Anne Perry - Rutland Place

She frowned. "But I have not observed this attitude lately in anyone but Mina herself! And I never really knew whether she had any great knowledge or merely wished us to think so!"

He was equally puzzled. "Do you not think that someone might be prepared to speak now that a death is involved," he said, "to avoid misunderstandings, and perhaps even injustice?"

She gave a weary little smile. "What an optimist you are, Inspector. You make me feel very old-or at least as if you must be very young. Death is the very best excuse of all to hide things forever. Few people have the least objection to injustice-the world is run on it. And, after all, it is part of the creed: 'De mortuis nil nisi bonum.' "

He waited for her to explain, although he thought he knew what she meant.

" 'Speak no ill of the dead,' " she said bleakly. "Of course I mean Society's creed, not the Church's. A very charitable idea, at first glance, but it leaves all the weight of the blame upon the living-which, of course, is what it is designed to do. Whoever took any joy from hunting a dead fox?"

"The blame for what?" he asked her soberly, forcing himself not to be diverted from the issue of Mina.

"That depends upon whom we are discussing," she replied. "In the case of Mina, I really do not know. It is a field in which I would have expected you to be far more knowledgeable than I. Why are you concerned in the matter at all? To die is not a crime. Of course I appreciate that to kill oneself is-but since it is obviously quite unprosecutable, I fail to see your involvement."

"My only interest is to make certain that that is what it is," he answered. "A matter of her having taken her own life. No one appears to know of any reason whatsoever why she should have done so."

"No," she said thoughtfully. "We know so little about each other, I sometimes wonder if we even know why we do the important things. I don't suppose it is the reason that appears- like money, or love."

"Mrs. Spencer-Brown seems to have been very well provided for." He tried a more direct approach. "Do you suppose it could have been anything to do with an affaire of love?"

Her mouth quivered with a suppressed smile.

"How delicate of you, Inspector. I have no idea about that, either. I'm sorry. If she had a lover, then she was more discreet than I gave her credit for."

"Perhaps she loved someone who did not return her feelings?" he suggested.

"Possibly. But if all the people who ever did were to kill themselves, half of London would be occupied burying the other half!" She dismissed it with a lift of her fingers. "Mina was not a melancholy romantic, you know. She was a highly practical person, and fully acquainted with the realities of life. And she was thirty-five, not eighteen!"

"People of thirty-five can fall in love." He smiled very slightly.

She looked him up and down, judging him correctly to within a year.

"Of course they can," she agreed, with the shadow of an answering smile. "People can fall in love at any age at all. But at thirty-five they have probably had the experience several times before and do not mistake it for the end of the world when it goes amiss."

"Then why do you think Mrs. Spencer-Brown killed herself, Mrs. Charrington?" He surprised himself by being so candid.

"I? You really wish for my opinion, Inspector?"

"I do."

"I am disinclined to believe that she did. Mina was far too practical not to find some way out of whatever misfortune she had got herself into. She was not an emotional woman, and I never knew anyone less hysterical."

"An accident?"

"Not of her making. I should think an idiotic maid moved bottles or boxes, or mixed two things together to save room and created a poison by mistake. I daresay you will never find out, unless your policeman removed all the containers in the house before the servants had any opportunity to destroy or empty them. If I were you, I shouldn't worry myself-there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it, either to undo it or to prevent it happening again somewhere else, to somebody else."

"A domestic accident?"

"I would think so. If you had ever been responsible for the running of a large house, Inspector, you would know what extraordinary things can happen. If you were aware what some cooks do, and what other strange bodies find their way into the larder, I daresay you would never eat again!"

He stood up, concealing an unseemly impulse to laugh that welled up inside him. There was something in her he liked enormously.

"Thank you, ma'am. If that is indeed what happened, then I expect you are right-I shall never know."

She rang the bell for the butler to show Pitt out.

"It is one of the marks of wisdom to learn to leave alone that which you cannot help," she said gently. "You will do more harm than good threshing all the fine chaff to discover a grain of truth. A lot of people will be frightened, perhaps made unemploy shy;able in the future, and you will still not have helped anyone."

He called on Theodora von Schenck and found her an utterly different kind of woman: handsome in her own way, but entirely lacking the aristocratic beauty of Ambrosine or the ethereal delicacy of Eloise. But more surprising than her appearance was the fact that, like Charlotte, she was busy with quite ordinary household chores. When Pitt arrived, she was counting linen and sorting into a pile the things that required mending or replacement.

In fact, she did not seem to be ashamed that she had put some aside to be cut down into smaller articles, such as pillowcases from worn sheets, and linen cloths for drying and polishing from those pieces that were smaller or more worn.

However, for all her frankness, she was unable to offer him any assistance about the reasons for Mina's death. She found the idea of suicide pitiful, expressing her sorrow that anyone should reach such depths of despair, but she did not deny that some shy;times it did happen. On the other hand, since she had not known Mina well, she was aware of nothing at all to bring her to such a state. Theodora herself was a widow with two children, which reduced her social connections considerably, and she preferred to devote her time to her home and children rather than making social calls or attending soirees and such functions; therefore she heard little gossip.

Pitt left no wiser, and certainly no happier. If he could feel certain that there was some unresolved tragedy, as Tormod Lagarde had seemed convinced, then he would be satisfied to leave it decently alone. On the other hand, Ambrosine Charrington had been sure that such a thing was utterly out of character. If it had been some preposterous accident, should he persist until he had done all he could to discover precisely what? Did he owe it to Mina herself? To be buried in a suicide's grave was a disgrace, a stigma not easy to bear for her survivors. And did he perhaps owe it to Alston Spencer-Brown to show him that his wife had not been so unhappy as to prefer death to life? Might not Spencer-Brown go on torturing himself with hurt and confusion in the belief that she had loved someone else and found life insupportable without him? And other people-would they be shy;lieve something secret and perhaps obscure about Alston that had driven his wife to such an end?

Was it possible that no matter how ugly, or how expensive, the facts were better? The truth deals only one wound, but suspicions a thousand.

Because Theodora had mentioned that Amaryllis and she were sisters, Amaryllis Denbigh was a complete surprise to Pitt. With shy;out giving it conscious thought, he had been expecting someone similar, and it was a faintly unpleasant readjustment to meet a woman younger, not only in years but jarringly so in fashion, manner, and deportment.

She met him with cool civility, but the spark of interest was in her eyes and in the suppressed tightness of her body. He never for a moment feared that she might decline to talk. There was something hungry in her, something seeking, and yet at the same time contemptuous of him. She had not forgotten that he was a policeman.