Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [84]
He could not like Augustus FitzJames, and the further he delved into the probability of his having enemies who might hate him enough to have gone to these lengths to ruin him, the less did he find to like.
The further back Pitt went in the search into Augustus’s past, the less easy it became to trace with any clarity. He had apparently inherited no money from his father, a somewhat feckless landowner in Lincolnshire who had mortgaged his holdings to the hilt. Augustus had served a short time in the merchant navy, largely on the Far Eastern routes. He had returned home shortly after the Second Opium War in 1860 with sufficient money to begin investing, an art which he exercised with skill amounting at times to genius.
Now he possessed a financial empire of enormous size and complexity, with tentacles stretching across the breadth of the Empire. He had investments in India, Egypt, the African expeditions of Cecil Rhodes, and the new expansions in Australia. Frequently his interests cut across those of others to their disadvantage.
Pitt heard several stories both of Augustus’s generosity and of his ruthlessness. He seemed never to forget a friend or an enemy, and there were anecdotes of his cherishing a grudge over decades and repaying it when the perfect opportunity presented itself.
He lacked polish. He had no social grace, but even so he had been attractive to women. Aloysia had married him for love, and he had been far from her only suitor. Other men, with more humor, with more charm, had sought her hand. She certainly had not needed the money. At that time her own fortune was greater than his. Perhaps there was something in his energy, his driving ambition and the inner power that drove him which attracted her.
Finlay had not only his mother’s broader face and easier, more graceful manner, it seemed he also had her more malleable nature and slower intellect. He appeared altogether a more likable man, a little self-indulgent, but that was not unnatural at his age, or with the pressure of expectation placed upon him.
Ewart grew more insistent that Finlay was innocent and that it was some enemy of Augustus who had deliberately implicated him. And where he had dismissed it before, Pitt now began to entertain the idea with some seriousness.
“The valet said he’s never seen the cuff links,” Ewart argued as they were sitting in Pitt’s office in Bow Street. “They could have gone missing years ago, as Finlay says.”
“How did one get down the back of the chair in Ada’s room?” Pitt asked, although he knew what Ewart would answer.
Ewart screwed up his face. He still looked tired and harassed. His suit was rumpled and his tie a little crooked. There were shadows around his dark eyes as though he habitually slept poorly.
“I know he said he’d never been to Whitechapel,” he replied, shaking his head. “But it was an understandable lie, in the circumstances. He could well have been there years ago. He could have been drunk at the time, and completely forgotten it.”
That was true—Pitt did not argue. He could also understand Ewart’s reluctance to think Finlay guilty. The evidence was not conclusive, and if they charged him it would be a hard fight and a very ugly case. To lose it would be an embarrassment from which neither of their careers would recover easily.
“And the badge?” Pitt was almost thinking aloud, Charlotte’s words to him the previous evening turning over in his mind.
“He said he’d lost it years ago,” Ewart reminded him. “I daresay that’s true. Certainly we can’t prove the club has ever met in, say, five … six years. All the members say it hasn’t, and I’m inclined to believe them. They don’t seem to have any connection anymore. Helliwell is married and doing well in the City. Thirlstone has taken up with the aesthete group. And Jones has taken the cloth and gone to the East End. Frankly, if it isn’t one of Augustus