Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [107]
Unsworth shook his head violently.
“Or,” Pitt continued, “I shall presume you have these here for your own pleasure, and since one of them is evidence in a murder, that you are protecting the person who committed it . . .”
Unsworth gasped and waved his hands in denial.
“Or that you committed it yourself,” Pitt finished. “Which is it to be?”
“I . . . eh . . . I . . .” Unsworth ground his teeth. “I’ll give you a list. But you’ll ruin me! You’ll put me in the workhouse!”
“I hope so,” Pitt said.
Unsworth shot him a venomous look, but he went and fetched a piece of paper and a pen and ink, and wrote a long list of names for Pitt, but no addresses.
Pitt read through the names and saw none he recognized. He would get a list of members of the camera club and compare them, but he held little hope that there would be any in common.
“Tell me something about each of these men,” he said grimly to Unsworth.
Unsworth shook his head. “They’re customers. They buy pictures. What do I know about them?”
“A great deal,” Pitt replied without shifting his gaze. “If you didn’t, you’d not risk selling pictures like these to them. And I want a list of the men who supply these pictures as well.” He watched Unsworth’s face. “And before you deny that too, one of these pictures prompted the murder of Cathcart. The murderer saw it, and laid Cathcart’s body in the exact image.” He was satisfied to see Unsworth pale considerably and a sweat break out on his brow. “Coincidence would be unbelievable,” he went on. “Especially since Cathcart took the photograph. I need to know who else saw it. Do you understand me, Mr. Unsworth? You are the key to a murder which I intend to solve. You can tell me now . . . or I can close down your business until you do. Which will it be?”
Unsworth looked at him with hatred, his eyes narrow and dark.
“You tell me which picture it is, I’ll tell yer ’oo brought it an’ ’oo I sold it to,” he said grudgingly.
Pitt indicated the photograph of Cecily Antrim in the punt.
“Oh. Well, like yer said yerself, Cathcart brought me that one.”
“Sole rights?” Pitt asked.
“Wot?” Unsworth hedged.
“Do you have sole rights to the picture?” Pitt snapped.
“Wake up an’ dream! O’ course I don’t!”
It was a lie. Pitt knew it from the fixed steadiness of his eyes.
“I see. And you wouldn’t know the names of the other dealers who have it because you wouldn’t have sold it to them?” Pitt agreed.
Unsworth shifted his weight again. “That’s right.”
“So tell me all you can about those people you did sell to.”
“That’d take all day!” Unsworth protested.
“Probably,” Pitt agreed. “But Sergeant Tellman and I have all day.”
“Maybe you bleedin’ ’ave—but I ’aven’t. I’ve got a livin’ ter make!”
“Then you had better start quickly, hadn’t you, and not waste your valuable time in arguing,” Pitt said reasonably.
But even though they spent several hours in the small upstairs room and the shop was closed for business all the time, they learned nothing that appeared to be of use in guiding them any further in Cathcart’s murder. They left as it was growing dusk and went out onto the gaslit pavements with a heavy feeling of oppression.
Tellman drew in a long breath, as though the foggy air—with its slight damp, the smell of horses, wet roads, soot and chimneys—was still cleaner than the air inside the closed shop.
“That’s poison,” he said quietly, his voice husky with misery and rage. “Why do we let people make things like that?” It was not a rhetorical question. He wanted and needed an answer. “What good are we doing if we can only arrest people after they do things wrong, if we can’t stop them?” He jerked his head back towards the shop. “We could arrest someone if they put poison in a sack of flour.”
“Because people don’t want to buy sacks of flour with poisons in them,” Pitt answered him. “They want to buy these things. That’s the difference.”
They walked in silence for a while, crossing the street amid rumbling drays and wagons, fast-moving carriages, light hansoms, all with lamps gleaming. The sound of