by Anne Perry
She swung around and looked at him with anger. Phrased like that and repeated blindly it sounded preposterous. It was the first spark of real emotion he had seen in her, and as such the very beginning of hope.
“No of course not,” she said coldly. “He was more than merely flirting with her. He had been having an affair with her and they were flaunting it in my face—and in front of my own daughter and her husband. It would have been enough to anger any woman.”
He watched her face closely, the remarkable features, the sleeplessness, the shock and the fear. He did see anger there also, but it was on the surface, a flare of temper, shallow and without heat, the flame of a match, not the searing heat of a furnace. Was that because she was lying about the flirting, the affair, or because she was too exhausted, too spent to feel any passion now? The object of her rage was dead and she was in the shadow of the noose herself.
“And yet many women must have endured it,” he replied, still watching her.
She lifted her shoulders very slightly and he realized again how thin she was. The white blouse and gray unhooped skirt made her look almost waiflike, except for the power in her face. She was not a childlike woman at all; that broad brow and short, round jaw were too willful to be demure, except by deliberate artifice, and it would be a deception short-lived.
“Tell me how it happened, Mrs. Carlyon,” he tried again. “Start that evening. Of course the affair with Mrs. Furnival had been continuing for some time. By the way, when did you first realize they were enamored of each other?”
“I don’t remember.” Still she did not look at him. There was no urgency in her at all. It was quite obvious she did not care whether he believed her or not. The emotion was gone again. She shrugged very faintly. “A few weeks, I suppose. One doesn’t know what one doesn’t want to.” Now suddenly there was real passion in her, harsh and desperately painful. Something hurt her so deeply it was tangible in the small room.
He was confused. One moment she felt so profoundly he could almost sense the pulse of it himself; the next she was numb, as if she were speaking of total trivialities that mattered to no one.
“And this particular evening brought it to a climax?” he said gently.
“Yes …” Her voice was husky anyway, with a pleasing depth to it unusual in a woman. Now it was little above a whisper.
“You must tell me what happened, event by event as you recall it, Mrs. Carlyon, if I am to … understand.” He had nearly said to help, when he remembered the hopelessness in her face and in her bearing, and knew that she had no belief in help. The promise would be without meaning to her, and she would reject him again for using it.
As it was she still kept her face turned away and her voice was tight with emotion.
“Understanding will not achieve anything, Mr. Rathbone. I killed him. That is all the law will know or care about. And that is unarguable.”
He smiled wryly. “Nothing is ever unarguable in law, Mrs. Carlyon. That is how I make my living, and believe me I am good at it. I don’t always win, but I do far more often than I lose.”
She swung around to face him and for the first time there was real humor in her face, lighting it and showing a trace of the delightful woman she might be in other circumstances.
“A true lawyer’s reply,” she said quietly. “But I am afraid I would be one of those few.”
“Oh please. Don’t defeat me before I begin!” He allowed an answering trace of lightness into his tone also. “I prefer to be beaten than to surrender.”
“It is not your battle, Mr. Rathbone. It is mine.”
“I would like to make it mine. And you do need a barrister of some kind to plead your case. You cannot do it yourself.”
“All you can do is repeat my confession,” she said again.
“Mrs. Carlyon, I dislike intensely any form of cruelty, especially that which is unnecessary, but I have to tell you the truth. If you are found guilty, without any mitigating circumstances, then you will hang.”
She closed her eyes very slowly and took a long, deep breath, her skin ashen white. As he had thought earlier, she had already touched this in her mind, but some defense, some hope had kept it just beyond her grasp. Now it was there in words and she could no longer pretend. He felt brutal watching her, and yet to have allowed her to cling to a delusion would have been far worse, immeasurably dangerous.
He must judge exactly, precisely all the intangible measures of fear and strength, honesty and love or hate which made her emotional balance at this moment if he were to guide her through this morass which he himself could only guess at. Public opinion would have no pity for a woman who murdered out of jealousy. In fact there would be little pity for a woman who murdered her husband whatever the reason. Anything short of life-threatening physical brutality was expected to be endured. Obscene or unnatural demands, of course, would be abhorred, but so would anyone crass enough to mention such things. What hell anyone endured in the bedroom was something people preferred not to speak of, like fatal diseases and death itself. It was not decent.
“Mrs. Carlyon…”
“I know,” she whispered. “They will…” She still could not bring herself to say the words, and he did not force her. He knew they were there in her mind.
“I can do a great deal more than simply repeat your confession, if you will tell me the truth,” he went on. “You did not simply push your husband over the banister and then stab him with the halberd because he was overfamiliar with Mrs. Furnival. Did you speak to him about it? Did you quarrel?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She turned to look at him, her blue eyes uncomprehending.
“What?”
“Why did you not speak to him?” he repeated patiently. “Surely at some time you must have told him his behavior was distressing you?”
