Anne Perry - Death On Blackheath

‘Probably in good health, as far as I could tell at this stage,’ Whistler answered. ‘No apparent disease. Organs all fine, apart from beginning to decay. If you find whoever did this to her, I hope you hang him! If you don’t, don’t come back to me for any help!’ His glare swivelled to Pitt, then away again. There was a faint flush in his cheeks. ‘She was probably a domestic servant. Little things, you know? Good teeth. Well-nourished. Clean nails, good hands, but several small scars from burning, the sort you see on a woman who does a lot of ironing. Difficult things not to burn yourself with now and again, flat irons. Especially if you’re ironing something fiddly, like lace, or gathered sleeves, delicate collars, that kind of thing.’

‘A lady’s maid …’ Pitt said the inevitable.

‘Yes … or a laundry maid of a more general sort. Children’s clothes are fiddly too.’

‘So you still have no idea whether it is Kitty Ryder or not?’

‘No, I haven’t. Sorry. But she wasn’t a lady. Ladies don’t do their own ironing. And she wasn’t a prostitute — much too clean and healthy for that. She must have been in her mid-to late twenties. On the streets, by that age she’d have looked a lot worse. A servant, or a young married woman, taking in laundry. Not likely. Everyone around here has their own servants for that sort of thing. And she’d had no children. With the injuries and the rot I don’t know if she was still a virgin.’

‘Thank you,’ Pitt said grimly, as a matter of courtesy; it was the last thing he actually meant. He did not want the case, and he knew that Whistler would rather not have found the evidence, or have had to tell him about it. It was all inevitable now: the slow, sad unravelling of whoever’s tragedy it was. ‘Have you told the local police?’ he added, almost as an afterthought.

A bitter amusement flashed in Whistler’s eyes. ‘Yes.’ He did not add their reaction, but Pitt could guess it. They would be delighted it was a problem they would have to give up to Special Branch, just in case it should end up involving Dudley Kynaston.

Pitt took his damp overcoat and hat off the coat rack and put them on. He said goodbye to Whistler and went out into the passage, and then the cold street again. He could have got a hansom here and ridden all the way back to Lisson Grove, but he preferred to walk down to the river and sit in a ferry on the choppy grey water, alone with the wind and the rain, and think what he was going to do next, and how he was going to do it. He could get a cab on the far side.

There were too many questions unanswered. If this were the body of Kitty Ryder, had it also been her blood and hair on the steps of the Kynaston house? Was it a quarrel, but she had still eventually gone willingly? Or had she been taken by force? Why would her suitor have done such a thing? If he had killed her there, it had been an extraordinarily violent quarrel to conduct so close to an inhabited house. Why had no one heard anything? In fact, why had she not screamed, and brought the whole household out?

Why had he not left her there and escaped as fast as he could? She was a big woman for someone to have carried anywhere. If he had run off into the night, leaving her dead in the alleyway, he had an excellent chance of never being found. London was a large city to lose yourself in, and there was the whole of the countryside beyond that! Or, if you were desperate enough, ships sailed every day from the Pool of London for every part of the world.

Pitt looked across the rough water at them now: masts jostling against the sky in the distance; steamers heavier, and more solid; barges and lighters threading between them. A man could lose himself here in a day, never mind three weeks. None of this made sense. What was he missing?

The silent ferryman at the oars and the rhythmic slap of the water on the sides of the boat helped him to concentrate.

Where had she been from the time she left Kynaston’s house until she was placed in the gravel pit? Was she killed straight away, or later? Why put her in the gravel pit anyway? Why not bury her? That made no sense. It was almost as if someone had intended her to be found.

The longer he considered it, the uglier and more senseless it appeared. He still hoped it was not Kitty at all, but he knew he must proceed as if it were.

At Lisson Grove, Stoker would have heard that Pitt had been summoned by Whistler, and must have been watching for Pitt to return. Within ten minutes he appeared in Pitt’s office. He closed the door behind him and stood expectantly, waiting to be told.

Pitt did so, briefly.

Stoker listened in silence. His strong, bony face was unreadable, except for the increased pallor. He looked down at the floor, his shoulders hunched a little, hands in his pockets.

‘No choice, have we?’ he stated. ‘This doesn’t make any sense. There’s a major part of it we don’t know anything about.’ He looked up, his blue-grey eyes brilliant. ‘Maybe it has nothing to do with the young man she was courting, sir. It could all be in the Kynaston household. According to what I learned about her from the other servants, she was smart, and didn’t miss much. A lady’s maid gets to know a lot of things, that’s why they stay in places a long time. You can’t afford to let them go, ’specially not to a position with anyone in your own circle.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ Pitt faced the inevitable. ‘That she was blackmailing someone in the house, and they refused to pay? Or that they killed her simply because she knew?’

Stoker winced. ‘Either one, sir. Maybe she knew what they’d do and she tried to run away, an’ that’s where they caught her?’

‘And she didn’t cry out?’

‘Couldn’t you kill a woman without letting her scream, sir? I could.’

Pitt imagined it: Kitty terrified because she knew what she had seen, or heard, running out of the house, even in the dark in the winter. She would have gone through the dimly lit kitchen and scullery to the back door, struggling with the bolts on the doors, flinging them open and going outside into the bitter air, scrambling up the steps. Had she known her killer was only yards behind her? Or had he come silently, his footsteps masked in her ears by her own pounding heart? There had been a brief, terrible fight on the steps, a blow — fatal sooner than the killer had realised. He had gone on pounding, beating, until the hysteria had died down inside him and he had saw what he had done.

Then what?

He had moved the body quickly. Where to? A cellar? Somewhere bitterly cold, until he could move it again. And some mischance had delayed that.

Pitt looked at Stoker’s face and saw a trace of the same thought in his eyes.

‘Most likely Kynaston,’ Stoker said aloud. ‘We’d better find out.’

There was no argument to be made, only careful plans, and perhaps something of Dudley Kynaston himself to be learned before they began. ‘Yes …’ Pitt agreed. ‘I’ll start with Kynaston tomorrow. You start with Kitty Ryder.’

Stoker did not wait until the morning. He had already learned all he could about Kitty Ryder from where she had lived and worked.

He and Pitt had naturally checked with police all over the area to see if there had been similar attacks, and found nothing.

Stoker himself had spoken to the institutions that kept the criminally insane. No one had escaped. There was no record of such mutilations anywhere else.

No matter where else they looked, they were turned back to Kitty herself, and her connections with the Kynaston house.

Stoker lived alone in rented rooms. He had no family in this part of London. In fact there were only himself and his sister Gwen left anyway, and she lived in King’s Langley, a short train journey away. Their two brothers had died in childhood, and a sister in giving birth to her own child. His work filled his life. He realised how much, with an awareness of suddenly being anonymous as he walked along the wet pavement from the island of light beneath one streetlamp through the mist and shadows to the island beneath the next.