Paragon Walk

by Anne Perry

  Could it have been Algernon Burnon? It would have needed no great strength to strike the blow, a single plunge with a knife. He was close to the open grave, his face sober, no passion in it. It was unlikely he had cared much for Fulbert. Probably, he was thinking of Fanny. Had he loved her? Whatever grief he had felt had been masked behind generations of careful composure. Gentlemen did not make exhibitions of their feelings. It was unbecoming, effeminate to show obvious distress. A gentleman managed even to die with dignity.

  Who had decided on the long engagement? Surely, if he had felt such violent hunger for her, he could have insisted the marriage take place sooner? Many women married at Fanny’s age, or younger; there was nothing hasty or improper about it. Looking at Algernon’s calm face now, Pitt found it too difficult to believe there lay behind it ungovernable passion of any sort.

  Diggory Nash was next to him, close to Jessamyn but not touching her. Indeed she looked so unlike a woman who needed any supporting arm, it would almost have been an impertinence, an intrusion to have offered her one. She was isolated in whatever feeling gripped her, unaware of the rest of them, even of her husband.

  Did she know something about Diggory that they did not? Pitt stared at him from the discreet shelter of the yews. It was a less proportionate face than Afton’s and yet so much warmer. There was no laughter in it now, but the lines were there, and a gentleness in the mouth—perhaps not the power of Afton? Had some weakness of appetite, years of easy gratification, led him to a mistaken identity in the dark, rape of his own sister, and murder to hide it?

  Surely such a character would have betrayed itself before now? Guilt and terror would have wracked him, haunted his solitude, kept him awake, ended in some desperate folly and downfall? All Forbes’s questions had elicited no complaint from any maid as to Diggory’s behavior. Admittedly, there had been advances, but no unwelcome ones had been pressed. Refusal had been accepted, on the rare occasions it was offered, with humor and resignation.

  No, Pitt could not believe Diggory was more than exactly what he seemed.

  And George? He knew now why George had been so evasive in the beginning. He had simply been too drunk to remember where he had been—and too embarrassed to say so, Perhaps the fright would have done him good, at least for Emily’s sake?

  Freddie Dilbridge. He had his back to Pitt now, but Pitt had watched him as he walked down the path behind the coffin. His face had been anxious, confused rather than grieved. If there was fear, it was of the unknown, the inexplicable, not the all-too-plain fear of one who knows precisely what is wrong, and what the vengeance for it will be.

  And yet there was something about Freddie that troubled Pitt. He had not yet discovered what it was. Dissolute parties were not exceptional. There were always those who were bored, occupied by no necessity to earn their bread or even to administer their property, driven by no ambition, who found entertainment in satisfying their own appetites, or the more bizarre appetites of others. Voyeurism was not novel, even a little moral blackmail afterward, a feeling of superiority.

  Although that picture fitted his mind’s perception of Afton Nash better. There was cruelty in him, a delight in the frailty of others, especially the sexual frailty. He was a man who might well pander to tastes he despised, for the pleasure of reveling in his own superiority at the same time. Pitt could not think of anyone he had disliked as much. To be the victim of one’s own faults, however grotesque, he could find a pity for. But to delight in and prey upon the weakness of others was beyond the realm of any compassion he could muster.

  Afton was standing at the head of the grave, his eyes on the minister, grim and hard. But then he had buried a brother and had a sister murdered in one short summer. Was it conceivable he was the arch-hypocrite and had violated and killed his own sister, then stabbed to death his brother to keep his secret? Was that why Phoebe was disintegrating in terror before their eyes, descending from eccentricity into madness? Dear God, if it were, Pitt must catch him, prove it, and have him taken away. Pitt had never enjoyed hanging. It was commonplace, a part of society’s mechanics to purge itself of a disease, but still he found it repellent. He knew too much about murder, about the fear or the madness that impelled it. He had seen and smelled the grinding poverty, the unnumbered deaths from and diseases of starvation in the rookeries, and he knew there were forms of murder that never soiled the hands, long-distance extermination that blind society and profit never looked at. Death from hunger happened a hundred yards from death from obesity.