“Oh … I—yes.” She looked surprised. “Of course … I asked him to be—discreet …”
“Is that all? You loved him so much you were prepared to stab him to death rather than allow another woman to have him—and yet all you did was to ask—” He stopped. He could see in her face that she had not even thought of that sort of love. The very idea of a consuming sexual passion which culminated in murder was something that had not occurred to her with regard to herself and the general. She seemed to have been speaking of something else.
Their eyes met, and she realized that to continue with that pretense would be useless.
“No.” She looked away and her voice changed again. “It was the betrayal. I did not love him in that way.” The very faintest smile tugged at the corners of her wide mouth. “We had been married twenty-three years, Mr. Rathbone. Such a long-lived passion is not impossible, I suppose, but it would be rare.”
“Then what, Mrs. Carlyon?” he demanded. “Why did you kill him as he lay there in front of you, senseless? And do not tell me you were afraid he would attack you for having pushed him, either physically or in words. The last thing he would have done was allow the rest of the dinner party to know that his wife had pushed him downstairs. It has far too much of the ridiculous.”
She drew breath, and let it out again without speaking.
“Had he ever beaten you?” he asked. “Seriously?”
She did not look at him. “No,” she said very quietly. “It would help if he had, wouldn’t it? I should have said yes.”
“Not if it is untrue. Your word alone would not be greatly helpful anyway. Many husbands beat their wives. It is not a legal offense unless you feared for your life. And for such a profound charge you would need a great deal of corroborative evidence.”
“He didn’t beat me. He was a—a very civilized man—a hero.” Her lips curled in a harsh, wounding humor as she said it, as if there were some dark joke behind the words.
He knew she was not yet prepared to share it, and he avoided rebuff by not asking.
“So why did you kill him, Mrs. Carlyon? You were not passionately jealous. He had not threatened y
ou. What then?”
“He was having an affair with Louisa Furnival—publicly—in front of my friends and family,” she repeated flatly.
He was back to the beginning. He did not believe her; at least he did not believe that was all. There was something raw and deep that she was concealing. All this was surface, and laced with lies and evasions. “What about your daughter?” he asked.
She turned back to him, frowning. “My daughter?”
“Your daughter, Sabella. Had she a good relationship with her father?”
Again the shadow of a smile curled her mouth.
“You have heard she quarreled with him. Yes she did, very unpleasantly. She did not get on well with him. She had wished to take the veil, and he thought it was not in her best interest. Instead he arranged for her to marry Fenton Pole, a very agreeable young man who has treated her well.”
“But she has still not forgiven her father, even after this time?”
“No.”
“Why not? Such a grudge seems excessive.”
“She—she was very ill,” she said defensively. “Very disturbed—after the birth of her child. It sometimes happens.” She stared at him, her head high. “That was when she began to be angry again. It has largely passed.”
“Mrs. Carlyon—was it your daughter, and not you, who killed your husband?”
She swung around to him, her eyes wide, very blue. She really did have a most unusual face. Now it was full of anger and fear, ready to fight in an instant.
“No—Sabella had nothing to do with it! I have already told you, Mr. Rathbone, it was I who killed him. I absolutely forbid you to bring her into it, do you understand me? She is totally innocent. I shall discharge you if you suggest for a moment anything else!”
And that was all he could achieve. She would say nothing more. He rose to his feet.
“I will see you again, Mrs. Carlyon. In the meantime speak of this to no one, except with my authority. Do you understand?” He did not know why he bothered to say this. All his instincts told him to decline the case. He could do very little to help a woman who deliberately killed her husband without acceptable reason, and a flirtation at a dinner party was not an acceptable reason to anyone at all. Had she found him in bed with another woman it might be mitigating, especially if it were in her own house, and with a close friend. But even that was not much. Many a woman had found her husband in bed with a maid and been obliged to accept in silence, indeed to keep a smile on her face. Society would be more likely to criticize her for being clumsy enough to find them, when with a little discretion she could have avoided placing herself—and him—in such a situation.
“If that is what you wish,” she said without interest. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Rathbone.” She did not even ask who had sent him.
“It is what I wish,” he answered. “Good day, Mrs. Carlyon.” What an absurd parting. How could she possibly have a good anything?
Rathbone left the prison in a turmoil of mind. Every judgment of intelligence decreed that he decline the case. And yet when he hailed a hansom he gave the driver instructions to go to Grafton Street, where William Monk had his rooms, and not to High Holborn and Peverell Erskine’s offices, where he could tell him politely that he felt unable to be of any real assistance to Alexandra Carlyon.
All the way riding along in the cab at a steady trot his mind was finding ways of refusing the case, and the most excellent reasons why he should. Any competent barrister could go through the motions of pleading for her, and for half the sum. There was really nothing to say. It might well be more merciful not to offer her hope, or to drag out the proceedings, which would only prolong the pain of what was in the end inevitable.
And yet he did not reach forward and tap on the window to redirect the cabby. He did not even move in his seat until they stopped at Grafton Street and he climbed down and paid the man. He even watched him move away along towards the Tottenham Court Road and turn the corner without calling him back.
