Anne Perry - Traitors Gate

Chancellor’s hand closed tight above the desk where he was sitting. Pitt was still standing across from him.

“Her murderer kept her there,” Pitt continued, “for a long time, in fact until half past two in the morning, when the tide turned. Then he placed her in the small boat which is often tied up at the steps, the boat he had seen when crossing London Bridge. It is a few hundred yards away.”

Chancellor was staring at him, his face curiously devoid of expression, as if his mind were on the verge of something terrible, hovering on the brink.

“When he had rowed out a short way,” Pitt went on, “he put her over the stem, tied across her back and under her arms with a rope, and rowed the rest of the way, dragging her behind, so her body would look as if it had been in the water a long time. When he got to the far side, he laid her on the slipway at Traitors Gate, because that was where he wished her to be found.”

Chancellor’s eyes widened so imperceptibly it could have been a trick of the light.

“How do you know this? Do you have him?”

“Yes, I have him,” Pitt said softly. “But I know it because the carriage was seen.”

Chancellor did not move.

“And during the long wait, he smoked at least two cigars,” Pitt went on, his eyes going for a moment to the humidor a few inches from Chancellor’s hand, “of a curiously aromatic, pungent brand.”

Chancellor coughed and caught his breath. “And you … worked all this out?”

“With difficulty.”

“Was …” Chancellor was watching Pitt very closely, measuring him. “Was she killed in the hansom cab? Was she ever really going to Christabel Thorne’s?”

“No, she was never going to Christabel Thorne’s,” Pitt replied. “There was no hansom cab. She was murdered here in this house.”

Chancellor’s face tightened, but he did not move. His hand on the desk opened and closed, but he did not touch the cigar box.

“Her maid saw her leave,” he said, swallowing with difficulty.

“No, Mr. Chancellor, she saw you leave, wearing Mrs. Chancellor’s cloak,” Pitt corrected him. “She was a very tall woman, as tall as you are. You walked along the street to the manhole at the corner of the square, then you opened it and pushed the cloak down. You returned here and went upstairs saying you had put her in the hansom. You rang the bell and ordered your own carriage. Shortly after that you contrived an accident in which you scalded your coachman’s arm, and while everyone was attending to that, you carried Mrs. Chancellor’s body downstairs and put it into your own carriage, which you drove east and south until you crossed the river, as I have already said, and waited until the tide turned, so you could leave her at Traitors Gate, when the water would not rise any further and take her away again.”

Pitt reached forward and opened the cigar box, taking out one of the rich cigars. The aroma of it was sickeningly familiar. He held it to his nose, and looked over it at Chancellor.

Suddenly the pretense was gone. A passion flooded Chancellor’s face that was so savage and so violent it altered him utterly. The assurance, the urbanity, were vanished, his lips drawn back revealing his teeth, his cheeks white; there was a burning outrage in his eyes.

“She betrayed me,” he said harshly, his voice still high with the incredulity of it. “I loved her absolutely. We were everything to each other. She was more than just my wife, she was my companion, my partner in all my dreams. She was part of everything I did, everything I’ve admired. She always believed exactly as I did … she understood … and then she betrayed me! That’s the worst sin of all, Pitt … to betray love, to betray trust! She fell away, she couldn’t trust me to be right. A few rambling, ill-informed, hysterical conversations with Arthur Desmond, and she began to doubt! To doubt me! As if I didn’t know more about Africa than he did, than all of them! Then Kreisler came along, and she listened to him!” His voice was rising with the fury which consumed him till it was close to a shriek.

Pitt moved a step forward but Chancellor ignored him. The wound he felt engrossed him so he was barely aware of Pitt as anything more than an audience.

“After all I had told her, all I had explained,” he went on, risen to his feet now behind the desk, staring at Pitt, “she didn’t trust me, she listened to Kreisler-Peter Kreisler! A mere adventurer! He sowed a few seeds of doubt in her, and she lost her faith! She told me she was going to have Standish remove his backing from Rhodes’s venture. That in itself wouldn’t have mattered….”

He laughed savagely, a wild note of hysteria rising in it. “But when people knew about it … that my own wife no longer supported me! Dozens would have withdrawn-hundreds! Soon everyone would have doubted. Salisbury’s only looking for an excuse. I would have looked a complete fool, betrayed by my own wife!”

He threw himself back into the chair and pulled the desk drawer open, still staring at Pitt. “I never thought you’d work it out! You liked her … you admired her! I didn’t think you’d ever believe she was a traitor to her husband, to all we had both believed, even though I left her at Traitors Gate. It was the perfect place … she deserved that.”

Pitt wanted to say that if he had not, he might never have found the truth, but it was pointless now.

“Linus Chancellor-”

Chancellor pulled his hand out of the desk drawer. There was a small black pistol in it. He turned the barrel on himself and pulled the trigger. The shot was like a whip crack in the room and exploded in his head, splattering blood and bone everywhere.

Pitt was numb with horror. The room rocked like a ship at sea; the light from the chandelier seemed to splinter and break. There was a terrible smell in the air, and he felt sick.

He heard a running of feet outside. A servant threw open the door and someone screamed, but he did not know if it was a man or a woman. He stumbled over the other chair, bruising himself violently as he made his way out, and heard his own voice like a stranger’s sending someone for help.

“Why?” Nobby Gunne stood in Charlotte’s front parlor, her face twisted with anxiety. Of course the newspapers had been full of the tragedy of Linus Chancellor’s death. Whatever discretion or pity may have dictated, it was impossible to conceal the fact that he had taken his life suddenly and violently in the presence of a superintendent of the police. No euphemistic explanation would have satisfied even the most naive person. It had to be because the police had brought him some news which was not only unbearable, but so threatening that his response was immediate.

Were it a normal tragedy, some solution to his wife’s death which destroyed the faith and trust he had had in her, or which implied some further disaster, he might well have felt there was no alternative but to take his own life; but he would have done it later, after contemplation, and in the privacy of his own company, perhaps late at night. He would not have done it in the police superintendent’s presence unless he had not only brought shattering news but also a threat to arrest him and place him under such immediate restraint as to make instant action the only possible way of escape.

There might have been other answers, but no one thought further than the murder of Susannah and that Chancellor himself was guilty.

“Why?” Nobby repeated, staring at Charlotte with urgency and mounting distress. “What did she do that he could not possibly have forgiven her? He did love her, I would have sworn to that. Was it-” she swallowed with great difficulty, as though there were something blocking her throat ”-another man?”