Highgate Rise (26 page)

“I don’t know. Something about Shaw and Clemency, perhaps; or Theophilus’s death.”

“Do you think Theophilus was murdered?” Murdo’s voice changed and he faltered in his stride as the thought occurred to him. “Do you think Shaw killed him so his wife would inherit sooner? Then he killed his wife? That’s dreadful. But why Lindsay, sir? What had he to gain from that? Surely he wouldn’t have done it as a blind, just because it was—pointless.” The enormity of it made him shudder and nearly miss his footstep on the path.

“I doubt it,” Pitt replied, stretching his pace to keep warm and pulling his muffler tighter around his neck. It was cold enough to snow. “But he’s stayed with Lindsay for several days. Lindsay’s no fool. If Shaw made a mistake, betrayed himself in some way by a word, or an omission, Lindsay would have seen it and understood what it meant. He may have said nothing at the time, but Shaw, knowing his own guilt and fearing discovery, may have been frightened by the smallest thing, and acted immediately to protect himself.”

Murdo hunched his shoulders and his face tightened as the ugliness of the thought caught hold of his mind. He looked cold and miserable in spite of his burned face.

“Do you think so, sir?”

“I don’t know, but it’s possible. We can’t ignore it.”

“It’s brutal.”

“Burning people to death is brutal.” Pitt clenched his teeth against the wind stinging the flesh and creeping into every ill-covered corner of neck and wrist and ankle. “We’re not looking for a moderate or squeamish man—or woman.”

Murdo looked away, refusing to meet Pitt’s eyes or even guess his thoughts when he spoke of women and these crimes. “There must be other motives,” he said doggedly. “Shaw’s a doctor. He could have treated all kinds of diseases, deaths that someone wants hidden—or at least the way of it. What if someone else murdered Theophilus Worlingham?”

“Who?” Pitt asked.

“Mrs. Shaw? She would inherit.”

“And then burned herself to death—and Lindsay?” Pitt said sarcastically.

Murdo restrained an angry answer with difficulty. Pitt was his superior and he dared not be openly rude, but the unhappiness inside him wanted to lash out. Every time Pitt mentioned motive Flora’s face came back to his mind, flushed with anger, lovely, full of fire to defend Shaw.

Pitt’s voice broke through his thoughts.

“But you are right; there is a whole area of motive we haven’t even begun to uncover. God knows what ugly or tragic secrets. We’ve got to get Shaw to tell us.”

They were almost at the Worlinghams’ house and nothing more was said until they were in the morning room by the fire. Angeline was sitting upright in the large armchair and Celeste was standing behind her.

“I’m sure I don’t know what we can tell you, Mr. Pitt,” Celeste said quietly. She looked older than the last time he had seen her; there were lines of strain around her eyes and mouth and her hair was pulled back more severely in an unflattering fashion. But it made the strength of her face more
apparent. Angeline, on the other hand, looked pale and puffy, and the softer shape of her jaw, sagging a little, showed her irresolution. There were signs of weeping in the redness of her eyelids, and she looked tremulous enough to weep again now.

“We were asleep,” Angeline added. “This is terrible! What is happening to us? Who would do these things?”

“Perhaps if we learn why, we will also know who.” Pitt guided them towards the subject he wanted.

“Why?” Angeline blinked. “We don’t know!”

“You may, Miss Worlingham—without realizing it. There is money involved, inheritances …”

“Our money?” Celeste said the word unconsciously.

“Your brother Theophilus’s money, to be exact,” Pitt corrected her. “But yes, Worlingham money. I know it is intrusive, but it is necessary that we know; can you tell us all you remember of your brother’s death, Miss Worlingham?” He looked from one to the other of them, making sure they knew he included them both.

“It was very sudden,” Celeste’s features hardened, her mouth forming a thin, judgmental line. “I am afraid I agree with Angeline: Stephen did not care for him as we would have wished. Theophilus was in the most excellent health.”

“If you had known him,” Angeline added, “you would have been as shocked as we were. He was such a—” She searched her memory for the vision of him as he had been. “He was so vigorous.” She smiled tearfully. “He was so alive. He always knew what to do. He was so decisive, you know, a natural leader, like Papa. He believed in health in the mind and a lot of exercise and fresh air for the body—for men, of course. Not ladies. Theophilus always knew the right answer, and what one should believe. He was not Papa’s equal, of course, but still I never knew him when he was mistaken about anything that mattered.” She sniffed hard and reached for a wholly inadequate wisp of a handkerchief. “We always doubted the manner of his death, one may as well say so now. It was not natural, not for Theophilus.”

“What was the cause, Miss Worlingham?”

“Stephen said it was apoplexy,” Celeste answered coldly. “But of course we have only his word for that.”

“Who found him?” Pitt pressed, although he already knew.

“Clemency.” Celeste’s eyes opened wide. “Do you believe Stephen killed him, and then when he realized that Clemency knew what he had done, he killed her also? And then poor Mr. Lindsay. Dear heaven.” She shivered convulsively. “How evil—how monstrously evil. He shall not come into this house again—not set foot over the step!”

“Of course not, dear.” Angeline sniffed noisily. “Mr. Pitt will arrest him, and he will be put in prison.”

“Hanged,” Celeste corrected grimly.

“Oh dear.” Angeline was horrified. “How dreadful—thank heaven Papa did not live to see it. Someone in our family hanged.” She began to weep, her shoulders bent, her body huddled in frightened misery.

“Stephen Shaw is not in our family!” Celeste snapped. “He is not and never was a Worlingham. It is Clemency’s misfortune that she married him, but she became a Shaw—he is not one of us.”

