by Anne Perry
He looked at the papers on the top of the desk. Half a dozen in a neat pile were letters and minutes from the Foreign Office; one, alone, to the left of the pile, was composed of pieces clipped from newspapers … probably the Times again, and pasted onto plain white paper. He read it.
I know the police are close behind me now. I cannot succeed, and I will not wait for them to arrest me. I could not face that.
This is a quick, clean end, and I shall not be aware of what happens after I am gone, except that the case is ended. It is all over.
Leo Cadell
It was terse; no regrets, no apologies. Perhaps there was another letter somewhere to Theodosia. Pitt could not believe she had known his guilt.
He looked closely at it again. It appeared exactly the same as the others he had seen. The spacing was a trifle different, less precise, but then in the circumstances that was unsurprising.
There were scissors along with a paper knife, a stick of sealing wax, a small ball of string and two pencils in a holder on the desk. He could not see any glue or paste. Perhaps it had been used up and the container thrown away.
Where was the newspaper from which the words and letters had been cut? It was not on the desk or on the floor. He looked in the wastepaper basket. It was there, folded neatly. He took it out. Yesterday’s copy of the Times. It was easy to see where the pieces had been cut.
He let it fall again. There seemed little more to say. Cadell was right; as far as the police were concerned, the case was complete. For the victims, most of all for Theodosia, it never would be.
The sharp morning sunlight fell through the clear glass of the French doors into the garden. The maid had been too distraught to think of closing the curtains. There was no one in sight. He moved across and did it now, closing the latch on the door and then drawing the heavy velvet across.
He went out and locked the hall door behind him. He must speak with Theodosia. Speaking to the family of the victim, and the ultimate arrest of someone, the shock and anguish of their family, were the two worst times in any investigation. In this one they were bound together in one occasion, and the grief in one person.
She was sitting in the withdrawing room, gray-faced, her body stiff, her hands clenched together in her lap so hard her knuckles shone where the skin was stretched tight. She stared at him wordlessly out of eyes almost black. She was alone, no maid or footman with her.
He came in quietly and sat down opposite her. Not only had she lost her husband, a man Vespasia said she truly loved, and her future was gone, but-immeasurably more painful-her past was destroyed as well. The whole precious image of her world and all it had meant was shattered. The foundation upon which she had built her beliefs was gone. Everything about her husband that truly mattered, that formed the structure of her relationships, even of her understanding of herself and her own judgments, was proved a lie. She had been misled, deceived in everything. What was left?
How often do we perceive the world and those we love not as they are but only as we want them to be?
He wished he could offer her any comfort at all, but there was none.
“Would you like me to call Vespasia for you?” he asked her.
“What? Oh.” She remained silent for a few moments, struggling within herself. Then she seemed to reach some inner conviction. “No … thank you. Not yet. She will find this very difficult. She was-” Her voice cracked. “She was fond of Leo. She thought well of him. Please wait until I am more composed. Until I have a better idea of what happened so that I can tell her.”
“Would you like me to tell her?” he offered. “I can go to her home. Otherwise she will read it in the newspapers.”
The very last vestige of blood drained from her face, and for a moment he was afraid she was going to collapse. She struggled for breath.
Instinctively, ignoring conventions, he moved forward to kneel on the floor beside her, holding her hands where they were knotted iron hard on her lap. He put his other arm around her. “Slowly!” he commanded. “Breathe slowly. Don’t gasp.”
She obeyed, but even so it was several minutes before she regained physical control of herself.
“I am sorry,” she apologized. “I beg your pardon. I had barely thought of the newspapers.”
“I’ll call on Vespasia as I leave here,” he said decisively. “I am sure she will wish to be with you. It will be easier for her to face this if she is not alone.”
She looked at him, and there was a warmth of gratitude momentarily in her eyes. She did not question his decision. Perhaps she was glad to have any step taken for her, anything that relieved a bit of the weight she must bear alone from now on.
“Thank you,” she accepted.
There was nothing else to ask her. He rose to his feet. She could summon the maid if she wished. She might prefer just at the moment to be alone, perhaps to weep, although that would probably come later.
He was at the door when she spoke.
“Mr. Pitt … my husband did not kill himself … he was murdered. I don’t know how, or by whom, except that I have to presume it was the blackmailer. If you stop now, he will get away with it.” The last sentence was said with sudden, choking anger, and her eyes blazed a challenge to him, on the brink of blame.
He did not know what to say. There were no grounds for her charge except loyalty, pain and despair.
“I won’t take anything for granted, Mrs. Cadell,” he promised. “I shall look for proof of every detail before I accept it.”
He and Tellman questioned all the household staff, but there had been no break-in; no strangers had been seen. The delivery boys at the back door had not gone through the wooden gate in the wall to the garden; indeed, they had been too busy flirting with the scullery maid and the lady’s maid, respectively, to leave the step at all. They had barely succeeded in doing the duty they were employed for.
No one had come through the house, and the only person to go through the garden door was the gardener’s boy delivering ties and doing a little work on the old white climbing rose which was in bloom and in need of holding up.
