Bedford Square tp-19

by Anne Perry

  But that did raise a genuine question to which Pitt had seen no satisfactory answer … who had moved the body of Josiah Slingsby from Shoreditch to Bedford Square? Who had put Albert Cole’s receipt for socks in Slingsby’s pocket? How had he had it in the first place?

  For that matter, where was Albert Cole now? If he was alive, where had he gone and why? And if he was dead, why had Slingsby’s body been left on Balantyne’s step and not Cole’s body? Had he coincidentally died of natural causes?

  That seemed to be stretching unlikelihood too far.

  And it did not answer the questions about Slingsby’s body and how Cadell had even heard of it, let alone how he’d moved it to Bedford Square.

  Did any of it matter now, except that it was a puzzle?

  A pleasure steamer went by, its passengers shouting and waving, its wake setting the ferry rocking. The sun was dazzlingly bright on the water.

  Was he being self-indulgent, expecting every case to have a complete solution, wanting to understand exactly what had happened? Or was he being diligent, making sure of the truth?

  What he was really doing was taking a trip up the river instead of sitting in Bow Street doing his paperwork, and trying to help Vespasia a little … although she would have to accept in the end that Leo Cadell was the blackmailer. He had confessed it … in a letter exactly like all the others. Possibly he had gained his knowledge of the lives of the other victims through knowing them in the Jessop Club. One could learn a great deal about people from casual conversation, expanded by a little questioning as if from interest or admiration. The rest he could have gleaned from public records; army and navy details he could easily have asked for on the pretext of having some need to know in his position at the Foreign Office.

  But the question remained, how did he know Slingsby at all, let alone remark his resemblance to Cole?

  Pitt put it out of his mind for a while and enjoyed the river and the brilliance of the day. All around him people were having fun.

  The orphanage at Kew Green was a large, rambling old house with a garden walled around and overhung with trees. It looked spacious enough to house fifty or sixty children, at the very least, and the appropriate number of staff to look after them.

  He walked up to the front door, noticing the clean scrubbed step, and pulled the bell. It was answered within minutes by a girl of about seventeen. She was wearing a dark blue cotton dress, starched apron and cap.

  “Yes sir?” she said helpfully.

  Pitt explained who he was and asked if he might speak to whoever was in charge. He conveyed in his manner that refusal was not to be tolerated.

  She conducted him to a very pleasant room facing the front entrance and invited him to sit in one of the threadbare but surprisingly comfortable seats while she went for Mr. Horsfall.

  When he arrived, closing the door behind him with a snap, he was taller even than Pitt, very rotund around the middle, and with a genial face, as if he smiled often and easily.

  “Yes sir,” he said agreeably. “What can we do for you? Dolly said something about the police. I hope none of our charges have been creating a nuisance? We do the best we can to see they are well behaved, and if I say so myself, I think we more than succeed, most times. But children will be children.”

  “I have no reason to doubt it,” Pitt replied honestly. “I am from Bow Street, not Kew.” He ignored the surprise in Horsfall’s face. “And it is regarding financial matters I have come. The recent suicide of one of the committee of beneficiaries who donate a large amount to your establishment had raised some questions as to possible irregularities.”

  Horsfall looked suitably saddened. “Oh, dear. How painful. Well, sir, of course you may examine our books, with pleasure. But I do assure you, if there has been anything amiss, it has not been after any funds have reached us. We are very careful.” He nodded. “We have to be. We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that we are dealing with other people’s money. If they cannot trust us, then there will be no more.” He looked at Pitt with wide eyes.

  What he said was transparently true, and Pitt felt foolish for wasting both Horsfall’s time and his own. But he could hardly say so now.

  “Thank you,” he replied. “It is merely to complete the matter. I would be negligent to overlook it.”

  “Of course. Of course.” Horsfall nodded again, hooking his thumbs in his waistcoat. “Shall I bring them to you here, or would you prefer to come through to my office, where you can sit at a desk?”

