Bethlehem Road

'Or someone is lying!' Royce said quickly. 'Perhaps he has an accomplice.'

Drummond looked at him thoughtfully. 'That supposes a kind of sanity-at least, on the part of one of them. Why should anyone aid in such a grotesque and profitless act unless they were paid?'

'I don't know,' Royce admitted. 'Perhaps the accomplice is really the instigator? He keeps a madman to commit his crimes for him?'

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Drummond shivered. 'It is grotesque, but I suppose it is possible. Someone driving a cab across the bridge, by night, with a madman inside, whom he lets loose just long enough to commit murder, then removes him from the scene before the body is discovered? At a good pace he could be along the Embankment, or going south up the Waterloo Road, and indistinguishable from a thousand others in a matter of moments-before the body is discovered or crime known. It's hideous.'

'Indeed it is,' Royce said huskily.

They stood in silence for a moment or two. Outside, the eaves dripped steadily and the shadows of mourners leaving passed across the doorway.

'If there is anything I can do,' Royce said at last, 'anything at all that will help, call on me. I mean it, Drummond- I will go to any lengths to catch this monster before he kills again.'

'Thank you,' Drummond accepted quietly. 'If there is any way, I shall call on you.'

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11

Pitt left the funeral and walked in the rain all the way down to the Albert Embankment. He was halfway across the Lambeth Bridge before he finally caught a cab back to the police station at Bow Street. It gave him time to think before he should see Micah Drummond again. What Garnet Royce had said was fearful-but it could not be discarded. It was possible some conspiracy existed, some person was using a madman to achieve his ends, taking him to the bridge, directing him to his victim, and then driving him away again afterwards. They had long ago questioned every cabby with a license to drive a carriage of any sort in London, and learned nothing of value. In the beginning it was conceivable one might have lied, for bribe or out of fear, but with three murders it was no longer a serious thought.

Every effort to discover a sane motive for all three crimes had failed. No battle for money or power, no motive of revenge, love, or hate tied all three victims, nothing that he or Drummond had been able even to imagine, still less to find. Even Charlotte, usually so perceptive, had nothing to offer, except that she feared Florence Ivory had a passion of hatred

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strong enough to have moved her to murder, and the courage to act once her mind was set.

Yet with Etheridge dead, what reason had she to kill Sheridan? Except precisely that reason-that there was none- and perhaps by that means to establish her innocence. Could she have killed Hamilton by mistake, believing him to be Etheridge, and then killed Sheridan simply because it was senseless, to remove herself from suspicion? She would have to be a woman not only of passion but of terrifying coldness. He did not want to think so. In his mind sharp and unfeigned, unmarked by pretense or guilt, was an understanding of the pain of a woman who had lost all she valued, her last child.

There was nothing to do but return to the most basic, prosaic police work, rechecking everything, looking for the inconsistency, for the person who had seen something, recalled something.

Micah Drummond was already in his office when Pitt came up the stairs and knocked.

'Come in,' Drummond said quietly. He was standing by the fire waiting, warming himself and drying his wet clothes. His boots were dark with water and his trousers steamed gently. He moved sideways so Pitt might receive some of the fire's warmth. It was a small gesture, but Pitt was touched by the graciousness of it more than by any words of praise or sympathy Drummond might have offered.

'Well?' Drummond asked.

'Back to the beginning,' Pitt replied. 'Interview the witnesses again, the constables on the beat closest to the bridge, find the cabbies again, everyone who crossed the bridge or passed along either embankment within an hour of the crime, before or after. I'll speak to all the M.P.s in the House on any of the