Long Spoon Lane Read Online Free PDF Page B

happened.”
     
     
    Pitt returned to Long Spoon Lane with a sense of foreboding. It was still guarded by police and he was stopped by a constable, who took a moment to recognize him before snapping to attention.
    Pitt did not blame him. He did not look like an officer at all, let alone a senior one. He was tall, and walked with the loose-limbed practical grace of a countryman who was accustomed to covering great distances over heath and woodland. His father had been a gamekeeper on a large estate, and as a boy Pitt had gone through the woods or over the heath with him at times. Even now, decades later, Pitt still tended to stuff his pockets full of objects that might one day be of use: handkerchiefs, odd bits of string, coins, sealing wax, a box of matches, pencil stubs, paper, a couple of bull’s-eye sweets in wrappers, two paper clips, a pipe cleaner, half a dozen keys, and odd buttons.
    “How’s the man who was injured?” he asked.
    “Oh, he’ll be all right, sir,” the constable assured him. “Bled a bit, but it’s nothing that won’t heal. He was lucky. You’ll be wanting to see the sergeant.”
    “Yes. And I need to go back into the building and see the room where the young man was killed. Who was at the back stairs first?”
    “I dunno, sir, but I’ll find out. Can you make your own way inside, or would you like someone to go with you?”
    “I’ll make my own way.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Pitt walked across the cobbled lane, in through the broken door, and up the stairs. It was only a matter of hours since he had come in here, his heart pounding. The shots were still ringing in his ears. Now it seemed oddly desolate, as if no one alive had been here for weeks. It was not that it had a sense of settled dust, or even the staleness of closed air, but a feeling as if whoever had left it would never return. There were no personal belongings anywhere, nothing valued or intimate: only a broken bottle, the lower half of a cocoa tin, a couple of rags too discolored to be identifiable.
    At the top, in the main room, light streamed in through the broken windows. The dust and grime on the shards still left in the frames made them look almost like frosted or painted glass. The pool of blood where Magnus Landsborough had lain was congealed now and smeared because the body had been moved. Other than that it was exactly as when Pitt had first arrived. The police and the surgeon had been very diligent.
    Pitt leaned over and looked at it long and carefully, studying the outline of the body where it was indicated by footprints, dried blood, and the scuffing of men lifting something heavy and awkward. Magnus had lain full length on the floor. Pitt had a measuring tape among the numerous items in his coat pocket. He took it out and stretched it from the top of where the head had been down to the farthest mark of the feet. Allowing for a little crumpling, the man must have been a trifle over six feet tall. It was not possible to be more accurate.
    What was absolutely certain was that he had fallen forward when the shot had struck the back of his head. There was no way at all in which it could have come from the street below and caused him to fall as he had. Added to that, the shot had struck him in the back of the skull, and emerged through the general area of his left cheekbone. The street was narrow and two stories down. Had it come from below it would have been at a sharp upward angle, in at the back of the neck, and out through the brow. And he would have to have been standing facing the room, looking away from the gunfire.
    Was it possible Welling was speaking the truth, and the first constable up the back stairs had shot him? But why? Rage? Fear that Landsborough had a gun and posed some immediate danger to him? There had been no gun beside the body.
    He heard footsteps on the stairs and a moment later a uniformed sergeant stood in the doorway. He was fresh-faced, probably in his late twenties, and at the moment very