I watched the hood fall back from her face and hair, and for a moment felt even more confounded, as at first glance I did not recognize her. Yet before it could come fully free, settling around the back of her head, I heard myself audibly gasp.
“You recognize me,” she said, sounding neither disappointed nor concerned that I should do so. “How could you not?” she added. “What do I know of subterfuge or concealment?”
I wanted to say that she knew a great deal, standing before me with hair as black as the very night itself hanging like a frame around her strikingly beautiful face. It made her look younger thusly arranged, whereas the last time I had seen her it had been curled atop her head and as yellow as straw. “I could never forget your face, Mrs. Hutton,” I replied.
“I wish I could take that for a compliment.” She spoke wistfully, her eyes parroting the somber tone of her voice. “Is Mr. Pendragon not with you?”
“He will be along shortly,” I lied, not even certain why I had done so.
“Yes, of course,” she muttered, though I wondered if she believed me. “I . . .” She seemed to be studying me, and as she did so I caught a quick flash of blue from her eyes in the shadowy cast of a nearby gas lamp. “I have been watching your flat from here for the better part of the past day and a half, trying to summon the nerve to speak with the two of you. This morning I finally had the presence of mind to pay a man to follow you.” She dropped her gaze, but it was too dark for me to see whether she had flushed with the audacity of her statement. “He alerted me that you were having supper at that pub a short time ago.” Her eyes shifted back to mine. “I hope you will forgive my temerity. . . .”
“I see. Well, you might have tried knocking on our door as most people would do,” I bit back, trying not to let my vitriol against this murderous woman sink our conversation before it had even begun. She had sought me out for some reason, and I was determined to know it before I turned her over to the Yard for her complicity in six murders, including those of her own husband and infirm six-year-old son. And that did not even count the shooting death of Inspector Varcoe, who had lost his life during the arrest of her accomplice, Wynn Tessler.
“It is your understandable wrath that has left me cast out like a ghost upon your trail.” I don’t know whether it was the blackness of the hair around her face or the starkness of the night itself, but she looked sallow and drawn, and not at all the formidable woman Colin and I had run up against during the Connicle case. “Will you sit down for a moment, Mr. Pruitt?” she asked, the hint of pleading in her voice. She gestured at one of the iron benches nearby, all of them appearing cold and uninviting in the darkness.
“I should think we would be more comfortable if we went to my flat.”
“Doubtlessly so,” she responded at once, “but I cannot be so careless when I must presume that you would sooner see me in prison than hear me speak another word.” She managed something of a smile that was so filled with weariness I could not help but be struck by it.
“Very well,” I said after a moment, as enticed by curiosity as anything else. I followed her to the nearest bench and sat down beside her, leaving the largest gap between the two of us that I could so that any onlooker spying upon us would have thought we were not together at all.
“You know why I’m here,” she stated so softly that the wind nearly carried her voice away.
“Tell me,” I said, though I did have little doubt.
“You believe me a calculating woman who carries the responsibility of many deaths upon her heart. Am I right?”
I did not know what she was driving at nor did I have any desire to engage in her dubious games. Nothing would have pleased me more than to drag her to the nearest bobby so she could complete her self-assessment from within a cell, but that was out of the question. So I remained silent and decided to see if she would hang herself with her own words.
It took a full minute, the two of us sitting there like ornamental sculptures, awaiting the impending shower that even now was imbuing the night with the scent of ozone. “Is it too impossible to consider that Mr. Tessler drew the deepest wounds from me?” she spoke at last, her gaze having moved somewhere along the edge of the slender park. “I will not deny that I allowed myself to become entangled with him a few years ago, but it is not as you believe. My husband and I had become estranged in every way after the birth of our poor son, Will. It was evident almost at once that something was not right with him. He was always so docile. I would hold him and stare into his sweet face, but it was as if he could not see me. Like he was caught somewhere that the rest of us could not perceive.” Her voice hitched the slightest bit, but she maintained her composure, neither dropping her chin nor turning to look at me.
