Paragon Walk (3 page)

The humor and the pleasantness vanished as suddenly as winter sun, leaving a chill in the room behind it.

Pitt felt obliged to speak, but his voice was remote, and it sounded trivial, meaningless.

“Did she make any remark about calling upon anyone else?”

Vespasia seemed to have been touched by the same coldness.

“No,” she said solemnly. “She had stayed here long enough to serve her purpose. If Eliza Pomeroy had chanced still to be at the Nashes, she could quite easily have excused herself and gone straight up to bed without discourtesy. From her conversation before leaving here, I gathered she intended to go straight home.”

“She took her leave of you some time after ten?” Pitt confirmed. “How long do you judge she was here?”

“A little above a half an hour. She came in the early dusk and left when it was fully dark.”

That would be roughly quarter to ten until about quarter past, he thought. She must have been attacked somewhere in the short journey down Paragon Walk. They were large houses with broad frontages, carriageways, and shrubbery deep enough to hide a figure, but even so there were only three between Emily’s and the Nashes’. She could not have been on the street for more than minutes—unless she had called somewhere else after all?

“She was engaged to marry Algernon Burnon?” His mind searched for possibilities.

“Very suitable,” Vespasia agreed. “A pleasant enough young man of quite adequate means. His habits are sober and his manners good, if a trifle boring, so far as I know. Altogether a suitable choice.”

Pitt wondered inwardly how much good sense appealed to seventeen-year-old Fanny.

“Do you know, ma’am,” he said aloud, “if there was anyone else who especially admired her?” He hoped his meaning was plain under such genteel disguise.

She looked at him with a slight puckering of her eyebrows, and over her shoulder he could see Emily wince.

“I can imagine no one, Mr. Pitt, who held such feelings for her as to precipitate last night’s tragedy, which I presume is what you are trying to say?”

Emily shut her eyes and bit her lip to stop herself from laughing.

Pitt was aware he had fallen into precisely the strain of language he despised, and both women knew it. Now he must avoid overcompensating.

“Thank you, Lady Cumming-Gould.” He stood up, “I’m sure if anything comes to your mind that you believe could help us, you will let us know. Thank you, Lady Ashworth.”

Vespasia nodded slightly and permitted herself a faint smile, but Emily came around the table from the back of the sofa and held out both her hands.

“Please give my love to Charlotte. I shall be calling upon her directly, but not until the worst of this is over. But perhaps that won’t be long?”

“I hope not.” He touched her hand gently, but he had no belief that it would be so brief, or so easy. Investigations were not pleasant, and things were seldom the same afterward. There was always hurt.

He visited several of the other houses along the Walk and found at home Algernon Burnon, Lord and Lady Dilbridge, who had held the party, Mrs. Selena Montague, a very handsome widow, and the Misses Horbury. By half past five he left its quiet dignity and made his way back to the scruffy, heelworn utility of the police station. By seven he was at his own front door. The facade of the house was narrow, tidy, but there was no carriageway, no trees, only a scrubbed and whitened step and the wooden gateway through to the back yard.

He opened the door with his key, and at once the same little bubble of pleasure that rose inside him every time burst in warmth, and he found himself smiling. Violence and ugliness slipped away.

“Charlotte?”

There was a clatter in the kitchen, and his smile broadened. He went down the passage and stopped in the doorway. She was on her knees on the scrubbed floor, and two saucepan lids were still rolling just out of her reach under the table. She was in a plain dress with a white apron over it, and her shining, mahogany hair was coming out of its knot in long, trailing strands. She looked up and pulled a face, grabbing at the lids and missing. He bent and picked them up for her, holding out his other hand. She took it, and he pulled her up and toward him. As she relaxed in his arms, he dropped the lids on the table. It was good to feel her, the warmth of her body, of her answering mouth on his.

“Who have you been chasing today?” she asked after a moment.

He pushed the hair off her face.

“Murder,” he said quietly. “And rape.”

“Oh,” her face stiffened a little, perhaps memory. “I’m sorry.”

It would have been easy to have left it at that, not to have told her that it was someone Emily knew, living in Emily’s street, but she would have to know sometime. Emily would be bound to tell her. Perhaps they would solve it quickly after all—a drunken footman.

