Bethlehem Road (33 page)

“They’s extra, cos they smells sweeter. White flars orften does. Ter make up fer the color p’raps?”

“Then give me some of each, if you will.”

“There y’are, luv—but I still didn’t see nuffin.’ I can’t ’elp yer. Wish I could!”

“But you remember selling flowers to Sir Lockwood Hamilton?”

“Yeah, course I do! Sold ’im flars reg’lar. Nice gent ’e was, poor soul. Never ’aggled, like some as I could name. Some gents wot ’as fortunes’ll ’aggle over a farvin’.” She sighed heavily, and Pitt imagined her life; a quarter of a penny on a bunch of flowers meant a difference to her, and she was only mildly indignant that men who ate nine-course dinners as a way of life would argue with her over the cost of a slice of bread.

“Do you remember that night? It was an unusually late sitting.”

“Bless yer, they ’as late sittin’s an’ late sittin’s,” she said with a wink rather more like a twitch. “Wot was they sittin’ over, eh? An argy-bargy, new laws fer us all—or a good bottle o’ port wine?”

“It was a fine night, nice enough to walk home with pleasure. Go over it all again in your mind for me. Please. Did you have supper? What did you eat? Did you buy it from someone here?”

“That’s right!” she said with sudden cheer. “I got some pickled eels an’ a slice of ’ot bread down Jacko’s stand, ’long the Embankment.”

“Then what? What time was that?”

“Dunno, luv.”

“Yes you do. You would have heard Big Ben—think! You’d be waiting to catch the Members as they left the House.”

She screwed up her face. “I ’eard ten—but that was afore I went down ter Jacko’s.”

“Did you hear eleven? Where were you when Big Ben struck eleven?”

Someone else came past and bought a bunch of purple violets before she replied. “I was talkin’ ter Jacko. ’E said as it was a good night fer trade, and folk was still abaht, it bein’ fine like. An’ I said that was good, cos I’d gorn an’ got an extra load o’ flars, and they don’t last.”

“And then you came back up here sometime before the House rose,” he prompted.

“No,” she said, deep in thought, her brow furrowed. “That’s wot I din’ do! I got fed up wiv waitin’ fer ’em, an I went up ter the Strand and the theaters. Sold all me flars there, I did.”

“You can’t have,” Pitt argued. “That must have been another night. You sold flowers to Sir Lockwood Hamilton. Primroses. He was wearing fresh flowers when he was killed, and he didn’t have them when he left the House a few minutes before he crossed the bridge.”

“Primroses? I don’t ’ave no primroses. Violets, me, this time o’ year. All sorts later on, but violets now.”

“Never primroses?” Pitt said carefully, a strange and dreadfully sensible idea opening up in his mind. “Would you swear to that?”

“Gor lumme! D’yer fink I sold flars all me life since I were six years old, and don’ know the difference between a primrose nor a violet? Wot yer take me for?”

“Then who gave the primroses to Sir Lockwood Hamilton?”

“Someone wot poached my beat!” she said sourly. Then her face eased in innate fairness. “Not as I didn’t go up the Strand, wot in’t stric’ly my place, but ...” She shrugged. “Sorry, ducky.”

“I suppose you didn’t sell primroses to Mr. Etheridge, or Mr. Sheridan either?”

“I told yer, I never sold primroses to no one!”

Pitt thrust his hands deep into his pockets and pulled out a sixpence. He gave it to her and took two more bunches of flowers.

“Well then, I wonder who did.”

“Cor!” She let out her breath in a moan of incredulity, which turned to horror. “The Westminster Cutthroat! ’E sold ’em! Don’ it fair make yer blood cold? It do mine!”

“Thank you!” Pitt turned on his heel and walked rapidly away, then started to run, shouting and waving his arms for a cab.

“A flower seller?” Micah Drummond repeated, his brow puckered in surprise. He turned the thought over in his mind, examining it and finding it more and more acceptable.

“It gives me something to look for,” Pitt said eagerly. “In a way, flower sellers are invisible, as long as you don’t know that is what you are looking for. But once you do, they are a very definite body. They have their own territories, like birds. You won’t get two of the same sort in one street.”

“Birds?”

