by Anne Perry
"And they didn't tell you what it was?"
"No."
"Didn't you ask?"
"I suppose I must have. All I can really remember was the shock, and how nobody spoke of it, almost as if by not putting it into words they could undo it, stop it from being real. I didn't press them. How could I?"
"But as far as you know she was perfectly well at the time she left Rutland Place?" Pitt inquired.
Mulgrew looked at him at last.
"One of the healthiest I know. Why? Obviously it matters to you or you wouldn't be here asking so many questions. Do you imagine it has something to do with Mrs. Spencer-Brown?"
"I don't know. It's one of several possibilities."
"What kind of possibility?" Mulgrew's face creased in pain. "Ottilie was eccentric, even in bad taste to many, but there was nothing evil in her. She was one of the most truly generous people I ever knew. I mean generous with her time-she was never too busy to listen if she thought someone needed to talk. And generous with her praise-she didn't grudge appreciation, or envy other people's successes."
So Mulgrew had loved her, in whatever manner. Pitt did not need to know more: the warmth in Mulgrew's voice told of the loss still hurting him, twisting an emptiness inside.
It made Pitt's own thoughts, prompted by Charlotte, the more painful. It was sharp enough for him to lie. He needed to think about it a little, come to it by degrees. He did not look at Mulgrew when he spoke.
"From evidence I've just heard"-he measured his words slowly-"it seems possible that Mina Spencer-Brown was inordi shy;nately curious about other people's affairs, that she listened, and peeped. Does that seem likely to you?"
Mulgrew's eyes widened and he stared at Pitt, but he did not answer for several minutes. The fire crackled, and on Pitt's knees the cat woke and started kneading him gently with her claws. Absentmindedly he eased her up to rest on his jacket, where she could not reach her claws through to his flesh.
"Yes," Mulgrew said at last. "Never occurred to me before, but she was a watcher, never missed a thing. Sometimes people do that. Knowledge gives them an illusion of power, I suppose. It becomes compulsive. Mina could have been one of them. Intelligent woman, but an empty life-one stupid, prattling party after another. Poor creature." He leaned forward and put another piece of coal on the fire. "All day, every day, and not really necessary anywhere. What a bloody stupid thing to die for- some piece of information acquired through idiotic curiosity, no use to you at all." He turned his face away from the firelight. "And you think it had something to do with Ottilie Charrington?"
"I don't know. Apparently, Mina thought her death was a mystery, hinting that there was a great deal more to it than had been told and that she knew what it was."
"Stupid, sad, cruel woman," Mulgrew said quietly. "What on earth did she imagine it was?"
"I don't know. The possibilities are legion." He did not Want to spell them out and hurt this man still more, but he had to mention at least one, if only to discount it. "A badly done abortion, for example?"
Mulgrew did not move.
"I believe not," he said very levelly. "I cannot swear to it, but I believe not. Do you have to pursue it?"
"At least enough to satisfy myself it is wrong."
"Then ask her brother Inigo Charrington. They were always close. Don't ask Lovell. He's a pompous idiot-can't see further than the quality of print on a calling card! Ottilie drove him frantic. She used to sing songs from the music halls-God only knows where she learned them! Sang one on a Sunday once- drinking song, it was, something about beer-not even a decent claret! Ambrosine called me in. She thought Lovell was going to take a seizure. Purple to the hair, he was, poor fool."
At any other time Pitt would have laughed. But the knowledge that Ottilie was dead, perhaps murdered, robbed the anecdote of any humor.
"Pity," he said quietly. "We get so many of our priorities wrong and never know it until afterwards, when it doesn't matter anymore. Thank you. I'll speak to Inigo." He stood up and put the little cat on the warm spot where he had been sitting. She stretched and curled up again, totally content.
Mulgrew shot to his feet. "But that can't be all! If Mina, wretched woman, was a Peeping Tom, she must have seen other things-God knows what! Affaires, at least! There's more than one butler around here should lose his job, that I know of-and more than one parlormaid, if her mistress knew of it!"