  “That would be very courteous of you,” Pitt accepted. He was aware that there was always the possibility of two sets of books, but he acknowledged to himself that he had never really expected anything from his visit beyond being able to tell Vespasia he had tried.

  He spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, apart from a brief respite for luncheon at the local public house, going over endless receipts both for money and for goods, food, fuel, clothes, wages, and found everything in the most meticulous order. Had Horsfall not explained his need for exactness, he might have found the perfection suspicious. But there was not a farthing unaccounted for, and he did not doubt for a moment that if he went equally carefully through the Jessop Club’s donations, he would find a faultless match.

  He was barely aware of the children who must fill the building. As Horsfall had said, they were remarkably well behaved. He did see two little girls, walking hand in hand, aged about five and six, respectively, and suddenly one of them began to run, pulling the other along. They were followed a moment later by a girl of ten or so, carrying a boy not more than two. Other movements caught the corner of his vision, and he heard voices.

  He closed the books, thanked Horsfall and apologized for troubling him, then took his leave of the orphanage, feeling a trifle foolish. There seemed no reason whatever why Balantyne-or Cadell, for that matter-should have been concerned. Perhaps it was a matter of raising funds, rather than their use, which had worried him.

  He could ask Balantyne, but it hardly seemed worth it.

  The question of how Cadell had known of Slingsby’s death, and how he had moved the body, seemed far more important. And where was Albert Cole? If he was dead, they should know if it had been a result of natural causes, and if not, then what had happened to him? He would put Tellman onto that as soon as he returned to Bow Street … tomorrow. Tonight he would write to Vespasia and tell her that the orphanage books were immaculate.

  Charlotte was grieved by the news of Leo Cadell’s death, largely for Aunt Vespasia, but her imagination extended to how his widow must feel. However, she was relieved of an immense weight of anxiety, even of fear, regarding both General Balantyne and Cornwallis. She liked Cornwallis profoundly, and she knew also how deep was Pitt’s affection for him.

  She knew Balantyne must have read of Cadell’s death in the newspapers. He could hardly have missed it. It was sprawled across the front page, along with Lyndon Remus’s speculations as to what sort of long and tragic story might be behind Cadell’s fall from brilliant diplomat to blackmailer, extortionist and, ultimately, suicide.

  Half of her mind could understand the necessity for freedom to question and investigate the lives of all public figures. Without such liberty, secrecy begot oppression and ended in tyranny. But with freedom came responsibility, and the immense power of the written word could so easily be abused. There was a sense in which Lyndon Remus was doing exactly the same thing as Cadell had attempted. The fact that Cadell and his family were now the victims did not leave her with any sense of satisfaction or poetic justice, just an awareness of the vulnerability of reputation and the thought of how Theodosia Cadell must feel.

  An errand boy delivered a note from General Balantyne, and she gave him the answer that she would be happy to meet him, again in the Royal Botanical Gardens, at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  The day was less oppressively hot, and a considerable crowd was taking the air for one sort of pleasure or another. She marveled at how many people seemed
to have no other call upon their time and were free from the necessity of any form of work. Before she had met Pitt such a thought would never have crossed her mind. Young ladies of her social class then had far too much time and too little to fill it that gave anything but the most momentary satisfaction. Then she seemed always to have been looking forward to tomorrow for something that might happen.

  She saw Balantyne as soon as she was through the gates. He was standing alone, facing the parade of soldiers in uniform, couples arm in arm, girls with parasols accompanied by their mothers, parasols swinging dangerously as they glanced at the young men and pretended they weren’t. He appeared to be watching them, but the stillness of his head betrayed that his thoughts were elsewhere.

  Charlotte walked over to him and was almost beside him before he noticed her.

  “Mrs. Pitt!” He looked at her gravely, searching her eyes. “How are you?” He paid not the slightest regard to her appearance; he was concerned entirely with her feelings.

