Southampton Row

by Anne Perry

  The police said that there was something in Maude Lamont’s papers which indicated that she had known who the third man was, and that he, like the other two, had been blackmailed by her. They were close to a breakthrough, and when they read her diaries again, with this new understanding, they would have the identity of Cartouche, and of her murderer.

  The Bishop had gone to Southampton Row. She knew it as surely as if she had followed him there. He was the one who had gone to Maude Lamont’s séances, hoping to find some kind of proof that there was life after death, that his spirit would live on in a form he could recognize. It was not extinction that awaited him, but merely change. All the Christian teachings of his lifetime had built no sure faith in him. In his desperation he had turned to a spirit medium, with her table rappings, levitation, ectoplasm. Far worse than that, which held more horror, doubt and weakness, and which she could understand only too easily, he had known fear, loneliness soul-deep, even the hollow, consuming well of despair. But he had done it secretly, and even when Maude Lamont had been murdered, he had not come forward. He had allowed Francis Wray to be suspected of being the third person, and to have his reputation ruined, and now Pitt’s as well.

  Her anger and her contempt for him burned in a pain that ran through her mind and body, consuming her. She sat down suddenly in his chair, the newspaper dropped onto the table, still open at the article. It had been proved that Francis Wray was not the third person, but too late to save his grief, or his sense that all his life’s meaning had been denied as far as those who had loved and cherished him could see. Too late, above all, to prevent him from committing the irretrievable act of taking his own life.

  Could she ever forgive Reginald for his part in letting that happen, for his utter cowardice?

  What was she going to do? Reginald was even now going to Southampton Row to see if he could find and destroy the evidence that implicated him. What loyalty did she owe him?

  He was doing something she believed to be profoundly wrong. It was hypocritical and ugly, but it was largely his own destruction rather than anyone else’s. Worse, he had allowed Francis Wray to be blamed for long enough to destroy him, to be the last weight of misery on top of his grief, which had broken him, perhaps not only for this life but for the life to come. Although she could not accept that God would condemn forever any man, or woman, who had finally broken, perhaps only for one fatal instant, beneath something too great for them to bear.

  It could not be undone. Wray was gone. The degree of sin in his death was beyond anyone to alter. If the church concealed it and gave him a decent burial that would redeem him to the world, but it altered none of the truth.

  What was her deepest loyalty now? How far along the road of his cowardice did she have to go with her husband? Not all the way. You did not owe it to anyone to drown yourself along with him.

  And yet she was perfectly sure that he would regard it as betrayal whenever she left him.

  Did he know who had killed Maude Lamont? Was it even imaginable that he had done it himself? Surely not! No! He was shallow, self-important, condescending, totally absorbed in his own feelings and oblivious of the joy or the pain of anyone else. And he was a coward. But he would not have committed any of the open sins, the ones that even he could not deny because they were against the law of the land, and he would be forced to conceal them. Even he could not justify murdering Maude Lamont, no matter what she had blackmailed him for.

  But he might know who had, and why. The police must know the truth. She had no idea how to contact Pitt at Special Branch, and the new commander of Bow Street was a stranger to her. She needed to speak to someone she knew. This was going to be agonizing enough without trying to explain to a stranger. She would go to Cornwallis. He would begin halfway towards understanding.

  Now that she had made up her mind she did not hesitate. It hardly mattered what she wore, simply that she composed her mind to speak sensibly and to tell only the truth she knew and allow him to make all deductions. She must not permit her anger or her contempt to show through, or the bitterness that welled up inside her. There must be no manipulation of emotions. She must tell him as one person to another, no more, and with no reminder, however subtle, of what either of them might feel.

  Cornwallis was in his office but occupied with someone. She asked if she might wait, and nearly half an hour later she was taken up by a constable and found Cornwallis standing in the middle of his room waiting for her.

  The constable closed the door behind her and she remained standing.