  And yet he felt, if Afton were guilty, he could have sent him to the gallows without any personal pity.

  The Frenchman, Paul Alaric, was there, if indeed he were French? Perhaps he came from one of the African colonies? He was far too smooth, too wry and subtle to be from the great wind-and-snow-driven plains of Canada. There was something incredibly old in him; Pitt could not conceive of him belonging to the New World. Everything about him spoke of centuries of civilization, roots deep enough to cling to the very core and heart of old cultures and rich, dark history.

  He stood now with black head bent and the rising wind, sleek and beautiful even in this graveyard. He mirrored respect for the dead, courteous observance of custom. Was that all he was here for? Pitt had discovered no relationship between him and Fulbert except that of neighbors.

  Could Alaric be the supreme actor? Was there unfulfilled hunger under that intelligent face, hunger so violent it had driven him to attack first Fanny and then the all-too-willing Selena? Or was Selena not really willing, when it came to the point?

  He dared not dismiss it, it was his duty to consider everything possible, however unlikely. And yet he could not force himself to believe that Alaric was so different from every appearance. Over years of studying people, Pitt had become a skilled judge, and he had found most people do not hide much of themselves from a careful watcher, one who listens to every phrase, watches the eyes, the hands, the small deceptions to build the vanity, the tiny exhibitions of greed or ambition, the betrayals of essential selfishness, the straying eyes, the grubby innuendos.

  Alaric might be a seducer, but a rapist Pitt could not believe.

  That left Hallam Cayley. He was standing over the grave from Jessamyn, staring at her, as they at last began to shovel in the earth. The hard clay rubble clattered on the lid, sounding hollowly, almost as if there were no body inside. One by one they turned and walked away—the observances were over. Now it was the gravediggers’ duty to finish, fill in the earth and stamp it down. A fine misty rain hung on the wind, slicking the paths and making them dangerous.

  Hallam walked behind Freddie Dilbridge. As Pitt moved from the yews, hurrying to keep pace with them, he saw Hallam’s face. He looked like a man in a nightmare; the pock marks in his skin seemed to have become deeper, and he was pallid and sweating. His eyes were puffed, and even at that distance Pitt could see the nervous twitch in one lid. Was it excess of drink that racked him, and if so what torture had driven him to it? Surely loss of a dead wife would not have ravaged him so? From all that he and Forbes had learned through questioning neighbors and servants, the marriage had been no more than ordinary, a fondness for each other, but not a passion so consuming as to leave this devastation in its wake.

  In fact the more Pitt thought about it, the less likely did it seem. Hallam had only been seen to drink more than most men in the last year, certainly not since the time of his wife’s death. What had happened a year ago? He had so far discovered nothing.

  He was level with them now, and Hallam turned for a moment and saw him. His face twisted with fear and recognition, as if the gravestone he was passing were his own, and he had read his name on it. He hesitated, staring at Pitt, then Jessamyn caught up with him. Her face was tight, all expression ironed out of it.

  “Come, Hallam,” she said quietly. “Take no notice of him. He is here because it is his duty. It means nothing.” Her voice was quite flat. She had composed herself till every vestige of feeling was suppressed, c
ontrolled into what she wished it to be. She did not touch him, keeping herself apart, at least a yard from him. “Come,” she said again. “Don’t stand here. You’re holding everyone up.”

  Reluctantly Hallam moved, not that he wished to obey or to leave so much as that there was no purpose in remaining.

  Pitt stood still, watching their black-creped backs, as they wound up the damp path toward the lych-gate and out onto the street.

  Could Hallam Cayley have raped Fanny? It was possible. Emily had said Fanny was boring, nondescript, not the sort of girl to excite anyone. But Pitt remembered the small white body lying on the morgue table. It had been very delicate, virginal, almost childlike, the bones small, the skin clear. Perhaps that very innocence had attracted. She would demand nothing; her own hungers would not have awoken yet; there would be no expectations to satisfy, no comparisons to be made with other lovers, not even with dreams, except the most limpid and unformed.

