by Anne Perry
“Stop it!” Lennox said smartly. “There!” He grabbed the tea from Pearl and thrust it into Mabel’s hands. “Drink it slowly. Don’t gulp it.”
She tried to take it but she was shaking so badly, her fingers stiff, that she could not hold it.
Lennox steadied it, his hands over hers, keeping it from spilling.
“Drink it,” he told her firmly. “Concentrate, or you’ll get it all over you. Hold it still!”
She obeyed, sipping slowly, focusing her attention on it. Gradually her breathing began to subside and become normal again. After several minutes she sat up and put the now empty mug on the table in front of her.
“What did he look like?” Pitt asked her more gently.
“Look like?” She stared across the table at him. “ ’E were, I dunno. Orn’ry. ’E ’ad fair ’air, all sort o’ wavy.”
“What kind of clothes?” Pitt could feel himself cold inside. “What was he wearing, Mabel?”
“Din’t really look much.” She stared at him in horror, and he knew the other pictures that were in her mind, herself on the bed in Nora’s place.
“Expensive?” Lennox said, his voice cutting the silence.
Pitt glanced at him, but it was the same question he would have asked. It was in all their minds, it had to be.
“Yeah. Men around ’ere in’t got nuffink like that.”
“Would you know him if you saw him again?” Pitt asked, thinking back to Rose Burke, and her face as she had stared at Finlay FitzJames coming out of the front door in Devonshire Street.
“I dunno.” Mabel was terrified. It was there in her white, clammy skin and shivering body. “I sees ’undreds o’ men. In’t their faces wot I look at. It’s money wot matters at the end, i’n it? It’s only money as gets yer food an’ yer rent.”
“Thank you,” Pitt acknowledged, rising to his feet and pacing three steps across the kitchen floor, and back again. “Do you know anything else about your regular customers? Where do they live? What do they do? How can I find them?”
“Wo’ for?” Kate looked at him narrowly.
“In case they seen ’oo done Nora, yer stupid cow!” Edie said. “Wot yer think?” She swung around to Pitt. “It’s yer job to get this bastard wot’s doin’ girls ’round ’ere! Please, mister! First ’e done poor Ada over on Pentecost Alley, now ’e done Nora. ’Oo’s next? An’ next arter that?”
Pearl began to cry again, softly, like a lost child.
“Geez, Edie!” Mabel said desperately. “Why yer gotter say summink like that?”
Edie swung around. “Well, it weren’t that rotten little swine Costigan, were it? ’E bin ’anged by the neck till ’e were dead and stuck six feet under, in’t ’e?” She jabbed her fingers towards the wall and the darkness outside. “It’s some bastard wot’s still aht there, i’n it? Some bastard wot could come in ’ere an’ be yer next customer, eh? Poor Nora’s, weren’t it? ’Oo’s gonner ’elp us if the rozzers don’t, eh? I dunno ’oo ’e is. D’you?”
“Did anybody see anyone else here this afternoon?” Pitt asked one more time. “Anyone at all?”
Pitt took down everything else they had to say, but it added nothing more. At midnight he left Ewart and a white-faced Constable Binns to continue searching for the customers the women had named and question them as to who they had seen and what they had heard. That was work for the local station.
Lennox had taken the body of Nora Gough in the mortuary wagon, and tomorrow he would perform an autopsy on her. Not that Pitt expected it to tell him anything different from the brief, sad story he already knew.
He arrived home at five minutes to one to find Charlotte standing in the hall, the parlor door open behind her, her face pale, eyes wide.
He closed the door. He had forgotten until this moment that he was still dressed in his Sunday best and had no coat with him. He had expected to be home long before this. Neither had he eaten.
“Was it the same?” she asked huskily.
He nodded. “Exactly the same.” He walked past her into the parlor and sat down in his easy chair, but forward, leaning on his knees, not relaxing.
She came in and closed the door with a click, then sat opposite him.