“The Parliament end of Westminster Bridge is usually Maisie Willis’s patch; the night Hamilton was killed, as we know, she went up the Strand instead. But our cutthroat wouldn’t know that in advance. He—or perhaps I should say
she—
seized the opportunity, and again when Etheridge and Sheridan were killed. She must have been waiting, watching for the opportunity. She might have been there several nights before the House rose when Maisie wasn’t there, and she caught the man she wanted alone on the bridge. He probably stopped to buy flowers, not recognizing the seller in the half light, and naturally not expecting to see anyone he knew dressed in old clothes and with a tray of flowers!”

He leaned forward eagerly, the picture coming more sharply into his mind. “She, or he, took the money, gave him the flowers, and then reached up to pin them on for him”—he curved his right hand sharply sideways, fingers crooked as if to hold a razor—“and cut his throat. Then as he collapsed she propped him up against the lamppost and tied him to it with his own scarf, leaving the primroses in his buttonhole. She could hide the razor again on the tray of flowers and simply walk away. No one would notice her she was a flower seller who had made a sale and pinned the flowers on her patron before leaving.”

“She must be a damn strong woman!” Drummond said with a shiver of distaste. “Or it might have been a man; it would be perfectly possible for a man to disguise himself as a flower seller, muffled up on a chilly spring night, hat drawn down, shawl round his neck and chin. How in hell do we find him, Pitt?”

“We have an actual person to ask about now! We’ll start again with other M.P.s. She can’t have sold only the one bunch of flowers—others will have bought as well. Someone may remember something about her. After all, it was unusual for it to be anyone other than Maisie, and it was unusual to have primroses rather than violets. We ought to learn at least her height, that’s hard to disguise; a stoop is noticeable. And you can add weight easily enough with clothes, but you can’t take it off. A man can look like an old woman, but it’s very much harder to look like a young one: the bones and the skin are wrong. Did anyone notice hands? No doubt she wore mitts, but the size? A big man can’t make his hands look like a woman’s.”

“Perhaps it
was
two people?” Drummond met Pitt’s eyes and his own were bright with unhappiness, his features pinched and weary. “Perhaps the flowers were a decoy, to hold his attention while someone else attacked?”

Pitt knew what he was thinking. Africa Dowell with flowers while Florence Ivory crept up with a razor from behind, the victim turning at the last moment—the cuts had been made from the front with the left hand—and then both women together holding him and tying him to the lamppost. More dangerous; more likely they’d be noticed, two women leaving the scene. But not impossible.

“There must be clothes,” he said levelly, forcing the picture from his mind’s eye. “A flower seller in a lady’s gown and cloak would be remarked instantly, and the M.P.s never mentioned that it was not the usual woman, therefore she must have looked something similar, of average height, broadly built, big shoulders and bosom, wide hips. Plain clothes, probably several layers; a hat and shawl, and probably a second shawl against the wind coming up off the river. And most important of all, a tray of flowers. She had to buy some, not very many. She would want to look as if she were at the end of a long day’s selling: four or five bunches would be enough. But she had to buy them somewhere.”

“Didn’t you say Florence Ivory had a garden?” Drummond asked, moving back to the fire again and staring up at Pitt as he bent to put more coal on it. The day was colder and there was a thin drizzle of rain running down the window. Both men felt the chill.

“Yes, but you can’t pick primroses by the bunch day after day from a private garden.”

“Can’t you? How do you know so much about gardens, Pitt? Don’t have a garden, do you? When do you find the time?” He looked round. “Mind, you’ll have more when you’re promoted after we tie up this case.”

Pitt smiled thinly. “Yes—yes I will. Actually, we do have a small garden, but Charlotte does more in it than I do. I grew up in the country.”

“Did you?” Drummond’s eyebrows rose. “I didn’t know that. Somehow I thought you were a Londoner. Amazing how little we know about people, even though we see them every day. So she bought primroses?”

“Yes, probably from the same source as other flower sellers. One of the markets. We can send men out to search.”

“Good; arrange it. And questioning the M.P.s, I’ll go out on that again too. Which of the people we know would be capable of passing as a street vendor? Surely not Lady Hamilton?”

“I doubt it, and I don’t think Barclay Hamilton could pass himself off as a woman—he’s far too tall, apart from anything else.”

“Mrs. Sheridan?”

“Possibly.”

“Helen Carfax?”

Pitt shrugged, the question was too hard. He could not visualize the pale, unhappy woman he had seen after her father’s death, so torn with fears, so painfully in love with her husband, so wounded by his every small indifference, having the confidence and efficiency to acquire flowers and then stand on a street comer selling them to passing strangers so that she might commit murder. He remembered Maisie Willis’s voice, casual, broad, idiosyncratic.

