by Anne Perry
Pitt’s reply was unnecessary, both because Murdo knew perfectly well what it would be, and because the front door swung open the moment after Pitt knocked and Alfred Lutterworth himself stood in the lighted hall, hastily but fully dressed. Only his neck without a tie and his ill-matched coat and trousers betrayed that he had already been up. Perhaps he had been one of the many who had crowded around the edge of the fire, anxious, curious, concerned, some offering help—or to see the job done to its bitter conclusion.
“Lindsay’s ’ouse.” He made it a statement rather than a question. “Poor devil. ’E was a good man. What about Shaw—did they get ’im this time?”
“You believe it was Shaw they were after, sir?” Pitt stepped in and Murdo followed him nervously.
Lutterworth closed the door behind them. “Do you take me for a fool, man? Who else would they be after, first ’is own ’ouse, and now Lindsay’s? Don’t stand there. You’d best come in, although there’s nowt I can tell yer.” His northern accent was more pronounced in his emotion. “If I’d seen anyone you’d not ’ave ’ad to come seekin’ me, I’d’a gone seekin’ you.”
Pitt followed him and Murdo came a step behind. The withdrawing room was cold, the ashes of the fire already dark, but Flora was standing beside it. She was also fully dressed, in a gray winter gown, her face pale and her hair tied back with a silk kerchief. Murdo felt himself suddenly excruciatingly awkward, not knowing what to do with his feet, where to put his painful, dirty hands.
“Good evening, Inspector.” She looked at Pitt courteously, then at Murdo with something he thought was a smile. “Good evening, Constable Murdo.”
She had remembered his name. His heart lurched. It had been a smile—hadn’t it?
“Good evening, Miss Lutterworth.” His voice sounded husky and ended in a squeak.
“Can we help, Inspector?” She turned to Pitt again. “Does anyone … need shelter?” Her eyes pleaded with him to tell her the answer to the question she had not asked.
Murdo drew breath to tell her, but Pitt cut across him and he was left openmouthed.
“Your father thinks the fire was deliberately set, in order to kill Dr. Shaw.” Pitt was watching her, waiting for reaction.
Murdo was furious. He saw the last trace of color leave her face and he would have rushed forward to save her from collapsing, had he dared. In that instant he loathed Pitt for his brutality, and Lutterworth himself for not having protected her, he whose duty and privilege it was.
She bit her lip to stop it trembling and her eyes filled with tears. She turned away to hide them.
“No need to cry for ’im, girl,” Lutterworth said gently. “ ’E was no use to you, nor to ’is poor wife neither. ’E was a greedy man, with no sense o’ right nor wrong. Save your tears for poor Amos Lindsay. ’E was a good-enough chap, in ’is own way. A bit blunt, but none the worse for that. Don’t take on.” Then he swung around to Pitt. “Mind you could’a chosen your time and your words better! Clumsy great fool!”
Murdo was in an agony of indecision. Should he offer her his handkerchief? It had been clean this morning, as it was every morning, but it must smell terrible with smoke now; and anyway, wouldn’t she think him impertinent, overfamiliar?
Her shoulders were trembling and she sobbed without sound. She looked so hurt, like a woman and a child at once.
He could bear it no longer. He pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket, dropping keys and a pencil along with it, and went forward to give it to her, arm outstretched. He no longer cared what Pitt thought, or what detective strategy he might be using. He also hated Shaw, with an utterly new emotion that had never touched him before, because Flora wept for him with such heartbreak.
“He in’t dead, miss,” he said bluntly. “He was out on a call somewhere an’ ’e’s terrible upset—but he in’t even hurt. Mr. Oliphant, the curate, took him back to his lodgings for the night. Please don’t cry like that—”
Lutterworth’s face was dark. “You said he was dead.” He swung around, accusing Pitt.
“No, Mr. Lutterworth,” Pitt contradicted. “You assumed it. I am deeply sorry to say that Mr. Lindsay is dead. But Dr. Shaw is perfectly well.”
