Anne Perry - Rutland Place

"Thomas! Thomas, I saw Alston Spencer-Brown today, and I discovered something!" She ran down the corridor and grasped at both his hands. "I think I know something about Mina- perhaps why she was killed!"

He was wet and tired, and not in the best of moods. His superiors were still clinging to the belief that it must have been suicide while the balance of her mind was upset by some private distress. It could all be so much more decently disposed of, and without turning over a lot of people's lives to investigate affairs that were far preferably left alone. Uncovering causes for enmity was always an ugly and unpopular occupation, and seldom prof shy;ited the career of whoever undertook it-at least not if he was of a rank sufficiently advanced that there was no validity in the shield that he was merely following orders.

Pitt's superior, Dudley Athelstan, was a younger son who had married well and had an ambition that fed on its own success. He had spent the latter part of the day trying to persuade Pitt that there was no case to investigate. There were any number of ways an unbalanced woman might come by sufficient poison to take her own life if that was what she had determined to do. When Pitt had left him, Athelstan had been in growing ill-humor because he could not convince even himself, let alone Pitt and Sergeant Harris, that the matter had been answered beyond reasonable doubt, for no chemist or apothecary could be found who had sold such a substance, and certainly no doctor had prescribed it, no matter how diligently they had searched.

Now Pitt started to undo his coat. It was dripping in the hallway, and the day before he had received a very wounded and sober criticism from Gracie about the amount of labor it took to get the floor to its degree of polish, without inconsiderate people spilling water all over it.

"Why did you go and see Alston Spencer-Brown?" he in shy;quired a little sourly. "He's surely nothing to do with you, or your mother?"

Charlotte could feel the irritation in him as if he had brought the cold in from the street, but she was too excited to take heed.

"The murder is to do with Mama," she said briskly, taking the coat and putting it on a hook to drip further, instead of carrying it through to the kitchen to dry. "We have to get the locket back. Anyway, Emily wanted to visit Mama, and I went with her!" If the flame of the gas lamp in the hallway had been brighter, he might have seen her blush at the half-truth. She turned and walked smartly back to the kitchen and the fire. "Mama went to call upon him to express her sympathy," she explained. "Anyway, that's not important!" She swung around and faced him. "I know at least one good reason why Mina Spencer-Brown might have been killed-maybe two!" She waited, glowing with excitement.

"I can think of a dozen," he said soberly. "But no proof for any of them. It never lacked possibilities, but they are not enough. Superintendent Athelstan wants the case closed. Suicide leaves them decently alone with their grief.''

"Not possibilities," she burst out with impatience. "I mean real reasons! Do you remember I told you Mama said she felt as if she were being followed, watched all the time?"

"No," he said honestly.

"I told you! Mama was aware of someone-most of the time! And Ambrosine Charrington said the same thing. Well, I believe it was Mina! She spied on people-she was what is called a Peeping Tom. Alston said so, in a roundabout sort of way- although of course he didn't realize what he was meaning. Don't you see, Thomas? If she followed someone with a secret, a real secret, she may have learned something that was worth killing over. And I know from Alston of at least two possibilities!"

He sat down and took off his wet boots. "What?"

"Don't you believe me?" She had expected him to receive the news eagerly, and now he looked as if he were listening only to humor her.

He was too tired to be polite.

"I think your mother's affaire is probably not as serious as you imagine. Plenty of people have a little flirtation, especially Society women who have little else to do. You should know that by now. I expect it's all dropped handkerchiefs and bunches of flowers-about as real as a piece of embroidery. And I daresay if anyone was watching her, it was only out of boredom. You are making too much of it, Charlotte. If she were not your mother, you would take no notice."

She restrained herself with great difficulty. For a moment she considered losing her temper, telling him that the outward show might be trivial but the feeling underneath was as real and as potentially violent as anything conducted in the back streets, or in less naturally restricted levels of Society. Then she realized how tired he was, how discouraged by Athelstan's desire to hide or ignore what did not suit his ambition. Anger would communi shy;cate nothing.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" she said instead, looking at his wet feet and the white skin of his hands where the cold had numbed the circulation. Without waiting for an answer, she topped up the kettle and moved it from the back of the stove onto the front.

After a few moments' silence while he put on dry socks, he looked up.

"What are these two possibilities?"

She heated the teapot and measured out the tea.

"Theodora von Schenck has an income, lately acquired, which nobody can account for. Her husband left her nothing, nor did anyone else, apparently. When she came to Rutland Place, she had nothing but the house. Now she has coats with sable collars, and Mina perhaps put forward some very interesting speculations as to where they might have come from."

"Like what?" he inquired.

She jiggled the teapot impatiently while the kettle blew faint halfhearted whiffs of steam, hot but not yet boiling.,

"A brothel," Charlotte answered. "Or a lover. Or blackmail? There are all sorts of things worth killing to hide, where money is concerned. Maybe Theodora was blackmailing people with Mina's information and they had a fight over the money."

He smiled sourly. "Indeed. Your Mina seems to have had a most uncharitable turn of imagination, and a tongue to go with it. Are you sure that is what she said, and not what you are thinking for her?"

"Alston remarked several times on how perceptive she was of other people's characters, especially the less pleasant aspects of them. But he also said that she never spoke of them to anyone but him." She reached for the kettle at last. "However, that is the less likely possibility of the two, I think. The other possibil shy;ity I remember Mina mentioning myself, and with a kind of relish, as if she knew something." She poured the water onto the tea and put on the lid, then brought the pot to the table and set it on the polished pewter stand. She let it brew while she went on: "It has to do with the death of Ottilie Charrington, which was sudden and unexplained. One week she was in perfect health, and the next the family returned from a holiday in the country and said she was dead. Just like that! No one ever said from what cause, no one was invited to any funeral, and she was never mentioned again. Mina apparently hinted that there was something very shameful about it-perhaps a badly done abortion?" She shivered and thought of Jemima asleep upstairs in her pink cot. "Or she was murdered by a lover, or in some unbearable place, like a brothel. Or possibly even she did some shy;thing so terrible that her own family murdered her to keep it silent!"

Pitt looked at her gravely, without speaking.

She poured the tea and passed him his cup.

"I know it sounds violent, and unlikely," she went on. "But then I suppose murder always is unlikely-until it actually happens. And.Mina was murdered, wasn't she? You know now that she didn't kill herself."

"No." He sipped the tea and burned his mouth; his hands were too numb for him to have realized its heat. "No, I think someone else put poison into the cordial wine we found in her stomach in the autopsy. We found the dregs in the empty bottle in her bedroom, and a glass. It was just chance she took it when she did; it could have been anytime she felt like it. It could have been anyone who put it there, anytime."