Long Spoon Lane - Anne Perry [77]
Narraway’s face darkened and he sat up in his chair, no longer at any kind of ease. “Be careful of whoever is behind the extortion,” he warned. “Remember, you play by rules, they don’t.”
Pitt knew Narraway was worried for him, but the warning still irritated him. “You sound like Voisey.”
Narraway shot upright, scraping the legs of his chair on the floor. “For God’s sake! You didn’t tell him—”
“Of course I didn’t!” Pitt said tartly. “I told him about Piers Denoon, nothing else. He patronizes me, as if I know nothing about crime. You’d think I was a country parson!”
“I’ve known a few country parsons. One of them in particular was more familiar with the ugly side of human cruelty and greed than anyone else I’ve met. He saw them when they were very small sins, but he recognized the hunger for dominion over others, the use of belittlements, countless small humiliations that destroy belief.” He stopped suddenly, as if recalling himself to the present. “Get on with it, Pitt. Find out exactly what is happening in this anarchist group.”
“Yes, sir. Have you learned anything that I ought to know?”
A ghost of quite real humor flickered in Narraway’s eyes. “Are you asking me to report to you, Pitt?”
Pitt weighed his chances of getting away with candor. He chose to risk it. “Yes, sir, it might be helpful.”
Narraway’s eyebrows rose. “So far the likelihood of the Inner Circle being penetrated by any European power is extremely slight,” he said. “However, there are certain men high in finance whose interests might not coincide with England’s. You do not need to know more than that. Attend to the police corruption. It endangers us all.”
Pitt found Welling in a cell in Newgate Prison. He looked cold in spite of the fact that it was quite a pleasant day outside. The stone seemed to hold a dampness that ate into the flesh and touched the bones. His face was even paler and his hair more unkempt than last time. He sat on the cot, his shoulders hunched.
“What do you want?” he asked as Pitt came in and the warden closed the door behind him with the clang of iron on stone. “I told you before, I’m giving you no names and no places. Don’t you believe me?”
“I believe that you mean what you say,” Pitt answered. The air was stale in here. There was only one man living in it, yet it had the odor of many men, as if it had never been washed, or had clean air blown through it. The heaviness added to the sense of chill.
“So why are you wasting your time here? You haven’t any idea who shot Magnus, have you?” Welling said with a sneer curling his lip. “Except it was the police, and you won’t admit that! You’re helpless.”
“If it was someone in the police, I’d like to know who,” Pitt responded.
“What difference does it make? You aren’t going to do anything about it.”
“Don’t you want to know who it was?”
Welling slid a little farther down in the cot, his arms folded tight across his chest. “What for? They’re all the same to me. And Magnus will be just as dead, and there’ll still be no justice. I don’t care a damn who.”
Pitt felt the man’s anger and fear as if there had been a drop in temperature in the air. It made him angry as well, for the futility of it and the blindness, but it also stirred a pity. He had known something very close to it when, as a child, his father had been accused falsely of poaching, a form of theft taken very seriously then. He could not prove his innocence. He had been deported, and Pitt had never seen him again.
He concentrated on the present. “How many policemen did he know?” he asked, controlling his voice with an effort.
“What?” Welling was startled.
Pitt repeated the question.
“None!” Welling said angrily. “The police are liars, corrupt oppressors, and thieves from the poor. Why would you ask such a stupid question?”
“Then why would a policeman kill Magnus?” Pitt asked.
“Because we know them for what they