Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [115]
He left late in the afternoon with a heavy feeling of depression. Mrs. Latimer was apparently a woman with considerable social ambition and a driving will to achieve, indeed he was obliged to leave through the servants’ entrance to avoid the guests arriving at the front.
Latimer might well have felt the same ambition, but whatever his own desires he appeared determined to drive himself to the limit, and perhaps beyond. It would be very easy to believe he had borrowed from Weems in order to throw the extra party, feed his guests with the best, serve the best wines and impress all the right people. But how had he expected to repay? His salary was set.
Pitt had taken the very obvious step of learning a superintendent’s salary. He could imagine no way in which it could have maintained the establishment in Beaufort Gardens, even with the stringent economies practiced in the kitchens, the family bedrooms and the servants’ quarters. Thinking of it in the hansom on the way back to Bow Street he felt oppressed by the anxiety of it, the constant worry, the fear of the letter, the knock on the door, the feeling that everything was temporary, nothing safe, robbing one pocket to pay another, always juggling, thinking, deceiving, covering one lie with a second, spoken or implied.
There was little point in speaking to Latimer directly. If it were untrue he could not prove it; if it were true he would deny it. Neither would mean anything. Proof was all that would stand. He might not have killed Weems, but that was only part of the question, and now not the part that troubled Pitt the most. Whatever the truth of Weems’s murder, he needed to know where Latimer had hoped to acquire the money to repay the loans. He needed to know it was an honest way, although he could think of none.
He would have to have Micah Drummond’s authorization to inquire into Latimer’s cases. They were not in Bow Street but in Scotland Yard, and it would need a very strong explanation before an officer from another station would be permitted to examine them.
It took him many days of close, unhappy reading in a little room off a long corridor, sitting on a hard-backed chair in front of a wooden table piled with papers. He followed case after case of human violence, greed and deceit. Latimer had worked on a wide variety of evils, from murder and arson through to organized fraud and large-scale embezzlement. It was an unhappy catalogue of behavior, probably much the same as would have been found in the records of any other officer of similar rank in a city the size of London, the largest city in the world, the hub of an empire that circled the earth, the financial capital, the industrial and commercial heart, the busiest port, the center for transport and communication, as well as the social pinnacle.
He put aside all those where Latimer had worked closely with other officers and the results were precisely what anyone with experience would have expected. He also took out those where the trail of evidence was obvious and had culminated in arrest and conviction of a known felon.
He read and reread any that ended in an acquittal, but found little that was unusual, and nothing that was unaccountable.
Lastly, tired, eyes aching and fed up with spending his days inside poring over papers instead of out dealing with people, he turned to the cases unsolved. There were three murders over the last five years, and he read them carefully. From the evidence, the statements recorded, he would have done precisely what Latimer had done. His spirits lifted a little. Perhaps after all he was going to find it was simply a case of a man in love with a beautiful and socially ambitious wife who had overextended his means to satisfy her.
But there was no reason to suppose Carswell had borrowed money, and every reason to believe he was being blackmailed.