Resurrection Row (26 page)

She was striding along in a fashion unbefitting a lady, her head in the air, enjoying the bleak beauty of the trees against the ragged clouds far above. In the Park it was almost still; heavy drops glistened and dripped from twigs. She had never considered February had any loveliness before, but now she took pleasure in the stark simplicity of it, the soft, subdued colors.

She had stopped to watch a bird in branches above her when she was aware of overhearing a conversation immediately the other side of the tree.

“Did you really?” The voice was so soft that she did not at first recognize it.

There appeared to be no answer.

“Come and tell me all about it then,” the voice continued.

Again there was silence, except for a faint squeak.

“My, well, how about that! You are a clever girl.”

Then she knew it; at least she was almost sure she did. It sounded too soft, too American to be anyone but Virgil Smith.

But whom on earth was he talking to?

“My, you are beautiful! Well, come on now, tell me all about it.”

An appalling thought came to her; he must be making advances to some servant or streetwalker! How dreadful! And she had accidentally come upon him. How could she possibly get away without embarrassing them both quite unforgettably? She froze.

Still there was no reply from whomever he was speaking to.

“You pretty thing.” He was still talking gently, softly. “You beautiful girl.”

She could not stay any longer overhearing a conversation that was obviously desperately private. She took a step to creep, in the lee of the tree trunk, till she was back on the path and could affect not to have noticed him.

Her foot cracked on a twig, and it broke loudly.

He stood up and came around, enormous in a greatcoat; square, like the tree itself.

Alicia shut her eyes, her face burning up with her distress for him. She was sure it must be scarlet. She would have given anything not to have been witness to his shameful conduct.

“Good morning, Lady Alicia,” he said with the softness she had heard in it before.

“Good morning, Mr. Smith,” she replied, swallowing hard. She must force herself to carry it off with some aplomb. He was an American and a social impossibility, but she should know how to conduct herself whatever the occasion.

She opened her eyes.

He was standing in front of her, holding a little calico cat that was stretching and curling under his arms. He saw her glazed look and glanced down at the animal, his fingers running gently over its fur. She could hear the little creature singing even from where she was.

The color rose up to his face also when he realized she had overheard him talking to it.

“Oh,” he said a little awkwardly. “Don’t mind me, ma’am. I often talk to animals, especially cats. I’m kind of fond of this one in particular.”

She breathed out a sigh of immense relief. She found she was grinning foolishly, a sudden, bubbling happiness inside her. She stretched out her fingers to touch the cat.

Virgil Smith was smiling, too, a shining tenderness in his face.

For the first time she recognized it and knew what it was. Only for a moment did it surprise her; then it seemed like something familiar, amazing and beautiful, like the leaves bursting open in the milky sunshine of spring.

P
ITT CONSIDERED WHAT
might be reasonable, what he might expect to receive, and then requested three additional constables to help him with the enormous task of sorting and identifying the photographs in Godolphin Jones’s shop.

He was granted one, along with the one he already had.

He dispatched them both back to Resurrection Row with instructions to find a name for every face, and then an occupation and a social background, but not to allow any part of the picture to be seen other than the head and to ask no questions and to give no information as to where or in what circumstances the photographs had been found. This last instruction had been repeated to him by his superiors with much anxiety and a great deal of hemming and hawing as to whether there might not be some other way of tackling the whole matter. One superintendent even suggested tentatively that perhaps it would be advisable to overlook the tragedy as insoluble and turn their attention to something else. There was, for example, a nasty case of burglary that was still outstanding, and it would be a most useful thing if they could recover the property.

Pitt pointed out that Jones had been a society artist and that anyone who had lived in an area like Gadstone Park could not be murdered and then merely forgotten, or other residents of such areas would feel distinctly uneasy as to their own future safety.

The point was conceded him, unhappily.