“Arthur blamed me, of course,” she continued. “Perhaps I am the one to blame. . . .” she added heavily. “I suppose that doesn’t matter anymore. But it drove us apart, Mr. Pruitt, and it crushed my spirit. So when Wynn Tessler began to pay me gentle heed, enquiring after my health and setting himself to my well-being . . .” She made a tsking sound as she continued to gaze off into the darkness another moment before suddenly turning and glaring at me, her eyes clear and hard and full of anguish. “And like a fool I allowed myself to fall into him. It was weakness, Mr. Pruitt, and desperation, and I have paid for that ever since.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheeks to keep from saying something unseemly. That she could imagine such a sordid confession might justify the murders of her husband and unfortunate son sickened me. Yet here she was sitting beside me, speaking as though she was nothing more than the victim of an impulsive decision she had come to regret, and hadn’t she just been the thoughtless little gadabout? “Your son . . .” I started to say, taking pains to speak slowly and with as level a tone as I could achieve, “. . . was still missing when you took your daughter and disappeared onto the Continent. You had left an address and contact information with the Yard, and it was, all of it, lies. That would seem to be what you truly thought of your sweet-faced son.” In spite of my best efforts I bit the words out more harshly than I had meant, expecting her to cower or look away shamefacedly. But she did neither. She held herself steady and continued to look at me, unabashed, or perhaps willing to accept what she knew she deserved.
“I do not deny a word of what you say,” she answered boldly. “By the time I took Anna to Claridge’s the night we discovered Willy missing, I knew what I was going to do. What I had to do,” she quickly corrected.
“Was that when you also decided to embezzle all of Edmond Connicle’s funds and those that Mr. Tessler controlled at Columbia Financial?”
“No, Mr. Pruitt,” she said without blinking. “Embezzling Wynn Tessler’s money had been my intention for several months. I was going to leave Arthur and take Anna and Willy somewhere safe where we could start over again. I had made a mess of everything, Mr. Pruitt. Arthur despised me and took every opportunity to flaunt his affections for other women where he knew I was sure to see. When Edmond Connicle set his eye on me I encouraged him. . . .” She hesitated a moment before seeming to force herself forward. “But it was a shameful decision, as I could not deny to myself that I was doing the same thing to Edmond’s poor, delicate wife that my own husband had been doing to me, which only served to force me closer to Wynn Tessler.” She stared off and shook her head. “Which was my final undoing.”
My head began to tumble about as she spoke, the starkness of black and white getting whirled with an unexpected range of grays as, for the first time since Wynn Tessler had railed his outrage at the duplicity of Charlotte Hutton, a seedling began to niggle at the back of my mind suggesting that maybe, just maybe, there was more to this case then any of us had suspected. “Whatever are you talking about, Mrs. Hutton?” I asked, gratified to hear that I still sounded gruff and unmoved.
“My reckless liaison with Mr. Tessler turned untenable almost at once.” She turned back to me, wrapping her arms around herself to ward off the rising cold, yet managin
g to look ever the more pitiable for it. “While I craved comfort and solace, Wynn Tessler was seeking control and financial gain. It started subtly: a passing word about how Arthur had squandered our money, how it was simply a matter of time before we found ourselves destitute. I was terrified, Mr. Pruitt. Not for myself but for my children. What would it do to Anna and most especially poor Will? He was going to need constant care for the whole of his life. I wept for fear of what would happen to them. Was he to spend his life in one of those horrid sanitariums?” She rubbed her forehead with a gloved hand and glanced away, still clinging to herself with her other arm. “I could not allow it. It terrified me to the core of my soul.”
“Is that why your son was killed?” I asked, the callousness of my question striking me uncomfortably.
Her eyes bolted back to mine and I could see a glint of fury behind them. “Never.” She spat the word as if it tasted of acid. “I was his mother, Mr. Pruitt. A mother does not kill her child, her own flesh and blood. It goes against the laws of nature and humanity. I would not expect you to understand.”
