Treachery at Lancaster Gate by Anne Perry Read Free Book Online

truly beautiful. His appreciation of it revealed some part of himself. He was not going to break the silence. He would wait until Pitt delivered an equally honest answer.
    “That’s real,” Pitt said sincerely. “I almost expect them to move. I can smell the dry earth and hear the wind whisper in the grass.”
    Alexander did not hide his pleasure. For a moment in time they stood side by side and looked at the drawing. Then Pitt dragged his attention from the tiny lives caught both by a man’s pencil and by his heart, and thought again of bombs, burning wreckage, and dead police.
    “Wonderful,” he said quietly, “how a man can catch something so small, and make it eternal. Thank you for showing me.”
    “Worth it, isn’t it?” Alexander replied, his thin face alight. “The whole trip, just to have seen that. Life’s full of small things that matter passionately. Absurd—a man that doesn’t, and mice that do.”
    “You say that as if you had someone particular in mind?” Pitt prompted, wondering if he was speaking of Lezant.
    Suddenly the pain was back in Alexander’s face, and with it a startling bitterness. “Too many,” he replied. “People dead, who shouldn’t be. People alive who do only harm.”
    Pitt felt faintly deceitful in broaching the subject, but perhaps this young man had nothing to do with the Lancaster Gate bombing either. He would be pleased if that proved to be so.
    “Indeed,” he said quietly, looking at the next painting, a rather flat still life with flowers. “Anarchists, for example. Destroy everything and create nothing.”
    Alexander did not reply for several moments.
    Pitt was about to speak again.
    “Sometimes it’s only the destroyers who get noticed,” Alexander answered then. “Everybody remembers the man or men who assassinate a president that oppresses his people and puts to death hundreds of the poor who dare to protest. Who’s going to remember the man who drew the mice? Are you?”
    Pitt felt a moment’s embarrassment. He had been too absorbed in the drawing to look for the artist’s name.
    “No,” he admitted. “Who was he?”
    Alexander smiled, a wide, flashing radiance that was instantly gone as the darkness swept back in again. “Actually it was a woman. Mary Ann Church.”
    “And the anarchists?” Pitt said.
    Now Alexander’s face was shadowed and his body tense, visibly so, even under his beautifully cut jacket. “I wouldn’t tell you, even if I knew.”
    Pitt did not hide his surprise.
    Alexander shrugged. “Well, perhaps if I knew, and they got the wrong people, and were going to hang them, I would,” he amended. “Justice is a very big thing, kind of ugly and beautiful at the same time. Like that tiger over there!” He pointed vaguely.
    Pitt searched the paintings on the far wall.
    “I can’t see a tiger.”
    “That’s rather my point,” Alexander replied. “There are some more nice things in here, if you look. I must go.” He turned and walked away, and as Pitt watched him he was aware of a considerable limp, as if the young man’s back gave him constant pain.
    Pitt looked at the mice, tiny, pulsing with life, and now immortal, at least in the mind.
    —
    T ELLMAN CAME TO P ITT’S office late, just as Pitt was thinking of going home. Tellman looked tired and his lean face was pinched with unhappiness. He stood stiffly in front of Pitt’s desk. He would not sit down until he had been given permission. It was as if he were making a statement that he did not belong here. He had an overcoat on, but no gloves, and Pitt noticed that his hands were red from the cold air outside.
    “Tea?” Pitt offered. These days he had someone who would make it for him and bring it.
    “I’ve little to report,” Tellman replied. “Not be here long enough to take tea. But thank you…sir.”
    “Yes, you will. Please sit,” Pitt told him, pulling the bell cord for someone to come. As soon as they did, he asked for tea, and biscuits as