Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [108]
“One of his friends, or supposed friends,” Ewart responded after a moment. “Maybe one of the original club members. We don’t know what they really felt about each other. Could have been a lot of envy there. Finlay had more money than any of them, more opportunities in life. He’s going on to hold high office someday. They are not.” There was an anger, almost a viciousness, in his voice that was startling in the golden summer evening. Pitt thought of how easily Finlay’s opportunities had been bought, and at what cost Ewart’s son’s had been, the countless small things that had been given up to pay for it. It was not surprising Ewart felt resentful at Finlay’s waste of it.
“We’ll never know.” Ewart caught himself and the emotion died out of his voice. It became bland again, professional. “We never do know all of a case. There are motives, small actions unexplained in even the best of them. We have the right man. That’s all that really matters.” He pushed his hands into his pockets and stared over the water. One or two barges had already lit riding lights and they drifted, almost without undulation.
“It’s part of the crime,” Pitt said, unsatisfied. “Someone put those things there, which means if it wasn’t Costigan, then someone else was present. A good defense counsel is going to ask who it was and raise reasonable doubt.”
Lennox stared at him, his face half shadowed, half gold in the dying sunlight. There was surprise in him and a mixture of alarm.
Ewart frowned, his mouth tight, eyes black.
“They’d never get him off,” he said slowly. “He’s guilty as the devil. It’s all perfectly plain. She cheated him and he found out. He went to her to have it out, she wasn’t giving in, maybe told him to take himself off. They quarreled and he lost his temper. Sadistic little swine. But then what kind of man lives off the prostitution of women anyway?”
Lennox let out a little grunt, sad and savage. His shoulders were hunched hard, as if all his body muscles were locked. There was utter loathing in every part of his face in the half the sun caught. The other half was almost invisible.
Pitt guessed what he felt. He was the one who had examined Ada’s body, touched her, seen precisely what had been done to her. He must have imagined her alive, perhaps he even knew what pain she had experienced with the wrenched and dislocated joints, the broken bones, the terror as she struggled for breath. His own pity for Costigan drained away as he watched the younger man’s emotions raw in his face.
Pitt sighed. “What I’m really thinking of is that FitzJames knows who it was who tried to incriminate him, or believes he does, and will take his own revenge,” he said quietly.
Ewart shrugged. “If we can’t work it out, why should they?” He laughed with surprising bitterness. “And if he succeeds, and gets caught, I, for one, shall not mind.”
The western sky was burning with the last embers, spilling fire across the water and casting them into black shadows from the Tower and the span of the bridge. The tide was running faster. But the air was still warm, and there were just as many people out strolling, some alone, some arm in arm with others. The sound of laughter came from somewhere just beyond sight.
Ewart shrugged. “We can’t stop them, sir.” The “sir” distanced him from Pitt, in a sense closing the subject. “If they know that much, they’ll almost certainly have the right person, and I’d say they deserve it. It’s a filthy thing to do, trying to get a man hanged for a crime he didn’t commit.”
His face was hard and weary, the light accentuating the lines. “Anyway, if you think you can stop Augustus FitzJames from executing his own form of justice on his enemies, pardon me for saying it, sir, but you just aren’t living in the world as it is. If there’s a crime committed, and we know about it, it is our job to try to sort it out. But a private hatred between gentlemen is not our business.”
Pitt said nothing.
“We can’t take the whole