“You never told me what the first was like,” she said quietly. “Perhaps you should.”
He knew she did not mean that she could see any answer he did not, simply that the process of explaining would clarify his own mind, as it had so often before. There was no better way to learn what one meant than by trying to explain it to someone else who was not afraid to say they did not understand.
Carefully, hating every detail, he told her about finding the body of Ada McKinley, what it was like, what had been done to her. He watched her face, and saw the pain in it, but she did not look away.
“And this time?” she asked. “What was her name?”
“Nora Gough.”
“And it was exactly the same?”
“Yes. Broken fingers and toes. Water. Garter with the ribbon ’round her arm, the boots buttoned together.”
“That couldn’t be chance,” she said. “Who knew about all those things, apart from whoever did it?”
“Ewart, Lennox, he’s the police surgeon, Cornwallis, and the constable who was first called. And Tellman,” he answered. “No one else.”
“Newspapers?”
“No.”
“The women in the same house could have talked,” she pointed out. “People do, especially about something that frightens them. To share it diminishes it … sometimes.”
“Even they didn’t have all the details,” he said, remembering what Rose Burke had actually seen. “They didn’t know about the fingers and toes. In fact, Binns and Tellman didn’t either.”
She was sitting forward also, her knees close to his, her hands only inches away.
“Then it was the same person, wasn’t it,” she said softly. There was no criticism in her voice, nor did he see fear in her eyes, only sorrow.
“Yes,” he answered, biting his lip. “It must have been.” Neither of them added that it could not then have been Costigan, but it hung in the air between them, with all its dark pain and guilt.
Charlotte put her hands over his and held them.
“Was it Finlay FitzJames?” she asked, searching his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said frankly. “I found a handkerchief under Nora Gough’s pillow with his initials on it. They aren’t common. But it doesn’t prove he was there tonight.” He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “But her one customer tonight was seen. He was fair-haired and well-dressed. In other words, a gentleman.”
“Does Finlay FitzJames have fair hair?”
“Yes. Very handsome hair, thick and waving. And they mentioned that particularly tonight.”
“Thomas …”
Her voice had changed. He was aware she was about to tell him something he would not like, something which she found extremely difficult.
“What?”
“Emily was absolutely sure Finlay FitzJames was innocent. She knows his sister….”
He waited.
“She saw him the night Ada was killed, you know?” She looked up, her brow furrowed, her eyes dark and wide.
“Emily saw Finlay?” He was incredulous. “Why on earth didn’t she say so?”
“No … no, Tallulah saw him!” she corrected him. “She couldn’t say so because she had already lied to her father about where she was, saying she was somewhere else!” She was speaking more and more rapidly. “It was a pretty debauched affair. People were drinking too much and smoking opium, or taking cocaine and things like that. It was in Chelsea, on Beaufort Street. She wasn’t supposed to be there. Her father would have taken an apoplexy if he’d known.”
“That I can believe,” Pitt said fervently. “But Tallulah saw Finlay there? Are you sure?”
“Well, Emily is sure. But Tallulah didn’t think anyone would believe her anyway, when she is his sister and had already told ev
eryone she was at Lady Swaffham’s party.”
“But someone else must have seen him!” Pitt said with a strange, almost frightening sense of exhilaration. Perhaps at least he had not been wrong about Finlay. “Who else was there?”
“That’s it. Tallulah didn’t know anyone, except the person she went with, and she hardly knew him. He was drunk half out of his senses, and doesn’t even remember going.”
“Well, people must have seen Tallulah!” he insisted, gripping her hands without realizing it.
“She doesn’t know who to ask. Parties like that are … well, they are held in private houses. Apparently people drift from one room to another. There are screens for privacy, potted palms, people half drunk … you could come and go and no one would know who you were, or care. Even the host himself didn’t know who was there.”
“How on earth do you know that?” he demanded, trying to envision such an affair. “Did Emily tell you? And I suppose Tallulah FitzJames told her?”
