personable. He needed a prostitute who had venereal disease. How hard had he looked, and how easy had he been to satisfy once he had found someone, anyone-who filled that need?
It was a shocking thought, but Gillivray would not have been 244
the first man to seize a chance for evidence to convict someone he sincerely believed to be guilty of an appalling crime, a crime likely to occur again and again if the offender was not imprisoned. There was a deep, natural desire to prevent hideous crime, especially when one has only recently seen the victims. It was easy to understand. Yet it was also inexcusable.
He called Gillivray into the office and told him to sit down.
'I've found Abigail Winters,' he announced, watching Gillivray's face.
Gillivray's eyes were suddenly bright and blurry. There was a heat inside him that robbed him of words. It was the guilt Pitt might not have found in an hour of interrogation, no matter how many of his suspicions he pressed or how many verbal traps he laid. Surprise and fear were so much more effective, putting the onus of reply on Gillivray before he had time to conceal the guilt in his eyes, to grasp what it was Pitt was saying.
'I see,' Pitt said quietly. 'I would rather not believe you openly bribed her. But you did, tacitly, lead her into perjury, didn't you? You invited her, and she accepted.'
'Mr. Pitt!' Gillivray's face was scarlet.
Pitt knew what was coming, the rationalizations. He did not want to hear them because he knew them all, and he did not want Gillivray to make them. He had thought he disliked him, but now that it came to the moment, he wanted to save him from self-degradation.
'Don't,' he said quietly. 'I know all the reasons.'
'But, Mr. Pitt-'
Pitt held up a piece of paper. 'There's been a robbery, a lot of good silver taken. This is the address. Go and see them.'
Silently, Gillivray took it, hesitated a moment as though he would argue again, then turned on his heel and left, closing the door hard behind him.
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11
Pitt stood under the new electric lights along the Thames Embankment and stared at the dark water brilliantly dancing in the reflections, then sliding away into obscurity. The round globes along the balustrade were like so many moons hung just above the heads of the elegant and fashionable as they paraded in the wintry night, muffled in furs, their boots making little high, chiplike sounds on the ice-cold footpath.
If Jerome were hanged, whatever Pitt found out about the murder would be academic. And yet there would still be Albie. Whoever had killed him, it was not Jerome; he had been safely entombed in the heart of Newgate when that had happened.
Were the two murders connected? Or was it just gross and irrelevant mischance?
A woman laughed as she passed behind Pitt, so close her skirts brushed the bottom of his trousers. The man beside her, his top hat rakishly sideways on his head, leaned and whispered something. She laughed again, and instinctively Pitt knew what he had said.
He kept his back to them and stared out into the nothingness of the river. He wanted to know who had killed Albie. And he still felt that there were other lies concerning Arthur Way-bourne, lies that mattered, although his brain could not tell him how, or what the answer was.
He had been back to Deptford tonight, but hadn't learned anything that really mattered, just a lot of detail that he might as easily have guessed. Albie had some wealthy customers, men who might go to a considerable length to keep their tastes from
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becoming known. Had Albie had been foolish enough to try enhancing his standard of living by a little selective blackmail, an insurance against the time when he could no longer command a price?
But still, as Wittle had pointed out, far more likely he had had some sort of lovers' quarrel and been strangled in the heat of jealousy or unsatisfied lust. Or perhaps it was as commonplace as a fight over money. Maybe he had simply been greedy. . Yet Pitt wanted to know; the untidy ends trailed across his mind, irritating his thoughts like a constant nagging pain.