No one knew anything about the gun. Cadell must have had it for some time. There were a pair of pistols in a case locked into the corner cupboard in the study, but this was not one of them. Theodosia said she had never seen it before, but admitted that she hated guns and would not recognize one from another.
The staff were not permitted to touch them or have anything to do with them, so they could offer no information at all. It seemed that where Cadell had obtained it or how long he had owned it would remain a mystery, like much else to do with his whole blackmail scheme.
Pitt called at Vespasia’s house before returning to Bow Street. She, too, was shocked by the news of Leo Cadell’s death, and found it almost impossible to believe that he was responsible for the blackmail, but she did not deny it as Theodosia had done. She thanked Pitt for coming to tell her personally rather than allowing her to read of it in the newspapers, then she called for her carriage and her lady’s maid, and prepared to go and offer whatever comfort she could to her goddaughter.
Pitt decided then to tell Cornwallis. He also should not learn it from the evening editions of the newspapers.
“Cadell?” he said in amazement. He was standing in the middle of his office as if he had been pacing the floor. His face was haggard. He had neither eaten nor slept well in weeks. There was a very slight nervous tic in his left temple. “I … I presume you must be sure?”
“Can you think of another explanation?” Pitt asked unhappily.
Cornwallis hesitated. He looked profoundly miserable, but even as they spoke, some of the agonized tension had eased out of his body, and his shoulders were lowering into a more natural position. Whatever the surprise or the understanding of grief, his own ordeal was over, and even if he despised himself for it, he could not help but be aware of that.
“No …” he said at last. “No. From what you say, that must be the answer. What a damned tragedy.
I’m sorry. I could have wished it were … someone I didn’t know. I suppose that’s idiotic. It had to be someone I knew …. It had to be someone we all knew. Well done, Pitt … and …” He wanted to thank Pitt for his loyalty, it was there in his eyes, but he did not know how to word it.
“I’ll go back to Bow Street,” Pitt said briefly, “and tidy up the details.”
“Yes.” Cornwallis nodded. “Yes. Of course.”
10
Vespasia went immediately to Theodosia, taking her lady’s maid with her, and such necessities as she would require to remain overnight, or longer. She had no intention of allowing Theodosia to remain alone in the grief, confusion and despair which must follow upon such an appalling loss. In her long life she had encountered suicide before. It was in many ways the hardest of all to endure, and the loneliness and the guilt which invariably followed all but doubled the pain.
There was nothing to do that first afternoon and evening but to survive them, to be there and allow Theodosia to begin to realize that Leo was truly dead. Of course, tomorrow morning would be worse. Sleep, however little of it, would bring respite, then with waking there would be a few moments before memory returned. That would be like hearing it all over again, only without the numbing mercy of shock.
They sat up and talked in Theodosia’s boudoir. She seemed to need to speak of Leo, most particularly of the kind of man he had been when they first met. With a rising tone of desperation she recalled dozens of good things he had done, brave or kind or wise, acts of honesty where less would have passed uncriticized, even unnoticed, but he had silently done his best.
Vespasia listened, and indeed she could remember a great many of them herself. It was only too easy to recall all that was likable in him, all she had admired over the years.
A little before midnight Theodosia suddenly found she was able to weep, and the release of tears exhausted her. After that Vespasia’s maid brewed her a sleeping draft and she went to bed. Vespasia took a draft herself and retired fifteen minutes later.
The morning was even worse than she had expected, then she was angry with herself for not having foreseen it. She met Woods in the hallway as she was crossing to the breakfast room. He looked pale and red-eyed.
“Good morning, your ladyship,” he said hoarsely, and cleared his throat. “How is Mrs. Cadell?”
“Asleep,” Vespasia answered. “I shall not disturb her. Will you be good enough to bring me the newspapers.”
“The newspapers, your ladyship?” His eyebrows rose.
“Yes, please.”
He stood unmoving. “Did you mean the whole newspaper, your ladyship?”
“Of course, the whole newspaper, Woods. Am I not making myself plain?” It would have been pleasanter to have them burnt. It was her first instinct, but she needed to know what they said. There were truths that could not be avoided. “I shall be in the breakfast room. I shall have tea and toast. No more will be necessary.”
“Yes, your ladyship,” Woods said hastily. “I’ll … I’ll have them ironed ….”
“Don’t bother.” She realized that with the master dead the usual duties in this respect had been abandoned. “I’ll look at them as they are.” And without waiting for argument, she passed him and went to the breakfast room.
He brought them on a tray, smoothed but unironed, and she took them from him. They were uniformly dreadful. One of them summed up everything that was worst in all three and added a great deal of speculation that was both cruel and destructive. It was written by Lyndon Remus. He had done his own investigation into the corpse found in Bedford Square and its possible connection with General Balantyne. He must have followed Pitt because he also was aware of his visits to Dunraithe White, Tannifer and Sir Guy Stanley.
In his article on Cadell’s suicide he suggested a conspiracy that Pitt had discovered and that he had been on the brink of arresting Cadell.
Superintendent Thomas Pitt refused to comment, but Bow Street police station did not deny that Mr. Cadell was being investigated in connection with a very serious matter involving extortion and murder, and figures in the establishment, both financial and military, as well as in the government.
