by Anne Perry
“A woman?” Her eyes widened. “I assume you are suggesting something sordid.” It was a statement.
He smiled broadly. “Not necessarily, Miss Danver. I think there may gave been a theft, unreported because only Mr. York himself knew of it, and that this woman may have been the thief, or may have witnessed the murder.”
“You are full of surprises,” Adeline Danver conceded with an answering softness touching the corners of her mouth. “And you cannot find this woman?”
“Not so far. I have been singularly unsuccessful. Can you describe her for me?”
“I am fascinated.” She bent her head very slightly to one side. “How do you know she exists?”
“Someone else saw her, in the York house, also by gaslight.”
“And their description is not adequate? Or do you fear they are misleading you deliberately?”
Should he frighten her? Dulcie’s trusting face came back as sharply as if she had gone out of the library door only yesterday.
“Her description was very brief,” he said without moderating the blow at all. “But I can’t go back and ask her again because the day after she spoke to me she fell out of an upstairs window to her death.”
Adeline’s thin cheeks were white. She was well acquainted with tragedy. She was over fifty and had known many deaths, but none of them had left her untouched. Much of her life lay in the triumphs and the sorrows of others; it had had to.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “You are referring to Veronica York’s maid, I assume?”
“Yes.” He did not want to seem melodramatic, foolish. “Miss Danver—” He stopped.
“Yes, Inspector?”
“Please do not speak of our conversation to anyone else, even in your own family. They may inadvertently repeat it, without intending harm.”
Her eyebrows rose and her thin hands gripped the arms of her chair. “Do I understand you correctly?” Her voice was little more than a breath, but still perfectly controlled, beautifully modulated.
“I believe she is still here, somewhere—at times very close,” he replied. “Someone among your family, or your acquaintances knows where she is, who she is—and possibly what really happened on that night three years ago in Hanover Close.”
“It is not I, Mr. Pitt.”
He smiled bleakly. “If I thought it were, Miss Danver, I should not waste my time asking you.”
“But you think one of us, someone I daresay I am fond of, does know this terrible thing?”
“People keep secrets for many reasons,” he replied. “Most often out of fear for themselves, or to protect someone they love. Scandal can blow up out of sins that are very slight—if they catch the imagination. And scandal can be a worse punishment for some than imprisonment or financial loss. The admiration of our peers is a far greater prize than some realize—more blood has been shed for it than is seen, and more pain. Women marry men they do not love rather than be imagined to be unloved. People pretend all the time so that others will imagine they are happy. We need our masks, our small illusions; few of us can bear to go naked into the world’s gaze. And people will kill to keep their clothes.”
She stared at him. “What an odd person you are. Why on earth do you choose to be a policeman?”
He looked down at the carpet. It did not occur to him to evade, still less to lie. “Originally because my father was convicted for something he did not do. The truth has its uses, Miss Danver, and although it can be painful, lies are worse in the end. Though there are times when I hate it, when I learn things I would rather not have to know. But that’s cowardice, because we are afraid of the pain of pitying.”
“And do you expect it to hurt this time, Mr. Pitt?” she asked, her eyes on his face, her thin fingers picking very slightly at the lace in her skirt.
“No,” he said honestly. “No more man the murder already has done. What did she look like, Miss Danver? Could you describe this woman for me?”
She hesitated for a moment, searching her memory. “She was tall,” she said slowly. “I think quite definitely taller than average; she had a kind of grace short women cannot possess. And she was slender, not...” She blinked, grasping for the word which eluded her. “Not voluptuous, and yet she—no. Her voluptuousness was not in her shape but it was there! Quite definitely it was there; it was in the way she moved. She had passion, style, a kind of daring, as if she were dancing a great ballet along a razor’s edge. I’m sorry— do I sound ridiculous?”
“No.” He shook his head without taking his eyes from hers. “No, if what I guess about her is right, then that is a fitting analogy. Go on.”
“She had dark hair, black it seemed in the gaslight. I only caught the briefest glimpse of her face, and I remember she was very beautiful.”
