Isadora shifted. “He did. But I am not sure that is still the case, or if it is, if it is in the amounts he wishes.”

  Pitt was uncomfortably aware that Isadora’s story, like that of the police being lured to the Lancaster Gate house, seemed to center on opium.

  “Are you afraid that he is buying opium himself, illegally?” he asked. It had not been made public that the raid had been intended to capture dealers in drugs. Did Isadora know somehow? Cornwallis could have told her; it was possible he had heard through a friend on the force or an old colleague, despite the fact that he was no longer assistant commissioner. “Does your husband know you have come to see me?” he asked.

  She winced. “No. And he is not aware of Alexander’s…frailty. I prefer that it remains so. I have no obligation to act regarding opium. I can assume that it is legally prescribed and not inquire. He might feel that he could not.”

  Pitt was puzzled. “But you came to tell me? I don’t understand.”

  She was quick. “You seized on the opium when I mentioned it,” she said. “Did the bombing have something to do with opium?”

  “Is that not why you mentioned Duncannon and his addiction in the first place?” he countered.

  She smiled ruefully. “Don’t play with me, Mr. Pitt. I was well used to it with my brother, and with my first husband. I came to you, even though it is difficult for me, because Alexander is a charming, intelligent but unstable young man, who has a passionate hatred for the police. It amounts to an obsession, a crusade against them. He has made no secret of it, but I think many people assume it to be merely part of his rather eccentric style of living, perhaps an attempt to be accepted by the company he chooses to keep, possibly even as a rather desperate form of rebellion against his father, who is a wealthy and formidable man who once had high expectations of his only son.”

  “He hates the police?” Pitt sat back, surprised by this new information. “Does he have sympathy with anarchist connections?” It was not unusual for young men of wealth and privilege to have sympathies with the poor, and aspirations to see the politics changed. They saw it as a just cause on whose behalf to rebel.

  “No,” Isadora said simply. “A dear friend of his was convicted and hanged a couple of years ago. Alexander did everything he could to save his friend, certain that he was innocent. He failed, and Dylan Lezant went to the gallows. Alexander never really got over it. He believes that a large proportion of the police are deeply corrupt, and they are being shielded by other police for reasons of their own.”

  “Do you believe him?” he asked.

  She had not expected anything quite so direct. It was clear from the sudden widening of her eyes.

  “I believe it is what he thinks,” she answered slowly.

  Pitt remembered the Lezant case. He recalled with another chill that that, too, was to do with a drug arrest that had gone wrong. Lezant had been arrested after he shot a totally innocent man who merely happened to be passing.

  “I recall the case.” Pitt nodded. “Tragic. Lezant was also addicted, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, but as I said, Alexander was still certain that he was innocent.”

  “So who shot the bystander?”

  She shook her head very slightly. “Alexander believed Lezant’s story that it was the police themselves.”

  Pitt was startled.

  “Why would they do that, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Carelessness…panic,” she said. “But then they had to blame someone else, because they shouldn’t have had guns with them anyway. I know what you think: He was a young man who was devoted to his friend, perhaps the one person who understood his addiction and did not blame him. He believed what he had to, to preserve his own emotional values and possibly even to justify the battle he put up to save Lezant from the rope—and failed. Who knows all the reasons why we do things?”

  He could not argue with her. “So you think Alexander could have placed the bomb that blew up the Lancaster Gate house, killing two policemen and critically injuring three more? Is that not…extreme?”

  “Yes, it is,” she agreed. “And I very much hope that I am totally mistaken. Believe me, I debated long and deeply whether I should even mention it to you. It seems disloyal to my friend. Maybe it is worse than that. I am not certain John would approve. I suppose that is obvious, since I have not told him.” Now her face was pinched with a painful memory. “But I know that people you have loved, that you have known all your life, can be quite different from what you have supposed. Why would you even entertain the idea that they are really strangers to you, full of passions that you did not dream of?”

