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.“Presumably she realized he had killed the first woman, and he could not afford to leave her alive because sooner or later she would betray him over it?”Pitt spoke slowly.“That’s what it looks like.”“Why aren’t you satisfied?” Narraway’s voice rose in spite of his effort to keep it level and under control.He was accustomed to anarchy, treason, and very considerable violence, but he had not met sexual aberration before.There was something uniquely repulsive about the intimacy of it, like the foul smell of some disease.“There was no blood on him,” Pitt spoke carefully, as if picking his way through chaotic thoughts.“None at all, except the little from the scratches on his face.Nothing of the dark gore that came from her.”Narraway’s stomach turned and he felt the chill of sweat on his skin.“He’d had all night to wash,” he pointed out.Pitt shook his head.“There was shaving water in the jug and basin, but it was all clean.Nothing in it but soap.And what about his clothes?”“He stripped to do it?” Narraway suggested.“There was no blood on anyone the first time either.It seems to be his pattern.”Pitt frowned.“The first time he might have planned it, but the second was because she challenged him.He would hardly have told her to wait there while he stripped off, then came back and killed her!”“Then what did he do?” Narraway demanded, frustration burning up inside him.Just as Pitt was still unfamiliar with the complexities of anarchy, so was he with the nature of murder.“I don’t know,” Pitt replied.“He was distressed over her death, but he looked totally sane to me.He denied it.”Narraway was startled.“Did you expect him to confess?”Pitt pushed his hair out of his eyes with a clumsy hand.“It’s not just what he said, it’s the way in which he spoke.I don’t know what I think.” His brow furrowed.“There’s something wrong with it, something about all of it that I haven’t understood.I’ve racked my mind, but all I see is the break in reasoning, the place where something should be to tie it together.I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.”“Then for God’s sake, think!” Narraway said desperately.“Before it’s too late.We’ve got to make an arrest.This victim wasn’t a whore, she was Dunkeld’s daughter.We can’t afford to be wrong.If we are, and we have to admit it, it will be the end of Special Branch.We won’t ever have a case higher in the public eye than this, when it comes out.And it will.”“I won’t condemn the wrong man to a life in the hell of a madhouse,” Pitt told him, stubbornness setting hard in his face.“Have you ever been in one of those places? I have.He’ll be gibbering mad in a year or two, even if he isn’t to begin with.It would be cleaner and more humane to hang him in the first place.I can still hear the screaming of Bedlam in my nightmares sometimes.”Narraway leaned forward.“Pitt, we can’t afford any more dead women, whether we make or break the Cape-to-Cairo railway.One of those three men has murdered two women in four days.The Queen will be back here this week.”Pitt said nothing.Narraway waited again, his mind going back to what Forbes had said about Julius Sorokine.He seemed a civilized and intelligent man, even if a little indolent—or taking some of his privileges for granted.What could possibly have happened to turn him into a creature who had cut the throats and gouged open the bellies of two women? “Something started it,” he said aloud.“Find it.”Pitt looked up.“Two in four days? It started long before now.You aren’t sane one day and then a raving, blood-soaked murderer the next, unless something has happened to shatter your mind in between, and nothing did.They sat around talking about the African railway and planning the future full of wealth and achievement for all of them.They flirted, specifically Mrs.Sorokine with Mr.Marquand.And Mrs.Dunkeld is in love with Mr.Sorokine.”“And he with her?” Narraway asked quickly.Was that a thread to the truth?Pitt shrugged very slightly.“I don’t know.But none of it began while they were here, and I doubt anyone learned of it for the first time either.Even if they did, it doesn’t explain killing the prostitute.It’s not a crime of jealousy or even betrayal—it’s hatred born out of some kind of madness.”“Given that this particular insanity lies dormant most of the time, what wakens it out of control?” Narraway asked, the urgency building up inside him again.“You’ve dealt with madness before, people who kill and go on killing until they are caught.I know evil, but not unreason.Help me, Pitt! If I search through Sorokine’s history, what am I looking for?”Pitt sighed; there was weariness and desperation in it.“Obviously another death like these: a woman with her throat and belly slashed.Before that, for violent quarrels, irrational hatred of women, someone who belittled him, jilted him, did something that he might have seen as betrayal.An explosive temper.It will have to have been covered up very carefully.He’s a diplomat.Look for someone else being blamed, or something unsolved, possibly described as an accident.”Narraway considered for several minutes.“I spoke to Watson Forbes,” he said finally.“He’s against the Cape-to-Cairo railway.He believes it will exploit Africa to its disadvantage, and ultimately to the disadvantage of the whole British Empire, possibly in the next century.”“Interesting,” Pitt admitted.“But I can’t see any connection with the murders.Can you?”“No.They don’t seem to have anything to do with the railway, just a ghastly coincidence that they exploded here in the Palace just as the railway is being discussed.But I don’t like coincidences.I’ve seen very few real ones.”“There are other things I need to make sense of,” Pitt went on.“If Mrs.Sorokine deduced from all these odd pieces of information exactly how her husband killed Sadie, and possibly why, then I want to know how she did it.They seem unrelated and nonsensical to me.”“What pieces?” Narraway asked.“Port bottles with blood in them, a broken dish, which nobody admits ever existed, buckets of water being carried hurriedly and discreetly up-and downstairs.The Queen’s own sheets slept on, and soaked in blood [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]