Pitt pulled a face. "I daresay. I'll have to look at them all. By the way, did you know there is a sneak thief in Rutland Place?"
"Oh God, that too! No, I didn't know, but it doesn't surprise me. It happens every now and then."
"Not a servant. One of the residents."
"Oh, my God!" Mulgrew's face fell. "Are you sure?"
"Beyond reasonable doubt."
"What a wretched business. I suppose it couldn't have been Mina herself?"
"Yes, it could. Or it could have been her murderer."
"I thought my job was foul at times. I'd a damned sight rather have it than yours."
"I think I would too, at the moment," Pitt said. "Unfortunately we can't chop and change. I couldn't do yours, even if you were willing to trade. Thanks for your help."
"Come back if I can do anything." Mulgrew put out his hand, and Pitt clasped it hard. A few minutes later he was outside again in the rain.
It took him two and a half hours to find Inigo Charrington, by which time it was past noon and Inigo was at the dining table in his club. Pitt was obliged to wait in the smoking room, under the disapproving eye of a dyspeptic steward who kept clearing his throat with irritating persistence, till Pitt found he was counting the seconds each time, waiting for him to do it again.
Finally, Inigo came in and was informed in hushed tones of Pitt's presence. He came over to him, his face a mixture of amusement at the steward's dilemma-and his own as other eyes were raised to stare at him-and apprehension about what Pitt might want. '.
"Inspector Pitt?" He dropped rather sharply into the chair opposite. "From the police?"
"Yes, sir." Pitt regarded him with interest. He was slender, not more than thirty at the most, with an odd, quick-silver face and auburn hair.
"Something else happened?" Inigo said anxiously.
"No, sir." Pitt regretted having alarmed him. Somehow he could not picture him having murdered his sister, or Mina either, to keep a scandal quiet. There was too much sheer humor in his face. "No, nothing at all, that I am aware of. But we have still not found any satisfactory answer as to how Mrs. Spencer-Brown met her death. There seems no explanation, so far, that makes either accident or suicide possible."
"Oh." Indigo sat back a little. "I suppose that means it could only have been murder. Poor soul."
"Indeed. And I daresay a great deal more pain will be caused before the business is finished."
Inigo looked at him gravely. "I imagine so. What do you want me for? I don't think I know anything. I certainly didn't know Mina very well." His mouth turned down in a sour smile. "I didn't have any reason to kill her. Although I suppose you can hardly take my word for that! I wouldn't be likely to tell you so if I had!"
Pitt found himself smiling back. "Hardly. What I was hoping for was information." He could not afford to be direct. Inigo was far too quick; he would anticipate suspicion and cover any trace of real worth.
"About Mina? You'd do much better asking some of the women-even my mother. She's rather absentminded at times, and she gets her gossip a little twisted, but underneath it all she's a pretty shrewd judge of character. She may get her facts wrong, but her feelings are invariably right."
"I shall ask her," Pitt said. "But she might speak considera shy;bly more freely to me if I had approached you first. Normally ladies such as Mrs. Charrington do not confide their opinions of their neighbors to the police."
Inigo's face softened into mercurial laughter, gone in an instant.
"Very tactfully put, Inspector. I imagine they don't. Although Mama has a taste for the bizarre. I'
ll mention it to her this evening. She might surprise you and tell you all sorts of things. Although quite honestly, she isn't really a gossip. Not enough malice in her. She used to like to shock people occasionally when she was younger. Got bored with everyone repeating the same rubbish evening after evening at the same parties-just different dresses and different houses, but all the same con shy;versations. Bit like Tillie."
"Tillie?" Pitt was lost.
"My sister-Ottilie. Better not repeat that. My father used to go into an apoplexy when I called her Tillie when we were children."
"And she liked to shock people?" Pitt quickly asked.
"Loved it. Never heard anyone laugh like Tillie. It was beautiful, rich, the sort of laughter that you have to join in with even if you have no idea what was funny."
"She sounds like a delightful person. I'm sorry I shall not meet her." He found it was far more than a sympathetic platitude; he meant what he said. Ottilie was something good that he had missed.