  He knew now that she was speaking of her brother, who would have been willing to see her blamed for a crime she had not committed. She would never know if he would even have seen her hanged for it without speaking out to save her with the truth.

  The shadow of that time was there in the room. What did she recall of it now? It had been years ago and it had been Pitt who had saved her. It was also Pitt who had caused the downfall of her brother, and his death, in another case after that. So much old pain. And yet Isadora had come to him now with this, not choosing to look aside, not even choosing to confide in Cornwallis, the husband she loved so deeply, because he had once been assistant commissioner of the very police they were speaking of.

  Was that because she trusted Pitt to face the truth, whatever the cost?

  “I’ll speak to Mr. Duncannon tomorrow,” he promised. “Where can I find him?”

  She had wanted him to say just this; it was the reason she had come. And yet now she also looked stricken. The die was cast. It was too late to change her mind.

  With stiff fingers she opened her reticule and passed him a small piece of paper. On it was written the address of the flat in which Alexander Duncannon lived. He was of the social class and income that did not necessitate any occupation, except whatever he chose with which to pass his time.

  “When might I find him there?” he asked.

  “I would try about ten o’clock in the morning,” she answered. “I don’t imagine he will be an early riser. Later, and he might have gone out. He has friends.”

  “Thank you. I certainly will not mention your name when I talk to him,” Pitt promised.

  She hesitated for a moment, at a loss for words herself. Then she gave a brief smile and allowed him to escort her to the door and the street, where her carriage was waiting.

  —

  PITT FOUND ALEXANDER DUNCANNON not at his flat but at an art exhibition three blocks away from the Autonomy Club. The man at the door told him who he was. Apparently he came often. A dark, slender young man. He looked about twenty-five. He was standing alone in front of a large painting of a country scene. Laborers stood with scythes in hand. The August sun shone out of a clear blue sky onto the golden cornfield. A few scarlet poppies burned bright at the margins.

  Pitt had grown up in the country. This looked idyllic, and quite unreal to him. It had a kind of beauty, but it was set back from the smell of the earth, the relentless heat of harvesttime, the ache of backs too long bent.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  The softness of Alexander’s youth was in his cheeks when he turned, but there were hard shadows around his eyes. He was clearly familiar with pain. He smiled, suddenly and charmingly. It lit his face. “No,” he said with candor. “Do you? Or have you not looked at it long enough?”

  Pitt smiled back. “How long do I need to look at it in order to like it?” he asked.

  Alexander was amused. “I don’t know, but longer than I have. What do you not like about it? It’s pretty enough…isn’t it?”

  Pitt decided in that moment to engage him in an honest conversation. “Is that what you think it should be, pretty?” he asked.

  “You don’t like pretty pictures?” He took him up on the challenge instantly and—from the grace of his posture and the sudden life in his eyes—with pleasure.

  Pitt gave it consideration. “No, I think I don’t. At least not if it is at the expense of the real. Artifice has its own kind of ugliness.”

  Now Alexander was eager, his eyes alight.

  “Do you know the place?”

  “Not recognizably.”

  Alexander laughed. “Touché,” he said cheerfully. “But are you familiar with what it is meant to be? What it was, before it was sentimentalized?”

  “Many like it, yes,” Pitt admitted, for a moment caught back in a memory so sharp it was almost physical.

  “Funny. I don’t.” Alexander shrugged. “And yet I know it’s wrong. Perhaps anyone can develop a distaste for the artificial, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I agree.” Long ago, before graduating to murder cases, Pitt had dealt with theft, especially of fine art. He had learned a lot more about it than he had expected to, and found it gave him great pleasure. He need not tell this young man who he was, not just yet. Special Branch was not police. No such disclosure was required. “It is an emotional lie,” he added.

  Now he had Alexander’s complete attention. “How perceptive of you, Mr….?”

  “Pitt.” There was no escaping giving his name without just the kind of dishonesty he had spoken of. “Thomas Pitt.”

