Cardington Crescent (2 page)

“Send a message back to the station that we need half a dozen constables. And the mortuary cart, and the surgeon.”

“Yes, sir.” Stripe forced himself to look down once more, perhaps because he felt somehow callous disregarding the enormity of it, walking away without some acknowledgment. It was the same instinct that makes one take off one’s hat at the sight of a hearse passing in the street, even though one has no idea who is dead.

Pitt walked between the gravestones, curled and decorated, marred by weeds, and came to the graveled entrance to the church. The door was open and it was cool inside. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom and the hazy colored splashes on the stones from the stained glass. A large woman was collapsed, half prostrate, on a wooden seat, her hat on the floor beside her, the neck of her dress undone. The sexton’s wife, holding a glass of water in one hand and a bottle of ammonia smelling salts in the other, was muttering something comforting. They both looked round, startled, as Pitt’s footsteps sounded on the floor. A ginger-colored Pekingese dog was asleep in the doorway in the sun and ignored him completely.

“Mrs. Peabody?”

She stared at him with a mixture of suspicion and anticipation. It was not entirely displeasing to be the epicenter of such a drama—providing, of course, that everyone understood she had no connection with it but that of an innocent woman drawn in by chance.

“I am she,” she said somewhat unnecessarily.

Pitt had met many Mrs. Peabodys before, and he knew not only what she felt now but what nightmares were to come. He sat down on the bench beside her, a yard away.

“You must be extremely distressed”—he hurried on as she drew in a gasp of breath to tell him precisely how much—“so I will trouble you as little as possible. When was the last time you walked your dog past the churchyard?”

Her carefully arched eyebrows shot up into her rather sandy hairline. “I don’t think you understand, young man! I am not in the habit of finding such ... such ...” She could frame no words for the quite genuine horror that seized her.

“I’m sure,” Pitt said grimly. “I assume that if it had been there the last time, your dog would have found it then.”

Mrs. Peabody, in spite of her shock, was not without common sense. She saw the point immediately. “Oh. I came this way yesterday afternoon, and Clarence did not ...” She trailed off, not liking to complete such an unnecessary remark.

“I see. Thank you. Do you know if Clarence pulled the parcel out from under the bushes, or was it already out?”

She shook her head.

It did not matter, except that had it been in the open it would probably have been noticed earlier. Almost certainly, whoever had put it there had taken the time to hide it also. There was really nothing else to ask her but her name and address.

He left them and went outside again into the heat and began to think about organizing a search. It was half past four.

By seven o’clock they had found them all. It was a grim business; going down the steps into disused areaways, sifting through refuse in rubbish cans that could be reached from the street, poking under bushes and behind railings. Parcel by parcel the rest were retrieved. The worst was in a narrow and fetid alley just over a mile from the churchyard, in the sour tenements of St. Giles. It should have provided the first clue to her identity, but as with two of the others, feral cats had discovered it first, led by scent and their ever devouring hunger. There was nothing recognizable now but long, fair hair and a crushing injury to the skull.

The long summer day did not darken till ten in the evening. Pitt trudged from door to door asking, pleading, occasionally bullying an unfortunate servant into an admission of guilt for some domestic misdemeanor—perhaps an illicit flirtation that had held them on the back steps longer than usual—but no one admitted to having seen anything remotely relevant. There had been no costermongers but those on long known and legitimate business, no residents or strangers carrying mysterious parcels, no one hurrying furtively, and no one reported missing.

Pitt was back at the police station as the sun set cherry-red over the roofs, and the gaslights came on in the fashionable thoroughfares like so many straying moons. Inside, the station smelled of closed doors, heat, the sharpness of ink, and brand new linoleum on the floor. The police surgeon was waiting for him, shirt sleeves still rolled up and stained, his waistcoat done up on the wrong buttons. He looked tired, and there was a smear of blood across his nose.

“Well?” Pitt asked wearily.

“Young woman.” The man sat down without being asked. “Fair hair, fair skin. As near as one can tell, she might have been quite good-looking. She certainly wasn’t any beggar. Hands were clean, no broken nails, but she’d done a bit of housework. My first guess would be a parlormaid, but it’s only a guess.” He sighed. “And she’d had a child, but not within the last few months.”

