Bethlehem Road by Anne Perry

bridge as you approached it?”
    “Er ...” He blinked. “I don’t rightly recall. I’m fearfully sorry. I was definitely a bit—high—until I saw Etheridge and realized what’d happened.”
    “If you could search your memory, sir?” Pitt pressed, looking at the fair, earnest, rather placid face.
    Rawlins was very pale. He was neither so drunk nor so shaken that he did not realize the implication of Pitt’s insistence.
    “I think there was someone on the opposite of the bridge. I mean across the road, coming towards me; a big stout person. I have the impression of a longish coat, dark—that’s really what I remember, a sort of darkness moving. That’s about it. I’m sorry.”
    Pitt hesitated a moment longer, half hoping Rawlins would think of something more. Then he accepted that the young man’s mind had been in such a muddled state that that was really all there was.
    “And the time, sir?” he asked.
    “What?”
    “The time? Big Ben is just behind you, sir.”
    “Oh. Yes. Well, I definitely heard it strike eleven, so about five past. Not later.”
    “And you are sure you saw no one else? No cabs passing, for instance?”
    There was a flicker of light in his eyes. “Oh yes—yes I did see a cab. Came off the bridge and went along the Victoria Embankment. Remember now that you mention it. Sorry Constable.”
    Pitt did not bother to correct Rawlins as to his rank. The man had intended no insult; he was shocked past everyday niceties.
    “Thank you. If you think of anything else, I’m at the Bow Street Station. Now you had better go home and have a hot cup of tea and go to bed.”
    “Yes—yes I’ll do that. Good night, er—good night!” He went off rapidly and rather unsteadily, lurching from one pool of light to the next on up Westminster Bridge Road and disappearing behind the buildings.
    Pitt crossed the street back to Drummond. Drummond met his eyes, searching for some sign of hope and finding little.
    “There’s nothing else,” he said bleakly. “Looks political after all. We’ll get the men out tomorrow morning after conspiracies, but we’re already doing all we can. There isn’t a single piece of evidence of any sort to connect anyone with this. Dear heaven, Pitt, I hope it isn’t some lunatic.”
    “So do I,” Pitt said grimly. “We’ll be reduced to doubling police on duty and hoping to catch him in the act.” He said it in desperation, but he knew there was little else they could do if indeed that were the case. “There are still other possibilities.”
    “Someone mistook the first victim?” Drummond said thoughtfully. “They intended Etheridge, but got Hamilton by mistake? It’s dark enough in the stretches between the lamps, and if he’d had his back to the light and his face in shadow when he was attacked, their features are enough alike, and with the same light hair—a frightened or enraged person—” He did not finish; the vision was clear enough.
    “Or the second crime is an imitation of the first.” Pitt doubted it even as he spoke. “Sometimes it happens, especially when a crime gains a lot of publicity, as Hamilton’s murder did. Or it could be that only one of the murders matters, and we are intended to believe it is anarchists or a madman, when one cold-blooded crime was committed to mask another.”
    “Who was the intended victim, Hamilton or Etheridge?” Drummond looked tired. He had slept little in the last week and now this cold horror with all its implications stretched darkly in front of him.
    “I’d better go and tell the widow.” Pitt was shivering. The night air seemed to eat right through his clothes into his bones. “Have you the address?”
    “Three Paris Road, off the Lambeth Palace Road.”
    “I’ll walk.”
    “There’s a hansom,” said Drummond.
    “No, I’d rather walk.” He needed time to think, to prepare himself. He set off briskly, swinging his arms to get warm and trying to form in his mind how he would tell this new