  “Alexander Duncannon.” He held out his hand.

  Pitt shook it. “There has to be something better here, surely?” he asked. “What do you like?”

  “Ah! Let me show you something lovely,” Alexander responded. “It’s very small, but quite beautiful.” He turned away and began walking rather unevenly toward the next room.

  Pitt followed, interested to see what the young man would like.

  Alexander stopped in front of a small pencil drawing of a clump of grass depicted in intense detail. Every blade was perfectly drawn. In the heart of it was a nest of field mice. He stared at Pitt, waiting for his verdict.

  Pitt looked at the picture for several moments. He was uncomfortable. Alexander had shown him something that was truly beautiful. His appreciation of it revealed some part of himself. He was not going to break the silence. He would wait until Pitt delivered an equally honest answer.

  “That’s real,” Pitt said sincerely. “I almost expect them to move. I can smell the dry earth and hear the wind whisper in the grass.”

  Alexander did not hide his pleasure. For a moment in time they stood side by side and looked at the drawing. Then Pitt dragged his attention from the tiny lives caught both by a man’s pencil and by his heart, and thought again of bombs, burning wreckage, and dead police.

  “Wonderful,” he said quietly, “how a man can catch something so small, and make it eternal. Thank you for showing me.”

  “Worth it, isn’t it?” Alexander replied, his thin face alight. “The whole trip, just to have seen that. Life’s full of small things that matter passionately. Absurd—a man that doesn’t, and mice that do.”

  “You say that as if you had someone particular in mind?” Pitt prompted, wondering if he was speaking of Lezant.

  Suddenly the pain was back in Alexander’s face, and with it a startling bitterness. “Too many,” he replied. “People dead, who shouldn’t be. People alive who do only harm.”

  Pitt felt faintly deceitful in broaching the subject, but perhaps this young man had nothing to do with the Lancaster Gate bombing either. He would be pleased if that proved to be so.

  “Indeed,” he said quietly, looking at the next painting, a rather flat still life with flowers. “Anarchists, for example. Destroy everything and create nothing.”

  Alexander did not reply for several moments.

  Pitt was about to speak again.

  “Sometimes it’s only the destroyers who get noticed,” Alexander answered then. “Everybody remembers the man or men who assassinate a president that oppresses his people and puts to death hundreds of the poor who dare to protest. Who’s going to remember the man who drew the mice? Are you?”

  Pitt felt a moment’s embarrassment. He had been too absorbed in the drawing to look for the artist’s name.

  “No,” he admitted. “Who was he?”

  Alexander smiled, a wide, flashing radiance that was instantly gone as the darkness swept back in again. “Actually it was a woman. Mary Ann Church.”

  “And the anarchists?” Pitt said.

  Now Alexander’s face was shadowed and his body tense, visibly so, even under his beautifully cut jacket. “I wouldn’t tell you, even if I knew.”

  Pitt did not hide his surprise.

  Alexander shrugged. “Well, perhaps if I knew, and they got the wrong people, and were going to hang them, I would,” he amended. “Justice is a very big thing, kind of ugly and beautiful at the same time. Like that tiger over there!” He pointed vaguely.

  Pitt searched the paintings on the far wall.

  “I can’t see a tiger.”

  “That’s rather my point,” Alexander replied. “There are some more nice things in here, if you look. I must go.” He turned and walked away, and as Pitt watched him he was aware of a considerable limp, as if the young man’s back gave him constant pain.

  Pitt looked at the mice, tiny, pulsing with life, and now immortal, at least in the mind.

  —

  TELLMAN CAME TO PITT’S office late, just as Pitt was thinking of going home. Tellman looked tired and his lean face was pinched with unhappiness. He stood stiffly in front of Pitt’s desk. He would not sit down until he had been given permission. It was as if he were making a statement that he did not belong here. He had an overcoat on, but no gloves, and Pitt noticed that his hands were red from the cold air outside.

