Bluegate Fields - Anne Perry [107]
And this city was the heart of it all. London was where your Queen lived, whether you were in the Sudan or the Cape of Good Hope, Tasmania, Barbados, the Yukon, or Katmandu.
Did a boy like Albie ever know that he lived in the heart of such a world? Did the inhabitants of those teeming, rotten slums behind the proud streets ever conceive in their wildest drunken or opium-scented dreams of the wealth they were part of? All that immense might—and they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, even begin on the disease at home.
The barges were gone, the water shining silver in their wake, the flat light brilliant as the sun moved slowly westward. Some hours hence, the sky would redden, giving the pall-like clouds of the factories and docks the illusion of beauty before sunset.
Pitt straightened up and started to walk. He must find a cab and get back to the station. Athelstan would have to allow him to investigate now. This was a new murder. It might have nothing to do with Jerome or Arthur Waybourne, but it was still a murder. And murder must be solved, if it can be.
“No!” Athelstan shouted, rising to his feet. “Good God, Pitt! The boy was a prostitute! He catered to perverts! He was bound to end up either dead of some disease or murdered by a customer or a pimp or something. If we spent time on every dead prostitute, we’d need a force twice the size, and we’d still do nothing else. Do you know how many deaths there are in London every day?”
“No, sir. Do they stop mattering once they get past a certain number?”
Athelstan slammed his hand on the desk, sending papers flying.
“God dammit, Pitt, I’ll have your rank for insubordination! Of course it matters! If there was any chance, or any reason, I’d investigate it right to the end. But murder of a prostitute is not uncommon. If you take up a trade like that, then you expect violence—and disease—and sooner or later you’ll get it!
“I’m not sending my men out to comb the streets uselessly. We’ll never find out who killed Albie Frobisher. It could have been any one of a thousand people—ten thousand! Who knows who went into that house? Anyone! Anyone at all. Nobody sees them—that’s the nature of the place—and you bloody well know that as well as I do. I’m not wasting an inspector’s time, yours or anyone else’s, chasing after a hopeless case.
“Now get out of here and find that arsonist! You know who he is—so arrest him before we have another fire! And if I hear you mention Maurice Jerome, the Waybournes, or anything else to do with it again, I’ll put you back on the beat—and that I swear—so help me, God!”
Pitt said nothing more. He turned on his heel and walked out, leaving Athelstan still standing, his face crimson, his fists clenched on the desk.
10
CHARLOTTE WAS STUNNED when Pitt told her that Albie was dead; it was something she had not even considered, in spite of the terrifying number of deaths she had heard of among such people. Somehow it had not occurred to her that Albie, whose face and even something of his feelings she knew, would the within the space of her brief acquaintance with his life.
“How?” she demanded furiously, caught by surprise as well as pain. “What happened to him?”
Pitt looked tired; there were fine lines of strain on his face that she knew were not usually pronounced enough to see. He sat down heavily, close to the kitchen fire as though he had no warmth within.
She controlled the words that flew to her