Ashworth Hall (40 page)

And Eudora had not been close enough to him to give the gentleness, the silent understanding he would need. She had not been a large enough part of his experiences in the past to travel through this with him. He would not be able to allow her. Charlotte knew it already from the small things Eudora had said, but more from the way Eudora had watched him with Justine and not known how he would react, what would make him laugh or touch his emotions. Charlotte had felt Eudora’s sense of exclusion, as she felt the sudden chill of her own now.

She watched Pitt’s back as he reached the top of the stairs and wondered if he would turn and look at her. He must know she was still standing by the newel at the bottom.

But he did not. His mind was on Eudora and Piers, and what he must ask of them. So it should be. Perhaps hers was at least in part on Emily.

Aunt Vespasia’s advice seemed hollow. There was probably honor in it, but very little comfort. She turned away and went back to the withdrawing room. Kezia was alone. She ought to talk to her, not simply leave her.

“What do you need to look at him again for?” Piers asked with a shiver. He looked pale and tired, like everyone else, but in no sense afraid. It was perhaps the last evening he was going to have such an innocence.

“I would prefer to see if I am correct before I tell you,” Pitt replied, looking apologetically at Eudora, who had risen and was standing in front of the boudoir fire. She had not taken her eyes from Pitt’s face since he had come in. Thank heaven Justine was not there. She had apparently chosen to retire early.

“I suppose,” she said slowly. “If you must?”

“It matters, Mrs. Greville, or I would not ask,” he assured her. “I really am very sorry.” He was apologizing not only for the present, but for the future as well.

“I know.” She smiled at him, and there was a warmth in her he found it impossible to disbelieve. If it was indeed Doyle behind Finn Hennessey and the bomb, she was never going to heal from this. It would be a mortal wound. Half of him wanted to stay and offer whatever understanding or compassion was possible, the other half wanted to escape before he said or did something, or what he feared for her was betrayed in his face. He hesitated a moment.

She looked at him with increasing anxiety, as if she read his indecision and perceived the reasons.

He turned to Piers.

“There is no point in delaying what must be done,” he said grimly. “It is best to begin.”

Piers took a deep breath. “Yes, of course.” He glanced at his mother, seemed on the edge of saying something, then it eluded him. He moved to the door ahead of Pitt and held it open for him.

They went together, without speaking again, down the stairs, across the hall, through the baize door and along the passage past the kitchens and servants’ hall. Pitt collected the lanterns and led the way past the stillroom, gameroom, coal room, knife room, and general other storage and workplaces to the icehouse. He put the lantern down and took out the keys. Beside him Piers was standing rigidly, as though his muscles were locked. Perhaps Pitt should not have asked this of him? He hesitated with his hand on the key.

“What is it?” Piers asked.

Pitt still could not make a certain decision.

“What’s wrong?” Piers said again.

“Nothing.” It would not make any difference in the end. He put the key in the lock and turned it, then bent and picked up the lantern and went in. The cold hit him immediately, and the damp, slightly sickly smell. Or perhaps it was his imagination, knowing what was there.

“Is there a light?” Piers asked with a tremor in his voice.

“No, only the lanterns. I suppose they usually get the meat out during daylight,” Pitt replied. “And I expect leave the door open.”

Piers closed it and held the other lantern high. The room was quite large, stacked with blocks of ice. The floor was stone tile, with drains to carry off the surplus water. Carcasses of meat hung on hooks from the ceiling: beef, mutton, veal and pork. Offal sat in trays, and several strings of sausages looped over other hooks.

A large trestle table had been moved in, and the outlines of two human bodies were plainly visible under an old velvet dining room curtain, faded now.

Pitt took the curtain off and saw the white, oddly waxy face of Ainsley Greville. The other face, Lorcan McGinley’s, was so swathed in the remains of the study curtain to hide the blood and the injuries that it looked far less obviously human.

Piers took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“What am I looking for?” he asked.

“His neck,” Pitt replied. “The angle of his head.”

“But he’s been moved. What does it matter now? He was hit from behind. We already know that.” Piers frowned. “What are you thinking, Mr. Pitt? What do you know now that we didn’t then?”

“Please look at his neck.”

“That blow wouldn’t break it.” Piers was puzzled. “But if it had, how does that alter anything?”

Pitt looked down at the body and nodded very slightly.

Piers obeyed. There was a very slight moment of reluctance, the knowledge of who it was he was touching so professionally, then he placed his fingers on the skull and moved it gently, then again, exploring, concentrating.