  Jessamyn had said she was too guileless to interest, too young to be a woman. But perhaps Fanny had grown tired of being viewed as a child and had secretly started to think as a woman inside, while preserving outside the image everyone expected of her? Perhaps she had seen Jessamyn’s glamour and decided to grasp for a little of it herself. Had she practiced her budding arts on Hallam Cayley, imagining him safe, and found one dark evening that he was not, that she had gone too far, succeeded in her temptation?

  It was believable. More believable than that she had tempted some servant.

  The other possibility, of course, was that she had been mistaken for someone else, a maid. There were several kitchen girls and between maids who were not unlike her in build, even in face. Only the clothes were radically different. Would the fingers of an obsessed man in the dark feel the difference between Fanny’s silk and a servant girl’s wash-cotton?

  He had no idea.

  But Fulbert’s body had been found in Hallam’s house. The servants had let him in; no one denied that—but why had he gone there, if not to see Hallam? Had he waited till Hallam came home, as he had said he would do, and then been killed for his knowledge? Or could it have been a manservant, the footman or the valet, again because of what he knew. They could have killed Fanny; it was not impossible.

  He had not forgotten that someone else could have come in. It was not likely they had been let in by a servant. Any servant would tell of it, only too glad to widen the circle of suspicion, away from themselves. But the garden walls were not high. A man of average agility could climb over without difficulty. His clothes would be marked, brick dust, moss stains. They would be got rid of, but Pitt should ask valets. He must get Forbes to check again.

  There were gates, of course, but he had already ascertained that Hallam’s was kept locked.

  He followed the last of the funeral out of the gate and turned up the street, away from the graveyard and back toward the police station. He believed it was Hallam. It was possible, and the horror of it was in his face. But he had not enough to prove it. If Hallam were simply to deny it, to say someone had followed Fulbert and seized the chance to murder him and leave the body in Hallam’s house, there was nothing to prove him a liar. He could not arrest a man of Hallam Cayley’s social position without a better case than that.

  If he could not prove Hallam guilty, the next best thing he could do was to disprove any other possibility. It was a thin case—and unsatisfactory.

  At the police station one small question was answered— why Algernon Burnon had been so reluctant to name the person in whose company he claimed to have been on the evening Fanny was killed. Forbes had at last run her down, a handsome and cheerful girl who in a higher class of society might have called herself a courtesan, but from her usual clientele was no more than a tart. No wonder Algernon had preferred the odd glance of halfhearted suspicion to the surety that he had been paying for such indulgence while his fiancée was struggling for her life.

  The day after, Pitt and Forbes went back to the Walk, quietly, going in by back doors and asking to see valets. No one’s clothes showed stains of damp or moss, and there was no discernible brick dust, just the general dust of a dry summer. There had been one or two small tears, but nothing unaccountable. But then one could so easily say one had caught it getting in or out of a carriage, or in one’s own garden. Rose thorns tore; one knelt on the grass to pick up a fallen coin or handkerchief.

  He even went to Hallam Cayley’s garden and asked permission to look at the walls on both sides, and a highly nervous footman escorted him around step by step, watching him with increasing tension and unhappiness, as no mark or disturbance was found. If anyone had climbed over these walls lately, they had done it with a padded ladder placed so carefully it had not crushed the moss nor scratched a brick, and they had smoothed out the holes left by the feet of the ladder in the ground. Such care seemed impossible. How could he have hauled the ladder after him back to his own side without leaving great runnels in the moss on top of the wall? And once back, what then of the ladder marks in the ground? The summer had been dry, but the garden earth was still deep and friable enough to mark easily. He tried it with the weight of his own foot and left an unmistakable print.

  There was a door in the farthest wall onto the path beyond the aspen trees at the end, but it was locked, and the gardener’s boy had the key and said it had never left him.

