Long Spoon Lane - Anne Perry [119]
“You’ve been big-game hunting?”
Narraway looked straight back at him. “Only for the most dangerous creature of all—man. I have nothing against animals, and no desire to put their heads on my walls.”
Pitt liked him better for that.
“Yes, sir!”
He called on Vespasia briefly, only long enough to tell her about the night’s doings. She responded with a mixture of laughter and grief, and a deep and troubling fear that there might be further tragedy yet to happen. However, she would not tell him of what nature she thought it, nor whom it would involve, although he felt certain she knew.
He left her house and went to St. Paul’s where, at noon, he met Voisey at the tomb of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean clergyman, lawyer, philosopher, adventurer, and poet, John Donne. For once Voisey had little to say about him. A glance at Pitt’s exhausted face, the haste of his step, and the fact that he was ten minutes early, took from him all desire to show off beyond the first remark.
“He entered Oxford University at the age of eleven. Did you know that?” he said wryly. “You look awful. Did you go back to the bombing?”
“No,” Pitt said quietly, keeping his voice low so an elderly couple, also paying a passing reverence to Donne, could not hear him. “I was up most of the night, creating a diversion while a certain burglar took from Wetron’s house a piece of crucial evidence, as you suggested.”
Voisey’s face lit up, his eyes bright. And wide open. “What?”
The eagerness in him had been so intense the elderly couple turned in surprise. The man had been in the middle of quoting perhaps Donne’s most famous words: “therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls…”
“It tolls for thee.” The line finished in Pitt’s mind. “Exactly where you expected,” he said in little more than a whisper.
“For God’s sake!” Voisey snarled. “Who?”
“Piers Denoon. An old charge of rape.”
Voisey let his breath out in a sigh as if a long-held knot had at last unloosed itself. “Is it enough?”
“Almost. We need to be able to prove all the connections. We have the dynamite to Grover, Grover to Simbister, through that confession of Denoon’s, Simbister to Wetron, but Wetron could still deny it. He could say he had only just found that, and intended to act on it when he was certain. It would destroy Simbister, and Wetron would merely replace him with someone else.”
“I see, I see!” Voisey said impatiently. “We must tie Wetron to using Piers Denoon so he can’t escape it. If Denoon shot Magnus Landsborough you can charge him with murder. He’ll be happy to swear he was blackmailed into it. The papers are safe? Where? Not in your house!”
“Yes, they’re safe,” Pitt replied bleakly.
A half smile flashed on Voisey’s face. He had not really expected to be told.
“Use your old Circle connections,” Pitt went on. “We need the proof quickly. Wetron knows we have the papers.”
The half-smile widened. “Does he indeed? I wish I’d seen that.” There was regret in his voice, a hunger to take revenge: to roll it on his tongue, not merely be told about it.
Pitt felt faintly sick. A shiver passed over his skin, but there was no way around working with Voisey, and no point thinking about it as if he could escape. “Use them today,” he said aloud. “Find the proof that Wetron knew of the rape and used it on Denoon to force him into funding the anarchists, then murdering Magnus Landsborough.”
Voisey licked his lips. It was a slow, delicate gesture made without awareness that he was doing it. “Yes,” he said, looking at Pitt. “Yes, I know just who to go to. I still have a few old debts to call in. You have a telephone? Of course you have. Be by it from four o’clock onward. You’re right, there’s no time to waste.” He gave a very slight shrug, an inch, no more. “For Tellman’s sake!”
Pitt gave him the number of his telephone, then turned and walked away, his footsteps rapping on the stone, before he