Traitors Gate (33 page)

P
ITT WOKE UP SLOWLY
, the thumping in his head becoming more persistent till it dragged him to the surface of consciousness and forced him awake. He opened his eyes. The bedroom was barred with sunlight where the curtains did not quite meet. Charlotte was still asleep beside him, warm and hunched up, her hair in loose braids beginning to come undone.

The banging was still going on. There was no sound in the street outside, no carriages, no drays, no noise of footsteps or voices.

He turned over and looked at the clock beside the bed. It was ten minutes before five.

The banging was getting worse. It was downstairs at the front door.

He sat up reluctantly and pushed his fingers through his hair, then put his jacket on over his nightshirt and walked barefoot across the floor to open the window. Charlotte stirred but did not fully waken. He pushed up the sash and looked out.

The banging stopped and a foreshortened figure stepped back from the door and looked up. It was Tellman. His face was very white in the early morning light and he had come without his usual bowler hat. He looked disheveled and upset.

Pitt indicated that he would come down, and after closing
the window again, he walked as quietly as he could back to the door to the landing and went down the stairs into the hall. He undid the lock and pulled the door open.

Tellman looked even worse closer to. His face was ashen and what little flesh there was seemed to be sunken away. He did not wait to be asked.

“Something terrible has happened,” he said as soon as he saw Pitt. “You’d better come and deal with it yourself. I haven’t told anybody yet, but Mr. Farnsworth’s going to be in a right state when he hears.”

“Come in,” Pitt ordered, standing back. “What is it?” All sorts of fears whirled around in his head; presumably some terrible news had come from the German Embassy. Although how would Tellman know that? Had someone absconded, taking papers with them? “What is it?” he demanded more urgently.

Tellman remained on the step. He was so pale he looked as if he might collapse. That in itself alarmed Pitt. He would have thought Tellman inured to anything.

“Mrs. Chancellor,” Tellman said, and coughed painfully, then gulped. “We’ve just found her body, sir.”

Pitt was stunned. His breath caught in his throat and the words came out in a whisper. “Her body?”

“Yes sir. Washed up in the river at the Tower.” He watched Pitt with hollow eyes.

“Suicide?” Pitt said slowly, unable to believe it.

“No.” Tellman stood motionless except that he shivered very slightly although the morning was mild. “Murder. She’d been strangled, and then put in the water. Sometime last night by the looks of it. But you’ll need the medical examiner to tell you for sure.”

Pitt felt a sorrow so sharp it exploded in him in a kind of wild anger. She had been such a beautiful, vulnerable woman, so full of life, so highly individual. He remembered her vividly at the Duchess of Marlborough’s reception. He could picture her face in his mind as Tellman was talking. It was so seldom he had known a victim in life, the
sense of loss was personal, different from the pity that he usually felt.

“Why?” he said violently. “Why would anyone want to destroy a woman like that? It doesn’t make any kind of sense.” Without realizing it he had clenched his fists and his body was tight with rage under his jacket. He was not even aware of his bare feet on the step or the fact he had no trousers on.

“The treason at the Colonial Office …” Tellman said unhappily. “Maybe she knew something?”

Pitt thumped the door lintel with the heel of his clenched fist, and swore.

“You’d better get dressed, sir, and come,” Tellman said quietly. “There’s no one knows about it yet, except the boatman as found her and the constable who reported it to me, but we can’t keep it that way for long. Don’t matter what you say to ’em, discretion and all that, somebody’ll talk to someone.”

“They know who she is?” Pitt was startled.

“Yes sir. That’s why I was called.”

Pitt was irritated with himself; he should have thought of that before.

“How?” he demanded. “How could riverboat men know her?”

“The constables,” Tellman explained patiently. “They were the ones who knew who she was. She was obviously someone of quality, any fool could see that, but she had a locket ’round her neck, little gold thing that opened up, with a picture in it.” He sighed and there was a sadness for a moment in his eyes. “Linus Chancellor, it was, clear as you like. That’s why they called us. Whoever she was, they knew that picture meant something that could only mean trouble.”

“I see. Where is she now?” Pitt looked back at him.