“I doubt she could master selling,” he said frankly. “And James Carfax is the same as Barclay Hamilton, too tall not to be noticed.”

“Florence Ivory?”

Florence had left her husband and found shelter for herself and her child, until Africa Dowell had taken her in. Perhaps she had also worked at something.

“Yes, I imagine she might. She certainly has the imagination and intelligence to do it, and the willpower.”

Drummond leaned forward.

“Then, Pitt, we’ve got to catch her. We’ve got grounds to search her house now. We may find the clothes—if she means to do it again we almost certainly will. Dear God, she must be mad!”

“Yes,” Pitt agreed with cold unhappiness. “Yes, I daresay she is, poor soul.”

But the minutest search yielded only much-mended work clothes, gardening gloves, and kitchen aprons—nothing that would have dressed a flower seller—and only baskets and trugs for flowers, no trays such as street vendors use.

The third questioning of the members of Parliament produced a little more. Several men, when specifically pressed, recalled a different flower seller on the nights of the murders, but they could describe only the roughest details: she was rather larger than Maisie Willis, and taller they thought, but not much else. What they really recalled was that she had sold primroses instead of violets.

Was she very muffled with scarves or shawls?

Not particularly.

Was she young or old, dark or fair?

Definitely not young, nor, they thought, very old. Perhaps forty, perhaps fifty. For heaven’s sake, who spends their time estimating the age of flower sellers?

A big woman, they all agreed, bigger than Maisie Willis. Then it was certainly not Florence Ivory. Africa Dowell padded out a little, her face grimed and made up to hide her fine fair skin, her hair bound in an old scarf or hat, a little dirt judiciously rubbed in?

He returned to Bow Street and met with Drummond to share his findings and consider the next step.

Drummond looked tired and beaten. The bottoms of his trousers were wet, his feet were cold, and he was exhausted with talking, with searching for a courteous way of asking over and over again questions that had already been answered with negatives, worn out with weighing, measuring and sifting every fragment of memory, every fact or suggestion, and knowing at the end of it no more than the beginning.

“Do you think she’ll do it again?” he asked.

“Only God knows,” Pitt replied, not blasphemously—he meant it. “But if she does, this time we know what to look for.” Drummond pushed the blotter and the inkstand away and sat on the edge of his desk. “That could be weeks, months, or never.”

Pitt looked at him. The same thought was mirrored in both their faces.

Drummond put it into words. “We must provoke her. We will have someone cross the bridge alone, after every late sitting. We will be close at hand; we can disguise ourselves as street vendors and cabbies.”

“We haven’t got a constable who can pass for an M.P.”

Drummond pulled a very small face. “No, but I could. I’ll go myself.”

And for eight nights Micah Drummond slipped into the House of Commons strangers’ gallery and sat there until the House rose, then mixed with the members as they left, talking for a few minutes with the one or two he knew. Then he turned and left, walking up past the great statue of Boadicea and onto Westminster Bridge. Twice he bought violets from Maisie Willis, and once a hot pie from the vendor on the Embankment, but he saw no one with primroses, and no one approached him.

On the ninth evening, discouraged and tired, he was turning up his coat collar against a chilly wind and wraiths of fog coming off the river, when Garnet Royce came up to him.

“Good evening, Mr. Drummond.”

“Oh, er, good evening, Sir Garnet.”

Royce’s face was tense. The lamplight gleamed on his high forehead and reflected the pale brilliance of his eyes.

“I know what you’re doing, Mr. Drummond,” he said very quietly. “And that it is not succeeding.” He swallowed, his breath uneven, but he was a man used to being in command, of himself and of others. “And you won’t succeed—not this way. I offered to help you before, and I meant it. Let me walk back across the bridge. If this lunatic means to strike again, I am a legitimate target: a real M.P... .” He faltered for a moment, then he cleared his throat and made a fierce effort to speak without a quaver. “A real M.P. who lives south of the river, and who could reasonably go home on foot on a fine night.”

Drummond hesitated. All the risks swam before his eyes: his own guilt if anything were to happen to Royce, the charges that would be leveled against him. He winced as he thought how easily he could be accused of cowardice. And yet eight nights he had left the Palace of Westminster and walked alone across the bridge, and he’d achieved nothing. What Royce said was true: the cutthroat may well be insane, but she—or he—was not easily duped.