  “I am quite well,” she answered, equally concerned for him. Looking at his face, she could see little of the relief she would have expected, considering that the threat of ruin that had dogged him for weeks was now lifted. “And you?”

  He smiled very slightly. “I had expected to feel better,” he admitted. “Perhaps I am still bemused. I liked Cadell.” He offered her his arm. “Isn’t that ridiculous? But I cannot rid myself of the emotion in a single day, in spite of knowing now what he was really planning. I suppose I am not the judge of men’s characters that I thought I was.” He gave a very slight, rueful shrug.

  “I’m sorry,” she said simply. “I don’t think Great-Aunt Vespasia has ever been so fearfully mistaken either. Mrs. Cadell is her goddaughter, you know.”

  “I didn’t.” He walked in silence a few yards. “Poor woman. I can imagine the devastation she must be feeling now, the confusion and loss.”

  Charlotte thought of Christina. Perhaps he was remembering her when he spoke. Time might have blunted the edge of his own pain, but nothing could remove it. Looking sideways at him now, she would not intrude, it would be inexcusable, but she imagined him thinking of Theodosia Cadell with a pity that could only spring from his own knowledge. His mouth was tugged tight at the corners, the muscles in his neck tense.

  “We are all relieved of our fears,” he said after a little while, moving between the banks of roses heavy with perfume in the sun. “We need no longer dread the delivery of mail. We can encounter our friends in the street and meet their eyes without wondering what they are thinking, what double meaning may lie behind the simplest remark. I feel guilty for the people I doubted. I hope to heaven they will never know it. Oddly, in all my suspicions, I never thought of Cadell.”

  She wanted to answer with something intelligent, but she could think of nothing.

  He did not seem to be waiting for her to say anything, merely glad of her companionship and grateful for the presence of someone to whom he could speak his thoughts as they came to him.

  “It is terrible that our relief, the end of our ordeal, has to be the beginning of someone else’s,” he went on. “How will Mrs. Cadell endure this? The knowledge will destroy everything of the past as well as the future. Does she have children, do you know?”

  “No … I don’t. I think Aunt Vespasia said something about daughters; I’m not sure. I wasn’t really listening. How shatteringly life can change from one day to another.” She looked at the people passing by them, all seeming so carefree, as if there were nothing on their minds more serious than whether their gowns were fashionable or not, whether a young man had smiled at them, or the girl behind them. And yet underneath, their hearts could be breaking too. Every one of them must succeed in some way, or fail, and the price of that was heavy, perhaps poverty, perhaps loneliness. She had been as young, and as desperate in her own way, once.

  “What I don’t understand,” Balantyne went on, frowning, “is why Cadell put the body of Slingsby on my doorstep with Albert Cole’s receipt on him and the snuffbox in his pocket. What was he trying to do? Have me arrested for his murder?” He turned and looked at her, his eyes full of confusion. “Did he hate me so much? Why? I liked him ….”

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “What is more difficult to understand for me is how he got the body. Slingsby was killed in Shoreditch.”

  He sighed. “I suppose we shall never know. The man must have had a life quite separate from anything we guessed. I have never found myself so mistaken in anyone.” He gave a very slight laugh. “When I was worried about the orphanage in Kew, he was the one I wrote to.”

  “What worried you?” she asked, not that it mattered; it was simply something to continue the conversation.

  “The money,” he replied, smiling at her ruefully. “It all seems terribly trivial now. It wasn’t even a large amount.”

  “Missing?” she asked.

  “No … quite the contrary. I thought we were not giving enough … enough to meet the demands, that is. Perhaps I am a trifle naive as to how one may manage if one is skilled in housekeeping. I daresay they have a good kitchen garden. I have forgotten what children eat. I seem to recall rice pudding, plum duff and bread and jam. I suppose there must have been a great deal else.”