But she had already noticed his hesitation.

“Who was it?” she asked. Her first guess for his concern was wrong. “Was she someone with children?”

He thought of little Jemima, asleep upstairs now.

She saw the easing of his face, the shadow of relief.

“Who, Thomas?” she repeated.

“A young woman, a girl—”

She knew that was not all. “You mean a child?”

“No—no, she was seventeen. I’m sorry, love, she lived in Paragon Walk, just a few doors from Emily. I saw Emily this afternoon. She sent her love.”

Memories of Cater Street came back, of the fear that had ultimately reached into everything, touching and tainting everyone. She spoke the first fear that came to her mind.

“You don’t think George was—had anything to do with it?”

His face fell.

“Good heavens no! Of course not!”

She went back to the stove. She skewered the potatoes savagely to see if they were cooked, and two of them fell apart. She would like to have sworn at them, but she would not in front of him. If he still cherished her as a lady, let him keep his illusions. Her cooking was enough of a hurdle to overcome at one time. She was still enough in love with him to hunger for his admiration. Her mother had taught her how to govern a house most excellently and see that all the tasks were properly performed, but she had never foreseen that Charlotte would marry so far beneath her as to require that she actually do the cooking herself. It had been an experience not without its difficulties. It was to Pitt’s credit that he had laughed at her so little and only once lost his temper.

“Your dinner is nearly ready,” she said, carrying the pan to the sink. “Was Emily all right?”

“She seemed to be.” He sat on the edge of the table. “I met her Aunt Vespasia. Do you know her?”

“No. We don’t have an Aunt Vespasia. She must be George’s.”

“She ought to be yours,” he said with a sudden grin. “She is exactly as you might be when you get to be seventy or eighty.”

She let the pan go in her surprize and turned to stare at him, his body like some enormous flightless bird, coattails trailing.

“And the thought didn’t appall you?” she asked. “I’m surprized you still came home!”

“She was marvelous,” he laughed. “Made me feel a complete fool. She said precisely what she thought without a qualm.”

“I don’t do it without a qualm!” she defended herself. “I can’t help it, but I feel awful afterward.”

“You won’t by the time you’re seventy.”

“Get off the table. I’m going to put the vegetables on it.”

He moved obediently.

“Who else did you see?” she continued when they were in the dining room and the meal was begun. “Emily has told me something of the people in the Walk, although I’ve never been there.”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Of course, I do!” Why on earth did he need to ask? “If someone has been raped and murdered next door to Emily, I have to know about it. It wasn’t Jessamyn something-or-other, was it?”

“No. Why?”

“Emily can’t abide her, but she would miss her if she were not there. I think disliking her is one of her main entertainments. Although I shouldn’t speak like that of someone who might have been killed.”

He was laughing at her inside himself, and she knew it.

“Why not?” he asked.

She did not know why not, except she was quite sure her mother would have said so. She decided not to answer. Attack was the best form of defense.

“Then who was it? Why are you avoiding telling me?”

“It was Jessamyn Nash’s sister-in-law, a girl called Fanny.”

Suddenly gentility seemed irrelevant.

“Poor little child,” she said quietly. “I hope it was quick, and she knew little of it.”

“Not very. I’m afraid she was raped and then stabbed. She managed to make her way to the house and died in Jessamyn’s arms.”

She stopped with a forkful of meat halfway to her mouth, suddenly sick.

He saw it.

“Why the hell did you ask me in the middle of dinner?” he said angrily. “People die every day. You can’t do anything about it. Eat your food.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to point out that that did not make it any better. Then she realized that he had been hurt by it himself. He must have seen the body—it was part of his duty—and talked with those who had loved her. To Charlotte she was only imaginary, and imagination could be denied, while memory could not.

Obediently she put the food in her mouth, watching him. His face was calm, the anger entirely gone, but his shoulders were tense and he had forgotten to take any of the gravy she had so carefully made. Was he so moved by the death of the girl—or was it something far worse, fear that the investigations would uncover things uglier, close to him, something about George?