“Out again?” Lutterworth was staring at Flora now, his brows drawn down, his mouth tight. “I’ll lay odds that bounder struck the match ’imself.”
Flora jerked up, her face tearstained, Murdo’s handkerchief clasped in her fingers, but now her eyes were wide with fury.
“That’s a terrible thing to say, and you have no right even to think it, let alone to put it into words! It is completely irresponsible!”
“Oh, and you know all about responsibility, of course, girl,” Lutterworth retorted, by now regardless of Pitt or Murdo. His face was suffused with color and his voice thick in his emotion. “Creepin’ in and out at all hours to see ’im— imagining I don’t know. For heaven’s sake, ’alf Highgate knows! And talk about it over the teacups, like you were some common whore—”
Murdo gasped as if the word had struck him physically. He would rather have sustained a dozen blows from a thief or a drunkard than have such a term used of Flora. Were it any other man he would have knocked him to the ground—but he was helpless.
“—and I’ve nothing with which to call them liars!” Lutterworth was anguished with impotent fury himself, and anyone but Murdo would have pitied him. “Dear God—if your mother were alive she’d weep ’erself sick to see you. First time since she died I ’aven’t grieved she weren’t ’ere with me—the very first time …”
Flora stared at him and stood even straighter. She drew a breath to defend herself, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes burning. Then her face filled with misery and she remained silent.
“Nothing to say?” he demanded. “No excuses? No—what a fine man he is, if only I knew ’im like you do, eh?”
“You do me an injustice, Papa,” she said stiffly. “And yourself also. I am sorry you think so ill of me, but you must believe what you will.”
“Don’t you come high and mighty with me, girl.” Lutterworth’s face was torn between anger and pain. Had she been looking at him more closely she might have seen the pride as he gazed at her, and the shattered hope. But his words were unfortunate. “I’m your father, not some tomfool lad following after you. You’re not too big to send to your room, if I have to. An’ I’ll approve any man that sets ’is cap at you, or you’ll not so much as give ’im the time o’ day. Do you hear me, girl?”
She was trembling. “I’m sure everyone in the house hears you, Papa, including the tweeny in the attic—”
His face flushed purple with anger.
“—but if anyone does me the honor of courting me,” she went on before he had mustered the words, “I shall most certainly seek your approval. But if I love him, I’ll marry him whether you like him or not.” She turned to Murdo, and with a barely shaking voice thanked him for informing her that Dr. Shaw was alive and well. Then, still clutching his handkerchief, she swept out and they heard her footsteps go across the hall and up the stairs.
Lutterworth was too wretched and too embarrassed to apologize or seek polite excuses for such a scene.
“I can’t tell you anything you don’t know for yourselves,” he said brusquely when the silence returned. “I ’eard the alarm and went out to see, same as ’alf the street, but I didn’t see nor ’ear anything before that. Now I’ll be going back to my bed and you’d best get about your business. Good night to you.”
“Good night sir,” they replied quietly, and found their own way to the door.
It was not the only quarrel they witnessed that night.
Pascoe was too distressed to see them, and his servant refused on his behalf. They trudged in silence and little expectation of learning anything useful, first to the Hatches’ house: to question Lindsay’s maid, who was bundled up in blankets and shaking so violently she could not hold a cup steady in her hand. She could tell them nothing except that she had woken to the sound of fire bells a
nd had been so terrified she did not know what to do. A fireman had come to the window and carried her out, across the roof of the house and down a long ladder to the garden, where she had been soaked with water from a hose, no doubt by accident.
At this point her teeth were chattering on the edge of the cup and Pitt recognized that she was unlikely to know anything useful, and was beyond being able to tell him anyway. Not even the prospect of a clue towards who had burned two houses to the ground, with their occupants inside, prompted him to press her any further.
When she had been escorted upstairs to bed, he turned to Josiah Hatch, who was gaunt faced, eyes fixed in horror at the vision within his mind.