Then Pitt himself went back to the Park and Major Rodney. This time he would not be put off by the major’s anger or protestations; he could no longer afford to be. If the murderer of Godolphin Jones had taken advantage of the grave robbings to hide his own crime, as St. Jermyn had suggested, then the death of Lord Augustus was irrelevant. There was no point in looking any further for sense or connection between Albert Wilson, Horrie Snipe, W. W. Porteous, and Lord Augustus, because there was none. As far as either motive or means was concerned, the murder of Godolphin Jones stood alone. The key to them surely lay in the pornography shop in Resurrection Row, or in the little book with its hieroglyphic insects, or both.

It was possible the murderer was one of any number of women whose faces were on those photographs, or perhaps someone else he had blackmailed as he had done Gwendoline Cantlay. But surely the number of
affaires
he had had must be severely limited by both time and opportunity. By all accounts he was not an abnormally charming man. He might have flattered liberally, but society beauties were used to that. On the whole, Pitt inclined to think his romantic opportunities slight. The blackmail must lie in other areas as well, which brought Pitt back once again to Resurrection Row and the photographs.

He was at Major Rodney’s door. The butler answered and suffered him to enter with the look of weary acceptance of one who is resigned to something unpleasant but inevitable. Pitt had felt the same when toothache had finally driven him to the dentist.

The major received him with ill-concealed impatience.

“I have nothing else to add, Inspector Pitt,” he said, waspishly. “If you cannot do better than to go over and over old ground, pestering people, then it would be better if you were to pass the case over to someone more competent. You are making a nuisance of yourself!”

Pitt would not be pressured to apologize. It stuck in his throat. “Murder is an untidy and annoying business, sir,” he replied.

He towered over the major, putting him at a disadvantage. The major waved to a chair and ordered Pitt to sit down. He sat on a straight-backed chair himself, ramrod-stiff, reversing the advantage so now he could look down on Pitt, sprawled in a deep sofa, his coat falling open and his scarf undone in the warmth of the room.

The major’s confidence was somewhat restored.

“Well, what is it now?” he demanded. “I have told you that I had very little personal acquaintance with Mr. Jones, no more than civility required, and I have shown you the portraits. I really cannot think of anything else. I am not a man to make other people’s business my concern. I do not listen to gossip, and I will not permit my sisters to repeat such as they cannot help overhearing, since it is in the nature of women to talk, mostly upon trivial matters.”

Pitt would like to have argued—he could imagine what Charlotte would have said to such a condemnation of women—but the major would not have understood him, and he had no place to discuss such subjects. This was not a friendship and they were not equals; it was not for him to question the major’s convictions.

“Indeed,” he replied. “Gossip can be a great evil, and much of it is false. Although I have often gained valuable insight into the nature or personality of people by listening to it. What one man says of another may be false, but the fact that he says it at all tells me—”

“That the man is a gossipmonger and a liar to boot!” the major snapped. “I have nothing but contempt for you, or for an occupation which obliges you to indulge in such vices!” He stared at Pitt fiercely, seeming to burn him with indignation.

“Precisely,” Pitt agreed. “What a man says may tell nothing of the object of his speech, but it tells a great deal about him.”

“What?” The major was startled. It took him several moments to digest Pitt’s meaning.

“When you open your mouth you may or may not betray another, but you assuredly betray yourself,” Pitt repeated. A new thought had come to him, about Major Rodney and his feelings towards women.

“Huh!” the major snorted. “Never went in for sophistry. Soldier—all my life. Man for doing things, not sitting around talking about it. Better for you if you’d been in the army, make a man of you.” He looked at Pitt’s clothes, the way he was sitting, and Pitt could almost see in his face the vision of the drill sergeant, the barber, and the parade ground, and the miraculous change that could be wrought in a man. He smiled, blissful that it would never be.

“Of course, there are many women with mischievous tongues,” Pitt observed, feeding the major the thoughts he wanted. “And idleness is a schoolmaster of evil.”

The major was again surprised. He had not expected such perception in a policeman, especially this one. “Quite,” he agreed. “That is why I do all I can to see that my sisters are kept occupied. Good, homely tasks, and of course such study as they are capable of, in the care of homes and gardens, and so forth.”

“What about current affairs, or a little history?” Pitt inquired, leading him gently.