“What sort of face?” Pitt pressed. “There are many kinds of beauty.”
“Unusual,” she said slowly, and he knew she was trying to picture the moment again, the gaslight on the landing, the vivid dress, the turn of the head till she saw the features. “There was a perfect balance between the brow and the nose, the cheek and the curve of the throat; it was all a matter of bones and a sweeping hairline. It was nothing ordinary, like arched eyebrows or a pouting mouth, or dimples. She reminded me vaguely of someone, and yet I am perfectly sure I had never seen her before.”
“Are you?”
“Yes. And you may choose to believe me or not, but it is the truth. It was not Veronica, which I assume you are imagining, and it was most certainly not my niece Harriet.”
“Who did she remind you of? Please try to recall.”
“I have tried, Mr. Pitt. I can only think it may be someone whose picture I have seen. Artists’ impressions can be most misleading. They change so much with the fashion of the times, have you noticed? They paint you as they think you wish to look. But photographs give a remarkable likeness. I am sorry, I have no idea who it is, so there is no purpose in your pressing me. If at any time it comes to me, I shall certainly tell you. That I promise.”
“Then promise me also, Miss Danver, that you will not discuss this with anyone else, nor entrust a message to anyone—anyone at all. I really do mean what I say.” He leaned forward a little. If he frightened her it was a small price to pay for saving her life. “Robert York is dead, and so is Dulcie, both in their own homes, where they thought they were safe. Give me your word, Miss Danver.”
“Very well, Mr. Pitt,” she agreed. “If you really believe it is so serious. I shall discuss it with no one. You may cease to worry about it.” She looked at him levelly, her round, clever eyes very grave. “Good gracious, Mr. Pitt—your concern is a trifle unnerving!”
Outside again in the gray street he turned and walked south. He must find the woman in cerise. He had already exhausted the easier avenues, the hotels and theaters where she would have been most likely to meet her clients. He had questioned the doorkeepers, the prostitutes who might have been her rivals, as well as the pimps and madams. They either did not know her or would not say. It all confirmed what he imagined from the beginning, that she was a spy, not a woman earning her living from prostitution. She was not interested in general trade, only certain men in particular. And she had taken great care not to be traced.
Finding Cerise would be a matter of laborious, detailed police work. He knew at least one place which she had patronized several times, and now he had a close and unusual description. No one in the business of sexual favors for hire was likely to help him further; all the middlemen reaped their profits from silence. But there were always people in a London street who were almost invisible, people who might remember, who made their livelihood from passersby, their hungry eyes watching each one for even the tiniest signs of willingness to buy.
He stepped over to the curb and raised his arm, shouting to a hansom as it plodded along Park Lane through the thickening mist. There was snow in the wind. He climbed in and gave the address of the hotel where he had found the doorman who remembered Cerise, sitting back
to wait out the slow, cold journey. This was not the best time to begin—the vendors he wanted would be the ones who worked at night—but he had nothing else to pursue, and there was an urgency inside him.
He stopped short of the hotel itself and left the cab on the comer, opposite a stall where a man wearing a white apron and a black hat with a ribbon round it was selling hot eels. Beside him, a girl ladled out thick pea soup at a halfpenny a cup.
The aroma drifted on the wet air and Pitt automatically reached in his pocket. He had never acquired the native Londoners’ taste for eels, but he was partial to pea soup. A red-faced woman was before him in the queue, but after she was served he produced his halfpenny and took the hot cup gratefully. The liquid was thick and a little lumpy, but the flavor was rich and its warmth rippled through him, creating a tiny heart of strength inside.
“You here in the evenings?” he asked casually.
“Sometimes, in the summer wiv ve eels,” the man answered. “Vis time o’ year anyone wiv an ’ome ter go to is in it! Vem as ’asn’t usual don’t ’ave money neither.”
“Who’d be here in the evening?”