  Cornwallis opened his mouth to say something, the conventional greeting, to give himself time to adjust to her presence. And then before he could speak, he saw the pain in her eyes.

  He took half a step forward. “What is it?”

  She stood where she was, keeping the distance between them. This must be done carefully, and without ever losing her self-control.

  “This morning something occurred which makes me believe that I know who the third person was who visited Maude Lamont on the night of her death,” she began. “He was indicated only by the little drawing which looks rather like a small f with a semicircle over the top.” Now it was too late to retreat. She had committed herself. What would he think of her? That she was disloyal? He probably regarded that as the ultimate human sin. One does not betray one’s own, no matter what the circumstances. She stared at him, and could read nothing of what was in his face.

  He looked at the chair as if to invite her to sit down, then changed his mind. “What was it that happened?” he asked.

  “The police have issued a statement saying that they believe Maude Lamont knew the identity of that person,” she replied. “She was blackmailing him, and there are papers still in her house in Southampton Row, together with the information that Mr. Pitt gathered from the Reverend Francis Wray.” Her voice dropped at mention of Wray’s name, and for all her intentions not to allow it, her anger came through. “It will make his identity plain.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, frowning. “Superintendent Wetron told the press.”

  She took a deep breath. She wished she could control the lurching of her heart and the dizziness in her, the sheer physical reactions that were going to let her down. “When my husband read that at the breakfast table he went completely white,” she continued. “And then he rose and said that he was canceling his appointments this morning, and has left the house.” Put like that it sounded absurd, as if she wanted to believe it was Reginald. That was proof of nothing at all, except what was going on in her own mind. No wife who loved her husband would have leaped to such a conclusion. Cornwallis must see that—and despise her for it! Did he think she was trying to create some excuse to leave Reginald?

  That was terrible! She must make him understand that she truly believed it, and that it had come to her only slowly, and reluctantly.

  “He is ill!” she said jerkily.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. He looked terribly awkward, not knowing whether to offer any more sympathy, as if it were an irrelevance.

  “He is afraid he is dying,” she hurried on. “I mean really very afraid. I suppose I should have realized years ago.” Now she was speaking too quickly, words falling over each other. “All the signs were there if I’d been looking, but it never occurred to me. He preached so vividly . . . sometimes . . . with such power . . .” That was true, at least it was how she remembered it. Her voice dropped. “But he has no belief in God. Now, when it really matters, he is not sure if there is anything beyond the grave. That is why he went to a spirit medium, to try to contact a dead person, any dead person, just to know they were there.”

  He looked stunned. She could see it in his face, his unblinking eyes, the line of his lips. He had no idea what to say to her. Was it pity that silenced him, or disgust?

  She felt both herself, and shame because Reginald was her husband. However far apart they were in thought or care, they were still tied together by the years they had been married. Perhaps she c
ould have helped him if she had loved him enough? Perhaps the depth of the love she longed for had nothing to do with it; common humanity for a fellow being should have reached across the gulf and offered something!

  It was too late now.

  “Of course when she knew who he was, that gave her the means to blackmail him.” Her voice was now little more than a whisper. She felt the color hot in her cheeks. “‘Church of England Bishop goes to spirit medium to seek proof of life after death!’ He’d be a laughingstock. It would ruin him.” As she said it she realized just how much that was true. Would he have killed to prevent it? She had started out quite sure that that was impossible—but was it? If his reputation were gone, what had he left? How far had his illness, and the fear of death, unbalanced his mind? Fear can warp almost anything, only love was strong enough to overcome it . . . and did Reginald really love anything well enough for that?

  “I’m so sorry,” Cornwallis said with a break in his voice. “I . . . I wish I could . . .” He stopped, staring at her helplessly, not knowing what to do with his hands.

  “Aren’t you going to . . . to do something?” she asked. “If he finds the evidence he’ll destroy it. That’s what he’s gone for.”