Pitt sat down behind his desk and leaned on his elbows. “How old?”

“For God’s sake, man! How do I know?” the doctor said angrily, his pity, disgust, and sheer helplessness spilling over at the only victim available. “You present me with a corpse in half a dozen pieces, like so much offal from some bloody butcher, and you want me to tell you who she was! Well, I can’t!” He stood up, knocking his chair over. “She was a young woman, probably in domestic service, and some lunatic murdered her by hitting her on the back of the head and then, God knows why, cut her into pieces and left her strewn around Bloomsbury and St. Giles. You’ll be damned lucky if you ever find out who she is, still less who did that to her. I sometimes wonder why you bother. Of the thousand different ways to murder people, a crack on the head might be less cruel in the long run than some of the ways we ignore. Have you been in the tenements and lodging houses in St. Giles, Wapping, Mile End? The last corpse I looked at was a twelve-year-old girl. Died in childbirth—” He stopped, his voice thick with tears he was only half embarrassed for. He glanced at Pitt savagely and strode out, slamming the door.

Pitt stood up slowly, righted the chair, and went out after him. Normally he would have walked home; it was only a couple of miles. But it was nearly eleven and he was tired and hungry and his feet hurt more than usual. He took a hansom and ignored the expense.

The front of the house was dark and he let himself in with his key. Gracie, the maid, would long have gone to bed, but he could see a light on in the kitchen and he knew Charlotte would be waiting for him. Sighing, he took off his boots with relief and walked along the corridor, feeling the coolness of the linoleum through his socks.

Charlotte was in the doorway, the gas lamp behind her shining on the auburn in her hair and catching the warm curve of her cheek. Without saying anything, she put her arms round him and held him surprisingly tightly. For a moment he was afraid something was wrong, that one of the children was ill; then he realized she would of course have seen an evening newspaper. If it had not mentioned his name, she had guessed from his lateness that he was involved.

He had not intended to tell her. In spite of all the cases she had concerned herself with, part of him still believed she should be protected from such horror. Most men felt their homes were a retreat from the harshness, and frequently the ugliness, of the outside world, a place to refresh both body and spirit before returning again to the fray. Women were part of that gentler, better place.

But Charlotte had seldom done the expected, even before she had appalled her well-bred family by marrying into the police, a descent so radical she was fortunate they had not disowned her.

Now she loosed herself a little and looked up at him, her face puckered with concern.

“You are on that case, aren’t you, Thomas? That poor woman found in St. Mary’s churchyard?”

“Yes.” He kissed her gently, then again, hoping she would not talk about it. He was so tired he hurt, and there was nothing to say.

As she grew older Charlotte was learning when to keep her own counsel a little more, but this was not one of those occasions. She had read the extra edition of the newspaper with horror and pity, cooked two dinners for Pitt and had to abandon them both, and she expected at the very least that he would share with her the thoughts and some of the feelings that had possessed him during the day.

“Are you going to find out who she was?” she asked, pulling back and starting for the kitchen. “Have you eaten?”

“No, of course I haven’t,” he said wearily, following her. “But don’t bother cooking anything now.”

Her eyebrows shot up, but this time she glanced at his face and bit her tongue. Behind her on the blackened and polished range the kettle was billowing clouds of steam.

“Would you like cold mutton, pickle, and fresh bread?” she asked sweetly. “And a cup of tea?”

He smiled in spite of himself. It would be easier, and pleasanter in the long run, to surrender.

“Yes, I would.” He sat down, putting his jacket over the back of the chair.

She hesitated, then decided it would be wiser to make the tea before saying anything more, but there was a little upward quirk at the corner of her mouth.

Five minutes later he had three slices of crumbly bread, a pile of homemade chutney—Charlotte was very good at chutney and marmalade—several slices of meat, and a breakfast cup full of steaming tea.

Charlotte had contained herself long enough. “Are you going to find out who she was?”

“I doubt it,” he said, filling his mouth with food.

She stared at him solemnly. “Won’t somebody report her missing? Bloomsbury is quite a respectable area. People who have parlormaids notice if they’re gone.”

