Rutland Place (29 page)

“For goodness’ sake, Elsie, close that door!” the cook snapped. “Where were you brought up, girl?”

Elsie kicked at the door with one foot, obeying out of habit.

“Mr. Lagarde’s dead, Mrs. Abbotts!” she said, her eyes like saucers. “Just died this morning, so May from over the way says! Seen the doctor come, she did, and go again. A mercy, I says! Poor gentleman. So beautiful, he was. Reckon as he was destined to die. Some of us is. Shall I go and shut the blinds?”

“No, you will not!” the cook said tartly. “He didn’t die in this house. Mr. Lagarde’s passing is not our business. We’ve enough of our own griefs. You just get on with your work. And if you’re late for luncheon you’ll go hungry, my girl!”

Elsie scuttled off, and the cook sat down sharply.

“Dead.” She regarded Pitt sideways. “I suppose I shouldn’t say so, but perhaps it is as well, poor creature. You’ll excuse me, Mr. Pitt, but if he was as terrible hurt as they say, could be the Lord’s mercy he’s gone.” She mopped her brow with her apron.

Pitt looked at her, a buxom woman with thick graying hair and an agreeable face, now twisted with a mixture of relief and guilt.

“A nasty shock, all the same,” he said quietly. “On top of all else that has happened lately. Bound to upset you. You look a bit poorly. How about a drop of brandy? Do you keep any about the kitchen?”

She looked at him through narrow eyes, suspicion aroused.

“I’m used to such things,” he said, reading her thoughts perfectly. “But you aren’t. Let me get you some?”

She bridled a little, like a hen fluffing out her feathers.

“Well—if you think— On the top shelf over there, behind the split peas. Don’t you let that Mr. Jenkins see it, or he’ll have it back in his pantry before you can say ‘knife.’ ”

Pitt hid his smile and stood up to pour a generous measure into a cup and pass it to her.

“How about yourself?” she offered with a little squint.

“No, thank you,” he said, and put the bottle back, replacing the split peas. “Strictly for shock. And I’m afraid it’s my business to deal with death, on occasion.”

She drank the cup to the bottom, and he took it and rinsed it out in the scullery sink.

“Most civil of you, Mr. Pitt,” she said with satisfaction. “Pity as we can’t help you, but we can’t, and that’s a fact. We never seen any cordial wine like that, nor any bottle neither. And we don’t know anything as to why anyone should want to murder the mistress. I still say as it’s someone what’s mad!”

He was torn between duty to continue with questions—so far totally unprofitable—and an intense desire to forget the whole thing and abandon himself to the pleasures of Mrs. Abbotts’ luncheon. He settled for the luncheon.

Afterward he considered whether to continue his questioning, but the shock of Tormod’s death hung heavy over everything. In many houses curtains were drawn, and a silence muffled even the usual civil exchanges till they seemed an indecency.

A little after two o’clock he gave up and returned to the police station. He pulled out all the evidence they had collected to date and began to read it over again, in the somewhat forlorn hope that a new insight would emerge, a relationship between facts that he had overlooked before.

He had discovered nothing by quarter to five, when Harris poked his head around the door and announced Amaryllis Denbigh.

Pitt was startled. He had expected that with the blow of Tormod’s death she would be prostrated with grief, even in need of medical care, so fierce had been her anguish over his accident, according to Charlotte. And he trusted Charlotte’s judgment of people, if not always of her own behavior! Although in truth he was less outraged by the music hall incident, now that he thought about it, than he intended she should know.

But why on earth was Amaryllis here?

“Shall I send her in, sir?” Harris said irritably. “She looks in a right state to me. You want to be careful of her!”

“Yes, I suppose you’d better. And stay here yourself, in case she faints or becomes hysterical,” Pitt said. The thought was an extremely unpleasant one, but he could not afford to deny her entrance. Perhaps at last this was the catalyst, and she might give him the sliver of fact he so desperately needed.

“Yes, Mr. Pitt, sir.” Harris withdrew formally, signifying his disapproval, and a moment later followed Amaryllis in.

Amaryllis was white-faced, her eyes glittering, her hands moving over the folds of her skirt, into her muff, and out again over her skirt. She had entered the room with black veiling over her face, but now she threw it off.