  They walked a little farther in silence. Five minutes later they had completed the circle and were back at the gates again. He stopped.

  “I …” He cleared his throat. “I … I am deeply grateful for your friendship.” He coughed, removing his arm from hers. “I value it a great deal more than you know-or than it is remotely suitable that I should tell you.” He stopped abruptly, knowing he had already said too much.

  She saw the passion of gentleness in his eyes, and understood all that he could never say and she should not have allowed to happen.

  She closed her eyes, not to meet his.

  “I acted on impulse,” she said almost under her breath. “Sometimes … in fact, quite often … I have more feeling than sense. I apologize for it. But I never believed you were guilty and I cared so much to prove it.” She made herself smile, still with her eyes lowered. “I am very glad that that at least has been proved. I wish we could have solved all the other things too, but they will have to remain as they are.” For an instant she looked at him, then after a moment turned and walked away back towards the gates and outside, knowing that he watched her until was she out of sight, but she could not look back. She must not.

  11

  Pitt arrived home late after seeing Vespasia on the way back from Kew. He felt deeply sorry for her. Nothing he had been able to tell her was anything but crushing to the last shred of hope.

  Now he sat in front of the empty fireplace in his parlor. The doors to the garden were closed after having been open nearly all day. It was still light, but there was a coolness in the air that could be felt if one were sitting still. The sweet smell of the neighbor’s new-cut grass lingered in the room, reminding him it was time he attended to his own lawn, not to mention the weeding.

  Charlotte was sitting opposite him, her sewing discarded. He could see from the rough shape of it that it was a dress for Jemima. There seemed so much material he recalled with a jolt how rapidly she had grown. She was not a little girl anymore, and she most decidedly had opinions of her own. That had come forcibly to his attention a few times lately. It made him think with sharp pity of Christina Balantyne, and brought an awareness of how time can change people and one can be too preoccupied to notice it. Girls grow up and become women.

  “Was there nothing at the orphanage?” Charlotte asked, interrupting his thoughts.

  He was pleased to be able to share his findings with her. It did not make it any better; it simply hurt less.

  “No. Everything was in exceptionally good order. I went through the books in detail. Every penny was accounted for. Not only that, but it was all clean and obviously well cared for, and the half dozen or so children I actually saw seemed happy and in good health, well clothed and clean
also.”

  “But General Balantyne was worried about it.” She frowned slightly. “He told me that himself.” She looked at him very steadily, and he knew she was waiting to be asked when she had seen him again.

  He found himself smiling in spite of the gloom that he felt. She was very transparent.

  “Well, it looks as if he need not have been,” he answered. “I wish all institutions were as well run.”

  “He didn’t think they were misappropriating funds,” she explained. “He thought they weren’t using enough.” She took a deep breath. “But he did admit that perhaps he didn’t know very much about budgeting. I daresay he hasn’t much idea what you can do with things like potatoes and oatmeal and rice pudding, and of course bread.”

  “I assume he doesn’t know much about army catering, then?” he observed.

  “I didn’t ask,” she admitted. “I think honestly he was more troubled by his misjudgment of Leo Cadell. He truly liked him … and trusted him.”

  “I know,” Pitt said quietly. “It has wounded Aunt Vespasia profoundly as well. I think …”

  “Yes?” She was quick to respond, her face earnest.

  “You might visit her a little more often … for a while. At least offer to … somehow make it tactful.”

  She smiled a little ruefully. “It is not easy to be tactful with Aunt Vespasia. She can read my thoughts almost before I have them.”

  “Then perhaps you had better not try. Simply offer.”

  “Thomas …” she said tentatively.

  “Yes?”

  “What did he want? I mean, what was Cadell going to ask them all for? Was it just money, or something to do with Africa, as you thought?”

  “I don’t know. His note said very little. What puzzles me far more is how he knew about Slingsby at all, that he resembled Cole, let alone that he was dead.”

  “You don’t know?” She was startled.