But in that she was mistaken, for not only did I understand but I knew her assertion to be flawed. My own mother had been testament to that. “I am sorry for your son,” I said after a moment, and in that I was telling the truth, “but I fail to see the point of what you are telling me or why I should not summon the next constable who happens by to put you in prison where you belong.”
She finally released her grip on herself and raised a hand toward me. “Hear me out, Mr. Pruitt, and if you feel the same when I am finished then you may do as you please.”
It was an undeniably seductive statement and yet it held a hollowness that I told myself to be wary of. “Go on.”
“You see, Mr. Pruitt, Wynn Tessler preyed on my fears and then he preyed on me. At first it was with his words, vile and threatening, and then it was with his fists. Never to my face. He never left a mark on my face, he was not foolish, but he did what he wanted with my body.” She suddenly reached up and pulled open the cloak she was wearing, dexterously unbuttoning the collar of her dress before I even realized what was happening. “Do you see, Mr. Pruitt?” she asked as she wrenched the top of her neckline apart, revealing a long, jagged scar that ran from her left bosom nearly fully across her décolleté where it disappeared beneath her camisole. “There are many others. Cuts, burns, scars . . .” she mumbled as she refastened her collar with tremoring hands. “He was savage. . . .” And for the first time her voice broke and she sagged slightly as she finished sealing the cloak around her throat. “I was helpless. There was nothing I could do. I was ruined. If Arthur had found out he would have cast me aside and forbade me to ever see our children again. And that was the hold Mr. Tessler used on me. I would do his bidding or he would destroy my life.” She released a disdainful chuckle, full of anger and regret as she looked back at me. “Which is exactly what he did anyway.”
“You ran, Mrs. Hutton,” I reminded her, though even as I said it I could not deny the shimmer of doubt that was still wafting along the farthest reaches of my brain. “People who are innocent, especially those who are victims, tend not to flee in the face of impending resolution.”
“Wynn Tessler had already seen to the murders of Edmond Connicle and my husband, and at that time my son was missing. To say that I was terrified for my daughter’s life—for my own life—would be a gross understatement. He was out of control, Mr. Pruitt, and you and Scotland Yard were no closer to a resolution than you had ever been. So yes, I ran. I ran to protect my daughter, and I ran to free myself from his hateful grip. It was the only thing left I could think to do. And as I told you before, I had been planning it from the time Mr. Tessler first started blackmailing me.”
“You should have sought out the authorities,” I scolded, but could not help feeling unfair for doing so. It was ever the simple answer that took no measure of what she had been through. So it did not surprise me when she gave a sardonic laugh.
“And how might that have played out, Mr. Pruitt? Confessing to Scotland Yard my infidelities? Do you really suppose that group of men would have looked upon me with any sympathy?”
She paused, her eyes boring into mine, but I had nothing to add. I knew she was right. They would have summoned her husband and remanded her to his custody for admonishment. His responsibility, his burden, his shame. And there it would have ended. “No one would have died,” I finally muttered, but even I recognized the futility of my own words.
She nodded and looked away again, her shame as evident as the crisp chill of the wind. “In the beginning Wynn talked only about stealing money. Taking enough to run off and set ourselves up somewhere for the rest of our lives.” Her gaze flicked back to me. “I was always part of his plan. He’d convinced himself that he loved me.” That biting laugh came again. “So I began to plot how I could get away from him. Him and Arthur. And then Wynn had Arthur murdered. He thought I would be pleased.” She shook her head. “I never wished Arthur ill. Our marriage had withered years before, but I did not wish him ill. He was the father of my children. . . .” Her voice faded as she pinched the collar of her cloak closed and held it with a fist.
“And then Wynn Tessler handed me the keys to the kingdom,” she said, her eyes drifting back and for the first time I could see that they were filled with a hard-edged triumph.
“He opened trade accounts with both of your names on them and began to siphon money over,” I spoke up, knowing where her story was leading.
