Traitors Gate - Anne Perry [126]
“Are you talking about all this in theory, Matthew, or is there something specific you are trying to find the courage to say?” Pitt fell in step beside him.
Matthew looked away, facing back towards the house. “I don’t even know of anything about which I believe all that differently from you. I was thinking of Father, and his friends in the Inner Circle.” He glanced sideways for a moment at Pitt. “Some of them were his friends, you know? That is what he found so terribly difficult”
Nothing that Matthew said was untrue, but Pitt still had the feeling that in some way Matthew was lying. They walked up the lawn towards the house together but they did not touch on the subject again. Charlotte invited Matthew to stay and dine with them, but he declined, and took his leave, his face still shadowed with anxiety, and Pitt watched him go with a sadness he could not rid himself of all evening.
Charlotte looked at Pitt enquiringly when Matthew was gone. “Is he all right? He looked …” She searched for a word.
“Troubled,” Pitt supplied it for her, sitting down in his chair and leaning back, stretching a little. “Yes, I am almost sure there is something else, but he cannot bring himself to say it.”
“What sort of thing?” She looked at him anxiously. He was not sure whether she was concerned for Matthew or for both of them. He could see in her eyes the knowledge of his own regret mixed so heavily with his loss.
He turned his gaze away. “I don’t know, something to do with loyalties….”
She drew in her breath sharply, as if to speak, then changed her mind tactfully. He almost laughed, it was so unlike her, but it would too easily have broken into misery.
“I suppose it is to do with the Circle,” he said, although he was not at all sure that was what had gnawed at Matthew so painfully. But either way, this evening he preferred not to think of it any further. “What is for dinner?”
“That’s not much,” Farnsworth said grimly when Pitt reported to him next. “The wretched man cannot have disappeared from the face of the earth.” He was referring to the driver of the hansom cab which had picked up Susannah Chancellor in Berkeley Square. “Who did you say you had on it?”
They were in his own office rather than Pitt’s room in Bow Street, and he stood by the window looking towards the Embankment of the river. Pitt sat in the chair opposite. Farnsworth had invited him to sit when he had first come in, and then a moment later had risen himself. It gave him a physical advantage he seemed to prefer.
“Tellman,” Pitt replied, sitting back a little farther. He did not in the least mind looking up. “And I tried myself. I know the man may be crucial, but so far we have found no trace of him, which leads me to—”
“If you are going to say Chancellor was lying, then you are a fool,” Farnsworth said irritably. “You surely cannot be so out of touch with reality as to imagine Chancellor would—”
“The whole question is irrelevant,” Pitt interrupted in his turn. “Chancellor went straight back to his house and was seen within ten minutes of having put her in the hansom. I already know that from his own household staff. Not that I suspected him anyway. It is merely a matter of form to ascertain where everyone was at the relevant time.”
Farnsworth did not reply to that.
“Which leads me to suppose,” Pitt finished the sentence Farnsworth had broken into, “that the driver was in some way implicated. Possibly he was not a regular cabby at all, but someone dressed as one.”
“Then where did he get the hansom from?” Farnsworth demanded. “Chancellor said it was a hansom. He would know the difference between a cab and a private carriage.”
“I’ve got Tellman looking into that now. So far we don’t know, but it must have come from somewhere, either hired or stolen. He’s going around to all the companies.”
“Good. Good. That could be the break we are needing.”
“Kreisler thought it might have been an attempt at