“Still at the Tower, sir. I had ’em cover her up, and left her where she was, more or less, so as you could see.”

“I’ll be down,” Pitt said, and left Tellman on the step. He
went back upstairs, taking off his jacket as he reached the landing and pulling off his nightshirt as soon as he was through the bedroom door.

Charlotte had drifted back to sleep and it seemed cruel to waken her, but he had to give her some account of where he had gone. He finished dressing first. There was no time to shave. A brisk splash of cold water in the basin and a rubdown with the towel would have to do.

He reached over and touched her gently.

There must have been some rigidity in him, or perhaps the coldness of his hands after the water, but she woke immediately.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” She opened her eyes and saw him dressed. She struggled to sit up. “What’s happened?”

He had no time to tell her gently. “Tellman’s come to say they have found Susannah Chancellor’s body washed up from the river.”

She stared at him, unable for a moment to comprehend what he had said.

“I have to go.” He bent to kiss her.

“She committed suicide?” she said, her eyes still fixed on his. “The poor creature … I …” Her face was wrenched with pity.

“No … no. She was murdered.”

There was both shock and a kind of relief in her face.

“Why did you think she committed suicide?” he asked.

“I … I don’t know. She seemed so troubled.”

“Well there was no doubt about it, from what Tellman says.”

“How was she killed?”

“I haven’t been there yet,” he answered, not wanting to tell her. He kissed her quickly on the cheek and stepped back.

“Thomas!”

He waited.

“You said ‘from what Tellman said.’ What did he say?”

He let out his breath slowly. “She was strangled. I’m sorry. He’s waiting for me.”

She sat still, her face full of grief. There was nothing he could do. He went out feeling sad and helpless.

Tellman was waiting in the hall and he turned and led the way out into the street as soon as Pitt appeared. Pitt closed the door and hastened to catch him up. At the corner they crossed into the main thoroughfare, and it was only a matter of minutes before they hailed a hansom and Tellman directed it to the Tower of London.

It was a long journey from Bloomsbury. They went south first to Oxford Street, and then east until it turned into High Holborn and then for nearly a mile before turning right farther towards the river down St. Andrews Street, Shoe Lane and St. Bride’s to Ludgate Circus.

Tellman sat in silence. He was not a companionable man. Whatever his thoughts were he was disinclined to share them and he sat uncomfortably, staring straight ahead.

Several times it was on the edge of Pitt’s tongue to ask him something, but he could think of nothing that would be useful. Tellman had already said all he knew for certain. The rest would be only speculation. Anyway, Pitt was not sure he wanted to hear Tellman’s ideas on Susannah Chancellor. Her lovely, intelligent face with its capacity for pain was too sharp in his mind, and he knew what he was going to see when they got to the Tower.

They turned along Ludgate Hill and swung around St. Paul’s churchyard with the giant mass of the cathedral above them. Its dome was dark against the pale, early sky, which was marked only by a few shreds of cloud like banners across its limpid blue. There were very few people about. Down the whole length of Canon Street they passed only half a dozen cabs, two drays and a dung cart. Canon Street turned into East Cheap and then into Great Tower Street.

Tellman leaned forward and suddenly banged sharply against the roof for the cabby’s attention.

“Turn right!” he ordered. “Turn down Water Street to Lower Thames Street.”

“Ain’t nothing down there but Queen’s Stairs and Traitors Bridge,” the cabby replied. “If you want the Tower, like you said, you’d be better off in Trinity Square, which is up to the left.”

“Just take us to Queen’s Stairs and then go about your business,” Tellman said curtly.

The cabby muttered something inaudible, but obeyed.

They glimpsed the Custom House to the west, already busy with men coming and going. Then they turned right facing the great medieval bastion of the Tower of London, a stone memory of a conquest that spanned back to the Dark Ages and a history recorded only in brief bursts by illuminated writing and quaint works of art and tales of bloody battles and exquisite, passionate islands of Christianity.

The hansom stopped at Queen’s Stairs. Pitt paid the cabby and he turned and left, his horses moving into a brisk trot.

It was two minutes before six. The great silver sheet of the river was utterly calm. Even the cargo barges, dark against the bright surface, barely made a ripple. The air was fresh and slightly damp and smelled of salt from the tide.

