Hyde Park Headsman

“Do you?” Carvell said with only a thread of bitterness.

He looked utterly wretched. Pitt was acutely aware of his isolation. There was no one to comfort him in his grief, no one even to be aware of it.

Carvell looked up. “Who did this terrible thing, Superintendent? Is there really some demented soul loose in London with a lust for—for blood? Why should he have killed Aidan? He harmed no one….”

“I don’t know Mr. Carvell,” Pitt confessed. “The more I learn of the facts, the less I feel I grasp the elements of it.” There was nothing more to add, no questions he could think of that would have any meaning, even if he received an honest answer. He had come looking for a mistress, a cause for jealousy, a link with Winthrop. He had found instead a gentle, articulate man devastated with a very private and personal grief.

He excused himself and went out into the spring evening under a calm sky where an early moon had risen even before the sun had set.

“You’ve found her!” Farnsworth said the following morning, sitting bolt upright in the chair in Pitt’s office. “What about the husband? What is he like? What did he say? Did he admit any connection with Winthrop? Never mind, you’ll find it. Have you arrested him yet? When shall we have something to tell the public?”

“His name is Jerome Carvell, and he’s a quiet, respectable businessman,” Pitt began.

“For Heaven’s sake, Pitt!” Farnsworth exploded, his cheeks suffusing with color. “I don’t care if he’s an archdeacon of the church! His wife was having an affair with Arledge, and he found out about it and took his revenge. You’ll find the proof if you look for it.”

“There is no Mrs. Carvell.”

Farnsworth’s face fell. “Then what on earth are you telling me for? I thought you said you found the place where these alternative keys fitted? If he wasn’t having an affair, what on earth did he have keys to the house for?”

“He was having an affair,” Pitt said slowly, hating having to try to explain this to Farnsworth.

“Make sense, Pitt,” Farnsworth said between his teeth. “Was he having an affair with Carvell’s wife, or sister or whatever she is, or was he not? You are trying my patience too far.”

“He was having an affair with Carvell himself,” Pitt replied quietly. “If affair is the right word. It seemed they have loved each other for over thirty years.”

Farnsworth was dumbfounded, then as the full meaning of what Pitt had said dawned on him, he was filled with anger and outrage.

“Good God, man, you’re talking about it as if—as if it were …”

Pitt said nothing, but stared at Farnsworth with cold eyes, his mind filled with the tortured face of Jerome Carvell.

Farnsworth stopped, the words dying on his lips without his knowing why.

“Well you’d better get on and arrest him!” he said, rising to his feet. “I don’t know what you’re doing sitting around here.”

“I can’t arrest him,” Pitt replied. “There’s no evidence that he killed Arledge, and none at all that he even knew Winthrop.”

“For God’s sake, man, he was having an illegal relationship with Arledge.” He leaned over the desk, glaring at Pitt. “What more do you want? They quarreled and this man—what’s his name—killed him. You can’t need me to remind you how many murders are domestic—or spring from lovers’ quarrels. You’ve got your man. Arrest him before he kills again.” He straightened up as if preparing to leave, the matter settled.

“I can’t,” Pitt repeated. “There is no evidence.”

“What do you want, an eyewitness?” Farnsworth demanded, his face darkening with anger. “He probably killed him in his house, which is why you couldn’t find the site of the crime before. You have searched his premises, Pitt?”

“No.”

“You blithering incompetent!” Farnsworth exploded. “What’s the matter with you, man? Are you ill? I feared you were promoted beyond your ability, but this is absurd. Get Tellman to search the place immediately, and then arrest the man.”

Pitt felt his face burn with anger and a kind of embarrassment for both Farnsworth’s ignorance and assumption, and for Carvell’s crippling and so obvious emotion.

“I have no grounds for searching his house,” he said coldly. “Arledge stayed there sometimes. That is not a crime. And there is nothing whatever to connect Carvell with Winthrop or the omnibus conductor.”

Farnsworth’s lip curled.

“If the man is a sodomite he probably approached Winthrop, and when Winthrop rebuffed him he flew into a rage and killed him,” he said with conviction. “And as for Yeats, perhaps he knew something. He might have been in the park and witnessed the quarrel. He tried blackmail and was killed for his pains. Lose no sleep over that. Filthy crime, blackmail.”

“There’s no proof of any of it,” Pitt protested as Farnsworth took another step towards the door. “We don’t know where Carvell was the night Winthrop was killed. He may have been dining with the local vicar.”

“Well find out, Pitt!” Farnsworth spat between clenched teeth, his voice sharp with his own fear. “That’s your job. I expect you to report an arrest within forty-eight hours at the outside. I shall tell the Home Secretary we have our man, it is just a matter of collecting irrefutable evidence.”

“It’s a matter of collecting any evidence at all,” Pitt retorted. “All we know so far is that Carvell loved Arledge. For Heaven’s sake, if that were evidence of a murder, we should have to arrest the husband or wife of every victim in the country.”

“That is hardly the same,” Farnsworth said viciously. “We are talking about unnatural relations, not a normal