“Although,” Pitt conceded, “I’m listening to the evidence. It probably was Finlay. I daresay he has a vicious streak in him which he’s kept under control pretty well until now, and this time he went too far. He wouldn’t be the first well-bred man to enjoy hurting people and be willing to pay for his entertainment.” He took a deep breath. “Or the first to lose control and end in killing someone.”
A small black dog trundled past them, nose to the ground, tail high.
“No,” Drummond said sadly. “And I’m afraid it fits in with what little I know of him from my days in Bow Street.”
Pitt stopped abruptly.
Drummond put his hands in his pockets and continued walking, but more slowly.
Pitt increased his pace to catch up with him.
“We had to cover up one or two unpleasantries a few years ago,” Drummond went on. “Seven or eight years, almost. One incident was a brawl in one of the alleys off the Haymarket. Several young men had drunk too much and it ended in a very nasty affray. One of the women was fairly badly beaten.”
“You said one or two,” Pitt prompted.
“The other I recall was a fight with a pimp. He said FitzJames had asked for something unusual, and when it wasn’t given had refused to pay. Apparently he’d already had the regular services, and when she wouldn’t do whatever it was, he became very unpleasant. Unusually, the pimp came off quite badly. There was a knife, but both of them seem to have been cut with it. Not seriously.”
“But that was hushed up too?” Pitt was not sure whether he was surprised or not. The picture was becoming uglier, more into the pattern both he and Ewart feared.
“Well, there wasn’t a crime,” Drummond pointed out, touching his hat absentmindedly to another acquaintance passing by. “Unless you want to call disturbing the peace a crime. It didn’t seem worth a prosecution. He’d have fought against it, and the pimp was hardly a good witness.”
“What was it FitzJames wanted the girl to do?” Pitt remembered the boots buttoned together in Pentecost Alley, the cold water and the garter around Ada McKinley’s arm. He assumed the broken fingers were a cruelty peculiar to this particular incident.
“I don’t know,” Drummond confessed.
“What was the pimp’s name?” Pitt went on. “What date was it? I can look it up in the records. You did keep a record, didn’t you?”
“No I didn’t.” Drummond looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, Pitt. I think I was a little more naive then.” He did not say any more about it, but they both knew the world of experience they had seen since then, the corruption and the ugliness of influence misused, the inner dishonesties.
They walked in silence for fifty yards, no sound but their feet on the gravel of the path.
“Do you remember his name?” Pitt asked at length.
Drummond sighed. “Yes. Percy Manker. But it won’t do any good. He died of an overdose of opium. The river police pulled him out of Limehouse Reach. I’m sorry.”
Pitt said nothing. They walked a little farther in the sun, then turned and retraced their steps. They did not speak any more about FitzJames, choosing instead to think of pleasanter things, domestic and family matters. Drummond asked after Charlotte, and told Pitt about his own wife’s happiness in their new home and the small businesses of daily life.
Pitt had no hope of learning anything of value about Finlay FitzJames from Helliwell or Thirlstone. He had thought he might persuade Jago Jones that truth, in this case, was a higher good than personal loyalty. Jones’s parishioners had the right to expect a certain loyalty from him as well, and Ada had been a parishioner, in however loose a sense.
He found Jago alone in the church itself, the sunlight streaming in through the windows into bright patterns on the stone floor and across the worn pews. He turned in surprise when he saw Pitt walking up the aisle.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. Pitt knew he did not mean this occasion but the brief half hour he had spent at Ada’s funeral two days before.
He smiled. There was no answer to make.
“What brings you now?” Jago asked, walking down towards where a long-handled broom was resting against the first pew. “Do you know who killed Ada?”
“I think so….”
Jago’s eyebrows rose. “But you are not sure? That means you don’t have proof.”
“I have a very strong indication, it just seems such a stupid thing to have done. I need a clearer picture of the man in order to believe it. I already have a picture of Ada.”
Jago shook his head. “Well, Ada I could have helped you with. The man I doubt I know.” He picked up the broom and began to sweep the last area of the floor which still needed doing. “You don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” Pitt conceded, sitting on the pew and crossing his legs. “You’re wrong. You do know the man, or at least you did.”
Jago stopped, still standing with the broom in his hands, his shoulders back. He did not turn to look at Pitt.
“You mean Finlay?”
“Yes.”
“Because of the badge? I told you, he could have lost that years ago.”
“Possibly. But he didn’t leave it in Ada McKinley’s bed years ago, Reverend.”
Jago said nothing. The unlikelihood of someone else’s having stolen the badge, or found it by accident, and chancing to have left it by the dead woman’s bed, and the cuff link also, lay unspoken between them. Jago continued sweeping the floor, carefully directing the dust and grit into a little pile. Pitt watched him. The sunlight slanted in through the windows in bright, dusty bars.
“You knew him well a few years ago,” Pitt said at last. “Have you seen him at all since then?”
“Very little.” Jago did not look up. “I don’t frequent the places he does. I never go to Mayfair or Whitehall, and he doesn’t come to Saint Mary’s.”
“You don’t say that he doesn’t come to Whitechapel,” Pitt pointed out.
Jago smiled. “That’s rather the matter at issue, isn’t it?”
“Have you ever seen him here?”
“No.”
“Or heard that he was here?”
Jago straightened up. “No, Superintendent. I have never heard of Finlay being here, nor have I reason to suppose that he has been.”
Pitt believed him. Yet there was something in Jago’s attitude which disturbed him. There was a pain in him, an anxiety which was more than merely sadness for the violent death of someone he had known, however slightly. When he had first told him they had found Finlay’s badge he had looked like a man in a nightmare.
He changed his approach. “What was Finlay like when you knew him?”
Jago swept up the dust in a pan and set it aside before he answered, propping the broom up against the wall.
“Younger, and very much more foolish, Superintendent. We all were. I am not proud of my behavior in those times. I was extremely selfish, I indulged my tastes whenever I could, with disregard for the consequences to others. It is not a time I look back on with any pleasure. I imagine it may well be the same for Finlay. One grows up. One cannot undo the selfishness of youth, but one can leave it behind, learn from its mistakes, and avoid too quick or too cruel a judgment on those who in their turn do likewise.”
Pitt did not doubt his sincerity, but he also had the feeling it was a speech he had prepared in his mind for the time he should be asked.
“You have told me a lot about yourself, Reverend, but not about Finlay FitzJames.”
Jago shook his head very slightly.
“There’s nothing to tell. We were all self-indulgent. If you are asking me if Finlay has also changed, grown up, then since I have not seen him above a couple of times in the last three years, I cannot answer you from my knowledge. I imagine so.”
“I learned where to find you through his sister. Presumably you are still acquainted with her?” Pitt pressed.