Her face fell. “You don’t believe it, do you?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I believe Tallulah could have been to such an affair, and so could Finlay. But I don’t believe she saw him at one the night Ada McKinley was killed. As proof of his innocence, it’s worth nothing.”
“That’s what Tallulah thought. But it proved it to Emily.”
Suspicion in his mind was sharpening.
“Why are you telling me this now, Charlotte? Are you saying Finlay has to be innocent? You said it proved it to Emily-not to you!”
“I don’t know,” she said candidly, looking down and then up at him again. She was very pale, very unhappy. “Thomas … it was Emily who had the second Hellfire Club badge made, and Tallulah put it in Finlay’s belongings so you would find it.”
“She did what?” His voice rose to a shout. “What did you say?”
She was very pale, but her eyes did not waver. She spoke very quietly indeed, almost a whisper.
“Emily had a second badge made so Tallulah could put it in Finlay’s wardrobe.”
“God Almighty!” he exploded. “And you helped her! And then had me go and look for it! How could you be so deceitful?” That was what hurt, not the laying of false evidence, the muddying of a case, but the way she had deliberately deceived him. She had never done such a thing before. It was a betrayal from the one place he had never expected it.
Her eyes widened in horror, almost as if he had slapped her.
“I didn’t know she’d done that!” she protested.
He was too tired to be angry, and too aware of his own guilt over Costigan, and his need for Charlotte and the loyalty, the comfort, she could give him, even the sheer warmth of her physical presence.
She was waiting, watching his face. She was not afraid, but there was hurt and anxiety in her eyes. She understood the pain in him. Her fingers crept over his, soft and strong.
He leaned forward and kissed her, and then again, and again, and she answered him with the confidence and the generosity she had always had.
He sighed. “Even if I’d known, it wouldn’t have altered the evidence against Costigan,” he said at last. “Actually, Augustus FitzJames said he’d had the damn thing made. I wish I knew why he said that.”
“To stop you investigating any further,” she answered, sitting back again.
“But why?” He was puzzled. To him it made no sense.
“Scandal.” She shook her head. “It’s scandalous having the police in the house, whatever they are doing there. I suppose you have to go back and see him tomorrow?”
“Yes.” He did not want to think of it.
She rose to her feet. “Then we’d better go to bed while there’s still some of tonight left. Come …”
He rose also and turned off the gas, then put his arm around her, and together they went up the stairs. At least for a few hours he did not have to think of it.
In the morning Pitt got up early and went to the kitchen while Charlotte woke the children and began the chores of her own day. Gracie cooked him breakfast, glancing at him every now and then, her eyes narrowed, her little face pinched with anxiety. She had already seen the morning newspapers and heard there had been a second murder in Whitechapel. Charlotte had quite recently taught her to read, so she also knew most of what was being written, and she was ready to defend Pitt against anyone and everyone.
The afternoon editions would probably be worse, when there was more news to relate, more details, more accuracy from which to draw blame.
She clattered around, banging the crockery and leaving the kettle to whistle, because she was furious with the people who blamed Pitt, and frightened in case they made things even harder for him, and frustrated because she did not know what she could do to help. She did not even know whether she should mention it or not.
“Gracie, you’ll break it,” Pitt said gently.
“Sorry, sir.” She dropped the kettle with a crash. “It just makes me so mad, sir. It in’t fair! What’ve they done about it? Nuffink! They wouldn’t know Ow ter begin, they wouldn’t. Stupid little article, ’e is, ’ooever wrote them things. It in’t responsible.” She was using longer words these days. Reading had changed quite a lot of her vocabulary.
Pitt smiled in spite of the way he felt. Gracie’s loyalty was peculiarly warming. He hoped he could live up to the high image she had of him. But the more he thought of it, the more afraid he was that he had made an irreparable mistake with Costigan, that it was something he had overlooked, that he should have seen and understood, which had sent him to an unjust execution.
