Cardington Crescent (11 page)

Pitt hid a bitter smile. He was quite sure Great-aunt Vespasia knew better than Eustace precisely how old she was, and she was certainly braver.

“Emily is my sister-in-law,” he said quietly. “I should have called upon her whatever the circumstances of George’s death. But first I’ll see the doctor, if you please.”

Eustace left without speaking again. He resented the position he had been placed in; his house had been invaded and he had lost control of events. It was a unique and frightening occurrence—he was taking orders from a policeman, here in his own morning room! Damn Emily! She had brought all this upon them with her vulgar jealousy.

Treves came in so soon he must have been waiting close at hand. He looked tired. Pitt had not met him before, but liked him instantly; there was both humor and pity in the weary lines of his face.

“Inspector Pitt?” he said with a raised eyebrow. “Treves.” He held out his hand.

Pitt took it briefly. “Could it have been suicide?”

“Rubbish!” Treves replied dourly. “Men like George Ashworth don’t steal poison and take it in their coffee at seven o’clock on a sunny morning in someone else’s house—and certainly not over a love affair. If he’d ever have done it at all—which I doubt—it would have been in a fit of despair over a gambling debt he couldn’t pay, and he’d have blown his brains out with a gun. Gentlemanly thing to do. And he damn surely wouldn’t poison a nice little spaniel at the same time.”

“Spaniel? Mr. March said nothing about a spaniel.”

“He wouldn’t. He’s still trying to convince himself it’s suicide.”

Pitt sighed. “Then we’d better go up and see the body. The police surgeon will look at it later, but you can probably tell me all I need to know.”

“Enormous dose of digitalis,” Treves answered, walking towards the door. “Coffee would disguise it. I daresay your constable in the kitchen will have found that out. Poor fellow must have died very quickly. I suppose if you have to kill someone, short of a bullet through the head this would be about the most merciful and the most efficient way of doing it. I daresay you’ll find the old lady’s entire supply is gone.”

“She had a lot?” Pitt asked, following him across the hall and up the wide, shallow stairs to the landing and into the dressing room. He noted sadly that George apparently had been sleeping in a separate room from Emily. He knew perfectly well it was the custom among many people of affluence for husband and wife each to have their own bedroom, but he would not have cared for it. To wake in the night and know always that Charlotte was there beside him was one of the sweetest roots deep at the core of his life, an ever waiting retreat from ugliness, a warmth from which to go forth into the coldness of any day, even the most violent, the weariest and the most tragic.

But there was no time now to contemplate the difference in lives and how much or little it might mean. Treves was standing beside the bed and the sheet-covered body. Wordlessly he pulled the cover back, and Pitt stared down at the waxy, pale face. They were George’s features—the straight nose, broad brow—but the dark eyes were closed, and there was a blueness around the sockets. Everything was the right shape, exactly as he remembered him, and yet it did not seem to be George. Death was very real. Looking at him one could not imagine that the soul was present.

“No injury,” he said quietly. George was not really there, this was only a shell, but it seemed callous to speak in a normal voice in its presence.

“None at all,” Treves replied. “There was no struggle. Nothing but a man drinking coffee that had enough digitalis in it to give him a massive heart attack—and an unfortunate little dog getting a treat, and dying as well.”

“Which means it wasn’t suicide.” Pitt sighed. “George would never have killed the dog. It wasn’t even his. Stripe will get the details from the servants, find out where the coffee was, who could have reached it. I expect George was the only person to take coffee at that hour. Most people take tea. I’ll have to see the family.”

“Nasty,” Treves said sympathetically. “Domestic murder is one of the tragedies of our human condition. God knows what we do to each other in what is fondly imagined to be the sanctuary of our homes, and is too often a purgatory.” He opened the door onto the landing again. “The old lady is a selfish and autocratic old besom—don’t let her fool you she is in delicate health. There’s nothing the matter with her except old age.”

“Then why the digitalis?”

Treves shrugged. “She didn’t get it from me. She’s the sort who affects vapors and palpitations when her family thwarts her; it’s about the only hold she has over young Tassie. Without obedience dominion is empty, so she persuaded one of the other doctors in the area to prescribe it for her. She seldom misses an opportunity to tell me how he saved her life—implying I would have let her die.” He smiled grimly.

