“I hope you will be discreet, Inspector,” she said quietly. “You may cause a great deal of unnecessary distress if you are not and wrong my husband’s memory, not to mention those you imply may have had such motives.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “Facts may have to be inquired into, but no implications will be made.”
She did not look as if she were able to believe him, but she said no more.
Pitt excused himself, and the footman made sure that he left this time.
Outside, the cold caught at him, seizing his body even through his layers of coat and jacket, chilling the skin and tying knots in the muscles of his stomach. The fog had blown away, and there was sleet on the wind. It sighed through the laurel and magnolia, and the rain blackened everything. There was no alternative now but to press for a postmortem of Augustus Fitzroy-Hammond. The possibility of murder could not be ignored, discreetly tucked away because it could hurt too many people.
He had previously discovered where to find Dr. McDuff, and he took himself straight there. The less time he had to think about it the better. He would face telling Charlotte when he had to.
Dr. McDuff’s house was spacious and solid and conventional, like the man; it had nothing to wake the imagination, nothing to risk offending the complacent. Pitt was shown into yet another cold morning room and told to wait. After a quarter of an hour he was conducted to the study lined with leatherbound books, a little scuffed, where he stood before a vast desk to answer as a schoolboy might to a master. At least here there was a fire.
“Good morning,” Dr. McDuff said dourly. He may have been comely enough in his youth, but now his face was wrinkled with time and impatience, and self-satisfaction had set unbecoming lines round his nose and mouth. “What can I do for you?”
Pitt pulled up the only other chair and sat down. He refused to be treated like a servant by this man. After all, he was only another professional like himself, trained and paid to deal with the less pleasant problems of humanity.
“You were the physician in attendance to the late Lord Augustus Fitzroy-Hammond up to the time of his death—” he began.
“Indeed,” Dr. McDuff replied. “That is hardly a matter for the police. The man died of a heart attack. I signed the certificate. I know nothing about this appalling desecration that has taken place since. That is your affair, and the sooner you do something about it the better.”
Pitt could feel the antagonism in the air. To McDuff he represented a sordid world beyond the grace and comfort of his own circle, a tide that must be forever held back with sandbags of discrimination and social distinction. If he were to get anything from him at all, it would not be by a headlong charge, but with deviousness and appeal to his vanity.
“Yes, it is an appalling business,” he agreed. “I have not had to deal with anything like it before. I would value your professional opinion as to what manner of person might be affected with such an insane desire.”
McDuff had opened his mouth to disclaim anything to do with it, but his professional standing had been called on. It was not what he had been expecting Pitt to say, and he was momentarily off guard.
“Ah.” He sought to rearrange his thoughts rapidly. “Ah! Now, that’s a very complex matter.” He had been going to say he knew nothing about it either, but he never admitted ignorance outright; after all, his years of experience had given him immense wisdom, knowledge of human behavior in all its comedies and tragedies. “You are quite right; it is an insanity to dig a man’s corpse out of its grave. No question about it.”
“Do you know of any medical condition that would lead to such a thing?” Pitt inquired with a perfectly sober face. “Perhaps some sort of obsession?”
“Obsession with the dead?” McDuff turned it over in his mind, casting about for something positive to say. “Necrophilia is the term you are seeking.”
“Yes,” Pitt agreed. “Perhaps even an obsessive hatred or envy of Lord Augustus himself—after all, the wretched creature has dug him up twice! That hardly seems like coincidence.”
McDuff’s face stiffened to even harder lines of dislike. It was his own world that was being threatened now, his social circle.
Pitt saw it and turned it into necessity. “Naturally, your professional ethics would not permit you to mention names, Dr. McDuff,” he said quickly. “Even obliquely. But you can tell me, as a man of long experience in medicine, if there is any such condition—then I must search for myself to see if I can find its victim. It is the duty of both of us to see that Lord Augustus is decently buried and allowed to rest—and of course his unfortunate family. His widow—and his mother—”
Dr. McDuff remembered the purse strings.
“Of course,” he said immediately. “I will do everything I can—within the bounds of ethical discretion,” he added. “But I cannot readily think of any disease whatever which would produce such a repulsive form of madness. I will give the matter deep thought, and if you care to call again, I will have a more considered opinion.”
“Thank you very much.” Pitt stood up and moved to the door; then, just before he opened it, he turned. “By the way, there are some very unpleasant suggestions that Lord Augustus might have been murdered, and someone knows of it and is digging up his body to draw our attention to the fact—force us to investigate. I suppose his death was perfectly natural—expected?”
McDuff’s face darkened. “Of course it was perfectly natural, man! Do you imagine I would have signed the certificate if it were not?”
“Expected?” Pitt insisted. “He had been ill for some time?”
“A week or so. But in a man of sixty that is not unusual. His mother has a weak heart.”
“But she is still alive,” Pitt pointed out. “And somewhat over eighty, I should judge.”
“That has nothing to do with it!” McDuff snapped, his fist tightening on the desk top. “Lord Augustus’s death was quite natural, and in a man of his years and health not unusual.”
“You did a postmortem?” Pitt knew perfectly well he had not.
McDuff was too angry to think of that. The very idea outraged him. “I did not!” His face mottled heavily with purple. “You have practiced too long in the back streets, Inspector. I would have you remember that my clients have no resemblance whatsoever to yours! There is no murder here, and no crime, except that of grave robbing; and doubtless it is one from your world, not one from mine, who is to blame for that! Good day to you, sir!”
“Then I shall have to get a postmortem now,” Pitt said softly. “I am obliged to tell you, I shall apply to the magistrate this afternoon.”
“And I shall oppose you, sir!” McDuff banged his fist down. “And you may allow yourself to be quite certain his family will also! They are not without influence. Now please take yourself out of my house!”
Pitt went to his superiors with his request for a postmortem on Lord Augustus, and they received him with anxiety, saying they would have to consider such a thing and could not put it to a magistrate without due weighing of all its aspects. One could not do such things lightly or irresponsibly, and they must be sure they were justified before committing themselves.
Pitt was angry and disappointed, but he knew that he should have been prepared for it. One did not disembowel the corpses of the aristocracy and question their deaths without the most dire compulsion, and even then one obtained a justification that could not be denied before venturing forth.
The following day McDuff had done his best. The answer was returned to Pitt in his office that there were no grounds for the application, and it would not be made. He went back to his own small room, not sure whether he was angry or relieved. If there were no autopsy, then it was unlikely there would ever be any murder proved; the certificate had been signed for a natural death from heart failure. And he had already seen enough of Dr. McDuff to believe it would take more than anything Pitt was capable of to make him reverse a professional opinion, and certainly not publicly. And if there were no murder, Pitt would still be obliged to make the motions of further investigations as to who had disinterred the body and left it so bizarrely displayed, but he did not for a moment hold any hope of discovering the answer. In time it would be overtaken by more urgent crimes, and Dominic and the Fitzroy-Hammonds would be left alone to get on with their lives.