Anne Perry - Rutland Place

"Tillie?" Pitt was lost.

"My sister-Ottilie. Better not repeat that. My father used to go into an apoplexy when I called her Tillie when we were children."

"And she liked to shock people?" Pitt quickly asked.

"Loved it. Never heard anyone laugh like Tillie. It was beautiful, rich, the sort of laughter that you have to join in with even if you have no idea what was funny."

"She sounds like a delightful person. I'm sorry I shall not meet her." He found it was far more than a sympathetic platitude; he meant what he said. Ottilie was something good that he had missed.

Inigo's eyes widened for a moment as if he did not understand; then he let out a little sigh.

"Oh. Yes. You would have liked her. Everything seems rather colder now she's gone, not the same color in things. But that isn't what you're here for. What do you want to know?"

"I understand she died very suddenly?"

"Yes. Why?" -

"It must have been a great shock. I'm sorry."

"Thank you."

"Those fevers can be very sudden-no warning," he tried experimentally.

"What? Oh yes, very. But this must be wasting your time. What about Mina Spencer-Brown? She certainly didn't die of a fever. And Tillie wasn't given belladonna for treatment, I can assure you. Anyway, we were in the country at the time, not here."

"You have a country house?'.'

"Abbots Langley, in Hertfordshire." He smiled. "But you won't find any belladonna there. We all have excellent digestions- need to, some of the cooks we've had! If Papa chooses them, we have all soups and sauces, and if Mama does, then pies and pastries."

Pitt felt intrusive. How could anyone like being a Peeping Tom?

"I wasn't thinking of belladonna," he said honestly. "I am looking for reasons. Somewhere Mrs. Spencer-Brown must have given somebody cause to want her dead. Finding the belladonna is less important."

"Is it?" Inigo's eyebrows rose. "Don't you want to know who, more than why?"

"Of course I do. But anyone could make belladonna out of deadly nightshade. There's plenty of it about in these old gardens. It could have been picked anywhere. It's not like strychnine or cyanide that most people would have to buy."

Inigo winced. "What a terrible thought-going out to get something to kill people." He paused for a moment. "But I honestly haven't any idea why someone should kill Mina. I didn't especially like her. I always thought she was too"-he searched for the word he wanted-"too deliberate, too clever. All head and no heart. She was thinking all the time, never missed anything. I prefer people who are either stupider or less permanently interested. Then if I do something idiotic it can be decently forgotten." He smiled a little crookedly. "But you hardly go out and distill poison for someone because you don't like them very much. I couldn't even say I disliked her-just that I was not entirely comfortable when she was there, which wasn't very of ten."

It all fitted so easily with what Charlotte had said, slid into the pattern and coalesced: a watcher, a listener, adding everything together in her mind, working out answers, understanding things that were intimate.

But how, and for whom, had "not entirely comfortable" changed into "intolerable"?

He wanted to think of a useful question, something to make Inigo believe he was asking about Mina, not Ottilie.

"I never saw her alive. Was she attractive-to men?"

Inigo's face creased with spontaneous laughter.

"Not very subtle, Inspector. No, she wasn't-not to me. I like something a little less schooled, and with more humor. If you ask around the Place, no doubt you will be told my taste runs to the warmhearted, slightly eccentric, for entertainment. And if I were to marry-I really don't know who the woman would be. Someone I really liked-certainly not Mina!"

"You mistake me," Pitt said with a dry smile. "I was think shy;ing of a possible lover, even a rejected one. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but I've found men take it no less kindly, especially vain and successful men. There are many people who believe that loving someone puts the person into some sort of debt to you and gives you certain rights. More than one man has killed a woman because he thought she wasted herself on someone unworthy of her-someone other than himself, that is. I've known men with the notion that they somehow owned a woman's virtue, and if she stained it she had offended not against herself or against God-but against him!"

Inigo stared into the polished surface of the table and smiled very slowly over something he was not prepared to share with Pitt, something at the same time funny and bitter.

"Oh, indeed," he said sincerely. "I believe in feudal times if a woman lost her virginity she had to pay a fine to the lord of the manor, because she was then worth much less to him come the time someone wished to marry her and naturally had to pay the lord for the privilege. We haven't changed so much! We're far too genteel to pay in money, of course, but we still pay!"

Pitt would like to have known what he meant, but to ask would have been vulgar, and he probably would not have been answered.

"Could she have had a lover?" He went back to the original question. "Or an admirer?"

Inigo thought for a few moments before replying.

"Mina? I've never considered it, but I suppose she could have. The oddest people do."

"Why do you say that? She looked as if she had been at least attractive, if not even beautiful."

Inigo seemed surprised himself, "Just her personality. She didn't seem to have any fire, any-gentleness. But then you said an admirer, didn't you? She was very delicate; she had a feminin shy;ity about her that would have been just what appealed to some-a sort of austere purity. And she always dressed to suit it." He smiled apologetically. "But it is pointless asking me who, be shy;cause I have no idea."

"Thank you." Pitt stood up. "I can't think of anything else to ask you. It was most courteous of you to see me, especially here."

"Hardly." Inigo stood up as well. "Your presenting yourself didn't give me a great deal of choice. I had either to see you or to*look like a pompous ass-or, worse than that, as if I had something to hide."

It had been intentional, and Pitt would not insult him by denying it.

He did not go to see Ambrosine Charrington the following day, but instead packed a gladstone bag with clean shirt and socks and took the train from Huston Station to Abbots Langley to see what he could discover about Ottilie Charrington's death.

He spent two days, and the more he learned the more confused he became. He had no trouble in locating the house, for the Charringtons were well known and respected.

He ate a comfortable lunch at the inn, then walked to the local parish churchyard, but there were no Charringtons buried there- neither Ottilie nor anyone else.

"Oh, they've only been here for twenty years, going on," the sexton told him reasonably. "They're newcomers. You won't find any of 'em here. Buried in London somewhere, like as not.''

"But the daughter?" Pitt asked. "She died here little over a year ago!"

"Maybe so, but she ain't buried here," the sexton assured him. "Look for yourself! And I've been to every funeral here in the last twenty-five years. No Charringtons-not a one."

A sudden thought occurred to Pitt.

"How about Catholic or Nonconformist?" he asked. "What other churches are there close by?''

"I know every funeral as goes on in this neighborhood," the sexton said vehemently. "It's my job. And the Charringtons weren't any of them outlandish things. They was gentry-Church of England, like everybody else who knows what's good for them. Church here every Sunday they're in the village. If she'd been buried anywhere around here, it would be in this churchyard. Reckon as you must be mistaken and she died up in London somewhere. Leastways, if she died here, they took her back to London to bury her. Family vault, likely. Lie alongside your own, that's what I always say. Eternity's a mighty time."