Anne Perry - Southampton Row

He thanked her, then went back to the parlor, where the body was, and Tellman standing staring out of the window. The police surgeon had left, but there was a constable standing in the small garden, banked around by camellia and a long-legged yellow rose in full bloom.

“Was the garden door barred on the inside?” Pitt asked.

Tellman nodded. “And you can’t get from the French doors to the street. It had to be one of them already in here,” he said miserably. “Must have left through the front door, which closes itself. And the maid said she had no idea, when I first asked her.”

“No, but she said Maude Lamont kept an engagement diary, and it’s in the desk in the small study, and the key is around her neck.” Pitt nodded towards the dead woman. “That might tell us quite a bit, even why they came here. Presumably she knew.”

Tellman frowned. “Poor devils,” he said savagely. “What kind of need draws someone to come to a woman like this and look for the kind of answers you should get from your church, or common sense? I mean. . what do they ask?” He frowned, making his long face look forbidding. “‘Where are you?’ ‘What is it like there?’ She could tell them anything. . and how would they know? It’s wicked to take money to play on people’s grief.” He turned away. “And it’s daft of them to give it.”

It took Pitt a moment to adjust from one subject to the other, but he realized that Tellman was struggling with an inner anger and confusion, and had been trying to evade the conclusion that one of those he pitied, against his will, had to have killed the woman sitting silently in the chair only a few feet away, having put a knee in her chest as she struggled to breathe, choking on the strange substance clogging her throat. He was trying to imagine the fury that had driven the murderer to it. He was a single man, unused to women in other than a formal, police setting. He was waiting for Pitt to touch the body, reach for the key where he would be clumsy and embarrassed to look.

Pitt walked over and gently lifted up the lace front of the gown, and felt under the sides of the plunging fabric of the bodice. He found the fine gold chain and pulled it until he had the key in his fingers. He lifted the chain over her head carefully, trying not to disarrange her hair, which was absurd! What could it matter now? But only a few hours ago she had been alive, lit by intelligence and emotion. Then it would have been unthinkable to have touched her throat and her bosom in such a way.

He moved her hand out of his way, not that crushing it mattered. It was an automatic gesture. It was then that he noticed the long hair caught around the button on her sleeve, quite unlike the rich color of her own. She was dark, and this shone pale for a moment like a thread of spun glass. Then as he moved it became invisible again.

“What has this got to do with Special Branch?” Tellman demanded suddenly, his frustration hard in his voice.

“I have no idea,” Pitt replied, straightening up and moving the dead woman’s head back to the exact position it had been before.

Tellman stared at him. “Are you going to let me see it?” he challenged.

That was a decision he had not considered. Now he replied without thinking, stung by the absurdity of it. “Of course I am! I want a great deal more out of it than just the names of the people who were here last night. Short of a miracle, we’ll need to learn all we can about this woman. Speak to the rest of her clients. Learn all you can. What sort of people came to her, and why? What do they pay her? Does it account for this house?” Automatically, he glanced around at the room with its elaborate wallpaper and intricately carved Oriental furniture. He knew enough to estimate the cost of at least some of it.

Tellman frowned. “How does she know what to tell those people?” he said, biting his lip. “What is it? A mixture of finding out first, then building on good guesses?”

“Probably. She might pick her clients very carefully, only those she already knows something about, or is certain she can research with success.”

“I’ve looked all ’round the room.” Tellman stared at the walls, the gas brackets, the tall lacquer cabinet. “I can’t see how she did any tricks. What was she supposed to do? Make ghosts appear? Voices? People floating in the air? What? What made anyone believe it was spirits, not just someone telling them whatever they wanted to hear?”

“I don’t know,” Pitt replied. “Ask her other clients, but tread softly, Tellman. Don’t mock another person’s faith, however ridiculous you think it is. Most of us need more than the moment; we have dreams that won’t come true here, and we need eternity.” Without adding anything or waiting for any answer, he went out, leaving Tellman to go on searching the room for something without knowing what it was.

Pitt went to the small study and opened the door. The desk was immediately inside, a beautiful thing, as Lena Forrest had said, golden brown wood inlaid in exquisite marquetry of darker and lighter shades.

He slipped the key into the lock and turned it. It opened easily to form a flat writing surface inlaid with leather. There were two drawers and half a dozen or so pigeonholes. In one of the drawers he found an engagement book and opened it at the page for the previous day’s date. He saw two names, both of which he recognized immediately, and with a coldness in the bottom of his stomach: Roland Kingsley and Rose Serracold. Now he understood precisely why Narraway had sent him.

He stood still, absorbing the information and all it could mean. Could it be Rose Serracold’s long pale hair on the dead woman’s cuff? He had no idea, and he had never seen her, but he would have to find out. Should he show the hair to Tellman or wait to see if he found it for himself, or if the surgeon found it when he removed the clothes for the autopsy? It might mean anything-or nothing.

It was several seconds before he realized that the third line contained not a name at all but a sort of design, like the small drawings the ancient Egyptians had used to signify a word, a name. He had heard them called cartouches. This one was a circle, with a semicircle inside it arched over the top of a figure like a small F , but backwards. It was very simple, and to him at least had no meaning whatsoever.

Why would someone be so secretive that even Maude Lamont herself did this odd drawing rather than write his or her name? There was nothing illegal in consulting a spirit medium. It was not even scandalous, or for that matter a subject of ridicule, except for those who had portrayed themselves as otherwise and were thus branded as hypocrites. People of every walk of life had indulged in it, some as serious investigations, others purely as entertainment. And there were always the lonely, the insecure, the grieving who needed the assurance that those they had loved still existed somewhere and cared about them even beyond the grave. Perhaps Christianity, at least as the church preached it now, no longer did that for them.

He riffled through the pages to see if there were any more cartouches, but he saw none, only the same one half a dozen times previously over the months of May and June. The person appeared to have come every ten days or so, irregularly.

Looking again, Pitt saw also that Roland Kingsley had been seven times before, and Rose Serracold ten times. Only three times had they all come to the same session. He looked at the other names and saw many of them repeated over the months, others were there once or twice, or perhaps for three or four weeks in a row, and then not again. Were they satisfied or disillusioned? Tellman would have to find them and ask, learn what it was that Maude Lamont gave them, what it had to do with the strange substance found in her mouth and throat.