend he had in his own mind let down had robbed him of balance.
“For precisely the reasons you mentioned,” he answered, leaving off the courtesy of calling him sir. They were of equal enough rank, extraordinary as that seemed to Pitt. “I went there discreetly and his parents were present so they did not have to be informed.”
“What did you charge him with?” Bradshaw asked.
“Murder. Three policemen are dead.”
Bradshaw sat down very slowly. He looked exhausted, as if he were facing defeat after a long battle. “Why now? Why couldn’t you have waited?” It was a cry of despair, not accusation.
“Because he was trying to be arrested,” Pitt replied, sitting down in the chair opposite the desk. “He let off the second bomb because we took too little notice of the Lezant case after the first. I couldn’t afford to leave him free to do it again.”
“Are you so sure, Pitt?”
“Yes, I am. He left his monogrammed handkerchief for me at Craven Hill.”
Bradshaw put his elbows on the desktop and his head in his hands. “Oh God! But you’re still going to have to let him go.”
“Why? He’s guilty, and he doesn’t deny it. He refused to have his father’s lawyer represent him.”
“He’s out of his mind.” Bradshaw’s voice dropped even lower. “Opium addiction does that to you in the later stages. It’s…a very slow and terrible death.”
Pitt heard the pain in Bradshaw’s voice; saw the beaten, aching slump in his shoulders.
He stared beyond Bradshaw at the photograph in the alcove, the one of his lovely wife, who looked so happy. It would be cruel, inexcusable to ask if she was the addict he referred to. Was she still alive? Disintegrating in front of him, like Alexander Duncannon? Had she also suffered some agonizing disease from which there was no escape but death?
“Sir,” Pitt began almost gently, “I had to arrest him. If I didn’t, he’d have blown up something else, and there might be other people dead. We were lucky last time. He merely destroyed an empty building.”
Bradshaw raised his head and stared at Pitt.
Pitt did not say anything more.
Bradshaw pushed his hand through his hair. “I thought you were going to say that Josiah Abercorn was crucifying us in the papers, and we have to do something.”
Pitt did not often swear, but he felt like it now-except that to give in to fury was just the reaction men like Abercorn counted on. It was an admission of defeat.
“By-election coming up soon, is there?” he said bitterly.
Bradshaw looked at him. “I suppose it’s obvious, isn’t it? There are times when I hate politicians, Lords or Commons.”
“?‘A plague on both your houses,’?” Pitt replied with a twisted smile. “Do you still want me to release Duncannon?”
Bradshaw’s voice was very quiet, and he looked away, as though the words were forced out of him. He did not meet Pitt’s eyes. “Yes. But put a watch on him. For God’s sake don’t let him blow up anything more.”
Bradshaw stood up, moving stiffly, as though his body ached. “Was there police corruption at the time of the Lezant case?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Ednam and his immediate men, at the least. Probably more,” Pitt replied.
Bradshaw winced as if he had felt a sudden stab of pain, and there were tears in his eyes. “Let Alexander go anyway.”
Pitt did not reply.
Pitt kept his word to Jack. He went straight from Bradshaw’s office to Vespasia and Narraway’s home. He considered speaking to Narraway alone, then realized how foolish that was. Vespasia might well know more rumor about Josiah Abercorn than Narraway did, certainly more personal gossip, which frequently was the first step toward the truth, however unwelcome.
He sat beside the fire in Vespasia’s great sitting room.
“Highly ambitious,” Narraway answered Pitt’s questions. “And a man who likes to owe no one anything, so if he has accepted favors, and few people attain high office without, he will be as quick to pay them off as he can.”
“Godfrey Duncannon?” Pitt asked.
“I doubt it. I’ve never known Godfrey to act except in his own ultimate interest.”
“You don’t like him,” Pitt observed and saw Vespasia smile.
“Not a lot,” Narraway admitted. “But he is exceptionally competent, and I know nothing to his discredit. He’s just…chilling.”
“Invulnerable,” Vespasia said quietly.
Both Pitt and Narraway looked at her curiously.
“You do not like a man who is invulnerable,” she said to Narraway.