Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [59]
Other men did the same, gentlemen in beautifully cut suits and tall, shiny hats, soldiers in uniform, ribboned and medaled. There was laughter in the warm air, and faraway snatches on the breeze of a barrel organ, and children shouting in the park. Their feet made a slight crunch on the gravel.
“A ruthless man,” Micah Drummond said, using the same word Grainger had. He was speaking about Augustus FitzJames. “Of course he had enemies, Pitt, but hardly the sort who would frequent Whitechapel, or find themselves in a Pentecost Alley tenement. Most of them are his own age, for a start.”
“Elderly gentlemen use prostitutes as much as anyone else,” Pitt said with impatience. “And you must know that!”
“Of course I know it,” Drummond conceded, wrinkling his nose. He looked extremely well, not quite as thin as in the past, and his skin had the warmth of the sun on it. “But not in the Whitechapel area. Think about it, Pitt!” He raised his hat as he passed a lady who was apparently an acquaintance and then turned back to Pitt. “If the sort of man you are describing were to kill a prostitute in order to implicate FitzJames, he’d choose one of the better class of women, the sort he would use himself, around Windmill Street or the Haymarket. He wouldn’t enter into an area he didn’t know and where he’d be remembered as different.”
“But he was remembered.” Pitt half turned towards him. “That’s just the point! Perhaps he was afraid he’d be recognized in his own haunts?”
“And when did he get the Hellfire Club badge?” Drummond added.
“I don’t know. Perhaps he got it by chance, and that gave him the idea?”
“Opportunism?” Drummond was skeptical.
“Perhaps,” Pitt agreed. “And maybe the chance to use the murder was opportunism as well?”
Drummond looked sideways at him, his long face full of wordless disbelief.
“Although,” Pitt conceded, “I’m listening to the evidence. It probably was Finlay. I daresay he has a vicious streak in him which he’s kept under control pretty well until now, and this time he went too far. He wouldn’t be the first well-bred man to enjoy hurting people and be willing to pay for his entertainment.” He took a deep breath. “Or the first to lose control and end in killing someone.”
A small black dog trundled past them, nose to the ground, tail high.
“No,” Drummond said sadly. “And I’m afraid it fits in with what little I know of him from my days in Bow Street.”
Pitt stopped abruptly.
Drummond put his hands in his pockets and continued walking, but more slowly.
Pitt increased his pace to catch up with him.
“We had to cover up one or two unpleasantries a few years ago,” Drummond went on. “Seven or eight years, almost. One incident was a brawl in one of the alleys off the Haymarket. Several young men had drunk too much and it ended in a very nasty affray. One of the women was fairly badly beaten.”
“You said one or two,” Pitt prompted.
“The other I recall was a fight with a pimp. He said FitzJames had asked for something unusual, and when it wasn’t given had refused to pay. Apparently he’d already had the regular services, and when she wouldn’t do whatever it was, he became very unpleasant. Unusually, the pimp came off quite badly. There was a knife, but both of them seem to have been cut with it. Not seriously.”
“But that was hushed up too?” Pitt was not sure whether he was surprised or not. The picture was becoming uglier, more into the pattern both he and Ewart feared.
“Well, there wasn’t a crime,” Drummond pointed out, touching his hat absentmindedly to another acquaintance passing by. “Unless you want to call disturbing the peace a crime. It didn’t seem worth a prosecution. He’d have fought against it, and the pimp was hardly a good witness.”
“What was it FitzJames wanted the girl to do?” Pitt remembered the boots buttoned together in Pentecost Alley, the