Since Mr. Cadell, who shot himself to death in his study yesterday morning, held a high position in the Foreign Office, one cannot but wonder if the conspiracy concerned the interests of Great Britain abroad, and even treason may have been narrowly averted by swift action from the police.
It is to be hoped that if there are other guilty parties they will not now be protected from answering for their crimes, whether carried out or simply intended. Lesser men have been exposed for lesser offences, and paid the cost.
He continued for several paragraphs in a similar vein, and by the time Vespasia came to the end of it she was so angry she could hardly hold the paper still enough to read it. She set it down on the table. Lyndon Remus might have begun as a sincere journalist intending to expose corruption, but he had allowed ambition to warp his judgment. The chance of his own fame and the power that the pen afforded had prompted him to make unfounded assumptions. All of them had a marked lack of compassion for the results of his speculation upon the bereaved, who might have been innocent but for whom proof of that would come too late to undo the pain or the ostracism that went hand in hand with suspicion.
“I have read them,” she said to Woods when he returned to see if she was ready to have the table cleared. “You may burn them now. There is no need for Mrs. Cadell to see them.”
“Yes, your ladyship,” he said quickly. His opinion was clear in his face, and his hands, when he took the papers, shook a little.
“How are the staff?” Vespasia asked him.
“We are managing, your ladyship,” he replied. “I regret to say there are persons outside in the street attempting to ask questions … for the newspapers. They are … most … ill mannered. They are intrusive and have no respect for … death.”
“Have you locked the areaway doors?” she asked. “We can do without deliveries today.”
“I … I hadn’t,” he admitted. “With your permission I shall do so.”
“You have it. And no one is to answer the front door unless they have first ascertained who is outside and sought either my permission or Mrs. Cadell’s. Is that clear?”
“Yes, indeed. Cook asked me to enquire what you would like for luncheon, Lady Vespasia. I assume you will be remaining?” He looked a little desperate.
“Most certainly,” she answered him. “I think whatever Cook cares to prepare will be excellent. May I suggest something very light. An egg custard would be a suitable pudding, or a fruit fool.”
“Yes, thank you, your ladyship.”
Vespasia went to the withdrawing room; somehow the formality of it seemed appropriate to the mood.
Theodosia came down a little after ten. She looked exhausted and wretched, dressed entirely in black, but her head was high and she wore an expression of resolution.
“There is a great deal I need to do,” she said even before Vespasia had the opportunity to ask her how she was, although it would have been a pointless question. She would probably never in her life suffer more than she was doing this morning. “And you are the only one I can ask to help me,” she finished.
“Leo must have had a man of affairs,” Vespasia replied, regarding Theodosia gravely. “There is very little you’re required to do yourself. Even that, I can do for you, if you wish.”
Theodosia’s eyebrows rose. “I am not referring to that sort of thing, Aunt Vespasia. I am quite sure Mr. Astell can do all of that. Although I should welcome your advice as to what you think would be suitable.” She frowned very slightly, concentrating. “I am quite certain Leo did not take his own life. No one could drive him to that, no matter what he thought or feared. I am even more certain he was not behind the blackmail.”
She stood with her back to the room, her face towards the garden but blind to its flowers and dappled light. “I do not delude myself I know everyth
ing about him,” she said slowly. “One never does … nor should one. It would be intrusive, and more dangerous than that, it would be boring. But I really do believe I knew Leo too well for him to have deceived me either to his elation when the plan seemed to have been succeeding or his despair when he would have felt such imminent failure as to have driven him to this.”
Vespasia was uncertain what to say. She had often imagined she knew people better than events had proved. But Theodosia had spoken of emotions, not morality, and that was a matter of observation. It was less easy to dismiss.
“There is no need to humor me,” Theodosia said quietly, still facing the window. “I realize how I sound. What woman could admit to such a thing of her husband without struggling against it? But I intend to do a great deal more than wring my hands in protest.”
“It will not be easy,” Vespasia pointed out tentatively. “I am afraid you must be prepared for a great deal of opposition ….”
“Of course.” Theodosia did not move. “If Leo did not do this, then someone else did. They are hardly going to welcome my disturbing what they wish to appear a very tidy end to the affair.” She turned at last. “Will you help me, Aunt Vespasia?”
She looked at Theodosia’s haggard face, her stiff shoulders and the desperation in her eyes. It might be hopeless. It might bring more grief upon them than there was already. But how could she refuse? It would not prevent Theodosia; it would only leave her more isolated to do it.
“Are you sure you wish to?” she asked gently. “What we discover may not all be what you would like, my dear. Sometimes one is better knowing less of the truth, rather than more. And you will assuredly make enemies.”
“Of course.” Theodosia remained standing. “Do you imagine it will be much worse for me than it will be anyway when this becomes known? Mr. Gordon-Cumming will not be the only person who will find it unbearable to remain in London or the Home Counties. The blackmailer has taken so much from me he has left me very little still to lose now. I do not need you to promise me fairy-tale endings, Aunt Vespasia. I know there are none. I only wish you to lend me your intelligence and your support. As I daresay you know, I shall persist whether you give it me or not, but I shall have much less chance of success.”