“Dig up my own son!” she said at last. “You are a barbarian! A cretin!”
“No, ma’am.” Pitt refused to rise to her bait. “You mistake me. I meant, did you suspect that your son had been murdered?”
Suddenly she realized the trap, and her temper vanished. She looked at him with wary little eyes. “No, I did not. Not at the time. Although now I am beginning to consider the possibility.”
“So are we, ma’am,” Pitt stood up. He needed to learn everything he could, but venomous gossip from this old woman would only cloud the issue so early on. Murder was no more yet than a possibility, and there were still others left—hatred, or simply vandalism.
She snorted, held out her hand to be helped up, then remembered he was a policeman and withdrew it again, climbing to her feet unaided. She banged her stick on the floor.
“Nisbett!”
The ubiquitous maid appeared as if she had been leaning against the door.
“Show this man out,” the old lady ordered, lifting her stick in the air to point. “And then bring me a cup of chocolate up to my room. I don’t know, what’s the matter with the world; it gets colder every winter. It never used to be like this. We knew how to heat our houses properly!” She stumped out without looking at Pitt again.
Pitt followed Nisbett into the hallway and was about to go out when he heard voices in the withdrawing room to his left. One was a man’s, not loud but very clear, with words precisely spoken. It brought back a tide of memory—it could only be Dominic Corde.
He gave Nisbett a flashing smile, leaving her startled and not a little alarmed, and turned sharply to the door, brushed it with his knuckles in the briefest of knocks, and strode in.
Dominic was standing with Alicia by the fireplace. They both looked round with surprise as he burst in. Alicia flushed, and Dominic made as if to demand an explanation; then he recognized Pitt.
“Thomas!” His voice rose a little in surprise. “Thomas Pitt!” Then his composure returned and he smiled, putting his hand out; it was genuine, and Pitt’s dislike evaporated in spite of himself. But he could not afford to forget why he was here. There might be murder, and either one of these two, or even both, could be involved. Even if it were only grave robbing—then surely they were the intended victims of malice.
He took Dominic’s outstretched hand. “Good morning, Mr. Corde.”
Dominic was quite innocent, as he had always been. “Good morning. How is Charlotte?”
Pitt felt a strange mixture of elation, because Charlotte was his wife now, and resentment, because Dominic asked so easily, so naturally. But after all, he had lived in the same house with her all the years of his marriage to Sarah; he had seen her grow up from an adolescent to a young woman. And all the time it had never entered his head that Charlotte was infatuated with him.
But this was different; he was thirty now, surely more mature, wiser to his effect upon women? And this was Alicia, not his young sister-in-law.
“In excellent health, thank you,” Pitt replied. He could not resist adding, “And Jemima is two years old and full of conversation.”
Dominic was a little startled. Perhaps he had not thought of Charlotte with children. He and Sarah had not had any—instantly Pitt regretted his bragging. Already, with these few emotion-driven words, he had made detachment impossible, destroyed the professionalism he had intended to observe.
“I hope you’re well?” He floundered a little. “This is a very wretched business about Lord Fitzroy-Hammond.”
Dominic’s face colored, then the blood drained away. “Ghastly,” he agreed. “I hope you can find whoever did it and have him put away. Surely he must be mad and not too hard to recognize?”
“Unfortunately, insanity is not like the pox,” Pitt replied. “It doesn’t give you a rash that can be seen by the eye.”
Alicia stood silently, still absorbing the fact that the two men obviously knew each other and that it was no chance or merely formal acquaintance.
“Not by the untrained eye,” Dominic agreed. “But you are not untrained! And haven’t you doctors, or something?”
“Before you can do anything with a disease, you need to be familiar with it,” Pitt pointed out. “And grave robbing is not something that happens more than once in a policeman’s career.”
“What about selling them for medical research, wasn’t there a trade? I’m sorry, Alicia—” he apologized.
“Resurrectionists? That was quite a while ago,” Pitt replied. “They get cadavers quite legally now.”
“Then it can’t be that.” Dominic’s shoulders slumped. “It’s grisly. Do you think—no, it can’t be. They didn’t harm the body. It can’t be necromancers or satanists or anything like that—”
Alicia spoke at last. “Mr. Pitt is obliged to consider the possibility that they did not choose Augustus by chance, but quite deliberately, either out of hatred for him or for one of us.”
Dominic was not as surprised as Pitt would have expected. The thought occurred to him that perhaps she had already said as much before he came into the room. Perhaps that was even what they were discussing when he had broken in on them.
“I can’t imagine hating anyone so much,” Dominic said flatly.
It was Pitt’s chance, and he took it. “There can be many reasons for hatred,” he said, trying to make his voice lighter again, as though he were speaking impersonally. “Fear is one of the oldest. Although I have not yet been able to discover any reason why anybody should have feared Lord Augustus. It might turn out he had a power I know nothing of, a financial power, or even a power of knowledge of something someone else would greatly prefer kept secret. He may have learned of something, even unintentionally.”
“Then he would have kept it so,” Alicia said with conviction. “Augustus was very loyal, and he never gossiped.”
“He might consider it his duty to speak if the matter were a crime,” Pitt pointed out.
Neither Alicia nor Dominic spoke. They were both still standing, Dominic so close to the fire his legs must be scorching.
“Or revenge,” Pitt continued. “People can harbor a desire for revenge, nursing it over the years till it becomes monstrous. The original offense need not have been grave; indeed, it may not have been a genuine offense at all, merely a success where the other failed, something quite innocent.”
He drew in breath and came a little closer to what he really wanted to say.
“And of course there is greed, one of the commonest motives in the world. It may be that someone stood to benefit from his death in ways that are not immediately obvious—”
The blood ebbed out of Alicia’s face and then rushed back in scarlet. Pitt had not meant anything quite so simple as inheritance, but he knew she thought he did. Dominic too was silent, shifting from one foot to the other. It may have been unease, or merely that he was too close to the fire and unable to move without asking Pitt to move also.
“Or jealousy,” Pitt finished. “A desire for freedom. Perhaps he stood in the way of something someone else wished for desperately.” Now he could not look directly at either of them, and he was aware they did not look at each other.
“Lots of reasons.” He backed a little to allow Dominic away from the heat. “Any one of them possible, until we find otherwise.”
Alicia gulped. “Are—are you going to investigate all of them?”
“It may not be necessary,” he answered, feeling cruel as he said it and hating his job because already the suspicion was taking form in his mind and shaping like a picture in the fog. “We may discover the truth long before that.”
It was no comfort to her, as indeed he had not intended it to be. She came forward a little, standing between Pitt and Dominic. It was a gesture he had seen a hundred times in all manner and walk of women: a mother defending an unruly child, a wife lying about her husband, a daughter excusing her drunken father.