The Hyde Park Headsman - Anne Griffin Perry [54]
“Yes sir,” Bailey said dubiously. “Anything else, Mr. Pitt?”
“Not yet.”
“Yes sir. Then I’ll go and get started, sir.”
By the middle of the afternoon Pitt had been back home to Bloomsbury and changed into his oldest clothes: an ill-fitting jacket, shirt with twice-turned collar and cuffs, and boots that were scuffed on top, their soles coming apart. His trousers were frayed at the bottoms and his battered hat hid half his face. He set out for the Edgware Road, to the north of Hyde Park, and some of the warrens behind the facades, where he knew he would find the men he was looking for and, more important, the women.
It was a wild late spring day and a warm wind blew the clouds in white drifts across the sky. Late daffodils still shone gold against the grass. Nursemaids in stuff dresses pushed perambulators along the paths, and children followed after dutifully, some with horse heads on sticks or china-faced dolls. Two boys chased a hoop and a third brandished a wooden sword.
He should have loathed being dressed as he was and bound on a duty of finding pimps and prostitutes, and yet there was vitality in his step and a sense of freedom merely in being out of the station and in the open air, and even more of having no one looking over his shoulder with criticism poised on the tongue.
He turned off the Edgware Road left into Cambridge Street. Halfway along he went down the steps into an areaway and knocked on the basement door. He waited several moments, then knocked again, twice.
After a minute the door opened a crack and an eye and a nose appeared.
“Watcher want? ’ere, it’s Mr. Pitt. Come down in the world, ain’t yer? I ’eard as yer’ve bin made up ter one o’ the nobs. Threw yer out, did they? Serves yer right! Nobody should try ter get above their station wot they were born ter. Could ’ave told yer that. Yer weren’t born a gentleman, and nothing’ll make yer one. Not cleverness least of anything. Gentlemen ’ates them what’s clever. Back on the grubby cases, are yer?” The door remained firmly where it was.
“Don’t know,” Pitt prevaricated. “I could be. And yes, I’m on the grubby cases.”
The eye looked him up and down.
“I can see that. Yer looks awful. Watcher want wi’ me? I ain’t done nuffink. I don’t go in fer your kind of things.”
“Women,” Pitt said succinctly. “Some of your women work the park.”
“I ain’t sayin’ as they do or as they don’t. But wot’s it to you? They don’t go cutting people’s ’eads orf. Bad fer business, apart from why should they? It don’t make no sense. If yer think they did it, then yer should be back on the beat.” He laughed hollowly at his own joke.
“Are you going to let me in, or am I going to get every one of your girls down to the station and ask them?”
“You’re an ’ard man, Mr. Pitt, and unjust,” he complained, but the door opened and Pitt went into a pleasantly proportioned room, now appallingly overcrowded with all sorts of furniture, chairs, sofas, desks, cheval glasses, upholstered stools and a chaise longue. Nearly all of it that was upholstered was either red or sharp pink. It was extraordinarily oppressive, giving Pitt the feeling that at any moment something would fall over, although actually everything seemed to be resting quite safely on its feet.
The man who now stood in the small space in the middle of the red-and-gold carpet was of medium height with a straggly fair beard and mustache. His thin face with its aquiline nose did not seem to belong with the rest of his features. His shoulders were bent over, and his right side seemed to be withered in some fashion; his right arm was several inches shorter than the left. He looked at Pitt guardedly out of shrewd eyes.
“Life is unjust,” Pitt said without sympathy. “But make the best of it you can. I can always send Mr. Tellman here …”
The man spat and his eyes narrowed.
“ ’E’s a bastard, that one. I’d see ’im in the bottom o’ the river and dance on ’is grave, I would.”
Pitt forbore from pointing out the impossibility of