Inigo's eyes widened for a moment as if he did not understand; then he let out a little sigh.
"Oh. Yes. You would have liked her. Everything seems rather colder now she's gone, not the same color in things. But that isn't what you're here for. What do you want to know?"
"I understand she died very suddenly?"
"Yes. Why?" -
"It must have been a great shock. I'm sorry."
"Thank you."
"Those fevers can be very sudden-no warning," he tried experimentally.
"What? Oh yes, very. But this must be wasting your time. What about Mina Spencer-Brown? She certainly didn't die of a fever. And Tillie wasn't given belladonna for treatment, I can assure you. Anyway, we were in the country at the time, not here."
"You have a country house?'.'
"Abbots Langley, in Hertfordshire." He smiled. "But you won't find any belladonna there. We all have excellent digestions- need to, some of the cooks we've had! If Papa chooses them, we have all soups and sauces, and if Mama does, then pies and pastries."
Pitt felt intrusive. How could anyone like being a Peeping Tom?
"I wasn't thinking of belladonna," he said honestly. "I am looking for reasons. Somewhere Mrs. Spencer-Brown must have given somebody cause to want her dead. Finding the belladonna is less important."
"Is it?" Inigo's eyebrows rose. "Don't you want to know who, more than why?"
"Of course I do. But anyone could make belladonna out of deadly nightshade. There's plenty of it about in these old gardens. It could have been picked anywhere. It's not like strychnine or cyanide that most people would have to buy."
Inigo winced. "What a terrible thought-going out to get something to kill people." He paused for a moment. "But I honestly haven't any idea why someone should kill Mina. I didn't especially like her. I always thought she was too"-he searched for the word he wanted-"too deliberate, too clever. All head and no heart. She was thinking all the time, never missed anything. I prefer people who are either stupider or less permanently interested. Then if I do something idiotic it can be decently forgotten." He smiled a little crookedly. "But you hardly go out and distill poison for someone because you don't like them very much. I couldn't even say I disliked her-just that I was not entirely comfortable when she was there, which wasn't very of ten."
It all fitted so easily with what Charlotte had said, slid into the pattern and coalesced: a watcher, a listener, adding everything together in her mind, working out answers, understanding things that were intimate.
But how, and for whom, had "not entirely comfortable" changed into "intolerable"?
He wanted to think of a useful question, something to make Inigo believe he was asking about Mina, not Ottilie.
"I never saw her alive. Was she attractive-to men?"
Inigo's face creased with spontaneous laughter.
"Not very subtle, Inspector. No, she wasn't-not to me. I like something a little less schooled, and with more humor. If you ask around the Place, no doubt you will be told my taste runs to the warmhearted, slightly eccentric, for entertainment. And if I were to marry-I really don't know who the woman would be. Someone I really liked-certainly not Mina!"
"You mistake me," Pitt said with a dry smile. "I was think shy;ing of a possible lover, even a rejected one. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but I've found men take it no less kindly, especially vain and successful men. There are many people who believe that loving someone puts the person into some sort of debt to you and gives you certain rights. More than one man has killed a woman because he thought she wasted herself on someone unworthy of her-someone other than himself, that is. I've known men with the notion that they somehow owned a woman's virtue, and if she stained it she had offended not against herself or against God-but against him!"
Inigo stared into the polished surface of the table and smiled very slowly over something he was not prepared to share with Pitt, something at the same time funny and bitter.
"Oh, indeed," he said sincerely. "I believe in feudal times if a woman lost her virginity she had to pay a fine to the lord of the manor, because she was then worth much less to him come the time someone wished to marry her and naturally had to pay the lord for the privilege. We haven't changed so much! We're far too genteel to pay in money, of course, but we still pay!"
Pitt would like to have known what he meant, but to ask would have been vulgar, and he probably would not have been answered.
"Could she have had a lover?" He went back to the original question. "Or an admirer?"
Inigo thought for a few moments before replying.
"Mina? I've never considered it, but I suppose she could have. The oddest people do."
"Why do you say that? She looked as if she had been at least attractive, if not even beautiful."
