Highgate Rise (3 page)

The parlormaid went almost as white as her apron and Pitt was lucky she did not faint. Her waist was so tiny her stays must have been tight enough to choke a less determined spirit.

“Oh Lor’!” She recovered herself with an effort. “I thought it were an accident.”

“I am afraid not.” Pitt followed up his rather clumsy beginning as best he could. He should be past allowing his pride to be stung by a maid by now. “Did you happen to look out of your window around midnight and perhaps see a moving light, or hear anything unusual?”

“No I didn’t—” She hesitated. “But Alice, the tweeny, was up, and she told me this morning she saw a ghost outside. But she’s a bit daft, like. I don’t know if she dreamt it.”

“I’ll speak to Alice,” Pitt replied with a smile. “It may be important. Thank you.”

Very slowly she smiled back. “If you’ll wait in the morning room, I’ll tell Mr. Lutterworth as you’re ’ere … sir.”

The room they were shown to was unusually gracious, indicating not merely that the owner had money, but he also had far better taste than perhaps he knew. Pitt had time only to glance at the watercolors on the walls. They were certainly valuable, the sale of any one of them would have fed a family for a decade, but they were also genuinely beautiful, and entirely right in their setting, wooing the eye, not assaulting it.

Alfred Lutterworth was in his late fifties with a fresh complexion, at the moment considerably flushed, and a rim of smooth white hair around a shining head. He was of good height and solidly built, with the assured stance of a self-made man. His face was strong featured. In a gentleman it might have been considered handsome, but there was something both belligerent and uncertain in it that betrayed his sense of not belonging, for all his wealth.

“My maid tells me you’re ’ere about Mrs. Shaw bein’ murdered in that fire,” Lutterworth said with a strong Lancashire accent. “That right? Them girls reads penny dreadfuls in the cupboard under the stairs an’ ’as imaginations like the worst kind o’ novelists.”

“Yes sir, I’m afraid it is true,” Pitt replied. He introduced himself and Murdo, and explained the reason for their questions.

“Bad business,” Lutterworth said grimly. “She was a good woman. Too good for most o’ the likes o’ them ’round ’ere. ’Ceptin’ Maude Dalgetty. She’s another—no side to ’er, none at all. Civil to everyone.” He shook his head. “But I didn’t see a thing. Waited up till I ’eard Flora come ’ome, that were twenty afore midnight. Then I turned the light
down and went to sleep sound, until the fire bells woke me. Could ’a marched an army past in the street before that an’ I’d not ’ave ’eard ’em.”

“Flora is Miss Lutterworth?” Pitt asked, although he already knew from the Highgate police’s information.

“That’s right, me daughter. She was out with some friends at a lecture and slide show down at St. Alban’s Road. That’s just south of ’ere, beyond the church.”

Murdo stiffened to attention.

“Did she walk home, sir?” Pitt asked.

“It’s only a few steps.” Lutterworth’s deep-set, rather good eyes regarded Pitt sharply, expecting criticism. “She’s a healthy lass.”

“I would like to ask her if she saw anything.” Pitt kept his voice level. “Women can be very observant.”

“You mean nosey,” Lutterworth agreed ruefully. “Aye. My late wife, God rest ’er, noticed an ’undred things about folk I never did. An’ she was right, nine times out o’ ten.” For a moment his memory was so clear it obliterated the police in his house or the smell of water on burnt brick and wood still acrid in the air, in spite of the closed windows. From the momentary softness in his eyes and the half smile on his lips they bore nothing but sweetness. Then he recalled the present. “Aye—if you want to.” He reached over to the mantel and pulled the knob of the bell set on the wall. It was porcelain, and painted with miniature flowers. An instant later the parlormaid appeared at the door.

“Tell Miss Flora as I want ’er, Polly,” he ordered. “To speak to the police.”

“Yes sir.” And she departed hastily, whisking her skirts around the door as she closed it again.

“Uppity, that lass,” Lutterworth said under his breath. “Got opinions; but she’s ’andsome enough, and that’s what parlormaids ’as to be. And I suppose one can’t blame ’er.”

Flora Lutterworth must have been impelled as much by curiosity as her servants, because she came obediently even though her high chin and refusal to meet her father’s eyes, coupled with a fire in her cheeks equal to his, suggested they
had very recently had a heated difference of opinion about something, which was still unresolved.