Pitt waited. The cold seemed to eat into him. No wonder meat kept well here. It was not far above freezing, if at all. The damp from the ice seemed to penetrate the flesh. The taste of dead things filled his mouth and nose.

The lanterns burned absolutely steadily. It was totally windless, almost airless in there.

“You’re right!” Piers looked up, his eyes wide and dark in the uncertain light. “His neck is broken. I don’t understand it. That blow shouldn’t have done that. It’s in the wrong place, and at the wrong angle.”

“Would that blow at the back have killed him?” Pitt asked.

Piers looked unhappy. “I’m not absolutely certain, but I don’t think so. I don’t see how it could.” He swallowed, and Pitt could see his throat jerk. “There would be no way of knowing if he was dead when he slid under the water ….”

Pitt waited.

“I could find out if there is water in the lungs. If there isn’t, then the broken neck killed him and he was already dead before he went under.”

“And the blow at the back?” Pitt asked again.

“I might be able to tell from that if it happened when he was alive, or dead, by the blood and the bruising. The bathwater washed the outside clean, of course.” Piers seemed hunched into himself, his face shadowed starkly in the lanternlight. “But if I … if I did a postmortem examination … at least … I don’t know if I … I am really qualified to give an opinion. I couldn’t in court, of course …. They wouldn’t accept my judgment.”

“Then you had better be very careful how you treat the evidence,” Pitt said with a bleak smile. “It could make a lot of difference, one way or the other.”

“Could it?” Piers sounded disbelieving.

Pitt thought of Justine, of Doll, and of Lorcan McGinley.

“Oh, yes.”

“I can’t do it here,” Piers said grimly. “I can’t see, for a start. And I’m so cold I can’t hold my hands still.”

“We’ll use one of the laundry rooms,” Pitt decided. “There’s running water and a good wooden scrubbing table. I don’t suppose you have any instruments with you?”

“I’m only a student.” Piers’s voice was tight and a little high. “But I’m very nearly qualified. I take my final exams this year.”

“Can you do this? I don’t want to send for the village doctor. He won’t be trained for this kind of thing either. To send to London for someone I would have to do it through the assistant commissioner, and it will take too long.”

“I understand.” Piers looked at him unwaveringly in the lanternlight. “You think it was my Uncle Padraig, and you want the proof before he leaves.”

There was no purpose in denying it.

“Can you work with the best kitchen knives, if they are sharpened?” Pitt said instead.

Piers flinched. “Yes.”

Carrying the body from the icehouse was a miserable and exceedingly awkward matter. It must not be handled roughly, or damage might be done which would destroy the very evidence they were looking for. Geville had been a large man, tall and well built. To place him on a door would make him impossibly heavy for Pitt, Tellman and Piers to carry unassisted.

“Well, we can’t get anyone else,” Tellman said tartly. “We’ll have to think of another way. I’ve seen enough of these servants to know what would happen if we used a footman. We’d be branded ghouls or resurrectionists by tomorrow morning.”

“I’m afraid he’s right,” Piers agreed. “We could try boards. There’ll be some in one of the outbuildings, like the ones they used for the study window.”

“We’d never balance him on boards,” Pitt dismissed the idea. The thought of struggling along the passageway in the half dark trying to keep a corpse from falling off a plank was grotesque. “The door is the only thing.”

“It’s too heavy!” Tellman protested.

“Laundry basket,” Piers said suddenly. “If we’re really careful how we put him in it, we won’t disturb the evidence.”

Pitt and Tellman both looked at him with approval.

“Excellent,” Pitt agreed. “I’ll fetch one. You get him ready.”

*   *   *

It was after eleven o’clock by the time Tellman stood by the laundry door, which naturally did not lock, and Pitt watched as Piers Greville very slowly began cutting into the body of his father, holding Mrs. Williams’s best kitchen knife in his right hand. The ordinary lights were turned up as high as they could go, and there were three extra lanterns placed so as to cast as little shadow as possible.

It seemed to take hours. He worked slowly and extremely carefully, cutting tissue, hesitating, looking, cutting again. He obviously loathed the necessity of what he was doing. But once he had become engrossed in it, his professionalism asserted itself. He was a man who loved his calling and took a kind of joy in the delicate skill of his hands. Never once did he complain or suggest that it was unfair of Pitt to have asked him. Whatever fears he had as to what the evidence might show, he hid them.

It was warm in the laundry, and damp from the steam of the coppers boiling heavy linen and towels. It smelled of soap, carbolic, and wet cloth.

