Free Highgate Rise by Anne Perry Page B

the wife, which happened, or for the murder of Shaw, which may have been attempted. It could be a very long, sad job. Heaven knows what other sins and tragedies you’ll find—or what they will do to hide them. That’s what I hate about investigation—all the other lives we overturn on the way.” He poked his hands deeper into his pockets. “Where are you going to begin?”
    “At the Highgate police station,” Pitt replied, standing up also. “He was the local police surgeon—”
    “You omitted to mention that.”
    Pitt smiled broadly. “Makes the knowledge without complicity look a trifle more likely, doesn’t it?”
    “Granted,” Drummond said graciously. “Don’t get carried away with it. What then?”
    “Go to the local hospital and see what they think of him there, and his colleagues.”
    “You won’t get much.” Drummond shrugged. “They usually speak well of each other regardless. Imply that any one of them could have made an error, and they all close ranks like soldiers facing the enemy.”
    “There’ll be something to read between the lines.” Pitt knew what Drummond meant, but there was always the turn of a phrase, the overcompensation, the excessive fairness that betrayed layers of meaning and emotion beneath, conflictsof judgment or old desires. “Then I’ll see his servants. They may have direct evidence, although that would be a lot to hope for. But they may also have seen or heard something that will lead to a lie, an inconsistency, an act concealed, someone where they should not have been.” As he said it he thought of all the past frailties he had unearthed, foolishness and petty spites that had little or nothing to do with the crime, yet had broken old relationships, forged new ones, hurt and contused and changed. There were occasions when he hated the sheer intrusion of investigation. But the alternative was worse.
    “Keep me advised, Pitt.” Drummond was watching him, perhaps guessing his thoughts. “I want to know.”
    “Yes sir, I will.”
    Drummond smiled at the unusual formality, then nodded a dismissal, and Pitt left, going downstairs and out of the front doors to the pavement of Bow Street, where he caught a hansom north to Highgate. It was an extravagance, but the force would pay. He sat back inside the cab and stretched out his legs as far as possible. It was an agreeable feeling bowling along, not thinking of the cost.
    The cab took him through the tangle of streets up from the river, across High Holborn to the Grey’s Inn Road, north through Bloomsbury and Kentish Town into Highgate.
    At the police station he found Murdo waiting for him impatiently, having already sifted through all the police reports of the last two years and separating all those in which Shaw had played a significant part. Now he stood in the middle of the room, uncarpeted, furnished with a wooden table and three hard-backed chairs. His fair hair was ruffled and his tunic undone at the neck. He was keen to acquit himself well, and in truth the case touched him deeply, but at the back of his mind was the knowledge that when it was all over Pitt would return to Bow Street. He would be left here in Highgate to resume working with his local colleagues, who were at present still acutely conscious of an outsider, and stung by resentment that it had been considered necessary.
    “There they are, sir,” he said as soon as Pitt was in thedoor. “All the cases he had the slightest to do with that could amount to anything, even those of disturbing the Queen’s peace.” He pointed his finger to one of the piles. “That’s those. A few bloody noses, a broken rib and one broken foot where a carriage wheel went over it, and there was a fight afterwards between the man with the foot and the coachman. Can’t see anybody but a madman murdering him over that.”
    “Neither can I,” Pitt agreed. “And I don’t think we’re dealing with a madman. Fire was too well set, four lots of curtains, and all away