at the jacket. As the valet had said, it was good cloth. Very gently he put his fingers into the pockets one by one. He was acutely conscious of the nasty smell and a sweetness that was unpleasant. He was glad of the freezing rain on his face. In the first pocket there was nothing except a clean handkerchief. What an odd thing to be put there. It was a thought which he found curiously pitiful, as if someone had done it for him as if he could need it.
Pitt took a deep breath and tried the next pocket. His fingers met tobacco fragments and a slight stickiness. He took his hand out and smelled it. There was only a faint odor of tobacco. He looked up at Drummond.
“Anything?” Drummond asked.
“I think so. If this is opium then we have the answer. I’ll take it to the medical examiner.” He turned to the diggers. “Thank you. You can close it again and put it back.”
“That all, Guv? Yer jus’ want ’is coat?”
“Yes, thank you, just his coat.”
“Jeez!”
Drummond and Pitt turned away and Pitt folded the coat to carry it carefully. The dawn was graying very slightly in the east, dull and heavy in the overcast. They walked slowly, picking their way back down the sodden path to the waiting cab, where the horse was stamping in the roadway and snorting white breath as the smell of the grave frightened it.
“I’m coming with you,” Drummond said as soon as they were inside. “I want to know what the medical examiner says.”
Pitt smiled grimly.
“Opium,” the medical examiner stated, looking up at Pitt through his eyebrows. “Paste of opium.”
“Strong enough to kill a man if he put a cigar end with that on it into his mouth?” Pitt asked.
“That concentration, yes. Not immediately, but after thirty minutes or so, could be.”
“Thank you.”
“But there was opium in the whiskey,” the medical examiner said hastily.
“I know,” Pitt agreed. “But someone else was seen to drink from the flask in the theater, and came to no harm.”
“Impossible. The concentration in that flask was enough to kill anyone!”
“Pitt?” Drummond demanded. Both men were looking at him now.
“The opium that killed Stafford was on the cigar. The opium in the flask was put there after he was dead,” Pitt explained.
“After …” Drummond was very still, his face pale. “You mean, to confuse us. But that means …”
“Precisely,” Pitt replied.
“Why? For God’s sake, why?” Drummond was confused and distressed.
“One of the oldest of reasons,” Pitt answered. “To keep the public image, the honor and the status he had earned over the years. To be proved wrong now would be a blow he could not take. He is a proud man.”
“But murder,” Drummond protested.
“I daresay it began simply as coercion, a tacit conspiracy among them all.” Pitt drove his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. “They must have realized only very slowly that there was a possibility they had overlooked something, been too hasty to accept an answer because they needed one so badly. The public were clamoring. The Home Office would not wait. Everywhere they turned there was hysteria, pressure, fear. They clung together, bolstering each other up, and privately each took his own way of escaping from it, into retirement, the bottle, building allies against the day they might need them, salving conscience with good work—all except Stafford. His conscience nagged him until he found the courage to go back and look again. And it cost him his life.”
Drummond looked tired and sad, but he said nothing.
“They killed Godman,” Pitt said quietly. “I daresay they believed it was right at the time, a service to the law— and the people. But in the end he ruined them all, one way or another. Now if you will excuse me, I have a duty to carry out.”
“Yes—yes, of course. Pitt!”
“Yes sir?”
“I have no regrets over leaving the police force—but I might have had, were it not you taking my place.”
Pitt smiled, raised his hand as if to salute, then let it fall.
He entered Judge Livesey’s chambers without knocking and saw Livesey sitting behind his desk.
“Morning, Pitt,” Livesey said wearily. “I didn’t hear you knock.” Then he saw Pitt’s face and he frowned, slowly, the color dying from his cheeks. “What is it?” His voice was husky, forming the words with difficulty.
“I have just exhumed Samuel Stafford’s body.”
“What for, for God’s sake?”
“His dinner jacket. The opium on the unsmoked portion of his cigar …”
The last of the blood drained from Livesey’s face. His eyes met Pitt’s and he knew the end, as a man recognizes death when he sees it.
“He betrayed the law,” he said very quietly, so quietly Pitt barely heard him, although the words fell like stones.
“No,” Pitt argued with passionate belief. “It was you who betrayed the law.”
