Anne Perry - [Thomas Pitt 10]

by Bethlehem Road

  The same thread of an idea was stirring in Pitt’s mind, but it had no form, and he could find none for it.

  “What do you know about him?” Drummond asked, facing Pitt again curiously.

  “Member of Parliament for over twenty years,” Pitt answered, remembering everything he had heard, directly or indirectly. “Efficient, even gifted. As he said, he has held high office under the Home Secretary in the past. His reputation seems to be spotless, both personally and professionally. His wife died some time ago; he has remained a widower. He was Hamilton’s brother-in-law—but of course you know that.”

  Drummond inclined his head. “I suppose you looked into their relationship?” he asked wryly.

  Pitt smiled. “Yes. It was civil, but not close. And there was no financial involvement that we could find, except that he seems to be taking care of his sister’s affairs now she is widowed. But he is the elder brother, and that seems natural.”

  “Professional rivalry with Hamilton?”

  “No. They served in different areas. Allies, if anything.”

  “Personal?” Drummond persisted.

  “No. Nor political—not that you would cut a man’s throat because he espouses a different cause from your own. From everything I learned of Royce he is a strongly traditional family man with a deep conviction in the responsibility of the strong to care for the weak and the able to govern the masses—in their own interest.”

  Drummond sighed. “Sounds like practically every other Member in the House—in fact, like most well-to-do middle-aged gentlemen in England!”

  Pitt let out his breath in a little grunt, then took his leave, heading in the same direction Royce had gone, only at the end of the bridge he turned towards Baron’s Place and the home of the late Cuthbert Sheridan, M.P.

  It was the same as before, standing on the steps in the dark, banging again and again to waken sleeping servants, and then the wait while they relit the gas and pulled jackets on hastily to find out who could be calling at such an hour.

  There was the same look of horror, the halting request that he wait, the effort at composure, then the long silence while the awful news was broken, and once again Pitt found himself standing in a cold morning room in the gaslight facing a shocked and ashen woman who was trying hard not to weep or to faint.

  Parthenope Sheridan was perhaps thirty-five or thirty-six, a small woman with a very straight back. Her face was a little too pointed to be pretty, but she had fine eyes and hair, and slightly crooked teeth which gave her an individuality which at another time might well have been charming. Now she stood hollow-eyed, staring at Pitt.

  “Cuthbert?” she repeated the name as if she needed to say it again to grasp its meaning. “Cuthbert has been murdered—on Westminster Bridge? Like the others? But why? He has no connection with—with ... what? What is it about, Inspector Pitt? I don’t understand.” She reached for the chair behind her and sat down in it unsteadily, covering her face with her hands.

  Pitt wished passionately that they were of the same social class, just for a few moments, so he could put his arms round her and let her weep on his shoulder, instead of sitting stiffly hunched up, unable to share her emotion, isolated because there was no one in the house but servants, children, and a policeman.

  But there was nothing he could do. No pity in the world crossed the chasm between them. Familiarity would add to her burden, not decrease it. So instead he broke across the silence with formal words and the necessities of duty.

  “Nor do we, ma’am, but we are working on every possibility. And it seems that it may be political, or it may have been someone with a personal enmity towards any one of the three men, or it may simply be someone who is mad, and we shall find no reason that we can understand.”

  She made a supreme effort to speak clearly, without tears in her voice, without sniffling. “Political? You mean anarchists? People are talking about plots against the Queen, or Parliament. But why Cuthbert? He was only a very junior minister at the Treasury.”

  “Had he always been at the Treasury, ma’am?”

  “Oh no; members of Parliament move from one office to another, you know. He had been in the Home Office as well, and the Foreign Office for a very short while.”

  “Had he any convictions about Irish Home Rule?”

  “No—that is, I think he voted for it, but I’m not sure. He didn’t discuss that sort of thing with me.”

  “And reform, ma’am; was he inclined towards social and industrial reform, or against it?”