Pitt remembered other dowagers he had met who ruled their families with relentless threats of imminent collapse. Charlotte’s grandmother was a fearsome old lady who could cast a gloom on almost any family proceedings with a catalogue of the ingratitude she suffered at their hands.

“Perhaps I’d better see her next,” he remarked, offering his hand to the doctor. “Thank you.”

Treves shook it with a firm grip. “Good luck,” he said shortly, and his face conveyed his disbelief in it.

Pitt dispatched a note about digitalis to Stripe in the servants’ hall, and set about the next duty. He asked the footman to take him to Mrs. March.

She was still downstairs in the hot-pink boudoir, and in spite of the extremely pleasant early afternoon there was a fire burning strongly in the grate, making the room stuffy—quite unlike the rest of the house, where the windows were thrown open.

She was lying on the chaise longue, a tray of tea on a rosewood table beside her, also an ornate glass bottle of smelling salts. She clutched a handkerchief to her cheek as if she were about to burst into weeping.

The room was crowded with furniture and drapery, and Pitt found it almost robbed him of breath, closing in on him. But the old woman’s eyes over her fat hand, shining with rings, were as cold as chips of stone.

“I presume you are the policeman,” she said with distaste.

“Yes, ma’am.” She did not offer him a seat, and he did not invite rebuff by taking one unasked.

“I suppose you’ll be poking your nose into everybody’s affairs, and asking a lot of impertinent questions,” she went on, eyeing his wild hair and bulging pockets.

He disliked her immediately, and George’s white face was too recent a vision for his usual self-control.

“I hope also to ask some pertinent ones,” he answered. “I intend to discover who murdered George.” He used the word
murder
deliberately, turning its harshness on his tongue.

Her eyes narrowed. “Well, you’ll be a fool if you can’t do that! But then I daresay you are a fool.”

He stared back at her without a flicker. “I presume there has been no intruder in the house overnight, ma’am?”

She snorted. “Certainly not!” Her little mouth turned down at the corners in contempt. “But a burglar would hardly use poison, would he.”

“No, ma’am. The only possible conclusion is that it was someone in the house, and it’s extremely unlikely to be a servant. Which leaves the family, or your guests. Will you be kind enough to tell me something about those presently in the house?”

“You don’t need to go through them all.” She sniffed and pulled a face. The room was stifling, the cloudless sun hot on the windows, but she did not seem to notice. “There is only my immediate family: Lord Ashworth, he was a cousin; Lady Ashworth, whom I have heard tell is somehow connected with you.” She let this incredible piece of intelligence fall into the hot air and remained silent for several seconds. Then, as Pitt made no remark, she finished tartly, “And a Mr. Jack Radley, a person of some disappointment—to my son, anyway. Although I could have told him.”

Pitt took the bait. “Told him what, ma’am?”

Her eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

Pitt felt the sweat trickle down his skin, but it would not be acceptable to take off his jacket in her boudoir.

“Immoral,” the old lady said baldly. “No money, and too handsome by half. Mr. March thought he would be a suitable match for Anastasia. Nonsense! She doesn’t need to marry good blood, she’s got plenty of her own. Not that you’d know anything about that.” She stared up at him, cricking her neck to see him but determined not to let him sit down. He was an inferior, and he must be made to remember it; it was not for the likes of policemen to sit themselves on the good furniture in the front of the house. By such license had begun the whole erosion of every value that now afflicted the nation. If this man had to sit, let him do it in the servants’ hall. “Anyway,” she went on, “a man like Radley doesn’t pick a plain-Jane like Anastasia. All that orange-colored hair and skin full of speckles—doesn’t come from our side of the family! And thin as a washboard. Hardly a woman at all. A man like that is out to marry for money, for something fashionable to be seen with in public. Something handsome to bed. Ha! I shock you!”

Pitt remained totally straight-faced. “Not at all, ma’am. I’m sure you are right. There are many men like that, and many women who are much the same. Except, of course, they also like a title, where it is to be had.”

The old lady glared at him, wishing to snub his insolence, but he had made the point she desired, and at the moment that need was stronger.