Tellman stood with his back to the door. No one in the house had been told what they were doing. They had brought the body themselves, after making sure all the servants were elsewhere. Most had already gone upstairs. If they heard even a whisper that there had been a body cut up in the laundry, the stories would grow until they were monstrous, and no servant would come to work in Ashworth Hall ever again.

It was now half past eleven.

“Will you hold that, please?” Piers asked, indicating the bones of the chest he had cut with Mrs. Williams’s meat cleaver. Pitt obeyed. It seemed callous to be holding a part of a man’s body, and yet he knew as well as anyone that it was no longer animate, but it still seemed peculiarly personal.

Another ten minutes went by. No one spoke again.

There was no sound but the hissing of the gas. The entire house seemed silent, almost as if there was no one else in all the dozens of rooms.

“There is no water in the lungs,” Piers said at last, looking up at Pitt. “He didn’t drown.”

“Did the blow to the back of the head kill him?”

Piers did not answer, but closed up the chest as well as he could. He wiped the blood off his hands, then, after Pitt had helped him roll the body over so he could see, he turned his attention to the wound at the back of the neck.

Another twenty minutes passed.

“No,” he said with a lift of surprise. “There’s no bleeding, no real bruise at all, just a crushing of bone … there.” He pointed. “And there.” He screwed up his face in confusion. “He was killed … twice … if you see what I mean? First by breaking the neck, which was a very expert blow, exactly right. It must take some skill, and strength, to break a man’s neck with one blow. And there was only one. There’s no other bruising or damage.”

Tellman had come inside earlier, silently, and now he came forward from the door, his eyes wide open, looking first at Piers, then at Pitt.

“Then someone hit him over the back of the head and pushed him under the water,” Piers finished. “I haven’t the faintest idea why. It seems … crazy ….” He looked totally bewildered.

“Are you sure?” Pitt felt a soaring of spirit that was out of all proportion to any good there could possibly be. “Are you absolutely sure?”

Piers blinked. “Yes. You can get a proper police surgeon to check after me, but I’m sure. Why? What does it mean? Do you know who killed him?”

“No,” Pitt said with a catch in his voice. “No … but I think I know who didn’t ….”

“Well, it looks like two people did.” Tellman stared down at the body on the bench. “Or meant to!”

Pitt did not move. He was wondering if he could make a case against someone for hitting the head of a corpse and holding it under the water. What could the crime be? Defilement of a dead body? Would the courts bother with it? Did he even want them to?

“Sir?” Tellman prompted him.

Pitt jerked his attention back. “Yes … Yes, tidy up here, will you, Tellman. I have something to do upstairs … I think. Thank you.” He looked at Piers. “Thank you, Mr. Greville. I appreciate both your courage and your skill … very much. Put the body back in the icehouse, will you, and for God’s sake, lock the door and don’t leave any traces of what we’ve done here. Good night.” And he went to the door, opened it, and strode back towards the main house and the stairs.

12

C
HARLOTTE WAS ASLEEP
when Pitt reached the bedroom, but just as she had been on her return from London, he was unable to wait until morning to share with her what he had learned. He was less gentle about waking her. He made no pretense at diplomacy. He walked straight in and lit the main gaslamp and turned it up.

“Charlotte,” he said in a normal voice.

She grunted at the brightness of the light and turned over slowly, hiding her face under the coverlet.

“Charlotte,” he repeated, going over and sitting on the bed. He felt abrupt, but it was not a time for approaching softly. “Wake up. I need to speak to you.”

She caught the urgency in his voice even through the remnants of sleep. She sat up, blinking and shielding her eyes, her hair too loosely braided to stay in place, and now falling over her shoulders.

“What is it? What’s happened?” She stared at him, not yet alarmed because there was no fear in him. “Do you know who did it?”

“No … but it wasn’t Justine.”

“Yes, it was.” She was awake now, still blinking in the light, but feeling curious. “It had to be. Why else would she be on the landing in a maid’s dress? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“She went in and hit him on the head, then pulled him under the water,” he agreed. “But she didn’t kill him … he was already dead!”

She glanced at him as if she were not sure if she had grasped what he had said.

“Already dead? Are you sure? How do you know?”

“Yes, I am sure, because Piers said so—”

“Piers?” She was sitting up now. “If he knew, why didn’t he say before?” Her face darkened. “Thomas … maybe he knew it was Justine and he is—”

“No.” He was quite certain. “No, he does not know what it means. He merely told me the evidence ….”

“What evidence?” she demanded. “What evidence does he know now that he didn’t know before?” She was shivering as the bedclothes fell from around her.