  “As long as it was well conducted and not too hasty, he was for industrial reform.” A curious look passed across her face; it seemed made up of both anger and pain.

  He asked the question he least wished to. “And reform of the franchise; was he in favor of extending it to women?”

  “No.” The word came from between her teeth. “No, he was not.”

  “Was his opinion well known to others?”

  She hesitated; her eyebrows went up. “I—yes, I imagine so. He expressed it quite forcefully at times.”

  He could not fail to see both the surprise and the distress in her face. “Were you of the same opinion, Mrs. Sheridan? “ he asked.

  Her face was so white the shadows under her eyes looked almost gray, even in this yellow gaslight.

  “No.” Her voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “I believe very strongly that women should have the right to vote for members of Parliament, if they choose, and to stand for local councils themselves. I am a member of my local group fighting for women’s suffrage.”

  “Are you acquainted with a Mrs. Florence Ivory, or a Miss Africa Dowell?”

  There was no change in her expression, no added fear or start of apprehension. “Yes, I know them both, though not well. There are not many of us, Mr. Pitt; it is hard for us not to know of one another, especially of those few who are prepared to take risk, to fight for what they believe, rather than merely pleading for it to a government which is composed entirely of men and quite obviously not disposed to listen to us. Those who hold power have never in all history been inclined to relinquish it willingly. Usually it has been taken from them by force, or it has slipped from their hands because they were too weak or corrupt to retain it.”

  “Which does Mrs. Ivory believe will come to pass here?”

  The first pale flush of color marked her cheeks, and her face hardened.

  “That is a question you had better ask her, Mr. Pitt—after you have discovered who murdered my husband!” Then her anger dissolved in an agony of distress and she turned away from him and crumpled against the back of the chair, weeping silently, her whole body shaking with the violence of her emotion.

  Pitt could not apologize. It would have been ridiculous, and without purpose; grief had nothing to do with him; to comment would have served only to show his lack of comprehension. Instead he simply left, going out into the hallway, passing the white-faced butler, and opening the front door for himself. He went down the steps into the spring darkness; a slow mist was curling up from the river now, smelling of the incoming tide. She would weep now, and probably again when the cold light of morning brought back reality and memory, and loneliness.

  When Pitt reached home he went straight to the kitchen and made himself a pot of tea. He sat at the table drinking it, warming his hands on the mug, for well over an hour. He felt tired and helpless. There had been three murders, and he had no more real evidence than he’d had the night of the first one. Was it really Florence Ivory, driven beyond sanity by the loss of her child?

  But why Cuthbert Sheridan? Simple hatred, because he too was against giving women more power and influence in government, perhaps in law, medicine, and who knew what else? It was only twelve years since medical schools had been opened to women, six years since married women might own and administer their own property, four since they had ceased in law to be chattel belonging to their husbands.

  But surely only a madwoman would murder those who were unwilling to change
? That would be almost everyone except a mere handful! It made no sense—but should he be looking for sense in these deaths?

  At last he went to bed, warmer, sleepy, but no more certain in his mind.

  In the morning he left early, saying little to Charlotte except a few bleak works about finding Sheridan, the horror, the rising sense of hysteria in the crowd.

  “Surely it could not have been Florence Ivory?” she said when he finished. “Not this too?”

  He wanted to say of course not; this changes everything. But it did not. Such a burning sense of injustice does not know the bounds of sense, not even of self-preservation. Reason was no yardstick with which to measure.

  “Thomas?”

  “Yes.” He stood up and reached for his coat.” I am sorry, but it could still be her.”

  Micah Drummond was in his office already, and Pitt went straight up. The daily newspapers were in a pile on his desk, and the top one had black banner headlines: THIRD MURDERON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, and under it, ANOTHER M.P. BUTCHERED HALF A MILE FROM HOUSE OF COMMONS.