“Inspector Pitt!” She was so stiff her body shook.

“Yes, Mrs. Denbigh.” He did not like her, yet in spite of himself he was moved to pity. “Please sit down. You must be feeling distressed. May we offer you some refreshment, a cup of tea?”

“No, thank you.” She sat down with her back to Harris. “I should like to speak to you in private. What I have to say is very painful.”

Pitt hesitated. He did not want to be alone with her; she was obviously on the border of hysteria, and he was afraid of a storm of weeping that would be completely beyond his abilities to deal with. He thought of sending for the police surgeon. His eyes flickered to Harris.

“If you please?” Amaryllis’ voice was harsh, rising in a kind of desperation. “This is my duty, Inspector, because it concerns the murder of Mrs. Spencer-Brown, but it is extraordinarily painful for me and I do not wish the added mortification of having to repeat it in front of a sergeant!”

“Of course,” Pitt said immediately. He could not draw back now. “Sergeant Harris will wait outside.”

Harris stood up with a sour look of warning to Pitt over Amaryllis’ shoulder, then went out, closing the door firmly.

“Well, Mrs. Denbigh?” Pitt asked. It was a strange moment. He knew so much about these people, had studied them until they stalked his sleep, and yet now it was she, quite casually walking in here, unasked, who was about to tell him what might be the solution to the whole matter.

Her voice was grating, low, as if the words hurt her.

“I know who killed Mina Spencer-Brown, Mr. Pitt. I did not tell you before because I could not betray a friend. She was dead, and there was nothing to do for her. Now it is different. Tormod is dead too.” Her face was white and empty, like an unpainted doll. “There is no reason now to lie. He was too noble. He protected her all her life, but I shan’t! Justice can be done. I shall not stand in its way.”

“I think you had better explain, Mrs. Denbigh.” He wanted to encourage her, yet there was something inexpressibly ugly in the room and he could feel it as surely as damp in the air. “What lies have there been? Who was Mr. Lagarde protecting?”

Her eyes flashed wider. “His sister of course!” Her voice shook. “Eloise.”

He was surprised, but he stopped before speaking, masked his feelings, and looked across at her calmly.

“Eloise killed Mrs. Spencer-Brown?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know that, Mrs. Denbigh?”

She was breathing in and out so deeply he could see the rise and fall of her bosom.

“I suspected it from the first because I knew how she felt,” she began. “She adored her brother, she possessed him—she built her whole life around him. Their parents died when they were both young, and he has always looked after her. To begin with, of course, that was all quite natural. But as time passed and they grew older, she did not let go of the childish dependence. She continued to cling onto him, to go everywhere with him, demand his entire attention. And when he sought any outside interests she would become jealous, pretend to be ill—anything to bring him back to her.”

She took a long breath. She was watching Pitt, watching his eyes, his face.

“Of course if Tormod showed any natural affection for any other woman, Eloise was beside herself,” she continued. “She never rested until she had driven the woman away, either with lies or by feigning sickness, or else worrying at poor Tormod until he found it hardly worth his while to try anymore. And he was so kindhearted he still protected her, in spite of the cost to himself.

“I’m sure you have found out in all your questions that Mina was very attracted to Tormod? In fact, she was in love with him. It is stupid now to try to cover it with genteel words. It cannot hurt her anymore.

“Naturally that drove Eloise into a frenzy of jealousy. The thought that Tormod would give any of his attention to another woman was more than she could bear. It must have turned the balance of her mind. She poisoned the cordial you have been so assiduously seeking. I have had it offered to me in their house. They bring it from the country with them when they come back from visiting Hertfordshire. I have drunk it on occasion myself.”

She was sitting very upright in the chair, her eyes still fixed on Pitt’s.

“Mina went to their house that day to visit Eloise, as you already know. Eloise gave her the cordial wine as a parting present. She drank it when she got home—and died—as Eloise had planned that she should.

“Tormod protected her—naturally. He had brought her up from a child. I daresay he felt responsible—although God knows why he should. In time he would have had to have her put away in a sanatorium or somewhere. I think in his heart he knew that. But he could not bear to do it yet.

“Ask anyone who knew them. They will tell you that Eloise hated me also—because Tormod cared for me.”