She was a fine-looking girl, tall and slender with wide eyes and a cloud of dark hair. She avoided traditional beauty by the angularity of her cheekbones and surprisingly crooked front teeth. It was a face of strong character, and Pitt was not in the least surprised she had quarreled with her father. He could imagine a hundred subjects on which she would have fierce opinions at odds with his—everything from which pages of the newspaper she should be permitted to read to the price of a hat, or the time she came home, and with whom.

“Good afternoon, Miss Lutterworth,” he said courteously. “No doubt you are fully aware of the tragedy last night. May I ask you, did you see anyone on your way home from the lecture, either a stranger or someone you know?”

“Someone I know?” The thought obviously startled her.

“If you did, we should like to speak to them in case they saw or heard anything.” It was at least partly the truth. There was no point in making her feel as if she would automatically be accusing someone.

“Ah.” Her face cleared. “I saw Dr. Shaw’s trap go past just as we were leaving the Howards’.”

“How do you know it was his?”

“No one else around here has one like that.” She had no trace of Lancashire in her voice. Apparently her father had paid for elocution lessons so she should sound the lady he wished her, and even in his temper, now that her attention was engaged elsewhere, his eyes rested on her with warmth. “Anyway,” she continued, “I could see his face quite clearly in the carriage lamps.”

“Anyone else?” Pitt asked.

“You mean coming this way? Well, Mr. Lindsay came a few moments after us—I was walking with Mr. Arroway and the Misses Barking. They went on up to the Grove in Highgate itself. Mr. and Mrs. Dalgetty were just ahead of us. I don’t recall anyone else. I’m sorry.”

He pressed her for further descriptions of the evening and
the names of everyone attending, but learned nothing that he felt would be of use. The occasion had ended a little too early for the fire setter, and in all probability he, or she, would have waited until such a function was well over before venturing out. They must have supposed themselves to have several hours at least.

He thanked her, asked permission to speak to the tweeny and the rest of the staff, and accordingly he and Murdo were shown to the housekeeper’s sitting room, where he heard the twelve-year-old between maid’s story of seeing a ghost with burning yellow eyes flitting between the bushes in next-door’s garden. She did not know what time it was. The middle of the night. She had heard the clock in the hall strike ever so many times, and there was no one else about at all, all the gas lamps on the landing below were dimmed right down and she daren’t call anyone, terrified as she was. She had crept back to bed and put the covers over her head, and that was all she knew, she swore it.

Pitt thanked her gently—she was only a few years older than his own daughter, Jemima—and told her she had been a great help. She blushed and bobbed a curtsey, losing her balance a little, then retreated in some confusion. It was the first time in her life that an adult had listened to her seriously.

“Do you reckon that was our murderer, Inspector?” Murdo asked as they came out onto the footpath again. “That girl’s ghost?”

“A moving light in Shaw’s garden? Probably. We’ll have to follow up all the people Flora Lutterworth saw as she left the lecture. One of them may have seen somebody.”

“Very observant young lady, very sensible, I thought,” Murdo said, then colored pink. “I mean she recounted it all very clearly. No, er, no melodrama.”

“None at all,” Pitt agreed with the shadow of a smile. “A young woman of spirit, I think. She may well have had more to say if her father were not present. I imagine they do not see eye to eye on everything.”

Murdo opened his mouth to reply, then found himself in
confusion as to what he wanted to say, and swallowed hard without saying anything.

Pitt’s smile widened and he increased his rather gangling pace up the pavement towards the house of Amos Lindsay, where the widower Dr. Shaw was taking refuge, being not only bereaved but now also homeless.

The house was far smaller than the Lutterworths’, and as soon as they were inside they could not help being aware it was also of highly eccentric character. The owner was apparently at one time an explorer and anthropologist. Carvings of varied nature and origin decked the walls, crowded together on shelves and tables, and even stood in huddles on the floor. From Pitt’s very restricted knowledge he took them to be either African or central Asian. He saw nothing Egyptian, Oriental or from the Americas, nothing that had the subtle but familiar smoothness of the classicism that was the heritage of western European culture. There was something alien in it, a barbaric rawness at odds with the very conventional Victorian middle-class interior architecture.