  “The rest are much the same, or worse,” Drummond said bleakly. “Royce is right; people are beginning to panic. The Home Secretary has sent for me—heaven only knows what I can tell him. What have we got? Anything?”

  “Sheridan’s widow knew Mrs. Ivory and Africa Dowell,” Pitt replied miserably. “She is a member of her local women’s suffrage organization, and her husband was fiercely against it.”

  Drummond sat without moving for some time. “Ah,” he said at last, no conviction in his voice, no certainty. “Do you think that has anything to do with it? A women’s suffrage conspiracy?”

  Put in those words it sounded absurd, yet Pitt could not forget the passion in Florence Ivory, the loss that time had hardened but not touched with even the smallest healing. She was a woman who would not be stopped by fear or convention, risks to herself, or other people’s doubts or beliefs. Pitt was quite sure that she was capable of it, both emotionally and physically, with Africa Dowell’s help.

  And would Africa have helped? He thought so. She was a young woman full of idealism and burning emotions forcefully directed towards the bitter wrongs she felt had been done to Florence and her child. She had a dreamer’s or a revolutionary’s dedication to her vision of justice.

  “Pitt?” Drummond’s voice cut across his thoughts.

  “No, not really,” he replied, weighing his words. “Unless two people can be called a conspiracy. But it might be a series of circumstances... .”

  “What circumstances?” Drummond, too, was beginning to see the outline of a pattern, but there were too many unknowns. He had not met the people and so could not judge, and always at the back of his mind were the newspaper headlines, the grave and frightened faces of men in high office who now felt accountable and in turn passed on the responsibility and the blame to him. He was not frightened; he was not a man to run from challenge or duty, nor to blame others for his own helplessness. But neither did he evade the seriousness of the situation. “For heaven’s sake, Pitt, I want to know what you think!”

  Pitt was honest. “I fear it may be Florence Ivory, with Africa Dowell’s help. I think she has the passion and the commitment to have done it. She certainly had the motive, and it is more than possible she mistook Hamilton for Etheridge. But why she then went on to kill Sheridan I don’t know. That seems more cold-blooded than I judge her to be. It seems gratuitous. Of course, it could be someone else, perhaps an enemy of Sheridan’s taking advantage of a hideous opportunity.”

  “And you have some sympathy for Mrs. Ivory,” Drummond added, watching Pitt closely.

  “Yes,” Pitt admitted. It was true, he had liked Florence Ivory and felt keenly for her pain, perhaps too keenly, thinking of his own children. But then he had liked other murderers. It was the petty sinners, the hypocrites, the self-righteous, those who fed on humiliation and pain that he could not bear. “But I think it is also possible that we have come nowhere near the answer yet, that it is something we haven’t guessed at.”

  “Political conspiracy?”

  “Perhaps.” But Pitt doubted it; it would have to be a monstrous one, touched with madness.

  Drummond stood up and went to the fire, rubbing his hands as if he were cold, although the room was comfortable.

  “We’ve got to solve it, Pitt,” he said without condescension, turning to face him; for a moment the difference in office between them ceased to exist. “I have all the men I can spare raking through the files of every political malcontent we’ve ever heard of, every neorevolutionary, every radical socialist or activist for Irish Home Rule, or Welsh Home Rule, or any other reform that has ever had passionate supporters. You concentrate on the personal motives: greed, hatred, revenge, lust, blackmail; anything you can think of that makes one man kill another—or one woman, if you think that possible. There are enough women in the case with the money to employ someone to do what they could not or dared not do themselves.”

  “I’ll have a closer look at James Carfax,” Pitt said slowly. “And I’d better look in more detail at Etheridge’s personal life. Although an outraged husband or lover doesn’t seem likely—not for all three!”