“Current affairs? Don’t be foolish, man. Women have neither the interest nor the capacity for such things. And it is unsuitable in them. I see you don’t know women very well!”

“Not very,” Pitt lied. “I believe you were married, sir?”

The major blinked. He had not anticipated the question. “I was. My wife died a long time ago.”

“Very unfortunate,” Pitt commiserated. “Were you married long?”

“A year.”

“Tragic.”

“All over now. Got over it years ago. Not like getting used to a thing. Hardly knew her, really. I was a soldier—away fighting for my Queen and country. Price of duty.”

“Quite so.” Pitt did not have to affect pity; he was beginning to feel it like a welling, bitter spring inside him as his idea grew stronger. “And women are not always the companions one hopes,” he added.

The major’s face sank into lines of quiet reflection, looking back on disillusions. The reality was unpleasing, but the recognition of it gave him a certain satisfaction in having overcome, even a sense of superiority over those who had yet to face it.

“They are different from men,” he agreed. “Shallow creatures, for the most; nothing to talk about but fashion, the way they look, and other similar foolishness. Always laughing at nothing at all. A man cannot take much of that, unless he’s as big a fool as they are.”

The idea crystallized in Pitt’s brain. Now was the time to put it to the test. “Extraordinary thing about these bodies,” he said casually.

The major’s head jerked up. “Bodies? What bodies?”

“Keep turning up.” Pitt watched him. “First the man on the cab box, then Lord Augustus, then Porteous, then Horatio Snipe.” He saw the major’s eye flicker and his Adam’s apple move. “Did you know Horrie Snipe, sir?”

“Never heard of him.” The major swallowed.

“Are you sure, sir?”

“Do you question my word?”

“Shall we say, your memory, sir?” Pitt hated it, but he had to continue, and the more quickly it was done, the shorter the pain. “He was a procurer of women, and he worked in the Resurrection Row area. The same place Godolphin Jones kept his pornography shop. Perhaps that revives your recollection a bit?” He caught the major’s eye and held it in a hard, candid gaze that allowed no retreat, no mercy of pretended ignorance.

The color wavered, then swept up the major’s mottled skin. He was ugly and pathetic, hurting Pitt in a way perhaps he did not hurt himself. He could not see how fragile, how unused he looked, how much of him had never grown.

He could find no words. He could not admit it, and he dared no longer deny it.

“Was that what Godolphin Jones was blackmailing you with?” Pitt asked quietly. “He knew about Horrie Snipe’s woman, and he sold you photographs?”

The major sniffed. Tears started running down his cheeks, and he was furious with himself for showing weakness, hating Pitt for seeing it.

“I did—I did not kill him!” he said between gulps to control himself. “Before God, I did not kill him!”

Pitt did not doubt it for a moment. The major would never have killed him—he needed him for his private dreams, his pictures and fantasies where he could live out the mastery he could never achieve in life. Jones was doubly precious to him since Horrie Snipe had died just before him, cutting the major off from his brief, wild adventure into the realms of live women.

“No,” Pitt said quietly. “I don’t suppose you did.” He stood up, looking down on the rigid little man, wanting to get out into the fog and drizzle, and escape from the despair inside. “I’m sorry it has been necessary to discuss this. It need not be mentioned again.”

The major looked up, his eyes watering. “Your— report?”

“You are not a suspect, sir. That is all I shall say.”

The major sniffed. He could not bring himself to thank Pitt.

Pitt let himself out and breathed in the bitter fog with a sense of release, almost of warmth within him.

But it was not a solution. Suddenly the little notebook seemed much less promising. Without searching the drawing rooms of London, he knew of no way of finding all the rest of the pictures that carried the hieroglyphic insects. And there was no proof that the owners were all victims of blackmail, or any other sort of pressure. Possibly they were simply customers for the photographs as well, and Godolphin Jones had chosen this disguised and highly profitable way of collecting his fee. To have his art paid for at such inflated prices was a double reward, because it enhanced his professional reputation in a way his skill never could. Pitt was obliged to admire his ingenuity, if nothing else about him.