Bedford Square - Anne Perry [146]
“So they found someone who looked like him,” Charlotte took up the train of reasoning. “They had the snuffbox anyway, and they either stole the sock receipt or had one made up.”
“Had it made up,” Tellman put in. “Easy enough. Go and buy three pairs. Get yourself noticed. Say something about being a soldier, the importance of keeping your feet right. The shop clerk remembered all that, but not much about his face.”
“Who is ’they’?” Charlotte asked with a little shake of her head, a sharp return from logic to emotion. “Cadell … if it has to be … and who else? Ernest Wallace? Why?” She bit her lip, and her expression betrayed her disbelief. “I still can’t accept that.” She looked from Pitt to Tellman. “You haven’t found any reason why he should suddenly need money, or connected him to any plot to invest in Africa or anywhere else. Aunt Vespasia says he just wasn’t that sort of person.”
Pitt sighed. He reached his hand across the table and put it over hers.
“Of course she doesn’t want to think so, but what is the alternative?”
“That someone else is guilty,” she answered, her voice without the certainty she would have liked. “And he killed himself … because … I don’t know. He was so worn down by the blackmail he hadn’t the strength to go on.”
“And confessed,” Pitt said gently, “knowing what that would do to his family? To Theodosia? And they have grownup children, a son and two daughters. Have you seen what Lyndon Remus and the other newspapers have made of the scandal? Poor Gordon-Cumming pales beside it.”
“Then he could never have done it,” she said desperately. “He must have been murdered.”
“By whom?” he asked. “No one came or went but the family servants, and the entrances were observed all the time.”
She took her hand away, fists clenched. “Well, I still refuse to believe it. There’s something we don’t know ….”
“There’s a lot of things we don’t know,” he said dryly. He ticked them off on his fingers. “We don’t know why Cadell wanted or needed money, or even if that was the purpose of the blackmail. We don’t know why he chose specifically the other members of the orphanage committee of the Jessop Club. There must have been dozens of other men he knew as well, and could have created a web of fear around, built on imagination and misinterpretation. We certainly don’t know how he ever made the acquaintance of Ernest Wallace or why he trusted him.”
“We don’t know why Wallace lied to protect him and is still lying,” Tellman added.
“Yes, we do,” Pitt answered. “At least, we can deduce it. He is in Newgate and doesn’t know that Cadell is dead. He must be assuming that Cadell will twist the knife in Dunraithe White, and Wallace will be acquitted. He also doesn’t know that White has just resigned from the bench.”
“Then tell him,” Charlotte retorted. “That may concentrate his mind wonderfully. Show him he is completely alone. He has been let down on every side. Cadell has escaped, in a fashion, and left him to hang … alone.”
“Don’t make no difference whether you ’ang alone or together,” Gracie said with disgust. “Don’t suppose it feels no different. ’e killed Slingsby, so ’e’ll ’ang any which way.”
Pitt rose to his feet. “I’ll still go and see him.”
Charlotte’s eyes widened. “Now? It’s half past six.”
“I’ll be back by nine,” he promised, walking to the door. “I have to speak to him.”
Pitt hated visiting prisons. The walls closed in on him with the cold gray misery of countless angry and wasted lives. Hopelessness seemed to seep from the stones, and his footsteps echoed behind the warder’s like multiple treads, as if he were preceded and followed by unseen inmates, ghosts who would never escape.
Ernest Wallace would be tried in a week or two. He was brought into the small