“Not a weakness I fail to understand,” Drummond said quietly, standing looking down at Pitt. “I think a few of us suffer from that. It frightens me to think that such crimes can happen at all. We need to believe we can find the killers and prove their guilt. We need to believe in our own superiority, because the alternative is too dreadful.” He pushed his hands deep into his pockets. “Poor Paterson.”
Pitt said nothing. His mind was darkened by pity for him, imagining what he must have thought that last day of his life as he stood in his bedroom, bitterly alone, facing the ultimate failure. It was a knowledge he could never have denied, but he took a perverse satisfaction in turning the knife in himself, simply because it was truth, it was not escape, and he was sickened by escape. “He tore off his own stripes,” he said aloud. “It was a mark of dishonor, his own way of confessing.”
Drummond was silent for a long time.
“I still don’t see how you can be right,” he said at last, breaking into Pitt’s thoughts. “You said there was no way Paterson could have done it himself. There was nothing near for him to have climbed on. What are you saying happened?”
“That it was tidied up in order to look like murder,” Pitt replied quietly.
“For heaven’s sake, why? And by whom?”
“By Livesey, of course, when he found him, before he called us.”
“Livesey!” Drummond’s voice was high with disbelief. “Why? Why should he care if poor Paterson was condemned as a suicide? He may have pitied the man, but he is an appeal court judge. He wouldn’t tamper with evidence.”
Pitt rose to his feet. “Nothing to do with pity. That was before we knew Godman was innocent. Tell me when you have that exhumation order.”
“I don’t even know if I can get it. Pitt! Where are you going?”
“Home,” Pitt said from the doorway. “There’s nothing more I can do now. I’d like to go home to something clean and innocent before I dig up Stafford. I shall go and tell my children some fairy story before they go to bed, something about good and evil, where it all ends happily.”
The exhumation order was granted late in the evening, but Micah Drummond kept it till the early morning, and collected Pitt at seven o’clock in the drizzling darkness before dawn. The streets were wet, lamplight gleaming on the pavements and the splash and hiss of wheels in the water mingled with the clatter of hooves and slam of doors.
There was nothing to say. They sat together huddled up in greatcoats in the back of the cab and journeyed through the streets to the graveyard where they got out still in silence. Side by side they walked through the squelching mud over to the little group of men in rough clothes leaning on their spades. There was already a deep hole in the cold earth, bull’s-eye lanterns glowing like angry flares, showing the dark soil where it was turned. Pitt could smell the wet earth and feel the rain running down the back of his neck. Two lengths of rope were in place.
“ ’Allo, Guv,” one of the men said to Drummond. “You want that there coffin lifted now?”
“Yes, please,” Drummond replied.
Pitt stood beside him, chilled through, the wind in his face. The lamp was held high, light gleaming on the wet handles of the spades.
Slowly the men hauled on the ropes and the coffin rose into sight, handles shining where they had been wiped by a rough hand. One man leaned forward and brushed the loose earth off the top, smearing it in the rain. With difficulty they pulled it sideways out of the hole and set it on the ground. One of the men slipped in the mud and sent a shower of pebbles rattling down into the hole. Someone swore and crossed himself.
“Open it,” Drummond ordered.
The man took a screwdriver out of his coat pocket and obeyed. One of the others held the lantern higher. It took him several moments before finally he had all the screws removed and he could lift the lid. He looked away as he did it, his face pale. One of the others shuddered and said a few words of prayer.
“Thank you.” Pitt stepped forward. He had requested this. He must be the one to look.
The body was not as decayed as he had expected, probably because it was winter and the ground was cold. Still he would not look at the gray face more than once. With considerable difficulty he eased the limp body up and was immensely relieved when one of the men came forward and helped him. Very carefully he undid the jacket and slipped it off first one arm, then the other, then pulled it from underneath, laying the body back carefully. He looked at the jacket. As the valet had said, it was good cloth. Very gently he put his fingers into the pockets one by one. He was acutely conscious of the nasty smell and a sweetness that was unpleasant. He was glad of the freezing rain on his face. In the first pocket there was nothing except a clean handkerchief. What an odd thing to be put there. It was a thought which he found curiously pitiful, as if someone had done it for him as if he could need it.
Pitt took a deep breath and tried the next pocket. His fingers met tobacco fragments and a slight stickiness. He took his hand out and smelled it. There was only a faint odor of tobacco. He looked up at Drummond.
“Anything?” Drummond asked.
“I think so. If this is opium then we have the answer. I’ll take it to the medical examiner.” He turned to the diggers. “Thank you. You can close it again and put it back.”
“That all, Guv? Yer jus’ want ’is coat?”
“Yes, thank you, just his coat.”
“Jeez!”
Drummond and Pitt turned away and Pitt folded the coat to carry it carefully. The dawn was graying very slightly in the east, dull and heavy in the overcast. They walked slowly, picking their way back down the sodden path to the waiting cab, where the horse was stamping in the roadway and snorting white breath as the smell of the grave frightened it.
“I’m coming with you,” Drummond said as soon as they were inside. “I want to know what the medical examiner says.”
Pitt smiled grimly.
“Opium,” the medical examiner stated, looking up at Pitt through his eyebrows. “Paste of opium.”
“Strong enough to kill a man if he put a cigar end with that on it into his mouth?” Pitt asked.
“That concentration, yes. Not immediately, but after thirty minutes or so, could be.”
“Thank you.”
“But there was opium in the whiskey,” the medical examiner said hastily.
“I know,” Pitt agreed. “But someone else was seen to drink from the flask in the theater, and came to no harm.”
“Impossible. The concentration in that flask was enough to kill anyone!”
“Pitt?” Drummond demanded. Both men were looking at him now.
“The opium that killed Stafford was on the cigar. The opium in the flask was put there after he was dead,” Pitt explained.
“After …” Drummond was very still, his face pale. “You mean, to confuse us. But that means …”
“Precisely,” Pitt replied.
“Why? For God’s sake, why?” Drummond was confused and distressed.
“One of the oldest of reasons,” Pitt answered. “To keep the public image, the honor and the status he had earned over the years. To be proved wrong now would be a blow he could not take. He is a proud man.”
“But murder,” Drummond protested.
“I daresay it began simply as coercion, a tacit conspiracy among them all.” Pitt drove his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. “They must have realized only very slowly that there was a possibility they had overlooked something, been too hasty to accept an answer because they needed one so badly. The public were clamoring. The Home Office would not wait. Everywhere they turned there was hysteria, pressure, fear. They clung together, bolstering each other up, and privately each took his own way of escaping from it, into retirement, the bottle, building allies against the day they might need them, salving conscience with good work—all except Stafford. His conscience nagged him until he found the courage to go back and look again. And it cost him his life.”