Le Grange looked attentive.
“What have you in mind?” Pitt asked very slowly.
Tellman’s chin came up. “He’s guilty of one crime, by his own admission. You can get several years for sodomy. He may not realize we can’t prove it. We can pursue him on that.” His lip curled very slightly in unspoken contempt. “Mr. Carvell isn’t the sort to take well to a term in somewhere like Pentonville or the Coldbath Fields.”
“That’s right, sir,” le Grange said hopefully.
Pitt ignored him. He looked at Tellman with dislike.
“You have no evidence.”
“He admitted it,” Tellman said reasonably.
“Not to you, Inspector.”
Tellman’s face hardened and he stood facing Pitt squarely. “Are you saying you would deny it, sir?”
Pitt smiled very slightly. “I should say nothing at all, Inspector. All he told me was that he loved Arledge. That may be interpreted as you please. The emotion is not a crime. I imagine Carvell will say precisely that, and have his lawyers sue you for harassment.”
“You’re too squeamish,” Tellman said, disgust written large in his face. “If you pander to these people you’ll never learn anything. They’ll run rings ’round you.”
Bailey coughed loudly.
Tellman ignored him, still staring at Pitt. “We can’t afford your delicate conscience if we want to catch this bastard who’s cutting people’s heads off and terrifying half of London. People daren’t go out after dark unless they’re in twos or threes. There are cartoons all over the place. He’s making a laughingstock of us. Doesn’t that bother you?” He looked at Pitt with something close to loathing. “Doesn’t it make you angry?”
Le Grange nodded his head up and down, his eyes on Tellman.
“That’s just what it sounds like,” Pitt replied coldly. “The reaction of anger—not of thought or judgment: the instinctive lashing out of someone who’s afraid for his own reputation and works with one eye over his shoulder to see what others think of him.”
“The ‘others’ pay our bloody wages!” Tellman said, still staring icily and undeviatingly at Pitt. Neither Bailey nor le Grange interested him in the slightest, and the desk sergeant had faded from his awareness completely. “Yours as much as mine,” he went on. He had committed himself too far to turn back. “And they are not pleased with you.” His voice was rising. “Nobody cares how brilliant you may have been in the past—it’s now that matters. You are leaving their lordships’ reputations in tatters. They look like fools, and they won’t forgive you for that.”
“If you want me to arrest Carvell, prove he had something to do with it,” Pitt demanded, his own voice angry and hard. “Where was he when Yeats was killed?”
“At a concert, sir,” le Grange chipped in. “But he can’t find anyone who saw him there. He can tell us what the music was, but anyone could get that from a program.”
“And when Arledge was killed?” Pitt went on.
“Home alone.”
“Servants?”
“No point. There’s a French door in the study. He could have gone out that way and none of the servants would have known. Come back the same way.”
“And Winthrop?”
“For a walk in the park, so he says,” Tellman replied with heavy disbelief.
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Pass anyone?”
“Not that he can recall. Anyway, he’d have to pass pretty close for anyone to recognize him at midnight. People don’t hang around the park at night these days—not as they used to.”
“Not even the women?” Pitt asked.
Tellman shrugged. “They’ve got to, poor cows. Can’t afford to stay in. But they’re scared.”
“Well go and see if you can find anyone who saw Carvell,” Pitt said. “Try some of the women. What about in the street on the way home? Someone might be able to place him at a particular time. Don’t his servants remember his coming home?”
“No sir. He kept rather odd hours, and preferred the servants to go to bed and leave him to it.” Tellman’s lips lifted in a faint sneer of distaste. “Presumably he preferred they did not see Arledge coming and going. Caught him out last time—if he was really there.”
“Try the other people in the park,” Pitt repeated. “Try Fat George’s girls. They work that end.”
“What’d that prove?” Tellman said with open disgust. “If no one saw him, that doesn’t prove he wasn’t there. And we can’t find anyone who will say they saw him in Shepherd’s Bush. Tried all the passengers on that last bus.”
“And I suppose you haven’t yet found where Arledge was killed either?” Pitt asked sardonically. “Seems you have quite a lot to do. You’d better get on with it.”
And with that he went up to his office and closed the door, but Tellman’s charges lingered with him. Was he being too fastidious in his prosecution of this case? Was he allowing the fact that he liked Carvell to influence his judgment as to the weight of the evidence? Pity, no matter how real, was not a factor he should allow to blind him. If it were not Carvell, then who? Bart Mitchell, over Winthrop’s abuse of his sister? But why kill Arledge? And why