They were conducted in by a manservant with an accent Pitt could not place and a skin no darker than many Englishmen’s, but of an unusual smoothness, and hair that might have been drawn on his head with India ink. His manners were impeccable.

Amos Lindsay himself was eminently English in appearance, short, stocky and white-haired, and yet totally unlike Pascoe. Where Pascoe was essentially an idealist harking back to an age of medieval chivalry in Europe, Lindsay was a man of insatiable and indiscriminate curiosity—and irreverence for establishment, as his furnishings showed. But his mind was voyaging outward to the mysteries of savagery and the unknown. His skin was deep furrowed both by the dominant nature of his features and by the severity of tropical sun. His eyes were small and shrewd, those of a realist, not a dreamer. His whole aspect acknowledged humor and the absurdities of life.

Now he was very grave and met Pitt and Murdo in his study, having no use for a morning room.

“Good evening,” he said civilly. “Dr. Shaw is in the withdrawing room. I hope you will not ask him a lot of idiotic questions that anyone else could answer.”

“No sir,” Pitt assured him. “Perhaps towards that end you might answer a few for us before we meet Dr. Shaw?”

“Of course. Although I cannot imagine what you think there is to learn from us. But since you are here, you must suppose, in spite of the unlikelihood of it, that it was in some way criminal.” He looked acutely at Pitt. “I went to bed at nine; I rise early. I neither saw nor heard anything, nor did my domestic staff. I have already asked them because quite naturally they were alarmed and distressed by the noise of the fire. I have no idea what manner of person might do such a thing with intent, nor any sane reason why. But then the mind of man is capable of almost any contortion or delusion whatever.”

“Do you know Dr. and Mrs. Shaw well?”

Lindsay was unsurprised. “I know him well. He is one of the few local men I find it easy to converse with. Open-minded, not pickled in tradition like most around here. A man of considerable intelligence and wit. Not common qualities—and not always appreciated.”

“And Mrs. Shaw?” Pitt continued.

“Not so well. One doesn’t, of course. Can’t discuss with a woman in the same way as with a man. But she was a fine woman; sensible, compassionate, modest without unctuousness, no humbug about her. All the best female qualities.”

“What did she look like?”

“What?” Lindsay was obviously surprised. Then his face creased into a comic mixture of humor and indecision. “Matter of opinion, I suppose. Dark, good features, bit heavy in the—” He colored and his hands waved vaguely in the air. Pitt judged they would have described the curve of hips, had not his sense of propriety stopped him. “Good eyes, intelligent and mild. Sounds like a horse—I apologize. Handsome woman, that’s my judgment. And she walked well. No doubt you’ll talk to the Worlingham sisters, her aunts; Clemency resembles Celeste a trifle, not Angeline.”

“Thank you. Perhaps we should meet Dr. Shaw now?”

“Of course.” And without further speech he led them back into the hall, and then with a brief warning knock he opened the withdrawing room door.

Pitt ignored the remarkable curios on the walls, and his eyes went immediately to the man standing by the hearth, whose face was drained of emotion, but whose body was still tense, waiting for some action or demand upon it. He turned as he heard the door latch, but there was no interest in his eyes, only acknowledgment of duty. His skin had the pallor of shock, pinched at the sides of the lips and bruised around the eye sockets. His features were strong, and even bereavement in such fearful circumstances could not remove the wit and intelligence from him, nor the caustic individualism Pitt had heard others speak of.

“Good evening, Dr. Shaw,” Pitt said formally. “I am Inspector Pitt, from Bow Street, and this is Constable Murdo from the local station. I regret it is necessary that we ask you some distressing questions—”

“Of course.” Shaw cut off his explanations. As Murdo had said, he was a police surgeon and he understood. “Ask what you must. But first, tell me what you know. Are you sure it was arson?”

“Yes sir. There is no possibility that the fire started simultaneously in four different places, all accessible from the outside, and with no normal household reason, such as a spark from the hearth or a candle spilled in a bedroom or on the stairs.”

“Where did they start?” Shaw was curious now and unable to remain standing on the spot. He began to move about, first to one table, then another, automatically straightening things, compulsively making them tidier.

Pitt stood where he was, near the sofa.

“The fire chief says it was in the curtains,” he replied. “In every case.”