Cardington Crescent - Anne Perry [112]
“Mrs. Mapes’ll turn me aht!” She was really frightened now. “I’ll ’ave nowhere ter go!”
“You can stay here.” He leaned forward. “Nellie, you’ve learned something you shouldn’t. I’m a policeman, a rozzer. Do you know what happens to people who know secrets they shouldn’t?”
She nodded silently. She knew. They vanished. She had lived fifteen years in St. Giles; she understood the laws of survival very well.
“You a rozzer, honest? You ain’t got no cape ner ’elmet, ner one o’ them little lights.”
“I used to have. Now I only deal with big, important crimes, and I have some of the rozzers with helmets to work for me.”
Tibbs brought their food himself: crusty bread, thick slices of cold saddle of mutton and rich, dark pickle, two mugs of ale, and two portions of spotted Dick—steamed pudding thick with currants. Nellie was speechless when a full half of it was placed in front of her. Pitt only hoped she would not be sick with the unaccustomed wealth of it. He might have been wiser to give her shrunken stomach a little at first, but there was no time, and he was hungry himself.
“Eat as much as you want,” he said graciously. “But don’t feel you have to finish it. There’ll be more tonight, and tomorrow.”
Nellie simply stared at him.
He collected a constable from the local beat and co-opted him into going from one door to another yet again. All afternoon they worked the areas within five hundred yards of where the hideous parcels had been found—first in the approaches to the Bloomsbury churchyard, then closer to the outskirts of St. Giles, where the later discoveries were made. He had given the constable a precise description of Septimus Wigge, both his person and the clothes he had seen him wearing in his cellar storehouse.
By six o’clock in the evening they met again at the churchyard gate.
“Well?” Pitt asked, although the answer mattered little; he already had what he needed. He had been too impatient, too angry, to be subtle. But in spite of his unusual clumsiness he had found a footman who had been up early returning from an assignation and had seen a scraggy, lantern-jawed old man in a stovepipe hat a hundred yards from the church, hurrying along, pushing a small handcart with one fairly large parcel in it. He had not mentioned it at the time of the torso’s discovery because he did not wish to admit being out; it would almost certainly mean his dismissal from his position, and he had thought the old man merely a peddlar, probably with something stolen, to be about at such an hour. It was too early even for costers in from the outlying districts with vegetables, or up from the docks or the river with winkles, eels, or other such delicacies.
But Pitt had bullied him into believing that to hide such knowledge now would make him accomplice to the murder, and that was infinitely worse than losing a position over a bit of flirtation with a housemaid a mile away.
And he had also chanced on a prostitute further toward St. Giles, where one of the gruesome parcels, a leg, had been found. Now that he could describe Septimus Wigge so precisely he knew what to ask, and, after several girls, he came upon one who had seen him with his handcart. She remembered the fine stovepipe hat, its sheen gleaming in the moonlight as he turned the corner. She had noticed it then but not considered the three paper-and-string-wrapped parcels in his cart.
And there had been others—men he would not like to call to a witness stand, but nonetheless all helping to seal the certainty: a squint-eyed little fence who had been keeping an eye open for dealers, a pimp in a knife fight over one of his whores, and a burglar busy star-glazing a window to break into a house.
“Two,” the constable answered. He was good at his job and knew the crime, but he had not Pitt’s anger and had been more circumspect in his threats. He looked disappointed, feeling he had let down his superior. “Not much use in court. A rat-faced little magsman coming home after a night cheating at cards, and