Pitt watched him anxiously, he seemed so close to retreating into himself with shock. Perhaps to be forced to speak and think of and answer questions of fact would be less of a torture than one might suppose. It would draw him from the contemplation of the enormity of destruction, and from the flicker in the muscles in his eyelids and the corners of his mouth, the fear of the evil which now was so obviously still in their midst.
“What time did you retire this evening, Mr. Hatch?” he began.
“Ugh?” Hatch recalled himself to the present with difficulty. “Oh—late—I did not look at the clock. I was in deep contemplation of what I had been reading.”
“I heard you come up the stairs at about quarter to two,” Prudence put in very quietly, looking first at her husband and then at Pitt.
He turned a blank face towards her. “I disturbed you? I’m sorry, that was the last thing I intended.”
“Oh no, my dear! I had been roused by one of the children. Elizabeth had a nightmare. I had merely not yet gone back to sleep.”
“Is she well this morning?”
Prudence’s face relaxed into the ghost of a smile. “Of course. It was simply an ill dream. Children do have them, you know—quite often. All she required was a little reassurance.”
“Could not one of the older children have given her that without disturbing you?” He frowned, seizing on the matter as if it were important. “Nan is fifteen! In another few years she may have children of her own.”
“There is a world of difference between fifteen and twenty, Josiah. I can remember when I was fifteen.” The tiny smile returned again, soft and sad. “I knew nothing—and I imagined I knew everything. There were entire regions—continents of experience of which I had not the faintest conception.”
Pitt wondered what particular ignorances were in her mind. He thought perhaps those of marriage, the responsibility after the romance had cooled, the obedience, and perhaps the bearing of children—but he could have been wrong. It might have been worldly things, quite outside the home, other struggles or tragedies she had seen and coped with.
Hatch apparently did not know what she referred to either. He frowned at her in incomprehension for a few moments longer, then turned to Pitt again.
“I saw nothing of any import.” He answered the question before it was asked. “I was in my study, reading from the work of St. Augustine.” The muscles in his jaw and neck tightened and some inner dream took hold of him. “The words of men who have sought after God in other ages are a great enlightenment to us—and comfort. There has always been powerful evil in the world, and will be as long as the soul of man is as weak and beset by temptations as it is.” He looked at Pitt again. “But I am afraid I can be of no assistance to you. My mind and my senses were totally absorbed in contemplation and study.”
“How terrible,” Prudence said to no one in particular, “that you were awake in your study, reading of the very essence of the conflict between good and evil.” She shivered and held her arms close around herself. “And only a few hundred yards away, someone was setting a fire that murdered poor Mr. Lindsay—and but for a stroke of good fortune, would have murdered poor Stephen as well.”
“There are mighty forces of evil here in Highgate.” He stared straight ahead of him again, as if he could see the pattern in the space between the jardiniere with its gold chrysanthemums and the stitched sampler on the wall with the words of the Twenty-third Psalm, “Wickedness has been entertained, and invited to take up its abode with us,” he went on.
“Do you know by whom, Mr. Hatch?” It was surely a futile question, and yet Pitt felt impelled to ask it. Murdo behind him, silent until now, shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
Hatch looked around in surprise. “God forgive him and give him peace, by Lindsay himself. He spread dark ideas of revolution and anarchy, overthrow of the order of things as they are. He wanted some new society where individual ownership of property was done away and men were no longer rewarded according to their ability and effort but given a common wage regardless. It would do away with self-reliance, diligence, industry and responsibility—all the virtues which have made the Empire great and the nation the envy of all the Christian world.” His face was pinched with anger at the distortion, and grief for all that would be lost. “And John Dalgetty published them—to his dishonor—but he is a foolish man forever pursuing what he imagines is justice and a kind of freedom of the mind that has become all important to him, consuming all his better judgment. In his frenzy he deludes others.”
