Long Spoon Lane - Anne Perry [135]
“What happened?”
Pitt bent and took off his boots. “Stupid,” he answered. “He telephoned Voisey at home, and apparently spoke to him, then he told Tellman he was going to see him there. We believed it.”
“And?” Narraway snapped.
Pitt stood up, bootless. “He probably spoke to a butler, or maybe was just pretending to speak to someone. Voisey was at the House of Commons. By the time we got there he was already dead. Wetron was busy telling people he had gone to arrest Voisey, Voisey had resisted, attacked him with a paper knife, and in self-defense Wetron had had to shoot him.”
Narraway swore, oblivious of the fact that Charlotte and Vespasia were both in the kitchen behind him.
“What can we do now?” Charlotte asked quietly, her voice sounding crushed.
Narraway turned around, and colored deeply. He seemed to debate whether to apologize or not. He drew in his breath.
Vespasia overrode him. “Gracie will make us tea, and we shall consider what choices we have,” she answered.
“What are they?” Charlotte asked again, ten minutes later as they sat around the kitchen table, Gracie as well, eating thin-sliced bread and butter and drinking tea. Vespasia sat with them, exactly as if it were her habit to dine in the kitchen with friends, a maidservant, and the head of Special Branch.
“Denoon’s paper will be full of Wetron the hero by midafternoon,” Narraway said grimly. “On this tide, he’ll be the next commissioner of police.”
“We assume that was his intention,” Vespasia agreed. “I must admit, there are few things that anger me as much as that. The man is vile, and he will harm this whole country irreparably.”
“He’s also still head of the Inner Circle,” Pitt added. “And there is not even Voisey alive to challenge him. In fact, no one will dare to challenge him for a long time, I should think.”
Gracie screwed up her face. “ ’E still puts ’is trousers on one leg at a time, like anybody else. There must be summink as ’e’s weak in, summink ’e forgets.”
“He seems to have thought of everything,” Narraway replied to her. It cost him a moment’s surprise that she felt free to make a remark. “All the evidence anyone has could be attributed to Voisey as easily as to him. Simbister is totally discredited, and I imagine with Wetron’s intelligence he has made sure there are sufficient threats in his hands to be certain that Simbister does not accuse him. Not that there is likely to be any proof. I know Voisey said he had proof, but no one has seen it, and if it exists, Wetron will have destroyed it by now.”
“Piers Denoon’s confession is no good. It only implicates Simbister, and he’s finished anyway,” Pitt added. “We can arrest Piers, but that doesn’t implicate Wetron.”
“Piers Denoon’s confession to what?” Gracie asked, puzzled.
“He raped a young woman. Simbister got a confession from him and used it to blackmail him into supporting the anarchists, and then to shooting Magnus Landsborough,” Pitt explained briefly. “Wetron took it over, but we can’t prove that.”
Gracie wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“We…removed it from Wetron’s safe,” Pitt said drily, “but we are not in a position to say so.”
“All the same,” Gracie persisted. “ ’e’s gotter ’ave suffink as ’e’s scared of, or as ’urts ’im. Wi’ Mr. Voisey it were ’is sister. In’t Mr. Wetron got nobody?” She made a little noise of irritation. “We can’t jist let ’im be! It in’t right!”
“He has made himself very powerful indeed!” Vespasia said gently, looking at Gracie’s small, stiff figure across the kitchen table. “And most of his power is secret.”
“There must be someone as don’t care!” Gracie protested. “If ’e’s that wicked, ’e must ’ave ’urt someone bad enough. We just gotter find ’em.”
An idea was beginning to form in Pitt’s mind, but he did not like it. It helped very little, and it might take a long time.
Charlotte was watching him. “What is it?” she demanded. “What have you thought of?”
He rubbed his hand over his forehead. He was suddenly very tired. He did not seem to have had a restful night for weeks.