Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [135]
Finally in a small, crowded public alehouse called the Grinning Rat he sat opposite a little man with a twisted arm, broken when as a child he had been a sweep’s boy and fallen inside one of the vast chimneys. It had healed badly, and been broken a second time when he slipped off a church roof, stealing the lead, and now it was deformed past help. He made his living by selling information.
“Joey.” Pitt brought his wandering attention back from a large man with a protuberant belly hanging over grimy trousers and a tankard of ale in each hand.
Joey looked back at Pitt reluctantly.
“Yes, Mr. Pitt. I dunno wot yer wanna hear.” His voice sank into a plaintive whine as he expected to be criticized.
“ ’E in’t wot yer’d call reelly bad—just a bit kind o’ selective abaht ’Oo ’E does, like. Y’ unnerstand?”
“No,” Pitt said unhappily. “Explain to me, and there’ll behalf a guinea.”
“ ’Alf a guinea.” Joey’s face brightened.
“The truth,” Pitt warned. “Not what you think I want to hear. You don’t know what I want, or don’t want. If I discover you’re telling me lies I’ll come back and do you for everything in the book—I swear it.”
Joey let out a wail of outrage.
“Be quiet!” Pitt warned sharply. “Do you want everyone in the place looking at you?”
“Yer an ’ard man,” Joey complained.
“I am,” Pitt agreed. “Now tell me.”
And slowly Joey told Pitt what he most feared to hear. There was no explanation for Latimer’s omission to press some of his cases, for not calling certain witnesses. Joey did not know of his having taken money for his decisions, but he had assumed it, because to him there was no other answer. Why else did men do things, unless of course it was from fear? But to Joey, policemen of Latimer’s rank had nothing to fear. They were the powerful, the unassailable, the safe.
“Thank you,” Pitt said with a bitter misery inside. He handed over the half guinea he had promised and left the Grinning Rat. Tomorrow he would go back to Clerkenwell and Sergeant Innes.
Of course there were still the ordinary debtors from Weems’s first list, and perhaps Innes would turn up evidence against one of them. He half hoped for it, although he did not expect it; but perhaps a more conscious, sharper half would hate it even more should some desperate man struggling to survive prove to have shot Weems.
“Nothing,” Innes said gloomily, his thin face tired and without any lift of hope anymore.
“Nothing on Weems’s private life?” Pitt pressed pointlessly. “He must have had friends of some sort, surely? No women—not one?”
“Found nothin’,” Innes said flatly. His eyes looked anxious, even guilty.
“What is it?” Pitt demanded. They were sitting in the small room, little more than a cubbyhole, where Innes kept his notes and papers on the Weems case. Innes was perched on the narrow windowsill, leaving the solitary chair for Pitt, as the senior officer, and his guest.
Innes looked even more uncomfortable.
“I know as ’ow Mr. Latimer gets ’is money, sir. It weren’t borrered from Weems—”
Pitt would have been pleased, had not the look on Innes’s face made it impossible. Whatever the answer was, it was no better than usury.
“Well?” he said more sharply than he had intended.
Innes took no offense, he understood.
“Gambling, sir. ’E gambles, very successfully, it seems.”
“How do you know?”
“Discovered it by accident, sir. Was lookin’ inter one of our local debtors, ’Oo gambles. Come across proof as Mr. Latimer does—in a big way. An’ ’e wins, no doubt about it. ’E knows ’is bare-knuckle fighters.” His face was pinched with unhappiness. Apart from the brutality, bare-knuckle fighting was illegal and they both knew it; so would Latimer.
“I see,” Pitt said slowly. He did not bother to ask if Innes was sure beyond any doubt. He would not have mentioned it until he was.
Innes was looking at him earnestly. Neither of them needed to explain the possibilities ahead. Latimer would be ruined if his gambling, and condoning an illegal sport, were known. Was that what Weems had blackmailed him over? That would account for his