Farriers' Lane - Anne Perry [19]
“It is finished, Mrs. Stafford,” Pitt said gently. “There is no need to be concerned anymore, or to let it disturb you.”
“Is it?” She swung around, facing him. Her dark eyes were wide, still full of fear, and her voice had a hard, frightened edge to it. “Do you think so? Isn’t that why Samuel was killed?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “Mr. Livesey seems to think that Mr. Stafford was quite satisfied that the verdict was correct. He simply wanted to find further proof of it so even Tamar Macaulay would be convinced and let it rest. In the public good.”
She stood very still, her body stiff under its black gown.
“Then who killed Samuel?” she said quietly. “And for heaven’s sake, why? Nothing else makes any sense. And it was immediately after that woman came here, and he went to speak to O’Neil and Joshua Fielding about the evidence. Do you—do you think maybe one of them really killed Kingsley Blaine, and they are afraid Samuel knew something about it—and that he was going to prove it?”
“It is possible,” he conceded. “Mrs. Stafford, can you think of anything he may have said which would help us to find out what he knew? Even what he intended, would help.”
She was silent for several moments, her face heavy with concentration.
Pitt waited.
“He seemed to feel it was extremely urgent,” she said finally, a deep line of anxiety between her brows. “He would not have gone to Devlin O’Neil again, someone so close to the murdered man’s family, and a personal friend, unless he felt he had new information or evidence. I—I just know, from his manner, that he had learned something.” She stared at him with fierce concentration. “It is only natural that he did not discuss it with me. It would have been improper. And of course I did not know the details anyway. All I knew was what was public knowledge. Everyone was talking about it. One could not bump into a friend or acquaintance anywhere, even at the opera or the dinner table, without it creeping into the conversation after a few moments. There was terrible anger everywhere, Mr. Pitt. It was not an ordinary crime.”
“No.” Pitt thought of the dark air of fear and prejudice which would blow from the bloodstained Farriers’ Lane, even into the withdrawing rooms of London and the discreet, plush lined gentlemen’s clubs with a clink of crystal and the aroma of cigar smoke.
“It wasn’t, I assure you!” There was an urgency in her now, as if she thought he doubted her. “I have never known such a public fury over a crime—other than the Whitechapel murders, of course. And even so, there was an element of blasphemy in this which outraged people in quite a different way. Even gentle and pious people could not wait for him to be hanged.”
“Except Tamar Macaulay,” he observed.
She winced. “It is an abominable thought that she may have been right, is it not?”
“Indeed!” he said with a sudden surge of feeling. “In many ways far worse than the original crime.”
She looked uncomprehending.
“The murder of Kingsley Blaine was the murder of one man,” he explained with a bitter smile. “The murder, if you like, of Aaron Godman was the slow, judicial passion incurred by the fear and rage, and misjudgment, of a nation and what purports to be the justice system it practices. To have criminals is a sad fact of humanity. To have laws which, when tested to their limit, exact an irretrievable punishment from an innocent person, in order to assuage our own fears, is a tragedy of a far greater order. We all consented to it; we are all tainted.”
She looked very pale, her eyes hollow, skin tight on her throat.
“Mr. Pitt, that is—that is simply dreadful! Poor Samuel; if he feared that, no wonder he was so disturbed.”
“He was disturbed?”
“Oh yes, he