Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [118]
“That I can believe,” Pitt said fervently. “But Tallulah saw Finlay there? Are you sure?”
“Well, Emily is sure. But Tallulah didn’t think anyone would believe her anyway, when she is his sister and had already told everyone she was at Lady Swaffham’s party.”
“But someone else must have seen him!” Pitt said with a strange, almost frightening sense of exhilaration. Perhaps at least he had not been wrong about Finlay. “Who else was there?”
“That’s it. Tallulah didn’t know anyone, except the person she went with, and she hardly knew him. He was drunk half out of his senses, and doesn’t even remember going.”
“Well, people must have seen Tallulah!” he insisted, gripping her hands without realizing it.
“She doesn’t know who to ask. Parties like that are … well, they are held in private houses. Apparently people drift from one room to another. There are screens for privacy, potted palms, people half drunk … you could come and go and no one would know who you were, or care. Even the host himself didn’t know who was there.”
“How on earth do you know that?” he demanded, trying to envision such an affair. “Did Emily tell you? And I suppose Tallulah FitzJames told her?”
Her face fell. “You don’t believe it, do you?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I believe Tallulah could have been to such an affair, and so could Finlay. But I don’t believe she saw him at one the night Ada McKinley was killed. As proof of his innocence, it’s worth nothing.”
“That’s what Tallulah thought. But it proved it to Emily.”
Suspicion in his mind was sharpening.
“Why are you telling me this now, Charlotte? Are you saying Finlay has to be innocent? You said it proved it to Emily—not to you!”
“I don’t know,” she said candidly, looking down and then up at him again. She was very pale, very unhappy. “Thomas … it was Emily who had the second Hellfire Club badge made, and Tallulah put it in Finlay’s belongings so you would find it.”
“She did what?” His voice rose to a shout. “What did you say?”
She was very pale, but her eyes did not waver. She spoke very quietly indeed, almost a whisper.
“Emily had a second badge made so Tallulah could put it in Finlay’s wardrobe.”
“God Almighty!” he exploded. “And you helped her! And then had me go and look for it! How could you be so deceitful?” That was what hurt, not the laying of false evidence, the muddying of a case, but the way she had deliberately deceived him. She had never done such a thing before. It was a betrayal from the one place he had never expected it.
Her eyes widened in horror, almost as if he had slapped her.
“I didn’t know she’d done that!” she protested.
He was too tired to be angry, and too aware of his own guilt over Costigan, and his need for Charlotte and the loyalty, the comfort, she could give him, even the sheer warmth of her physical presence.
She was waiting, watching his face. She was not afraid, but there was hurt and anxiety in her eyes. She understood the pain in him. Her fingers crept over his, soft and strong.
He leaned forward and kissed her, and then again, and again, and she answered him with the confidence and the generosity she had always had.
He sighed. “Even if I’d known, it wouldn’t have altered the evidence against Costigan,” he said at last. “Actually, Augustus FitzJames said he’d had the damn thing made. I wish I knew why he said that.”
“To stop you investigating any further,” she answered, sitting back again.
“But why?” He was puzzled. To him it made no sense.
“Scandal.” She shook her head. “It’s scandalous having the police in the house, whatever they are doing there. I suppose you have to go back and see him