He looked at Pitt. “Poor Pascoe has done all he can to dissuade him, and then to prevent him by public opinion, and even the law; but he is puny against the tide of inquisitiveness and disobedience in mankind and the passion for novelty—always novelty.” His body was clenched under his clothes, aching with tension. “Novelty at any price! New sciences, a new social order, new art—we are insatiable. The minute we have seen a thing, we want to cast it aside and find something else. We worship freedom as if it were some infinite good. But you cannot escape morality—freedom from the consequence of your acts is the great delusion at the core of all this”—he flung his hand out—“this frenzy for newness—and for irresponsibility. We have been from the first a race that hungers for forbidden knowledge and would eat the fruit of sin and death. God commanded our first parents to abstain, and they would not. What chance has poor Quinton Pascoe?”
His face tightened and a look of defeat washed his whole countenance with pain. “And Stephen in his arrogance upheld Dalgetty and made mock of Pascoe and his attempts to protect the weak and the sensitive from the cruder expressions of ideas that could only injure and frighten at bestand at worst deprave. Mockery of the truth, of all man’s past aspirations to higher good, is one of the Evil One’s most fearsome weapons, and God help him, Stephen has been more than willing to use it.”
“Josiah—I think you speak too harshly,” Prudence protested. “I know Stephen speaks foolishly at times, but there is no cruelty in him—”
He turned around to her, his face grim, his eyes burning. “You know him very little, my dear. You see only the best. That is to your credit—and it is what I intend shall continue, but be counseled by me: I have heard him say much that I shall never repeat to you, which has been both cruel and degraded. He has a contempt for the virtues which you most admire.”
“Oh, Josiah, are you sure? Could you not perhaps have misunderstood him? He has an unfortunate sense of humor at times—and—”
“I could not!” He was absolute. “I am perfectly capable of telling when he is attempting to be amusing and when he means what he says, however superficially he covers it with lightness. The essence of mockery, Prudence, is that it should make good people laugh at what they would otherwise have taken seriously and loved—to make moral purity, labor, hope, and belief in people, seem ridiculous to them—things of jest to be derided.”
Prudence opened her mouth to refute what he was saying; then recalling some other knowledge, some fact until then secondary, she colored with embarrassment and looked down at the floor. Pitt was aware of her misery as if she had touched him, but he had no idea what caused it. She wanted to defend Shaw, but why? Affection, simple compassion because she believed his suffering to be genuine, or some other reason unguessed by him yet? And what h
eld her back?
“I regret we cannot help you,” Hatch said civilly, but he could not mask the exhaustion in his voice, nor the shock in his eyes. He was on the point of collapse, and it was nearly four in the morning.
Pitt gave up. “Thank you for your time now, and your courtesy. We will not keep you up longer. Good night, sir—Mrs. Hatch.”
Outside the night was black and the wind whined in the darkness, glaring red over towards the ruins of Amos Lindsay’s house. The street was still full of fire engines, and firemen were walking the horses up and down to keep them from chilling.
“Go home,” Pitt said to Murdo, stamping his feet on the ice around the pavement. “Get a few hours’ sleep and I’ll see you at the station at ten.”
“Yes sir. Do you think Shaw did it himself, sir? To cover the murder of his wife?”
Pitt looked at Murdo’s scorched and miserable face. He knew what he was thinking.
“Over Flora Lutterworth? Possibly. She’s a handsome girl, and can expect a lot of money. But I doubt Flora had any part in it. Now go home and sleep—and get that hand attended to. If that blister breaks and you get it dirty, God knows what infection you could get. Good night, Murdo.”
“Good night, sir.” And Murdo turned and made his way hastily across the road and past the firemen up towards Highgate.
It took Pitt nearly half an hour to find a cab, and then he only succeeded because some late-night junketer had failed to pay his fare and the cabby was standing on the pavement calling after him instead of making a hasty return to his own bed. He grumbled, and asked for extra, but since Bloomsbury was more or less on his way, he weighed exhaustion against profit and came out on the side of profit.
Charlotte came flying down the stairs almost before Pitt had the door shut, a shawl caught half around her shoulders and no slippers on. She stared at him, waiting for the answer.