  He shook his head. “There isn’t any,” he answered quietly. “We put it in the paper to try to make Cartouche show himself.”

  “Oh . . .” She was stunned. Reginald had betrayed himself unnecessarily. He would be caught. The police would be waiting for him. But that was what she had come here for, it had to be. She could never have imagined Cornwallis would simply listen and not act, and yet now that it was going to happen, she realized the enormity of it. It would be the end of her husband’s career, a complete disgrace. He would not ever be able to retire behind excuses of ill health, because the police would be involved. He might even be charged with something—obstruction, or concealing evidence. She refused to think, even in the very back of her mind, of a charge of murder.

  Suddenly, Cornwallis was standing in front of her, his hands holding her arms, steadying her as if she had swayed and were about to fall over.

  “Please . . .” he said urgently. “Please . . . sit down. Let me send for tea . . . or something. Brandy?” He slid his arm around her and led her to the chair, still holding her as she sank down into it.

  “The drawing,” she said, gulping a little. “It wasn’t an f, it was a bishop’s crozier, under a hill. It’s very clear when you think about it. I don’t want brandy, thank you. Tea would be quite all right.”

  Pitt knew that if he went to Southampton Row alone he could not prove anything satisfactorily, either about the identity of Cartouche or about his involvement in the death of Maude Lamont. Tellman was in Devon, and Pitt did not trust anyone from Bow Street, even supposing Wetron would give him somebody, which was unlikely without an explanation. And of course he could not explain, not knowing Wetron’s own involvement in any of it.

  Therefore he went straight to Narraway, and it was Narraway himself who came with Pitt to Southampton Row in the bright, early sunlight of the July morning. They traveled in mere silence, each absorbed in his own thoughts.

  Pitt could not rid his mind of his memory of Francis Wray. He hardly dared allow himself to hope that an autopsy would somehow show that Wray had not taken his own life, even if only to Pitt. Whether they could ever prove it to the rest of the world was another matter.

  He repeated in his mind all that he thought he had asked of the people in the village. Were the questions so open, so accusatory, that anyone would have supposed from them that Wray was suspected of being involved in Maude Lamont’s death? And if he went to see her with the intent of exposing her manifestations as fraud, then where was there any fault or hypocrisy in that?

  And it was very easy to believe that in his outrage at the damage spirit mediums could do, he might well have used all his energy to expose them. Pitt thought back to the story of the young woman Penelope, who had lived in Teddington, and whom Wray must have known. She had lost her child and been tricked and misled by séances and manifestations, and when she had seen through them, in despair she had taken her own life.

  He already knew that Maude Lamont had used mechanical tricks, at least some of the time—the table, for example—and he could not help feeling that the collected electric light bulbs were part of an illusion also. That number of them was certainly not for ordinary domestic use.

  Was it conceivable she had some real power, of which she herself was only partly aware? More than one of her clients had said she seemed startled by some of the manifestations, as if she had not engineered them herself. And she had no helper. Lena Forrest denied all knowledge of her arts or how they were exercised.

  Then another thought occurred to him, new and extraordinary, but the more he weighed it and measured it against all he knew, the more it seemed to make some kind of sense.

  When they reached Southampton Row he climbed out of the hansom, with Narraway at his heels. Narraway paid the cabbie and they waited until he had driven away before they turned into the short alley of Cosmo Place.

  Narraway looked at the door into the garden of Maude Lamont’s house.

  “It’ll be locked,” Pitt observed.

  “Probably.” Narraway squinted at it. “But I’m not climbing that damn wall and then finding I didn’t have to.” He put out his hand and tried the iron ring, turning it a quarter of a circle until it stopped. He grunted.

  “I’ll give you a lift up,” Pitt offered.

  Narraway shot him a malicious glance, but considering their relative heights, and Narraway’s slender build, it would have been absurd for him to have tried to lift Pitt. He regarded his trousers, his lips forming a thin line as he considered what the mossy stone would do to them, then turned to Pitt impatiently. “Get on with it, then! I would greatly prefer not to be caught doing this and trying to explain myself to the local constable on the beat.”

