Farriers' Lane - Anne Perry [136]
Two hours later Pitt had questioned the landlady, now alternately shrieking with outrage and mute with fear, and then the other tenants, and learned nothing from any of them. The medical examiner had been and gone, taking the body with him in his mortuary van, the horse stamping and blowing as it caught the smell of fear from passersby. Livesey, still pink-faced and now suddenly cold, had excused himself. Pitt and Lambert stood on the landing outside the door, the keys in the lock.
Lambert shook his head.
“I don’t understand,” he said yet again. “What on earth could he have wanted to tell Livesey? Why not us? If not me, then you?” He took the keys out of the door and gave them to Pitt. In single file they went down the stairs.
The landlady was still standing in the hall, her face haggard and eyes blazing.
“Murder!” she said furiously. “In my very own ’ouse! I always said I never should ’ave ’ad police as lodgers! Never again! I’ll take my oath on that, never again!”
Lambert swung around on her, his face white, his eyes blazing.
“A young policeman is murdered in your house, and you’ve got the impertinence to blame him! Perhaps if he’d never come here then he’d be alive today. What sort of a house do you keep anyway?”
“ ’Ow dare you?” she shrieked, her cheeks scarlet with outrage. “Why you—”
“Come on.” Pitt took Lambert by the arm and half pulled him out, still turned towards the woman, wanting to fight. The rage and the grief in him needed to lash out at someone, lay blame where he could see and hear.
“Come on,” Pitt repeated urgently. “We’ve got a lot to do!”
Reluctantly Lambert went with him. Outside the sky was overcast and it had begun to rain. Passersby were huddled into themselves, collars up, faces averted from the driving cold.
“What?” Lambert demanded between his teeth. “Who murdered poor Paterson? We haven’t even found out who killed Judge Stafford! We don’t know why! Do you know, Pitt?” He dodged off the pavement into the running gutter, then back on again. “Have you even got an idea? And don’t tell me Godman wasn’t guilty—that doesn’t make any sense. If he wasn’t, why would anybody rake it all up now? They’ve got away with it. It was the perfect murder. Godman is hanged and the case is closed.”
“What else was Paterson working on?” Pitt asked, matching his pace to Lambert’s as they walked along Battersea Park Road to a place where they could find a hansom back to the station.
“An arson case. A couple of robberies,” Lambert answered. “Nothing much. Nothing anyone would kill him over. Garotte him in a dark alley, maybe; or stick a knife into him if he went to make an arrest. But not go to his house and string him up on a rope. It’s insane. It’s that damn Macaulay woman. She’s out on a rampage of revenge.” He stopped in his stride, turning to face Pitt, his eyes brilliant and wretched. “She’s insane! She’s coming after the people she holds to blame for her brother’s hanging!”
“She’s not doing it alone,” Pitt said, trying to keep calm. “No woman by herself strung up Paterson. He’s a big man and was in good health.”
“All right then,” Lambert snapped. “She had help. She’s a clever woman, beautiful, and has got that sort of personality. Some poor devil fell in love with her, and she’s got ’im so obsessed he helped her do that.” He was talking too fast and Pitt could hear the hysteria rising in his voice. “Or maybe ’e did it for her,” he went on. “Go and find him, Pitt. Prove it! Paterson was a good man. Far too good to die for the likes of her! You do that! Prove it!” And he snatched himself away from Pitt’s outstretched hand and strode along the wet pavement towards the Battersea Bridge, and the carriages and cabs clattering back and forth along it.
Pitt began the long and tedious job of investigating the murder of Constable Paterson. The medical examiner’s report said that death had been caused by strangulation brought about by hanging, exactly as it had appeared. He had died some time the previous evening; his guess was that it had been earlier