Tellman led the way along the water’s edge to the stairs, where a boatman was waiting for them. He looked up without a change of expression and deftly maneuvered the small craft around so they could get in.

Pitt looked questioningly at Tellman.

“Traitors Gate,” he said succinctly, climbing in ahead of Pitt and sitting down. He disliked boats, and it showed in his face.

Pitt followed him easily and thanked the boatman as he pulled away.

“She was washed up at Traitors Gate?” he asked with a catch in his voice.

“Tide left her there,” Tellman replied. It was only a few
yards down the river to the gate itself, the entrance to the Tower by which condemned people had been brought to their execution, and which opened directly onto the water.

Pitt could see the little knot of people already gathered around: a constable in uniform looking cold in spite of the mildness of the morning, a scarlet tunic of a Yeoman of the Guard, the traditional Beefeaters who man the Tower, and the other of the two boatmen who had first found her.

Pitt climbed ashore, only just avoiding getting his feet wet on the slipway. Susannah was lying on the waterline where the high tide had left her, only her feet below the surface, a long, slender form barely crumpled, turned over half onto her face. One white hand was visible protruding from the wet, dripping cloth of her gown. Her hair had come unraveled from its pins and lay like seaweed around her neck, spilling onto the stone.

The constable turned as Pitt came ashore, recognized him and stepped back from the body.

“Morning, sir.” He looked very pale.

“Good morning, Constable,” Pitt replied. He did not remember the man’s name, if indeed he knew it. He looked down at Susannah. “When was she found?”

“‘Bout ’alf past three, sir. High tide’d be just before three, ‘cording to the boatman ’ere. Reckon as they were the first past ’ere on this side o’ the river after she were washed up, poor creature. Weren’t no suicide, sir. Poor soul was strangled, no two ways about that.” He looked sad and very solemn for his twenty-odd years. His beat was on the river’s edge, and this was not the first body he had seen, nor the first woman, but she was perhaps the first he had seen with beautiful clothes and—when the hair was pulled back, as it was now—such a passionate, vulnerable face. Pitt knelt down to look at her more closely. He saw the unmistakable finger marks purple on her throat, but from the lack of swelling or bloating on her face, he thought perhaps she had actually died of a broken neck rather than suffocation. It was a tiny thing, very tiny, but the fact that she was
not disfigured eased the hurt. Possibly she had suffered only very briefly. He would think that as long as he could.

“We didn’t touch her, sir,” one of the boatmen said nervously. “’cept to make sure as she was dead, and we couldn’t ’elp ’er, poor creature.” He knew enough of the circumstances which drive people to suicide to have no judgment over it. He would have put them all in consecrated ground and left the decision to God. But he was not a churchgoing man by choice. He went only to please his wife.

“Thank you,” Pitt said absently, still looking at Susannah. “Where would she have been put in the water to be washed up here?”

“That depends, sir. Currents is funny. ‘Specially in a river like this where it twists and turns, like. Most often bodies sink at first, then come up again right about where they went in. But if she was put in on the turn o’ the tide, into the water, like, if she moved at all it could a’ bin upriver from ’ere. That’s if she were put in off a boat. But if she were put in off the shore, more like it were on the incoming tide, and she came upriver from below. And that would depend on when she were put in, as to where, if you follow me, guv?”

“So all we know for sure is that she was here when the tide turned?”

“Yer got it right,” the boatman agreed. “Bodies stay in the water different sorts of times. Depends on what passes making a wake, or if they bump summink. Things get caught and pulled sometimes. There’s eddies and currents you can’t always account for. Maybe the doc can tell yer ’ow long she’s been gone, poor thing. Then we can tell yer if she were put in then, like, just about where it would be.”

“Thank you.” Pitt looked up at Tellman. “Have you sent for the mortuary wagon?”

“Yes sir. It will be waiting up in Trinity Square. Didn’t want a whole lot of talk going on,” Tellman answered without
glancing at the boatmen. If they didn’t know who she was, so much the better. The news would spread fast enough. It would be an appalling way for Chancellor to learn, or anyone else who had cared for her.