“We took the body to the laundry and did something of an autopsy …. Charlotte, Justine had every intention of killing Ainsley Greville, but someone else got there before her and broke his neck … with a single, very expert blow … someone who knows how to kill and has probably done it before.”

She shuddered, but seemed to have forgotten the bedclothes within a hand’s reach of her.

“You mean an assassin,” she said in a whisper. “One of the Irishmen here.”

“Yes, I can think of no other answer,” he agreed.

“Padraig Doyle?”

“I don’t know. Possibly.”

“Eudora will never get over it.” She stared at him. “Thomas …”

“What?” He thought he knew what she was going to say, something about pity and that it was not his fault; not to be too hurt for her, grieved, and above all guilty. He was wrong.

“You must prepare yourself for the possibility that she already knows,” she answered.

Everything in him was repelled by the idea—it was appalling. It was unimaginable that behind those soft features and wounded eyes was an accomplice, even a silent one, in cold, indiscriminate political murder.

Charlotte was looking at him with hurt and sorrow in her face, but for him, not for Eudora. “She is very close to her brother,” she went on quietly. “And she is as Irish as any of them, even if she doesn’t seem like it or hasn’t lived there for twenty years. She might still carry the old hatreds and the unreason which seems to infect everybody in this issue.”

She put out her hand and laid it softly over his. “Thomas … you’ve seen them, you’ve heard them argue. You can see what happens to people once they start talking about Ireland. One man’s freedom is seen as another man’s exploitation and loss, or theft of all he has built up over the generations, and far worse than that, and far more justifiable to defend, as loss of his freedom of faith. A Nationalist independent Ireland would be Roman Catholic. Its laws would be Catholic, whatever the beliefs of the individual. There would be censorship of books according to the Papal Index. All sorts of things would be banned.”

She grasped the coverlets and pulled them half around her.

“I resented it when my own father told me what to read and what not to. I should rebel if the Pope did. He’s not anything to do with me. But in a Catholic Ireland some books would be illegal. I wouldn’t even know they existed ….I’d learn only what the Church decided I should hear. Maybe I don’t want to read them ….I might even agree ….I just want the choice to be mine.”

He did not interrupt.

“On all things, I want laws my own people can vote on ….” She smiled lopsidedly. “Actually, I’d even like to vote on them myself. But either way, I won’t be told by a lot of cardinals in Rome what to do.”

“You’re exaggerating …” he protested.

“No, I’m not. In a Catholic state the Church has the last word.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’ve been talking to Kezia Moynihan. And before you say she is exaggerating too, she told me proof of it. There’s a lot they say which I think is nonsense. They blame the Catholics for all kinds of things, but that much is true. Where the Church of Rome has power, it is absolute. You can’t force religion on other people, Thomas. Mostly I think the Americans have it right. You should keep church and state separate ….”

“What do you know about the Americans?” He was startled. He had never thought of her as having the slightest interest in, let alone knowledge of, such things.

“Emily was telling me. Do you know how many millions of Irish people have emigrated to America since the potato famine?”

“No. Do you?”

“Yes … about three million,” she replied unhesitatingly. “That’s about one in three of the whole population, and it’s largely the young and able-bodied. Nearly all of them went to America, where they could find work—and food.”

“What is that to do with Eudora?” He was shaken by the information, and by the fact that Charlotte apparently knew it, but nothing could take the image of Eudora entirely from his mind.

“Only that the situation is desperate,” she answered, still looking at him with the same gentleness. “There are many people who think when issues are so large that the end justifies any means, even murder of those who stand in the way of what they see as a larger justice.”

He said nothing.

She hesitated, seeming on the brink of leaning forward and putting her arms around him, then changed her mind. Instead she climbed out of bed and went for her dressing robe.

“Where are you going?” he said in surprise. “You’re not going to Eudora?”

“No … I’m going to Justine.”

“Why?”

She put her robe on and tied the long sash. She was completely awake now, but she did not bother to wash her face from the ewer of cold water or run the brush over her tangled hair.

“Because I want to tell her she didn’t kill Ainsley Greville. She thinks she did.”

He stood up. “Charlotte, I don’t know that I want Justine to know ….”

“Yes you do,” she said firmly. “If you have to arrest Padraig Doyle tomorrow, you need this dealt with tonight. Don’t come with me. I can speak to her better on my own. We need to know the truth.”

He sat frozen on the bed. She was right in that they needed the truth, but he also dreaded it.