  “Tea?” Pitt offered. These days he had someone who would make it for him and bring it.

  “I’ve little to report,” Tellman replied. “Not be here long enough to take tea. But thank you…sir.”

  “Yes, you will. Please sit,” Pitt told him, pulling the bell cord for someone to come. As soon as they did, he asked for tea, and biscuits as well.

  Reluctantly Tellman took off his coat and hung it on the coat stand by the door, then sat down.

  “Haven’t got anything very helpful yet, sir,” he repeated. “Been to all our usual informers, and nobody seems to have anything. Sorry, but it looks as if you’ve got a new and very bad sort of anarchist in the city. Might have got the dynamite from one of the quarries inland a bit. Bessemer and Sons is missing a noticeable amount. A dozen sticks or more. Reported it unwillingly. Didn’t want to look as incompetent as it seems they are. Somebody’s head will roll for that. Probably the foreman’s.”

  “Any idea who took it?” Pitt asked. It could be a lead, and so far the only certain direction in which to look.

  “Working on it,” Tellman replied.

  The tea with biscuits came, and Pitt thanked the man as he left.

  Tellman glanced at the teapot reluctantly, but could not resist the fragrant steam and the suggestion of warmth. He took a biscuit and bit into it, clearly suddenly hungry.

  “You find anything?” he asked with his mouth full.

  “I’m not sure,” Pitt replied. He looked at Tellman’s tired, unhappy face, and knew that he was still deeply shocked by the violence of the bombing. Of course policemen were killed in the line of duty every now and then, and there were traffic accidents, even train wrecks where the casualties were appalling. Buildings burned, bridges collapsed, sometimes floods caused terrible damage. But this was deliberate, created by human imagination and intent, and directed specifically at police, men that Tellman knew.

  “Not sure?” Tellman said with surprise. He put his mug down, no longer warming his hands on it. “What do you mean?”

  “Isadora Cornwallis came to see me, privately, so this is confidential,” Pitt told him. “If she chooses to tell her husband that’s up to her. I don’t want it getting back to him through police gossip. I’m telling you it was she simply so that you know what I learned was not lightly given, or something I can afford to ignore.” He watched Tellman’s expression to be certain he understood.

  “What does she know about anarchy?” Tellman pursed his lips, doubt in his face.

  “Some anarchists come from privileged backgrounds,” Pitt told him. “They aren’t all peasants or laborers with a pittance to live on.”

  Tellman stared at him, waiting.

  “She is acquainted with a young man of excellent family who has a profound grudge against the police, many of whom he believes are corrupt,” he continued. “He also has possible connections with anarchists. Only philosophically, so far as we know, but he might know where to go to purchase dynamite, possibly stolen from a quarry such as Bessemer and Sons, who you say are presently missing about a dozen sticks.”

  Tellman put his hands back around the mug. “What’s his complaint about the police? Thinks he’s above having to accept order and behave himself?”

  “It’s a great deal more serious than that. At least, he believes it is.”

  “Like what?” Tellman said sharply.

  “Like police accidentally shooting someone and then blaming an innocent man, Dylan Lezant, and seeing him hang for it.”

  “Oh, yes?” Tellman sneered. “And who says Lezant was innocent? His good friend the anarchist sympathizer?”

  Pitt put down his own tea. “They were good friends, it’s true. And what actually happened doesn’t matter, Tellman. If this young man thinks that’s what happened, then that’s what he’s going to act on.”

  “That’s what he says,” Tellman argued. “Have you any reason to believe this man of yours isn’t just an ordinary bomber who thinks he can terrify us into doing whatever political madness he wants?” There was an edge of challenge in his voice, as if Pitt had deliberately suggested there were some justification for the murder of the policemen.

  Pitt measured his reply carefully, but he felt his own anger rise, even though he understood Tellman’s grief. He had seen those broken bodies himself.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know if he had anything to do with it. I’m telling you that we can’t rule him out as a possibility.”