“Hum-ha! Well—Mr. Radley and Emily Ashworth are an excellent pair. Came together like two magnets, and poor George was the victim. There—I’ve done your job for you. Now go away. I’m tired and I feel ill. I have had a severe shock today. If you had the slightest idea how to behave you would ...” She trailed off, not sure what he would do.

Pitt bowed. “You are bearing up magnificently, ma’am.”

She glared at him, sure there was sarcasm there but unable to pinpoint it exactly enough to retaliate. His face was almost offensively innocent. Wretched creature.

“Ha,” she said grudgingly. “You may go.”

For the first time he smiled. “Thank you, ma’am. Gracious of you.”

In the large hall he found a footman waiting for him.

“Lady Cumming-Gould is in the breakfast room, sir. She would like to see you,” the footman said anxiously. “This way, sir.”

With a slight nod, Pitt followed him to the door, knocked, and went in. The room was heavily furnished; bright sunlight picked out the massive sideboard and large breakfast table. The windows were open and a chatter of birds drifted in from the garden.

Vespasia was sitting at the foot of the table—Olivia’s place when she had been alive. She looked tired; there was a stoop to her shoulders that he had never seen before, even in the weariest days when she had been fighting to get the child poverty bill through Parliament. The relief in her eyes when she saw him was so intense, it gave him a lurch of pain that he could do nothing to make it easier for her. Indeed, he feared already that he was going to make it worse.

She straightened up with an effort. “Good afternoon, Thomas. I am pleased it was possible for you to take this—case—yourself.”

For once he could think of nothing to say. Grief was too strong for the few words he could find, and yet to speak purely as a policeman would be appalling.

“For heaven’s sake, sit down,” she ordered. “I am in no mood to break my neck looking up at you. I am sure you have already seen Eustace March, and his mother.”

“Yes.” He sat down obediently opposite her across the heavy polished table.

“What did they say?” she asked bluntly. There was no time for gentle skirting round the truth, simply because it was unpleasant.

“Mr. March tried to convince me it was suicide because George had fallen in love with another woman—”

“Rubbish!” Vespasia interrupted tartly. “He was infatuated with Sybilla. He behaved like a fool, but I think by last night he had realized that. Emily handled it perfectly. She had every bit as much sense as I could have hoped.”

Pitt glanced down for a moment, then up again. “Mrs. March said that Emily was having an affair with the other guest, Jack Radley.”

“Spiteful old besom!” Vespasia said in exasperation. “Emily’s husband was behaving like an ass with another woman, and without the slightest discretion, an affliction which Lavinia has had to put up with herself, and failed to resolve. Of course Emily made it appear she was developing an interest in another man. What woman with spirit wouldn’t?”

Pitt did not comment on Lavinia March; the pain of the dilemma was known to both of them. A man could divorce his wife for adultery; a woman had no such privilege. She must learn to live with it the best she could. With this death the fears engendered by suspicion had begun to grow, to warp thought, to seize and enlarge every ugly trait.

“Who is Sybilla?” he asked, because he had to.

“Eustace’s daughter-in-law,” Vespasia answered wearily. “William March is Eustace’s only son—my grandson.” She said it as if the idea surprised her. “Olivia had ten daughters, seven of whom lived. They are all married except Tassie. Eustace wanted to marry her to Jack Radley. That’s why he is here—to be inspected, so to speak.”

“I assume he does not meet with your approval?”

Her finely arched eyebrows rose and there was a gleam of humor in her eyes, too slight to reach her mouth. “Not for Tassie. She doesn’t love him, nor he her. But he’s pleasing enough, as long as one is sensible and doesn’t expect too much. He has one redeeming feature: I cannot imagine he will ever be a bore, and that is more than one can say of most socially acceptable young men.”

“Who else is there in the house?” He dreaded the answer, because if there had been any other outsider he knew Mrs. March would already have told him. No matter how she disapproved of Emily, she would never choose her for a cause of suicide had there been any other answer available. It reflected too badly on the family.

“No one,” Vespasia said very quietly. “Lavinia, Eustace, and Tassie live here; William and Sybilla were visiting for the Season. George and Emily were to be here for a month, and Jack Radley and I are here for three weeks.”