“You have done your research.”
“Because of . . .” I wanted to say you but settled on, “this . . . a revered inspector from Scotland Yard lost his life, shot by your Mr. Tessler.”
She sucked in a breath and her shoulders tensed. “I didn’t know. . . .”
“You fled, Mrs. Hutton, and you stole nearly every farthing that Mr. Tessler had already extorted. What did you presume would be left in your wake?”
“I . . .” She shook her head and stared off.
A single raindrop struck my forehead and reminded me that this conversation had to come to an end. In spite of her story, there was no question what had to be done. “You need to come with me to the Yard, and you need to tell them what you have told me. All of it. You cannot keep running, and I suspect you have figured that out already.” I knew it was the freezing of her financial accounts in Switzerland that had brought her here in the first place. What I could not figure was why she had come to see me.
“I cannot do that, Mr. Pruitt,” she stated with the assurance of someone who believes they are speaking with the utmost sense. “Wynn Tessler remains a threat to me for as long as he is alive. Need I remind you that, other than your Scotland Yard inspector, he did not murder any of the people you hold me culpable for. He hired a man to do his bidding, and now that he knows how I have double-crossed him, he will most certainly not rest until he has had my life taken and, almost assuredly, that of my dear Anna as well. I cannot allow that, Mr. Pruitt. My daughter has already paid enough for my mistakes. I will not have her pay with her life.”
“The Yard can protect you and your daughter. . . .”
She barked out a laugh that silenced me at once. “Why should they be able to do so now when they could never before? How you can say such a thing and not cringe, Mr. Pruitt. . . .”
A drop struck the side of my face and I angrily brushed it away. She was not wrong. I hated what she was saying, but even Colin and I had been of little use until far too long into the horrid affair. “What do you want from me, Mrs. Hutton?” I asked, but I was sure I already knew.
She swept a hand against her cheek. We were about out of time for sitting in this little bit of park, so I anxiously waited for her to say what I knew she had come here for. “You can have the money back. You, Mr. Pendragon, and Scotland Yard. I was frightened and I allowed myself to be enticed into doing something I should never have done. All I ask”—she turned to look at me once more, her gaze settling upon me like a great, burdened t
hing—“is that you leave me just enough to live on and take care of my daughter.”
“It is not your money to keep,” I said without a second’s thought. “It was stolen from the Connicles, Mr. Tessler, and any number of investors from Columbia Financial. If you expect to keep any of it, you will need to prove that it is yours to do so.”
To my surprise she gave a soft, low laugh. “I took you for a man of compassion and understanding, Mr. Pruitt.” Her voice was flat and colorless as she gazed out across the narrow park, the raindrops beginning to pelt us with ever more conviction. “I am an aggrieved woman who has suffered the betrayal of her husband and the murder of her son and, while I do not presume to hold myself blameless, neither am I the fulcrum around which those other poor souls lost their lives. I too am a victim, scarred of mind and body, who seeks only to live a quiet life away from here where I can protect my only child.” She pulled the hood of the cloak up over her head and her face instantly disappeared back into its shadows. “I thought you would understand. I certainly hoped you would. I see now that I was mistaken.”
She stood up just as the rain began to spatter in earnest, and I too sprang to my feet, confused by everything she had told me and the marks she had revealed across her chest. Whether she was speaking the truth or playing me for a fool I was not sure, but I knew I could not simply let her disappear into the night. “You approach me unbidden in the dark of night after such a startling disappearance to tell me things I could not know, and expect that I might have some immediate resolution for you? I’m afraid you ask too much of me.” My thoughts were racing as I stood before her, unable to see her face to gauge whether my words were having any effect. “I can give you my word that I will not confide our meeting to the Yard, but I will speak with Mr. Pendragon. If there is anything to be done, anything we might do to assist you, he will need to be involved. If all that you have told me is the truth, Mrs. Hutton, then you appreciate the generosity of my offer.”
The Endicott Evil Page 7