  Pitt grinned at the idea, but it was brief, and there was little pleasure in it. He bent and made a cradle of his hands and Narraway stepped gingerly onto it. Pitt straightened up and in seconds Narraway was on top of the wall, scrambling for a moment, until he found his balance and sat astride, then he leaned forward and offered Pitt his hand. It was an effort to haul himself up, but after a few very undignified wriggles he breasted the wall, and a moment later swung his legs over and down onto the earth at the far side, immediately followed by Narraway.

  He brushed as much of the moss stain and dust off himself as he could, then stared around. It was the reverse of the view he had seen from the strip of grass in front of the French windows of the parlor. “Keep back.” He waved. “Another couple of yards and we can be seen from the house.”

  “Then what, exactly, are we doing here?” Narraway retorted. “We can’t see the front door and we can’t see the parlor. And now we can’t even see the street!”

  “If we keep to the bushes we can make our way to the back of the house, and once we’ve seen where Lena Forrest is, we’ll know if she goes to answer the door, and we can get inside through the back,” Pitt replied softly. He moved over to shelter behind the laurels as he spoke, motioning Narraway to follow him. “Since Cartouche always came through the side door anyway, I think that’s probably the way he’ll come now, if he’s still got the key.”

  “Then we’d better make sure the bar is up,” Narraway observed, looking back over his shoulder at the door. “And it’s not!” He strode rapidly over to it and in a single movement lifted the bar up and laid it back off the rests that kept it closed. Then he drew back behind the shelter of the bushes beside Pitt.

  Pitt’s mind was still half occupied with the idea which had come to him. He looked up at the branches of the silver birch trees above the laurels. There would probably be nothing to see, no mark now, but he could not help searching.

  “What is it?” Narraway said crossly. “He’s hardly going to come down from the sky!”

  “Can you see any notches up there, notc
hes rubbed bare of moss or scraping on the bark?” Pitt said softly.

  Narraway’s face was tense, interest flaring in his eyes. “Like a rope burn? Why?”

  “An idea. It may be . . .”

  “Of course it’s an idea!” Narraway snapped. “What?”

  “To do with the night Maude Lamont was killed, and tricks, illusion that there might have been.”

  “We’ll discuss it when we’re watching the woman. I don’t care how brilliant your theory is, it’ll do us no good if we miss Cartouche arriving . . . assuming he comes.”

  Obediently, Pitt started to creep along the wall, as much as possible keeping concealed behind the various bushes and shrubs until they were fifteen yards away from the door in the wall, and only four yards from the scullery windows and the back door. They could see the shadowy figure of Lena Forrest moving about in the kitchen. Presumably she was getting herself breakfast and perhaps beginning whatever chores she had for the day. It must be a long, drawn-out, boring time for her with no mistress in the house to care for. They could not expect her to remain here much longer.

  “Why were you looking for rope marks?” Narraway said insistently.

  “Did you see any?” Pitt countered.

  “Yes, very slight, a mark more like twine than rope. What was on it? Something to do with Cartouche?”

  “No.”

  They heard the sound at the same instant, the scraping of a key in the lock of the garden door. As one they shrank back behind the heavy leaves, and Pitt found himself holding his breath.

  There was no sound until the key scraped again and then the slight clunk of the bar being dropped back. There were no footfalls across the grass.

  They waited. Seconds ticked by. Was the visitor waiting also, or had he passed by soundlessly and might already be inside?

  Narraway moved very carefully until he could see the side of the house. “He’s gone in through the French windows,” he said softly. “I can see him in the parlor.” He straightened up. “There’s no cover outside here. We’d better go around the back. If we run into the woman we’ll have to tell her.” And without waiting for Pitt to argue, he sprinted across the open space towards the scullery door and stopped just outside.