The man went on ladling eels. “Wot time yer talkin’ abaht? Early on, till eight or nine, ’er.” He gestured to a small girl about fifty yards up the pavement, who stood shivering in the cold, a box of sweet violets by her bare feet. She might have been ten or eleven years old.
“I’ll take another cup of soup.” Pitt gave the man a second halfpenny and took the cup from the girl. “Thank you.” He turned to walk away.
“Hey! I want the cup back!” the man shouted behind him.
“You’ll get it,” Pitt said over his shoulder, “when it’s empty.” He approached the flower girl. She was only a few years older than Jemima, with a pinched face and few underclothes beneath her plain dark dress and faded shawl. Her feet were mottled red and blue with extreme cold.
He put the cup of soup down on the pavement and fished in his pocket for two more pennies.
“I’ll have two bunches of violets for my wife,” he said, holding out the coins.
“Thank you, sir.” She took the pennies, glancing at him out of clear blue eyes, then stole a glance at the steaming soup.
He picked it up and took a sip, then set it down again.
“I’ve bought more than I can eat,” he said. “You can finish it if you like.”
She hesitated; nothing came into her life without a price.
“I don’t want it,” he repeated.
Very carefully she reached out her hand and picked it up, still watching him.
“Have you been on this street long?” he asked, knowing as he said it that she was probably too young to be any help to him. But he had bought the soup without thinking of Cerise.
“Two year,” she replied, sipping soup with a slurp and sucking it round her mouth.
“Is it busy in the evenings?”
“Fair.”
“Are there other traders here?”
“Some. ’Bout two or free.”
“Who? What do they sell?”
“There’s a woman wot sells combs, but she goes early. Girl wot sells matches sometimes. An’ o’ course there’s ’im wot sells ’ot plum duff; ’e’s ’ere of an evenin’. An’ sometimes there’s patterers. They moves abaht, mostly from Seven Dials way, ’cause vat’s w’ere the printers is.”
He did not need to question her, he knew what running patterers were: men of prodigious memory and usually a nice turn of humor, who sold red-hot news, generally of crime and seduction. And if there was nothing sufficiently grisly in truth, then they were not above inventing something, replete with detail, and frequently showing pictures.
“Thank you,” he said civilly, picking up the empty cup. “I’ll come back this evening.”
He went home for dinner and gave Charlotte, to her surprise and delight, both bunches of violets. Then at about ten o’clock he forced himself to go out again into the freezing fog.
It was a vile night, and there was no one in the street outside the hotel except a fat, pasty-faced youth selling hot plum duff, a cooked dough filled with sultanas and kept at a good temperature with layers of steaming cloth. The youth was well patronized by the men leaving the hotel, but after half an hour of standing and stamping his feet to keep the circulation going and a couple of brisk turns round the block, Pitt had seen none of the women who used the hotel rooms for their trade.
He questioned the plum duff boy and learned nothing at all. The boy had been there five years, he thought, but he had never noticed a woman in cerise.
The following night he came again, but he was no more successful, and the night after that he went instead to the Lyceum Theatre. He spoke to a seller of peppermint water who had seen someone in brilliant pink but could not recall her height, and rather thought she had had red hair.
Then after midnight, angry with the futility of it all, his feet numb in the settling snow and with his collar up round his ears, he moved forward amid the din of shouting, laughter, and occasional jeers as the theater turned out. He saw a youth selling ham sandwiches and decided to buy one. He was not hungry, but he liked ham. He pushed his way through the throng, jostled by elbows and plump bustles, assaulted by the smell of perfume, sweat, and beery breath till he reached the sandwich man in the street beyond. There was a threepence in his pocket but his fingers were too cold to grasp it.
The youth looked at him expectantly. He was thin and there were hectic spots of color in his cheeks. It was a wretched living and Pitt knew it, standing outside in all weather, often half the night, and to make enough to survive they had to buy the meat on the bone and cook it themselves, then cut the sandwiches. He made less than a halfpenny profit on each sandwich sold, and Pitt knew that anything spoiled or lost could wipe out the day’s takings.
