Long Spoon Lane - Anne Perry [6]
“Or went out and straight back into one of the other buildings?” Pitt suggested quickly. “We’d better search them all.”
“Do it,” Narraway said curtly. “And look everywhere, in every room, in beds, if there are any, cupboards, under rubbish or old clothes, if there are lofts, even if it’s only space enough to crawl. And up the chimneys, such as they are.” He turned and strode along the length of the alley, staring up at the other houses, at the rooftops and at every door. Pitt followed on his heels.
Fifteen minutes later they were back at the front door on Long Spoon Lane. The full daylight was cold and gray and there was a sharp edge to the wind down the alley. No anarchist had been found hiding anywhere. No policeman from the front admitted to having seen anyone or having chased them inside the building, and no one had emerged at the front. The sergeant at the back did not change his story by so much as a word.
White-faced and furious, Narraway was forced to accept that whoever else had been in the house where Magnus Landsborough lay dead, he, or they, had escaped.
“Nothing!” the young man with the dark hair replied with contempt. He was in the cell at the police station, sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair, his hands still manacled. The only light came from one small, high window in the outer wall. He had said his name was Welling, but he would give no more. Both Pitt and Narraway had tried to glean from him any information about his colleagues, their aims or allies, where they had obtained the dynamite or the money to purchase it.
The man with the fair skin and red-gold hair had given his name as Carmody, but he too refused to say anything of his fellows. He was in a separate cell; for the moment, alone.
Narraway leaned back against the whitewashed stone wall, his face creased with tiredness.
“No point in asking anymore.” His voice was flat, as if accepting defeat. “They’ll go to the grave without telling us what it’s all about. Either they don’t know the point of it, or there isn’t one. It’s just mindless violence for the sake of it.”
“I know!” Welling said between his teeth.
Narraway looked at him, affecting only the slightest interest. “Really? You will go to your grave, and I shall not know,” he continued. “That’s unusual for an anarchist. Most of you are fighting for something, and a grand gesture like being hanged is rather pointless if no one knows why you go to it like a cow to the abattoir.”
Welling froze, his eyes wide, his lean chest barely rising or falling with his breath. “You can’t hang me. No one was killed. One constable was hit, and you can’t prove that was me, because it wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t it?” Narraway said casually, as if he neither knew nor cared if it were true.
“You bastard!” Welling spat with stinging contempt. Suddenly his pretense of calm was gone, and the anger exploded through him. His face was slicked with sweat, his eyes widened. “You’re just like the police—corrupt to the bone!” His voice shook. “No, it wasn’t me! But you don’t care, do you! Just so long as you have someone to blame, and anyone will do!”
For a moment Pitt was merely aware that Narraway had provoked Welling into response, then he realized what Welling had said about the police. It was not the accusation that stung, but the passion in his voice. He believed what he was saying, enough to face them with it, even now when it could cost him the last hope of mercy.
“There’s a lot of difference between incompetence and corruption,” Pitt said. “Of course there’s the odd bad policeman, just as there is the odd bad doctor, or…” He stopped. The scorn in Welling’s face was so violent that it distorted his features grotesquely, like a white mask under his black hair.
Narraway did not interrupt. He watched Pitt, then Welling, waiting for the next one to speak.
Pitt