Pitt sat without moving. It all made sense. He remembered Eloise’s face, her dark eyes full of inward vision, absorbed in pain. She was the sort of woman who cried out for protection. She seemed as frail as a dream herself, as if she would vanish at a sudden start or a shout. He did not want to think she had receded into madness and murder. And yet he could think of no argument to refute it, nothing false in what Amaryllis had said.

“Thank you, Mrs. Denbigh,” he said coldly. “It is late now, but tomorrow I shall go to Rutland Place and investigate fully what you have said.” He could not resist adding, “A pity you were not as frank with me before.”

There were faint spots of color in her face.

“I couldn’t. And it would not have done any good anyway. Tormod would have denied it. He felt responsible for her. She had driven him into that, over the years. She is a parasite! She never wanted him to have any separate being, and she succeeded! She spent her whole life, every day, all day, trying to make sure he felt guilty if he ever did anything without her, went anywhere without her—even if he laughed at a joke without her laughing too!” Her voice was rising again, shrill and hard. “She’s mad! You’ve no idea what it did to him. She destroyed him! She deserves to be locked away—forever and ever!”

“Mrs. Denbigh!” He wanted to silence her, to get rid of that glittering face with its girlishly soft lines and its hollow, hate-bright eyes. “Mrs. Denbigh, please don’t distress yourself again! I will go tomorrow and talk to Miss Lagarde. I shall take Sergeant Harris and we shall look for the evidence you say is there. If we find any proof at all, then we shall act accordingly. Now Sergeant Harris will accompany you to your carriage, and I suggest you take some sedative and go to your bed early. This has been a most terrible day for you. You must be exhausted.”

She stood in the middle of the floor staring at him, apparently weighing in her mind whether he was going to do as she intended.

“I shall go tomorrow,” he acceded a little more sharply.

Without replying, she turned and walked out, closing the door behind her, leaving him alone and unaccountably miserable.

There was no way he could avoid it, this duty that gave him no satisfaction at all, no sense of resolution. But then, murder always brought tragedy.

He dispatched Harris to search yet again, this time particularly bedrooms and dressing rooms, for any cordial wine similar to that which Mina had drunk, or any empty bottles like the one found in Mina’s room. He also took the precaution of showing Harris a picture of the deadly nightshade plant, so that he might look for it in the conservatory and outhouses. Neither its presence nor its absence would prove anything, however, except that it was a country plant and would be unusual in the middle of London. But the Lagardes had a country house; there might be nightshade in every hedge or wood in Hertfordshire, for all he knew.

Eloise received him dressed completely in black; the blinds were drawn halfway in traditional mourning, the servants white-faced and somber. She sat on a chaise longue close to the fire, but she looked as if its heat would never again reach her.

“I’m sorry,” Pitt said instinctively—not only for his intrusion but for everything, for her loneliness, for death, for being unable to do anything but add to the burden.

She said nothing. What he did, perhaps what anyone did, no longer mattered to her. She was in a desolation beyond his power to touch, for good or ill.

He sat down. He felt ridiculous standing, as if his hands and feet might knock something over.

There was no point in stringing it out, trying to be tactful. That somehow made it worse, almost obscene, as if he did not recognize death.

“Mrs. Spencer-Brown came to see you the day she died.” It was a statement; no one had ever denied it.

“Yes.” She was uninterested.

“Did you give her a bottle of cordial wine?”

She was staring into the flames. “Cordial wine? No, I don’t think so. Didn’t you ask that before?”

“Yes.”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, Miss Lagarde, because the poison was in it.”

A smile passed over her face, as shadowy as a ripple of cold wind over water.

“And you think I put it there? I did not.”

“But you did give her the wine?”

“I don’t remember. I may have. Perhaps she was looking peaked and said she was tired, or something like that. We do have cordial wine. A neighbor in Hertfordshire gives it to us.”

“Do you still have any?”

“I expect so. I don’t like it, but Tormod did. It’s kept in the butler’s pantry—it’s safe there. It’s quite strong.”

“Miss Lagarde—” She did not appear to understand the consequence of what they were discussing. She was removed from it, as though it were all a story about someone else. “Miss Lagarde, it is a very serious matter.”