Southampton Row - Anne Perry [125]
Cornwallis nodded very slowly.
Tellman stared at them, his face pale. “One against the other?”
“Can you think of anything else?” Cornwallis asked him. “Wetron is ambitious. If he thinks he can challenge Voisey for leadership of half the Inner Circle, and I think we can assume he is the one who led the breakaway, if not at first, then at least by the time it achieved its independence, then he is very ambitious indeed. And he cannot be fool enough to think Voisey will forgive him for it. He will have to live the rest of his life watching his back. If you know you have an enemy, better make a preemptive strike. If you believe you can do it effectively, finish your man.”
“How?” Pitt asked. “Tie Voisey in to the Southampton Row murder?” The idea strengthened as he was speaking. “There must be a continuous connection: Voisey goes to Maude Lamont with social connections, money, whatever it is she wants, and in return she blackmails certain of her clients to speak out against Voisey’s opponent in the election, Aubrey Serracold. Which in turn helps Voisey.”
“Ties up,” Tellman agreed. “Voisey to Maude Lamont to her clients, who do what she tells them, which helps Voisey. But we can’t prove it! Maude Lamont was the link, and she’s dead.” He took in a deep breath. “Just a minute! Did the blackmail stop? Did they stop helping Voisey?” That question was asked of Pitt.
“No,” he said. “No. So Maude didn’t do the blackmailing, she just provided the information as to where they were vulnerable.” Then the chill returned. “But we found no connection to Voisey. We searched all her papers, letters, diaries, banking accounts, everything. There is no trace of a link between them. But then he wouldn’t leave one. He’s far too clever for that. For a start, she could have used it herself!”
“You are looking at the wrong enemy,” Cornwallis said with a rising note of excitement in his voice. It was almost as if he was reliving one of his battles at sea, lining up the opposing ship to fire the broadside that would hole her below the waterline. “Wetron! We shouldn’t aim at either one, but make them attack each other.”
Tellman scowled. “How?”
Pitt felt a leap of triumph again and turned to stifle it in case it flared up out of control, and the darkness afterwards was too deep to bear.
“Wetron is an ambitious man,” Cornwallis said again, but this time with a new intensity. “If he could solve the Southampton Row murder in a spectacular way, personally taking the credit for it, it would enhance his position, make him strong enough no one could challenge him in Bow Street, and perhaps build a rung higher in the ladder.”
The next major step up would be Cornwallis’s own job. Pitt felt a tug of emotion that Cornwallis could not have been unaware of such a risk, and yet looking at him leaning his elbows on the kitchen table, there was not a shadow of hesitation in him.
“Find Cartouche!” Cornwallis said. “If it was Wetron who worked out who he was, and trapped him, and forced from him the secret of the blackmail, perhaps even to implicate Voisey—which might be possible with Rose Serracold being one of the other victims and Kingsley the third.”
“Dangerous . . .” Pitt warned, but the blood was beginning to beat in his pulses and he felt alive again, quickened inside, and something like hope at the edge of his mind.
Cornwallis smiled very slightly, more a baring of the teeth. “He used Wray. Let us use him again. The poor man is beyond being hurt anymore. Even his reputation is ruined if they bring in a verdict of suicide. His life will be rendered almost meaningless in the sense he valued.”
A black rage hardened in Pitt at that thought. “Yes, I should very much like to use Wray,” he said between clenched jaws. “No one knows what I said to him, or he to me. And since I cannot prove I did not threaten him, neither can they deny anything I say he told me!” He too leaned forward across the table. “He had no idea who Cartouche was, but no one else knows that. What if I say that he did, and he told me, and that