Inigo seemed surprised himself, "Just her personality. She didn't seem to have any fire, any-gentleness. But then you said an admirer, didn't you? She was very delicate; she had a feminin shy;ity about her that would have been just what appealed to some-a sort of austere purity. And she always dressed to suit it." He smiled apologetically. "But it is pointless asking me who, be shy;cause I have no idea."
"Thank you." Pitt stood up. "I can't think of anything else to ask you. It was most courteous of you to see me, especially here."
"Hardly." Inigo stood up as well. "Your presenting yourself didn't give me a great deal of choice. I had either to see you or to*look like a pompous ass-or, worse than that, as if I had something to hide."
It had been intentional, and Pitt would not insult him by denying it.
He did not go to see Ambrosine Charrington the following day, but instead packed a gladstone bag with clean shirt and socks and took the train from Huston Station to Abbots Langley to see what he could discover about Ottilie Charrington's death.
He spent two days, and the more he learned the more confused he became. He had no trouble in locating the house, for the Charringtons were well known and respected.
He ate a comfortable lunch at the inn, then walked to the local parish churchyard, but there were no Charringtons buried there- neither Ottilie nor anyone else.
"Oh, they've only been here for twenty years, going on," the sexton told him reasonably. "They're newcomers. You won't find any of 'em here. Buried in London somewhere, like as not.''
"But the daughter?" Pitt asked. "She died here little over a year ago!"
"Maybe so, but she ain't buried here," the sexton assured him. "Look for yourself! And I've been to every funeral here in the last twenty-five years. No Charringtons-not a one."
A sudden thought occurred to Pitt.
"How about Catholic or Nonconformist?" he asked. "What other churches are there close by?''
"I know every funeral as goes on in this neighborhood," the sexton said vehemently. "It's my job. And the Charringtons weren't any of them outlandish things. They was gentry-Church of England, like everybody else who knows what's good for them. Church here every Sunday they're in the village. If she'd been burie
d anywhere around here, it would be in this churchyard. Reckon as you must be mistaken and she died up in London somewhere. Leastways, if she died here, they took her back to London to bury her. Family vault, likely. Lie alongside your own, that's what I always say. Eternity's a mighty time."
"Don't you believe in the Resurrection?" Pitt said curiously.
The sexton's face puckered with disgust At any man who would be so crass as to introduce abstract matters of doctrine into the practicalities of life and death.
"Now what kind of a question is that?" he demanded. "You know when that's going to be, do you? Grave's a long time, a very long time. Should be done proper. You'll be a lot longer in it than any grand house here!"
That was a point beyond argument. Pitt thanked him and set out to find the local doctor.
The doctor knew the Charringtons, but he had not attended Ottilie in her last illness, nor had he written any death certificate.
The following midday, by which time Pitt had seen servants, neighbors, and the postmistress, he caught the train back to London convinced that Ottilie Charrington had been in Abbots Langley on the week of her death but that she had not died there. The booking clerk at the station recalled seeing her on one or two occasions, but he could not swear when; and although she had bought a ticket to London, he did not know if she had returned. '
It seemed an inescapable conclusion that she had died not in Abbots Langley but somewhere unknown, and of some cause unknown.
Now Pitt could not avoid seeing Ambrosine and Lovell Charrington any longer. Even Superintendent Athelstan, much as it pained him, could think of no argument to avoid it, and an appointment was duly made-politely, as if it were a courtesy. Howeverjt was not as Pitt had intended: He would rather have been casual, and preferably have seen Lovell and then Ambrosine separately. But when he had reported on his visit to Abbots Langley, Athelstan had taken the matter into his own hands.
Lovell received Pitt in the withdrawing room. Ambrosine was not present.
"Yes, Inspector?" he said coolly. "I cannot think what else I can tell you about the unfortunate business. I have already done my duty and informed you fully of everything I knew. Poor Mrs. Spencer-Brown was most unstable, sad as it makes me to have to say so. I do ijot interest myself in other people's private lives. Therefore I have no idea what particular crisis may have precipi shy;tated the tragedy."