  Hallam was out. Tomorrow Pitt would call and ask him about keys, if he had ever had another and given or lent it, but it was only a formality. He did not believe for a moment that anyone else had come along the pathway at the end and let themselves in to keep an appointment with Fulbert in Hallam’s house—and still less that it could have been a chance meeting.

  He went home and told Charlotte nothing about it. He wanted to forget the whole affair and enjoy his own family, the peace and sureness of it. Even though Jemima was asleep, he demanded that Charlotte get her up, and then he sat in the parlor with her in his arms, while she blinked at him sleepily, unsure why she had been roused. He talked to her, telling her about his own childhood on the big estate in the country, exactly as if she understood him, and Charlotte sat opposite, smiling. She had some white sewing in her hands; he thought it looked like one of his shirts. He had no idea if she knew why he was talking like this—that it was to blot out Paragon Walk and what must be faced tomorrow. If she had, she was wise enough not to let him know.

  There was nothing new at the police station. He asked to see his superior officers and told them what he intended to do. If there were no other explanation, no other key to the garden door, and no one had seen any other person, he would have to assume it was someone in Cayley’s household and interrogate them in that light, not only the footman and the valet, but Hallam Cayley himself.

  They were unhappy with the idea, especially of accusing Hallam, but they conceded that it seemed unavoidable that it was someone in the house—most likely the valet or the footman.

  Pitt did not argue with them or give them all the reasons why he thought it was Hallam. After all, most of it was deduction and the misery in the man’s face, the horror within him that was greater than anything outside. They could so easily have said it was simply the terrors of a man who drinks too much and cannot stop himself. And he could not have reasoned otherwise.

  He arrived at the Walk in the late morning and went straight to the house. He rang at the front door and waited. Incredibly, there was no answer. He tried again, and again there was nothing. Had some domestic crisis occupied the footman to the neglect of his usual duties?

  He decided to go around to the kitchen door. There surely would be servants there; there were always maids in a kitchen, at any time of the day.

  He was still yards short of the door when he saw the scullery maid. She looked up and gave a yelp, grabbing at her apron front and staring at him.

  “Good morning,” he said, trying to force a smile.

  She stood frozen to the spot, speechless.

  “Good morning,” he repeated. �
�I can’t make anyone hear at the front. May I come in through the kitchen?”

  “The servants has got the day off,” she said breathlessly. “There’s just me and cook, and Polly. And Mr. Cayley in’t up yet!”

  Pitt swore under his breath. Had that fool of a constable allowed them all to leave the Walk—including the murderer?

  “Where have they gone?” he demanded.

  “Well, ’oskins, that’s the valet, ’e’s in ’is own room, I reckon. I ain’t seen ’im today, but Polly took ’im a tray o’ toast and a pot o’ tea. And Albert, that’s the footman, I reckon as ’e’s probably gorn round to Lord Dilbridge’s, ’cos ’e’s got a fancy for their upstairs maid. Is anything wrong, sir?”

  Pitt felt a wave of relief. This time the smile was real.

  “No, I shouldn’t think so. But I’d like to come in all the same. I dare say someone could wake Mr. Cayley for me. I need to see him to ask him about one or two things.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t, sir. Mr. Cayley, well, ’e’s—’e won’t like it. ’E in’t very well in the mornings!” She looked anxious, as if she feared she would be blamed for Pitt’s arrival.

  “I dare say not,” he agreed. “But this is police business, and it can’t wait. Just let me in, and I’ll wake him myself, if you prefer?”

  She looked very dubious, but she knew authority when she heard it and led him obediently through the kitchens and stopped at the baize door to the rest of the house. Pitt understood.

  “Very well,” he said quietly. “I’ll tell him you had no choice.” He pushed the door open and went into the hall. He had only got as far as the bottom stair when the barest movement caught his eye, just an inch or two, as of something unfixed among the straight wooden pillars of the stairway.

  He looked up.

  It was Hallam Cayley, swinging by his neck very, very slightly from his dressing gown cord, attached to the bannister where it ran along the landing.