“It is still dreadful. We have never had such shame anywhere near us, even by marriage,” Angeline protested. “The name of Worlingham has been synonymous with honor and dignity of the highest order. Just imagine what poor Papa would have felt if the slightest spot of dishonor had touched his name. He never did anything in his entire life to merit an ugly word. And now his son has been murdered—and his granddaughter—and her husband will be hanged. He would have died of shame.”

Pitt let her continue because he was curious to see how easily and completely they both accepted that Shaw was guilty. Now he must impress on them that it was only one of several possibilities.

“There is no need to distress yourself yet, Miss Worlingham. Your brother’s death may well have been apoplexy, just as Dr. Shaw said, and we do not know that he is guilty of anything yet. It may have nothing to do with money. It
may well be that he has treated some medical case which he realized involved a crime, or some disease that the sufferer would kill to keep secret.”

Angeline looked up sharply. “You mean insanity? Someone is mad, and Stephen knows about it? Then why doesn’t he say? They ought to be locked up in Bedlam, with other lunatics. He shouldn’t allow them to go around free—where they can burn people to death.”

Pitt opened his mouth to explain to her that perhaps the person only thought Shaw knew. Then he looked at the mounting hysteria in her, and at Celeste’s tense eyes, and decided it would be a waste of time.

“It is only a possibility,” he said levelly. “It may be someone’s death was not natural, and Dr. Shaw knew of it, or suspected it. There are many other motives, perhaps even some we have not yet thought of.”

“You are frightening me,” Angeline said in a small, shaky voice. “I am very confused. Did Stephen kill anyone, or not?”

“No one knows,” Celeste answered her. “It is the police’s job to find out.”

Pitt asked them several more questions, indirectly about Shaw or Theophilus, but learned nothing more. When they left, the sky had cleared and the wind was even colder. Pitt and Murdo walked side by side in silence till they reached Oliphant’s lodging house and at last found Shaw sitting in the front parlor by the fire writing up notes at a rolltop desk. He looked tired, his eyes ringed around with dark hollows and his skin pale, almost papery in quality. There was grief in the sag of his shoulders and the nervous energy in him was transmuted into tension, and jumpiness of his hands.

“There is no point in asking me who I treated or for what ailment,” he said tersely as soon as he saw Pitt. “Even if I knew of some disease that would prompt someone to kill me, there is certainly nothing that would cause anyone to harm poor Amos. But then I suppose he died because I was in his house.” His voice broke; he found the words so hard
to say. “First Clemency—and now Amos. Yes, I suppose you are right; if I really knew who it was, I would do something about it—I don’t know what. Perhaps not tell you—but something.”

Pitt sat down in the chair nearest him without being asked, and Murdo stood discreetly by the door.

“Think, Dr. Shaw,” he said quietly, looking at the exhausted figure opposite him and hating the need to remind him of his role in the tragedy. “Please think of anything you and Amos Lindsay discussed while you were in his house. It is possible that you were aware of some fact that, had you understood it, would have told you who set the first fire.”

Shaw looked up, a spark of interest in his eyes for the first time since they had entered the room. “And you think perhaps Amos understood it—and the murderer knew?”

“It’s possible,” Pitt replied carefully. “You knew him well, didn’t you? Was he the sort of man who might have gone to them himself—perhaps seeking proof?”

Suddenly Shaw’s eyes brimmed with tears and he turned away, his voice thick with emotion. “Yes,” he said so quietly Pitt barely heard him. “Yes—he was. And God help me, I’ve no idea who he saw or where he went when I was there. I was so wrapped up in my own grief and anger I didn’t see and I didn’t ask.”

“Then please think now, Dr. Shaw.” Pitt rose to his feet, moved more by pity not to intrude on a very obvious distress than the sort of impersonal curiosity his profession dictated. “And if you remember anything at all, come and tell me—no one else.”

“I will.” Shaw seemed sunk within himself again, almost as if Pitt and Murdo had already left.

Outside in the late-afternoon sun, pale and already touched with the dying fire of autumn, Murdo looked at Pitt, his eyes narrowed against the cold.

“Do you think that’s what happened, sir: Mr. Lindsay realized who did it—and went looking for proof?”

“God knows,” Pitt replied. “What did he see that we haven’t?”

Murdo shook his head and together, hands deep in pockets, they trudged back along the footpath towards the Highgate police station.

7

C
HARLOTTE WAS
deeply distressed that Lindsay had died in the second fire. Her relief that Shaw had escaped was like a healing on the surface of the first fear, but underneath that skin of sudden ease there ached the loss of a man she had seen and liked so very shortly since. She had noticed his kindness, especially to Shaw at his most abrasive. Perhaps he was the only one who understood his grief for Clemency, and the biting knowledge that she might have died in his place; that some enmity he had earned, incited, somehow induced, had sparked that inferno.

And now Amos Lindsay was gone too, burned beyond recognition.

How must Shaw be feeling this morning? Grieved—bewildered—guilty that yet another had suffered a death meant for him—frightened in case this was not the end? Would there go on being fires, more and more deaths until his own? Did he look at everyone and wonder? Was he even now searching his memory, his records, to guess whose secret was so devastating they would murder to keep it? Or did he already know—but feel bound by some professional ethic to guard it even at this price?

She felt the need for more furious action while the questions
raced through her thoughts. She stripped the beds and threw the sheets and pillowcases down the stairs, adding nightshirts for all the family, and towels; then followed them down, carrying armfuls into the scullery, off the kitchen, where she filled both tubs with water and added soap to one, screwed the mangle between them, and began the laundry. She was in one of her oldest dresses, sleeves rolled up and a pinafore around her waist, scrubbing fiercely, and she let her mind return to the problem again.