“I’ll have two, please.” He gripped the threepenny bit at last and produced it. The youth gave him two sandwiches and a penny change.
“Thank you.” Pitt bit into the first sandwich and found it surprisingly good. “Have you been here long?”
“Abaht eight hour,” the boy replied. “But they’re fresh, guv, I made ’em meself!” He looked anxious.
“They’re excellent,” Pitt agreed with more enthusiasm than he felt for anything except the idea of going home. “I meant, have you had this patch for long? For example, were you here three or four years ago?”
“Oh. Yeah, I bin ’ere since I were fourteen.”
“Do you ever remember seeing a very beautiful woman in a dark, very bright plum pink dress, about three years ago? Very striking woman, tall, with dark hair. Please think carefully, it’s very important.”
“What sort o’ woman, guv? Yer mean one o’ them?” He inclined his head very slightly towards a lush-looking woman with a pile of loose fair hair and rouge on her plump cheeks.
“Yes, but more expensive, more class.”
“One as I saw like that, wearing that sort o’ color, looked more like a lady ter me—though she were with a gent as was never ’er ’usband.”
Pitt deliberately quelled his feeling of excitement.
“How do you know?”
“Gam!” The boy pulled a face of disbelief. “ ’E were all over ’er. Eyes like limpets, ’e ’ad. An’ she were leading ’im on proper; all very tasteful like, but I seen too many not ter know. Some folks ’as class, and some ’asn’t, but it’s all the same in the end. Proper beauty, she were, though.”
“Was she buxom?” Pitt made an hourglass in the air with his hands, almost losing his sandwich in the process.
“No.” The youth’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “No, she weren’t. It were summer an’ she ’ad a real low gown an’ she were right scrawny! But ever so elegant!”
“Tall or short?” Pitt could not keep his voice from rising.
“Tall. Tall as me, I reckon, at least. Why? She someone you know? I an’t seen ’er since then. I can’t ’elp yer. She must ’ave moved uptown, or got married—which in’t
likely, ter be honest wiv yer. More like she come to a bad end. Got some sickness, or someone carved ’er up. Mebbe she got the pox, or the cholera.”
“Maybe. Can you describe the man she was with? How did she leave? Which direction did she go?”
“You are keen! I didn’t take no notice o’ the gent she was wiv, ’cept ’e were dead elegant as well. Looked better-class than most yer get rahnd ’ere. ’E weren’t no clerk or tradesman out for an evenin’. ’E were definitely a toff come slummin’. But yer gets a few o’ them, if they wants a bit o’ relaxation wivout the missus, ner anyone as they know as’d tell on ’em.”
“Where did they go? Did they go together?”
The youth looked at Pitt scornfully. “ ’Course they went together! No toff treats no tart to an evenin’ at the theayter, ’owever classy she is, just ter wish ’er good night on the steps arterwards!”
“In a cab, or a carriage?”
“A cab, o’ course! Don’t take their own carriages if’n they’re out on the sly! Use a bit o’ common, guv!”
“Good. Where is the nearest rank of cabs from here?”
“Rahnd the corner an ’baht ’undred yards down the street.”
“Thank you.” And before the youth could express his doubts, Pitt had disappeared into the swirl of falling snow beyond the canopy of the theater.
“Crazy,” the boy said cheerfully and curled his fingers round the pennies in his pocket. “ ’Am sammiches! Fresh ’am sammiches! Only a penny each!”
Over the next two days Pitt plowed through the snow, feet freezing, legs wet from the slush in the gutters, as he coughed in the smoke and fog clamped over the city roofs by an icy sky. He found every cabdriver from the rank and questioned them all. He also found two crossing sweepers who had worked the area at the relevant time. One had come up in the world and had an interest in a hot coffee stall, the other had found a better crossing. None of them could do more than describe Cerise and say that she had arrived at the hotel and the theater in a cab and left in one.
Only one cabbie could remember where he had taken her, and that was to Hanover Close.
