Belgrave Square by Anne Perry

Author:Anne Perry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery.Historical
ISBN: 9780307767738
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1992-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

7

MICAH DRUMMOND found himself thinking of the Byam case more and more often, at times even when he would normally have left police matters far behind him and begun to enjoy the very considerable pleasures of life. He smiled to himself wryly now. In his mind it was the Byam case, but to Pitt it would almost certainly be the Weems case. After all it was Weems who was dead. Byam was only a possible suspect, Drummond profoundly hoped an “impossible” one. That thought had troubled him like an unacknowledged darkness at the edge of his mind, something he refused to look at but could forget only for short, deliberately engineered moments, always ending when its shadow crossed his thoughts again.

Pitt had told him about the blunderbuss. That meant that in theory at least the means were there for anyone, even the poorest debtor from Clerkenwell. But did Weems leave gold coins lying around in such circumstances? Possibly. Maybe that kind of cruelty would appeal to him—have a desperate person, unable to make his repayments, into the office and face him across a pile of gold coins, then demand of him his last pence. Not only colorfully sadistic, but also surely dangerous? In his years of usury had not Weems learned to be a good enough judge of character to avoid such a thing?

Come to think, why had he received a debtor alone in his office after dark? That could hardly be his practice. But had Pitt asked? He would have been concentrating on finding who killed him, not on exonerating Byam.

Drummond stopped with a start of guilt. That was what he was doing: trying to exonerate Byam. He had given little thought to finding Weems’s murderer if it was someone else—once Byam was cleared. He felt the heat creep up his face at the consciousness of how his judgment had lapsed, his priorities become unbalanced.

It was a summer evening, still broad daylight, and he was at home. It was not the large house in Kensington he had kept when his wife was alive and his daughters were growing up; he had sold that when the loneliness in it became overbearing and the upkeep quite unnecessary. Now he had a spacious flat off Piccadilly. He no longer had any need to keep a carriage. He could always obtain a hansom if he needed one, and one manservant and a woman to do the domestic chores and cook were all that was necessary to see to his comfort. If they employed anyone else from time to time he was only peripherally aware of it. The expense was negligible, and he trusted their judgment.

This room still contained many of his old possessions: the embroidered fire screen with peacocks on it that his mother had given him the first year after he was married; the blue Meissen plates his wife had loved; the hideous brown elephant she had inherited, and they had both laughed over. And he had kept the Chippendale chairs, even though there were too many of them for this room.

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