He ate his breakfast without even being aware of what it was, and rose to leave just as Charlotte and the children came in. Gracie had hidden the newspapers. Even so, Jemima at least was aware that something was wrong. She looked from Charlotte to Pitt, then sat down.
“I don’t want any breakfast,” she said immediately.
Daniel hitched himself onto his chair, reached for the glass of milk provided for him and drank half of it, wiped the white ring off his mouth with his hand, then announced that he did not want any either.
“Yes you do,” Charlotte said quickly.
“There’s a man out in the street,” Jemima said, looking at Pitt. “He knocked on the door and Mama told him to go away. She was very rude. You told me I should never speak to anyone like that. She didn’t say please … or thank you.”
Pitt looked up at Charlotte.
“A man from one of the newspapers.” She forced a smile. “He was impertinent I told him to go away and not to knock on the door again or I’d bring the dog.”
“And she told a fib,” Jemima added. “We haven’t got a dog.”
Daniel looked frightened. “You wouldn’t give him Archie, would you? Or Angus?” he said anxiously.
“No, of course I wouldn’t,” Charlotte assured him. Then, as his face did not clear, she went on. “I wasn’t going to give him a dog, darling, I was going to tell it to bite him!”
Daniel smiled and reached for his milk. “Oh, that’s all right. Archie could scratch him,” he said hopefully.
Charlotte took his glass from him. “Don’t drink all that now or you won’t eat your porridge.”
He forgot about not wanting breakfast, and when Gracie passed him his porridge bowl he was happy enough to take it.
Jemima was more concerned. She sensed the unhappiness in the air. She fiddled with her food, and no one chastised her.
Suddenly there was a ring on the doorbell, and the instant after, a loud knocking. Gracie slammed down the kettle and marched towards the hall.
Charlotte looked at Pitt, ready to go after her.
Pitt rose to his feet. “I’ve got to face them sometime,” he said, wishing he could put it off until he had something to say that would explain it, some answer or reason. There were no excuses.
Charlotte started to speak, then stopped.
“What is it?” Jemima asked, looking at her mother, then at her father. “What’s happe
ned? What’s wrong?”
Charlotte put her hand on Jemima’s shoulder. “Nothing you need to worry about,” she said quickly. “Finish your breakfast.”
The front door opened and they heard a man’s voice, then Gracie’s answer, high-pitched and furious. A moment later the door banged shut, and then Gracie’s feet marched back down the corridor. For a small creature, she could make a lot of noise when she was angry.
“Cheek of them!” she said, coming into the kitchen, her face white, eyes blazing. “Who do they think they are? Write a few words and think they have all the brains in London! Nothing but a tuppenny upstart.” She turned the tap full on and the jet hit the spoon in the sink and rebounded back, soaking the top half of her dress. She drew in her breath to swear, then remembered Pitt was in the room and choked it back.
Charlotte stifled a laugh that was too close to hysteria.
“I assume that was a reporter from the newspaper, Gracie?”
“Yes,” Gracie conceded, dabbing at herself with a tea towel and not making the situation appreciably better. “Worthless little item!”
“You’d better go and put on a dry dress,” Charlotte suggested.
“Don’t matter,” Gracie responded, putting the tea towel down. “It’s warm enough in ’ere. Won’t come to no ’arm.” And she began rummaging furiously in the flour bin and then the dried fruit bin, looking for ingredients for a cake which would not be baked until mid-morning, but the physical activity was a release for the pent-up tension in her. She would probably pound the dough for bread to within an inch of flattening it altogether.
Pitt smiled a trifle weakly, kissed Charlotte good-bye, touched Jemima on the top of the head and Daniel on the shoulder as he passed and went out to begin the day’s investigation.
Jemima turned wide eyes to Charlotte. “What is it, Mama? Who’s Gracie angry with?”
“People who write things in the newspapers when they don’t know the whole story,” Charlotte replied. “People who try to make everyone upset and frightened because it sells more papers, regardless of the fact that it may make a lot of other things worse.”