In spite of their six years of marriage and all the cases she had one way or another found herself involved in, she still carried with her remnants of the innocence in which she had grown up, protected from unpleasantness, imprisoned from the harshness and the excitement of the world, as young ladies of gentility should be. To begin with, Charlotte’s breeding had awed Pitt and, in her blinder moments, angered him. But mostly it disappeared in all the infinitely more important things they shared: laughter at life’s absurdities, tenderness, passion, and anger at the same injustices.

“Thomas?”

“My darling Charlotte, she doesn’t have to have come from Bloomsbury. And even if she did, how many maids do you suppose have been dismissed, for any number of reasons, from dishonesty to having been caught in the arms of the master of the house? Others will have eloped!—or been supposed to have—or lifted the family silver and disappeared into the night.”

“Parlormaids aren’t like that!” she protested. “Aren’t you even going to ask after her?”

“We have done,” he replied with a tired edge to his voice. Had she no idea how futile it was—and that he would already have done everything he could? Did she not know that much of him, after all this time?

She bent her head, looking down at the tablecloth. “I’m sorry. I suppose you’ll never know.”

“Probably not,” he agreed, picking up his cup. “Is that a letter from Emily on the mantelpiece?”

“Yes.” Emily was her younger sister, who had married as far above herself as Charlotte had descended. “She is staying with Great-aunt Vespasia in Cardington Crescent.”

“I thought Great-aunt Vespasia lived in Gadstone Park.”

“She does. They’re all staying with Uncle Eustace March.”

He grunted. There was nothing to say to that. He had a deep admiration for the elegant, waspish Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, but Eustace March he had never heard of, nor did he wish to.

“She sounds very unhappy,” Charlotte went on, looking at him anxiously.

“I’m sorry.” He did not meet her eyes but fished for another piece of bread and the chutney dish. “But there’s nothing we can do. I daresay she’s bored.” This time he did look up, fixing her with something approaching a glare. “And you will go nowhere near Bloomsbury, not even to visit some long lost friend, either of yours or of Emily’s. Is that understood, Charlotte?”

“Yes, Thomas,” she said with wide eyes. “I don’t think I know anybody in Bloomsbury, anyway.”

E
MILY WAS INDEED
profoundly unhappy, in spite of the fact that she looked magnificent in a shimmering aquamarine gown of daring and elegant cut and was sitting in the Marches’ private box at the Savoy. On stage, in all its delicious, lyrical charm, was Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera
Iolanthe,
of which she was particularly fond. The very idea of a youth half human and half fairy, divided at the waist, normally appealed to her sense of the absurd. Tonight it passed her by.

The cause of her distress was that for several days now her husband, George, had taken no pains at all to hide the fact that he very evidently preferred Sybilla March’s company to Emily’s. He was perfectly civil, in an automatic kind of way, which was worse than rudeness. Rudeness would at least have meant he was sharply aware of her, not dimly, as of something blurred at the edge of his vision. It was Sybilla’s presence that brought the light to his face, it was she his eyes followed, she whose words held his attention, whose wit made him laugh.

Now he was sitting behind her, and to Emily she looked as gaudy as some overblown flower, in her flame-colored gown, with her white skin and peat-water-dark eyes and all that opulent mass of hair. In spite of the hurt and the foolishness of it, Emily glanced sideways at him often enough to know that George barely looked at the stage. The hero’s plight did not move him in the slightest, nor the heroine’s winsome flirtations, nor the fairy Queen nor Iolanthe herself. He did smile and move his fingers gently in time to “The Peers’ Song,” which surely would move anyone at all, and his attention was caught for a moment’s sheer pleasure in the dancing trio, with the Lord High Chancellor kicking his legs in the air with abandoned glee.

Emily could feel the misery and panic growing inside her. Everything around was color, gaiety, and sound; every face she could see was smiling—George at Sybilla, Uncle Eustace March at himself, Sybilla’s husband, William, at the fantasy on stage. His youngest sister, Tassie, only nineteen, thin as her mother had been and with a shock of hair the color of sunlight on apricots, was definitely smiling at the principal tenor. Old Mrs. March, her grandmother, was twitching the corner of her tight lips upward in spite of herself; she did not care to be amused. Great-aunt Vespasia, Tassie’s maternal grandmother, on the other hand, was delighted. She had a marked sense of the ridiculous and had long ago ceased to care a jot what anyone else thought of her.