A running patterer came along the footpath, a long lean man with fair hair flopping over his brow, his singsong voice reciting in easy rhymes some domestic drama ending in betrayal and murder. He stopped a few yards from Rathbone, and immediately a couple of idle passersby hesitated to hear the end of his tale. One threw him a threepenny piece.
A costermonger walked up the middle of the street with his barrow, crying his wares, and a cripple with a tray of matches hobbled up from Whitfield Street.
There was no purpose in standing on the paving stones. Rathbone went up and knocked on the door. It was a lodging house, quite respectable and spacious, very suitable for a single man of business or a minor profession. Monk would have no need of a house. From what he could remember of him, and he remembered him very vividly, Monk preferred to spend his money on expensive and very well-cut clothes. Apparently he had been a vain and highly ambitious man, professionally and socially. At least he had been, before the accident which had robbed him of his memory, at first so totally that even his name and his face were strange to him. All his life had had to be detected little by little, pieced together from fragments of evidence, letters, records of his police cases when he was still one of the most brilliant detectives London had seen, and from the reactions of others and their emotions towards him.
Then had come his resignation over the Moidore case, both on principle and in fury, because he would not be ordered against his judgment. Now he struggled to make a living by doing private work for those who, for one reason or another, found the police unsuitable or unavailable to them.
The buxom landlady opened the door and then, seeing Rathbone’s immaculate figure, her eyes widened with surprise. Some deep instinct told her the difference between the air of a superior tradesman, or a man of the commercial classes, and this almost indefinably different lawyer with his slightly more discreet gray coat and silver-topped cane.
“Yes sir?” she enquired.
“Is Mr. Monk at home?”
“Yes sir. May I tell ’im ’o’s calling?”
“Oliver Rathbone.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Rathbone. Will you come in, sir, an’ I’ll fetch ’im down for yer.”
“Thank you.” Obediently he followed her into the chilly morning room, with its dark colors, clean antimacassars and arrangement of dried flowers, presumably set aside for such purposes.
She left him, and a few minutes later the door opened again and Monk came in. Immediately he saw Monk, all the old emotions returned in Rathbone: the instinctive mixture of liking and dislike; the conviction in his mind that a man with such a face was ruthless, unpredictable, clever, wildly humorous and quick tongued, and yet also vindictive, fiercely emotional, honest regardless of whom it hurt, himself included, and moved by the oddest of pity. It was not a handsome face; the bones were strong and finely proportioned, the nose aquiline and yet broad, the eyes startling, but the mouth was too wide and thin and there was a scar on the lower lip.
“Morning Monk,” Rathbone said dryly. “I have a thankless case which needs some investigation.”
Monk’s eyebrows rose sharply. “So naturally you came to me? Should I be obliged?” Humor flashed across his face and vanished. “I presume it is not also moneyless? You certainly do not work for the love of it.” His voice was excellent. He had trained himself to lose his original lilting provincial Northumbrian accent, and had replaced it with perfectly modulated Queen’s English.
“No.” Rathbone kept his temper without difficulty. Monk might irritate him, but he was damned if he would allow him to dictate the interview or its tone. “The family has money, which naturally I shall use in what I deem to be the client’s best interest. That may be to employ you to investigate the case—but I fear there will be little to find that will be of use to her.”
“You are quite right,” Monk agreed. “It does sound thankless. But since you are here, I presume you want me to do it anyway.” It was not a question but a conclusion. “You had better tell me about it.”
&n
bsp; With difficulty Rathbone kept his equanimity. He would not permit Monk to maneuver him into defensiveness. He smiled deliberately.
“Have you read of the recent death of General Thaddeus Carlyon?”
“Naturally.”
“His wife has confessed to killing him.”
Monk’s eyebrows rose and there was sarcasm in his face, but he said nothing.
“There has to be more than she has told me,” Rathbone went on levelly, with some effort. “I need to know what it is before I go into court.”
“Why does she say she did it?” Monk sat down astride one of the two wooden chairs, facing Rathbone over the back of it. “Does she accuse him of anything as a provocation?”
“Having an affair with the hostess of the dinner party at which it happened.” This time it was Rathbone who smiled bleakly.
Monk saw it and the light flickered in his eyes. “A crime of passion,” he observed.
“I think not,” Rathbone answered. “But I don’t know why. She seems to have a depth of feeling in inappropriate places for that.”
“Could she have a lover herself?” Monk asked. “There would be a great deal less latitude for that than for anything he might do in such a field.”
“Possibly.” Rathbone found the thought distasteful, but he could not reason it away. “I shall need to know.”
“Did she do it?”
Rathbone thought for several moments before answering.
“I don’t know. Apparently her sister-in-law believes it was the younger daughter, who is seemingly very lightly balanced and has been emotionally ill after the birth of her child. She quarreled with her father both before the night of his death and at the dinner party that evening.”
“And the mother confessed to protect her?” Monk suggested.