  “Frankly nothing seems likely, except a remarkably cunning lunatic with a hatred of M.P.s who live on the south side of the river,” Drummond said with a twisted smile. “And we’ve doubled the police patrol of the area. All M.P.s know enough to guard themselves—I’d be very surprised if any of them choose to walk home across the bridge now.” He adjusted his necktie a little and pulled his jacket straighter on his shoulders, and his face lost even the shred of bleak humor it had shown. “I’d better go and see the Home Secretary.” He went to the door, then turned. “When we’ve dealt with this case, Pitt, you’re overdue for promotion. I’ll see that you get it; you have my word. I’d do it now, but I need you on the street until this is finished. You more than deserve it, and it will mean a considerable raise in salary.” And with that he went out of the door and closed it, leaving Pitt standing by the fire, surprised and confused.

  Drummond was right, promotion was long overdue; he had forfeited it previously by his attitude towards his superiors, by insubordination not by his acts but by his manner. It would be good to have his skills recognized, to have more command, more authority. And more money would mean so much to Charlotte, less scrimping on clothes, a few luxuries for the table, a trip to the country or the sea, maybe in time even a holiday abroad. One day she might even see Paris.

  But of course it would mean working behind a desk instead of on the street. He would detail other men to go out and question people, weigh the value of answers, watch faces; someone else would have the dreadful task of telling the bereaved, of examining the dead, of making the arrests. He would merely direct, make decisions, give advice, direct the investigations.

  He would not like it—at times he would hate it, hate being removed from the reality of the passion and the horror and the pity of street work. His men would hear the facts and return to him; he would no longer be aware of the flesh and the spirit, the people.

  But then he thought of Charlotte with Emily’s unopened letter in her pinafore pocket, waiting until he had gone because she did not want him to see her face when she read about Venice and Rome, about the glamor and romance of wherever Emily was now.

  He would accept the promotion—of course he would. He must.

  But first they must catch the Westminster Cutthroat, as the newspapers were calling him.

  Could it possibly be James Carfax? Pitt could not see in that handsome, charming, rather shallow face the ruthlessness necessary to kill three people, one after the other, merely to gain his wife’s inheritance, no matter how much he wanted it.

  What about Helen? Did she love her husband enough, want to keep him enough to commit such crimes, first for him, then to protect herself? Or him?

  He spent all day pursuing finances. First he found the record of the sale of Helen Carfax’s painting, then he
traced further back to see if she had sold other things and found that she had—small sketches, trinkets, a carving or two—before she’d sold the painting whose absence he had noticed. There was no way of proving what she had used the money for without searching her own personal accounts, and possibly not then. It could have been for gowns and perfumes, to make herself more attractive to a wandering husband, or for jewelry, or perhaps for medical expenses, or presents for James or even for someone else. Or maybe she gambled—some women did.

  He reached home a little after six, tired and dispirited. It was not only the difficulty of the case, it was the thought of promotion, of guiding other men rather than doing the work himself. But he must never let Charlotte know his feelings or it would rob her of any pleasure in the rewards it would bring. He must disguise his feeling of loss.

  She was in the kitchen finishing the children’s tea and preparing his. The whole room was warm, softly glowing from the gas lamps on the wall as the light faded in the sky outside. The wooden table was scrubbed clean and there was a smell of soap and hot bread and some kind of fragrant steam he could not place.

  He went to her without speaking and took her in his arms, holding her closely, kissing her, ignoring her wet hands and the flour on her apron. And after her first surprise she responded warmly, even passionately.

  He got it over with straightaway, before he had time to think or regret.

  “I’m to be promoted! Drummond said as soon as this case is finished. It will mean far more money, and influence, and position!”

  She held him even harder, burying her face against his shoulder. “Thomas, that’s wonderful! You deserve it—you’ve deserved it for ages! Will you still be out working on cases?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’ll be safer too!”

  He had done it, told her without a shadow, without her suspecting anything but joy and pride. He felt a moment of terrible isolation. She did not even know what it cost him; she had no idea how intensely he would rather be on the street, with people, feeling the dirt and the pain and the reality of it. It was the only way to understand.