Long Spoon Lane - Anne Perry [87]
She smiled very bleakly; it barely reached her eyes. “Thank you for not pretending. I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d said it wouldn’t.”
He rose from the table, kissed her lightly, and went to the front door to put on his boots. He knew she was standing in the kitchen, still watching him.
He went to see Carmody first, and found him pacing the floor, so tense he was unable to sit down. He swung around as soon as he heard the key in the big iron lock, and was facing Pitt when he came in. His hair was matted and his over-pale skin with its rash of freckles looked almost gray.
“Who did it?” he said accusingly. “That’s murder! Why didn’t you stop them? What’s the matter with you? Who are they? Irish, Russian, Poles, Spaniards? What?”
“I don’t think so,” Pitt replied as levelly as he could. “Who told you about the explosion?”
“It’s all over the prison!” Carmody shouted, losing control of his fury. “The warders are counting the hours till we get tried and hanged. It’s nothing to do with us. For God’s sake, we told you, so you would get everybody clear. We wanted to get rid of bloody Grover, and police corruption, not kill a whole street full of people.”
“All the evidence is that it’s not foreign anarchists, from Europe or anywhere else,” Pitt replied.
“It’s…not…us!” Carmody roared at him, his voice shaking. “Can’t you hear me? It’s not what we want, or what we believe. It’s bestial! There’s nothing of freedom or the honor or dignity of man in it. It’s just plain murder—and we’re not murderers.”
Pitt believed him, but he was not ready yet to say so.
“Magnus Landsborough’s dead,” he pointed out, leaning against the wall. “You and Welling are in prison. Has it even occurred to you that the purpose behind the Myrdle Street bombing was to get you out of the way?”
Carmody started to speak, then stopped. His face drained of the last vestige of blood. “Oh, God!” he breathed. “You think…no!” He started to shake his head, repeating the word over and over, but there was no belief in it. It was himself he was trying to convince, and his eyes never left Pitt’s.
“Why not?” Pitt asked him. “Maybe there was someone else in your group who wanted to follow a different plan, a more violent, more decisive one. Somebody certainly does!”
“No!” But it was an empty word. Carmody understood, and even as the seconds ticked by it made more and more sense to him. He sat down suddenly on the cot, as if his legs had given way.
“Someone you know killed Magnus,” Pitt went on, speaking quietly and firmly. “Someone planned it. They knew where you would escape to after the Myrdle Street bomb went off, and they were there waiting for you. They shot Magnus, and then escaped out the back way. They went down the stairs and past the police, who thought it was one of us from the front, in pursuit of one of yours. That takes thought, care, and intelligence. It also takes a good deal of knowledge about your plans. Why would any one of you want Magnus dead, except to get rid of him as leader, and take over yourselves?”
Carmody raised both hands up to his face and pushed his hair back so hard it stretched the skin of his brow and pulled his features. “This is a nightmare!”
“No, it isn’t,” Pitt said deliberately. “It’s real and you won’t wake up from it. The only way out is to tell the truth now. Who is the man to take over the leadership if anything happened to Magnus? And don’t tell me you never thought of that. That would be stupid. There was always a chance that any one of you could get caught, or killed.”
“Kydd,” Carmody said in a whisper. “Zachary Kydd. But I would have sworn he believed the same as we did. I’d have put my life on it!”
“Looks as if you would have lost, like the people in Scarborough Street last night.”
Carmody said nothing.
“Where will Kydd be now? Unless you want more like last night, we’ve got to get him.”
Carmody stared at him, his eyes wretched. “You’re asking me to betray my friend.”
“You can’t be loyal to your friend and your principles. You have to choose. Even remaining silent is a choice.”
Carmody closed his eyes.