“Have you seen Paterson in the last few days?” he said again.
“Yeah. ’e came ’ere day afore yesterday,” she replied. “Asked me all the same questions again, ’e did. An’ I answered ’em the same. Then the clock struck.” She jerked her head backwards towards the building behind her. “An’ ’e asked me about that.”
“What about it? Wasn’t that the clock that told you he was here at a quarter to one?”
“That’s what Mr. Paterson said to me. ’e were positive it were. Couldn’t shake ’im. In the end I could see as it must ’ave bin. But first off I said as it were quarter past midnight, as that’s wot I thought it were! Yer see …” She squinted at him, making sure he was giving her his full attention. “Yer see, it’s a funny kind o’ clock, that. It don’t ring once fer the quarter past, twice fer the ’alf, an’ then three times for the quarter to, like most, but only once at the quarter to as well. ’e said it must ’a bin quarter past, cos of ’ow much I’d sold. But I first thought it were quarter to one, cos w’en that clock’s bin cleaned, like it ’as now, it rings funny. Makes a kind o’ whirring sound on the quarter to. Didn’t do it that night.” She opened her eyes very wide and suddenly frightened. “That means it were a quarter past midnight, don’t it?”
“Yes …” Pitt said very slowly, a strange almost choking feeling welling up inside him, excitement, horror and amazement at once. “Yes, it does mean that, if you are sure. Quite sure? Did you see him take the hansom?”
“Yeah—from that corner there.” She pointed.
“You sure?”
“ ’Course I’m sure! I told Mr. Paterson that an’ ’e looked sick. I thought ’e were goin’ ter pass right out in front o’ me. Poor bastard looked fit to drop dead ’isself.”
“Yes.” Pitt took out the rest of the change from his pocket and offered it to her, about two shillings and nine-pence halfpenny.
She stared at it incredulously, then put out her hand and grabbed it, pushing it deep into her pocket, holding her hand there.
“Yes, he would,” Pitt said quietly. “If Aaron Godman bought flowers from you at quarter past midnight, and took a hansom cab straight home to Pimlico, then he could not have been the one who murdered Kingsley Blaine in Farriers’ Lane at half past.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head fractionally. “Come ter that, I don’t suppose ’e could, poor little swine! Still, ’e’s ’anged now—can’t bring ’im back. God rest ’im.”
PITT ARRIVED HOME a little before eleven o’clock, wet through from the steady rain, his face white, hair plastered over his brow. He took off his outer clothes in the hall and hung them on the hook, but the weight of the water in them pulled them off, and they lay in a sodden heap on the linoleum. He ignored them and went down the corridor towards the kitchen and the warmth of the stove where he could take off his soaking boots and thaw out his feet.
Charlotte met him at the kitchen door, her face startled and her hair loose around her shoulders. She had obviously been asleep in the rocking chair waiting for him.
“Thomas? Oh, you’re wet through! What on earth have you been doing? Come in! Come—” Then she saw his face, the expression in his eyes. “What is it? What’s happened? Is—is somebody else dead?”
“In a way.” He slumped down in the chair beside the stove and began to unlace his boots.
She knelt in front of him and started on the other one.
“What do you mean, ‘in a way’?”
“Aaron Godman. He didn’t kill Blaine,” he replied.
She stopped, her fingers curled around the wet laces, staring up at him.
“Who did?”
“I don’t know, but it wasn’t him. The flower seller was wrong about the time, and Paterson discovered it the day he died. Maybe he knew who it was, and that was why he was killed.”
“How can she have been wrong about the time? Didn’t they question her properly?”
He told her about the clock, and the malfunction when it was cleaned. She finished undoing his boots, took them off and put them close to the stove to dry out, then his socks, and rubbed his frozen feet with a warm towel. He wriggled his toes in exquisite relief, explaining how Paterson had misunderstood, how he had pressed until his conviction that Godman was guilty had overridden the woman and she had given in.
“Poor Paterson,” she said quietly. “He must have felt dreadful. I suppose it was his guilt over that which made him reckless for his own safety. He must have wanted desperately to put things right.” She went to the kettle which was singing quietly on the back of the stove, and pulled it forward onto the hot plate to bring it right to the boil, reaching with the other hand for the teapot and the caddy.
“Why did he write to Judge Livesey and not to you, or to his own inspector?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He continued rubbing his cold feet, rolling up his trousers to keep the wet fabric from his legs. “I suppose he thought Livesey had the power to reopen the case. I certainly hadn’t, without some absolutely conclusive evidence, and even then I could only take it to the courts. Livesey could do it much more directly. And he was involved with the original appeal; in fact he was in charge of it. It was he who presented the judgment.”
Charlotte poured the scalding water onto the tea and closed the lid of the pot. “I suppose he couldn’t be … at fault, could he?”
“He had nothing to do with the original case,” he replied. “He certainly couldn’t have killed Blaine—and he couldn’t have killed Paterson. He was at a dinner all evening until well into the small hours of the morning. By which time Paterson was dead. We can prove all that by the medical evidence, and also by the landlady’s testimony of the time the outer doors were locked.”
She brought the teapot to the kitchen table, and cups, milk from the pantry, and a large slice of brown bread, butter and pickle. She poured the tea, gave him his, and sat down opposite him as he began to eat hungrily.
“I suppose it must have been whoever killed Blaine,” she said thoughtfully. “Paterson must have told them he knew, which means that he had worked it all out. I wonder how.” She frowned. “I don’t see how knowing it couldn’t have been Godman tells him who it was.”
“Nor do I,” Pitt said with his mouth full. “Believe me, I’ve racked my mind over and over to think of what he could have seen or deduced which told him the answer—and I cannot think of it.” He sighed. “I wish to heaven he’d told someone! It was only in retracing his steps I even discovered that he’d found out Godman wasn’t guilty.”
She held her mug of tea in both hands.
“Who have you told?” she asked very quietly.
“Drummond—only Drummond,” he replied, watching her face. “It isn’t something anyone wants to know. It means they were all wrong—the police, the lawyers, the original trial and jury, the appeal—everyone. Even the hangman executed an innocent man. I imagine he’ll see that in his nightmares for a while.” He shivered and hunched his shoulders as though it were cold in the kitchen, in spite of the stove. “And the newspapers, the public—everyone, except Joshua Fielding and Tamar Macaulay.”
“What did Mr. Drummond say?”
“Not much. He knows as well as I do what the reaction is going to be.”
“What will it be? They cannot deny it—can they?”
“I don’t know.” He set his mug down wearily. “There’ll be a lot of anger, probably a lot of blame, everyone saying someone else should have known, should have been more competent, should have done something differently.” He smiled with a bitter humor. “I think Adolphus Pryce is about the only one who will come out of it without blame of some sort. He was supposed to prosecute, and he did. But Moorgate, Godman’s solicitor, is going to feel guilty for not having believed his client, whatever he does about it now; and Barton James for not having pressed the flower seller harder—but then he believed Godman was guilty, so he wouldn’t have seen any point. But he still had an innocent client, and let him be hanged.”