She went quietly along the corridor, across the landing and into the other wing. The whole house was silent. Everyone had long since gone to bed, apart from Pitt and Tellman, and presumably Piers. But he would not go to Justine’s room at this hour, and certainly not after what he had just been involved in. He would not take the smell and the emotional chaos of such a thing to her.

It was dim in the corridor, the gaslamps on very low, only sufficient to guide anyone who might wish to get up for any personal reason. She knocked on Justine’s door once, sharply, then without waiting for a reply, went in.

It was in darkness and complete silence.

“Justine,” she said in a soft voice, but well above a whisper.

There was a faint sound of movement, then a crinkle of bedclothes.

“Who is it?” Justine’s voice was tight, afraid.

“It’s Charlotte. Please turn up the light. I can’t see where it is.”

“Charlotte?” There was a moment’s silence, then more movement and the light came on.

Charlotte could see Justine sitting up in bed, but wide awake, her ink-black hair over her shoulders and a look of anxiety and puzzlement in her face.

“Has something happened?” she said quietly. “Something more?”

Charlotte came over and sat on the end of the bed. She must learn the truth from Justine, but she could think of no subterfuge with which to trick her in any way, nor did she want to trick her.

“Not really,” she said, making herself comfortable. “But we know more than we did at dinnertime, although we knew quite a lot then.”

Justine’s face reflected no emotion except relief that no further disaster had happened.

“Do you? Do you know who killed Mr. McGinley yet?”

“No.” Charlotte smiled in sad irony. “But we know who did not kill Mr. Greville ….”

“We already know who did not,” Justine said, still keeping a suitably good temper in the circumstances. “Mr. O’Day and Mr. McGinley, and the valet Hennessey, if you had considered him. I hope you would know it was not Mrs. Greville, or Piers, but I suppose you cannot take that for granted. Is that what you have come to say … that it was not Mrs. Greville?” She put her hand on the covers as if to get out.

Charlotte leaned forward and stopped her.

“I don’t know whether it was Mrs. Greville or not.” She met Justine’s dark eyes levelly. “But I should think it unlikely, although she might very well know who did. It was someone very skilled, very professional at killing.” She watched Justine closely, her eyes, her movement. “It was done with one very accurate blow.”

Justine sat absolutely motionless, but she could not keep the start of shock from her eyes. The instant after came a shadow of fear as she wondered how much Charlotte knew, what she had seen in her face. Then it was gone again.

“Was it?” she asked, her voice very nearly steady. Any huskiness in it could easily be attributed to the unpleasantness of the subject and the fact that she had been awoken from the first deep sleep of the night.

“Yes. His neck was broken.”

This time the surprise was accompanied by bewilderment, and for all her iron will and practiced composure she could not hide it. She masked it the instant she saw the recognition in Charlotte’s eyes. She shuddered in revulsion.

“How horrible!”

“It is cold-blooded,” Charlotte agreed. She clenched her hands in her lap where Justine could not see them. “Less understandable than the person who came in after that, with a maid’s cap on and a maid’s dress over her own, and walked behind him with ajar of bath salts in her hand and hit him over the back of the head, then, believing him senseless from the blow, pushed him under the water and held him there.”

Justine was white. She grasped the sheets as if they kept her afloat from drowning.

“Did … somebody … do that?”

“Yes.” Charlotte kept all doubt out of her voice.

“How …” Justine swallowed in spite of her effort at control. “How do you … know that?”

“She was seen. At least her shoes were seen.” Charlotte smiled very slightly, not a smile of triumph or blame. “Blue fabric slippers, stitched on the sides, with blue heels. Not a maid’s shoes. You wore them today at luncheon, with your muslin dress.”

This time Justine made no pretense. She would not lose her dignity so far as to continue to fight when the battle was over.

“Why?” Charlotte asked. “You must have had a very powerful reason.”

Justine looked drained, as if the life had ceased inside her. In a few words Charlotte had ended everything she had longed for and worked for, and almost had within her grasp. There seemed nothing she could say which would alter or redeem even a portion of the loss. There was no anger in her, only resignation in the face of absolute disaster.

Charlotte waited.

Justine began in a low, quiet voice, not looking at Charlotte, but down at the embroidered edge of the linen sheet under her fingers.

“My mother was a maidservant who married a Spanish sailor. He died when I was very young. He was lost at sea. She was left with no money and a small child to bring up. Because she had married a foreigner, against her family’s wishes, they would have nothing to do with her. She took in laundry and mending, but it barely kept us alive. She didn’t marry again.”