smoke was behind them. The light was soft and apricot gold over the shining sheet of water, hazy in the distance, softening the line of the farther shore. Tower Bridge was just above them. Downstream there was nothing more barring the way to the open sea.
“Are you going to mention the badge and the cuff link?” Pitt asked Ewart. The subject had to be discussed. They were to testify the day after tomorrow.
“Don’t see any point,” Ewart replied guardedly, looking sideways at Pitt. “Doesn’t seem to have any relevance to what happened.”
“I went back to FitzJames,” Pitt said, squinting into the sun. The reflection off the water was becoming brighter, a vivid daub of color, almost silver where it touched the slight ripples of a passing pleasure boat, darker at the widening edges where it spilled across the shore. “I asked him if he had made the second badge himself.”
“Always thought he had.” Lennox pursed his lips. His face still looked melancholy, even in the calm, golden air of evening. The light picked out the fine lines around his mouth and eyes, worn into his flesh by the strain of pity or distress. Pitt wondered what private life he had; where his home was; if he had anyone there to care for, anyone with whom he could laugh and share the beautiful and good things, or to whom he could tell at least some of the things that hurt him.
Ewart was talking to him, and he had not heard.
“What did you say? I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
“FitzJames admitted it?” Ewart pressed. “Then that solves it, doesn’t it! Stupid, perhaps, but understandable. There’s no point in making any mention of it. It only raises questions we can’t answer, and which don’t matter now. I daresay he did go there sometime, and lost them then. Point is: it wasn’t that night, and that’s all that matters.”
“It wasn’t Finlay who had it made,” Pitt argued. “It was his father.”
“Comes to the same thing.” Ewart dismissed it, but a look of loathing crossed his face for an instant and was suppressed.
“Costigan swears he doesn’t know anything about them,” Pitt said quietly into the balmy stillness. It still bothered him. It did not make any sense. He could understand Ewart’s feeling. He shared it.
“Maybe he doesn’t,” Lennox said quietly. “I still think FitzJames had something to do with Ada-if not her death, then at least as a customer. I don’t believe anyone stole those things from him. Who would? Except Ada herself.”
“One of his friends, or supposed friends,” Ewart responded after a moment. “Maybe one of the original club members. We don’t know what they really felt about each other. Could have been a lot of envy there. Finlay had more money than any of them, more opportunities in life. He’s going on to hold high office someday. They are not.” There was an anger, almost a viciousness, in his voice that was startling in the golden summer evening. Pitt thought of how easily Finlay’s opportunities had been bought, and at what cost Ewart’s son’s had been, the countless small things that had been given up to pay for it. It was not surprising Ewart felt resentful at Finlay’s waste of it.
“We’ll never know.” Ewart caught himself and the emotion died out of his voice. It became bland again, professional. “We never do know all of a case. There are motives, small actions unexplained in even the best of them. We have the right man. That’s all that really matters.” He pushed his hands into his pockets and stared over the water. One or two barges had already lit riding lights and they drifted, almost without undulation.
“It’s part of the crime,” Pitt said, unsatisfied. “Someone put those things there, which means if it wasn’t Costigan, then someone else was present. A good defense counsel is going to ask who it was and raise reasonable doubt.”
Lennox stared at him, his face half shadowed, half gold in the dying sunlight. There was surprise in him and a mixture of alarm.
Ewart frowned, his mouth tight, eyes black.
“They’d never get him off,” he said slowly. “He’s guilty as the devil. It’s all perfectly plain. She cheated him and he found out. He went to her to have it out, she wasn’t giving in, maybe told him to take himself off. They quarreled and he lost his temper. Sadistic little swine. But then what kind of man lives off the prostitution of women anyway?”
Lennox let out a little grunt, sad and savage. His shoulders were hunched hard, as if all his body muscles were locked. There was utter loathing in every part of his face in the half the sun caught. The other half was almost invisible.
Pitt guessed what he felt. He was the one who had examined Ada’s body, touched her, seen precisely what had been done to her. He must have imagined her alive, perhaps he even knew what pain she had experienced with the wrenched and dislocated joints, the broken bones, the terror as she struggled for breath. His own pity for Costigan drained away as he watched the younger man’s emotions raw in his face.
Pitt sighed. “What I’m really thinking of is that FitzJames knows who it was who tried to incriminate him, or believes he does, and will take his own revenge,” he said quietly.
Ewart shrugged. “If we can’t work it out, why should they?” He laughed with surprising bitterness. “And if he succeeds, and gets caught, I, for one, shall not mind.”
The western sky was burning with the last embers, spilling fire across the water and casting them into black shadows from the Tower and the span of the bridge. The tide was running faster. But the air was still warm, and there were just as many people out strolling, some alone, some arm in arm with others. The sound of laughter came from somewhere just beyond sight.
Ewart shrugged. “We can’t stop them, sir.” The “sir” distanced him from Pitt, in a sense closing the subject. “If they know that much, they’ll almost certainly have the right person, and I’d say they deserve it. It’s a filthy thing to do, trying to get a man hanged for a crime he didn’t commit.”
His face was hard and weary, the light accentuating the lines. “Anyway, if you think you can stop Augustus FitzJames from executing his own form of justice on his enemies, pardon me for saying it, sir, but you just aren’t living in the world as it is. If there’s a crime committed, and we know about it, it is our job to try to sort it out. But a private hatred between gentlemen is not our business.”
Pitt said nothing.
“We can’t take the whole world on our backs,” Ewart went on, hunching himself as if he had become cold. “And it would be overstepping ourselves if we imagined we can do anything about it, or that we even should.”
“He refused our help,” Pitt said. “I offered and he refused, very firmly.”
“Doesn’t want you looking into the family too closely,” Lennox said with an abrupt laugh. “Costigan might have killed the girl, but Finlay’s conduct won’t bear too close an investigation if he wants an ambassadorship.” He spat the word out as if his teeth were clenched, although it was now too dark to see, and he had turned away from the light.
“Well, if that’s so,” Ewart said tartly, “you’d be best to leave it alone. He won’t thank you for ferreting around in Finlay’s life to find out who has cause to hate him, and why. You’d no doubt turn up some pretty shabby behavior, and Augustus’ll direct his vengeance at you. And perhaps the law too. You’ve no cause to investigate Finlay now. We’ve got our man. Leave it alone, sir, for everybody’s sake!”
Lennox let out a little gasp as if he had stubbed his toe on a stone, but he was not moving.
Ewart was right. There was no legal ground for pursuing the subject, and Augustus FitzJames had made it unmistakably clear that he did not wish police assistance. Unless Pitt could deduce the answer from the information he already possessed, he was not going to resolve it.
“Then I’ll see you in court the day after tomorrow,” he said resignedly. “Are you going back that way?” He gestured towards the Queen’s Stairs.
“No, no, I’ll go home,” Ewart answered. “Thank you, sir. Good night.”
“Yes, I’ll come.” Lennox moved with Pitt, and they walked in companionable silence over the grass and down towards the steps and the water, then back up again to Great Tower Hill. It was almost dark.
They gave the evidence as precisely and exactly as they could, trying to rob it of emotion, and failing. Lennox in particular was white-faced, his voice high-pitched with the tension in his throat, his lips dry. Ewart was more practical, but a sense of triumph and relief came through his composure, and a hatred for the viciousness and the greed and the stupidity of it all.
There was not a large crowd. It was not a particularly interesting case. Albert Costigan was a name unknown outside the immediate area of the Whitechapel Road. Ada McKinley was merely an unfortunate woman who ran the