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
Pitt went first to the police station, where Forbes was waiting with a lugubrious face.

“Morning, Forbes,” Pitt said cheerfully. “What’s the matter?”

“Police surgeon’s been looking for you,” Forbes replied with a sniff. “Got a message about that corpse from yesterday.”

Pitt stopped.

“Fanny Nash? What message?”

“I don’t know. ’E wouldn’t say.”

“Well, where is he?” Pitt demanded. What on earth could the man have to say beyond the obvious? Was she with child? It was the only thing he could think of.

“Gone to ’ave a cup of tea,” Forbes shook his head. “I suppose we’re going back to Paragon Walk?”

“Of course, we are!” Pitt smiled at him and Forbes looked glumly back. “You can see a little more of how the gentry live. Try all the staff at that party.”

“Lord and Lady Dilbridge?”

“Precisely. Now I’m going to find that surgeon.” He swung out of the office and went to the little eating house on the corner where the police surgeon in a dapper suit was sitting over a pot of tea. He looked up as Pitt came in.

“Tea?” he inquired.

Pitt sat down.

“Never mind the breakfast. What about Fanny Nash?”

“Ah.” The surgeon took a long gulp from his cup. “Funny thing, that. May mean nothing at all, but thought I should mention it. She has a scar on her buttock, left buttock, low down. Looks pretty recent.”

Pitt frowned.

“A scar? Healed. So what does that matter?”

“Probably not at all,” the surgeon shrugged. “But it’s sort of cross-shaped, long bar with shorter cross bar toward the lower end. Very regular, but the funny thing about it is that it’s not a cut.” He looked up, his eyes very brilliant. “It’s a burn.”

Pitt sat perfectly still.

“A burn?” he said incredulously. “What on earth could burn her like that?”

“I don’t know,” the surgeon replied. “So help me, I don’t even care to think.”

Pitt left the tea house puzzled, unsure if it meant anything at all. Perhaps it was no more than a perverse and rather ridiculous accident. Meanwhile he must continue the dreary task of establishing where everyone had been at the time the murder was committed. He had already seen Algernon Burnon, the young man engaged to marry Fanny, and found him pale but as composed as was proper in the circumstances. He claimed to have been in the company of someone else all that evening, but refused to say whom. He implied it was a matter of honor that Pitt would not understand, but was too delicate to phrase it quite so plainly. Pitt could get no more from him and for the present was content to leave it so. If the wretched man had been indulging in some other affair at the very time his fiancée was being ravished, he would hardly care to admit it now.

Lord and Lady Dilbridge had been with company since seven o’clock, and could be written off. The household of the Misses Horbury contained no men at all. Selena Montague’s only manservant had been either in the servants’ hall or in his own pantry in view of the kitchen all the relevant time. That left Pitt with three more houses to call on and then the distressing duty of going back to the Nashes’ to see Jessamyn’s husband, the half brother of the dead girl. Lastly there was the personally awkward necessity of asking George Ashworth to account for his time. Pitt hoped, above anything else in the case, that George could do so.

He wished he could have got that interview over with first, but he knew that George would not be available so early in the morning. More than that, there was a foolishness in him that hoped he might discover some strong clue before he came to the necessity, something so urgent and pointed he could avoid asking George at all.

He began at the second house in the Walk, immediately after the Dilbridges’. At least this unpleasant task could be put behind him. There were three Nash brothers, and this was the house of the eldest, Mr. Afton Nash and his wife, and the youngest, Mr. Fulbert Nash, as yet single.

The butler let him in with weary resignation, warning him that the family was still at breakfast, and he must oblige him to wait. Pitt thanked him and, when the door was closed, began slowly to walk around the room. It was traditional, expensive, and yet made him feel uncomfortable. There were numerous leather-bound volumes in the bookcase in such neat order as to look unused. He ran his finger along them to see if there was dust on them, but they were immaculate, more to the credit of the housekeeper, he guessed, than of any reader. The bureau held the usual clutter of family photographs. None of them smiled, but that was usual; one had to hold a pose for so long that smiling was impossible. A sweetness of expression was the best that could be hoped for, and it had not been achieved here.