Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [82]
He turned and stumbled away back towards the north end and the Palace of Westminster, feet slipping on the damp pavement, the lights dancing in his blurred vision.
“You or’right, sir?” a voice said suspiciously.
Loughley looked up and saw light gleaming on silver buttons and the blessed uniform of a constable. He grasped the man’s arm.
“Dear God! It’s happened again! Over there ... Cuthbert Sheridan.”
“Wot’s ’appened sir?” The voice was heavy with skepticism.
“Another murder. Cuthbert Sheridan—with his throat cut, poor devil! For God’s sake, do something!”
At any other time P.C. Blackett would have regarded the shaking, semicoherent man in front of him as a hallucinating drunk, but there was something hideously familiar about this.
“You come wiv me an’ show me, sir.” He was not going to let the man out of his sight. It crossed his mind that perhaps he even had the Westminster Cutthroat in his grasp now, although he doubted it. This man looked too genuinely shocked. But he was unquestionably a witness.
Reluctantly Loughley returned, feeling nauseated by horror. It was exactly as had been burned indelibly in his mind. Now it had the quality of a nightmare.
“Ah,” P.C. Blackett said heavily. He looked back at Big Ben, noted the time, then pulled out his whistle and blew it long, shrilly, and with piercing intensity.
When Pitt arrived Micah Drummond was already there, dressed in a smoking jacket, as if he had just left his own fireside, and looking cold and sad. There was a hollowness in his eyes, even in the lamplight, and the bridge of his nose was even more pinched.
“Ah, Pitt.” He turned and left the small group of men huddled together by the mortuary coach. “Another one, exactly the same. I thought perhaps with Etheridge we’d seen the last of it. Well, it looks as if it wasn’t your woman after all. We’re back to a lunatic.”
For a moment Pitt felt a surge of relief mixed with the mounting horror. He did not want Florence Ivory to be guilty. Then her face came to his memory as clearly as if he had seen her the instant before. There was passion in it, intensity violent enough to carry out her will, whatever it was, and also a keen and subtle intelligence, quite enough to foresee precisely this conversation.
“Probably,” he agreed.
“Probably!”
“There are many possibilities.” Pitt stood still, staring at the lamppost. The body had been removed and had been laid out on the ground in an attempt at decency. He looked down at it, his mind taking in the details of clothing, the hands, the wound exactly like the two others’, the pallid, terrible face with its strong nose and deep-set eyes, the hair that might have been gray or blond, silvery in the lamplight. “It could be a madman,” he went on. “Or anarchists, though I doubt that; or there may be some political plot afoot that we have had no whisper of as yet. Or it could be that this has nothing to do with the other two, just someone copying. It happens. Or it could be three murders, only one of which the murderer cares about, the other two meant to lead us astray.”
Drummond closed his eyes, as if his eyelids could keep out the fearfulness of the thought. He put his long hands up to cover his face for a moment before taking them away with a sigh.
“Dear God, I hope not! Could anyone be so ...” But he could not find the word, and he let it go.
“Who is he?” Pitt asked.
“Cuthbert Sheridan.”
“Member of Parliament?”
“Yes. Oh yes, he’s another member of Parliament. About thirty-eight or forty, married, with three children. Lives on the south side of the river, Baron’s Court, off the Waterloo Road. Up-and-coming young backbencher, member for a constituency in Warwickshire. A bit conservative, against Home Rule, against penal reform; for better working conditions in mines and factories, better poor laws and child labor laws. Very definitely