Paragon Walk

by Anne Perry

  He eased his weight from one foot to the other and stood a little straighten

  “Then I had best go and see Lady Cumming-Gould. Thank you, Mrs. Nash. I hope we will be able to clear up the matter quickly and not need to distress you for long.”

  “I hope so,” she agreed with formal coolness. “Good day.”

  At the Ashworth house he was shown into the withdrawing room by a butler whose face mirrored his social dilemma. Here was a person who admitted to being of the police, and therefore undesirable, and should not be allowed to forget he was here on sufferance only, a most unpleasant necessity due to the recent tragedy. Yet, on the other hand, he was quite extraordinarily also Lady Ash-worth’s brother-in-law! Which is what comes of marrying beneath one! In the end the butler settled for a pained civility and withdrew to fetch Lord Ashworth. Pitt was too entertained by the man’s predicament to be annoyed.

  But when the door opened, it was not George but Emily herself who came in. He had forgotten how charming she could be, and at the same time how utterly different from Charlotte. She was fair and slight, dressed at the height of fashion and expense. Where Charlotte was disastrously forthright, Emily was far too practical to speak without thinking, and could be exquisitely devious when she chose, in a good cause, of course. And she usually considered Society to be an excellent cause. She could lie without a tremor.

  She came in now and closed the door behind her, looking straight at him.

  “Hello, Thomas,” she said wanly. “You must be here about poor Fanny. I didn’t dream we should have the good fortune that it should be you to investigate it. I’ve been trying to think if I knew anything that would be of help, as we did in Callander Square.” Her voice lifted for a moment, “Charlotte and I were rather clever there.” Then her tone dropped again, and her face took on a pinched, unhappy look. “But that was different. We didn’t know the people to start with. And the ones who were dead were dead before we ever knew of them. When you didn’t know people alive, it doesn’t hurt the same way.” She sighed. “Please sit down, Thomas. You tower there, sort of flapping. Can’t you do up your coat, or something? I must speak to Charlotte. She lets you come out without—” She looked him up and down and gave up the whole idea.

  Pitt ran his hands through his hair and made it worse.

  “Did you know Fanny Nash well?” he asked, sitting on the sofa and seeming to spread over it, all coattails and arms.

  “No. And I’m ashamed to say it now, but I didn’t especially like her either.” She made an apologetic little face. “She was rather—dull. Jessamyn’s enormous fun. At least half of me can’t bear her, and I’m constantly diverted by thinking what I might do next to annoy her.”

  He smiled. There were so many echoes of Charlotte in her that he could not help warming to her.

  “But Fanny was too young,” he finished the sentence for her. “Too naive.”

  “Quite. She was almost insipid.” Then her face changed, filling with pity and embarrassment, because she had momentarily forgotten death, and the manner of it. “Thomas, she was the last kind of creature in the world to invite such an abominable thing! Whoever did it must be quite insane. You must catch him, for Fanny’s sake—and for everyone else’s!”

  All sorts of answers ran through his mind, reassurance about strangers and vagrants, long gone now, and they all died on his tongue. It was quite possible that the murderer was someone who lived or worked here in Paragon Walk. Neither the constable on duty at one end nor the servants waiting at the other had seen anyone pass. It was not the sort of area where people wandered unremarked. The probability was that it had been some coachman or footman from the party, inflamed with drink and with time on his hands, allowing a foolish impulse, perhaps when she threatened to cry out, to become suddenly an ugly and appalling crime.

  But it was not the crime itself; it was the attendant investigation that frightened, and the haunting fear that it might not be a footman but some man on the Walk, one of themselves with a violent and obscene nature lying under the mannered surface they knew. And police investigations uncovered not only the major crimes, but so often the smaller sins, the meannesses and deceits that hurt so much.

  But there was no need to tell her that. For all her title and her assurance, she was still the same girl who had been so vulnerable in Cater Street, when she had seen her father frightened and stripped of his pretenses.

  “You will, won’t you?” Her voice cut across his silence, demanding an answer. She was standing in the middle of the floor, staring at him.

  “We usually do.” It was the best thing he could say and be honest. And even if he had wished to, it was not much use lying to Emily. Like many practical and ambitious people, she was disastrously perceptive. She was well accomplished in the art of polite lies, and she read them like a book in others.

  He recalled himself to the purpose of his visit.

  “She came to see you that evening, didn’t she?”

  “Fanny?” Her eyes widened a little. “Yes. She returned a book, or something, to Aunt Vespasia. Do you want to speak to her?”

  He took the chance immediately.

  “Yes, please. Perhaps you had better stay. In case she is distressed, you would be of comfort to her.” He imagined an elderly female relative of excessively gentle birth with a correspondingly tender susceptibility to the vapors.

  For the first time Emily laughed.

  “Oh, my dear,” she put her hand over her mouth. “You can’t imagine Aunt Vespasia!” She picked up her skirts and swept to the door. “But I shall most certainly stay. It is precisely what I need!”

  George Ashworth was handsome enough, with bold dark eyes and a fine head of hair, but he could never have been an equal for his aunt. She was over seventy now, but there were still the remnants of a startling beauty in her face—the strength of the bones, the high cheeks and long, straight nose. Blue-white hair was piled on her head, and she wore a dress of deep lilac silk. She stood in the doorway and looked at Pitt for several minutes, then moved into the room, picking up her lorgnette, and studied him more closely.

  “Can’t really see without the damn thing,” she said irritably. She snorted very gently, like an extremely well-bred horse. “Extraordinary,” she breathed out. “So you are a policeman?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” For an instant even Pitt was at a loss for words. Over his shoulder he saw Emily’s face alight with amusement.

  “What are you looking at?” Vespasia said sharply. “I never wear black. It doesn’t suit me. Always wear what suits you, regardless. Tried to tell Emily that, but she doesn’t listen. The Walk expects her to wear black, so she does. Very silly. Don’t let other people expect you into doing something you don’t wish to.” She sat down on the sofa opposite and stared at him, her fine, gray eyebrows arched a little. “Fanny came to see me the night she was killed. I assume you knew that, and that is why you have come.”

  Pitt swallowed and tried to compose his face.

  “Yes, ma’am. At what time, please?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “You must have some idea, Aunt Vespasia,” Emily interrupted. “It was after dinner.”

  “If I say I have no idea, Emily, then I have no idea. I don’t watch clocks. I don’t care for them. When one gets to my age, one doesn’t. It was dark, if that is of any help.”

  “A great help, thank you.” Pitt calculated quickly. It must have been after ten, at this time of the year. And Jessamyn Nash had sent the footman for the police at a little before quarter to eleven. “What did she come for, ma’am?” he asked.

  “To get away from an excessively boring dinner guest,” Vespasia replied immediately. “Eliza Pomeroy. Knew her as a child, and she was a bore even then. Talks about other people’s ailments. Who cares? One’s own are tedious enough!”

  Pitt hid a smile with difficulty. He dared not look at Emily.

  “She told you that?” he inquired.

  Vespasia considered whether to be patient w
ith him— because he was foolish—and decided against it. The thought was plain in her face.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” she said smartly. “She was a child of quite moderate breeding, neither good enough nor bad enough to be frank. She said she was returning some book or other.”

  “You have the book?” He did not know what made him ask, except habit to check every detail. It was almost certainly immaterial.

  “I should imagine so,” she replied with slight surprize. “But I never lend books I expect to require again, so I couldn’t say. She was an honest child. She hadn’t the imagination to lie successfully, and she was one of those comfortable people who know their own limitations. She would have done quite nicely, had she lived. No pretensions and no spite, poor little creature.”

  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 com
plete 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.