“Udney Road, just a few hundred yards from the railway station. London and South West Line, that is.”
“And his name?”
“Francis Wray,” Tellman replied, watching Pitt’s eyes.
Pitt thought of the cartouche with its bent letter inside the circle, like a reversed f. Now he understood more of Tellman’s unhappiness and why he could not cast it aside, much as he would prefer to. “I see,” he acknowledged.
Tellman opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. There really was nothing to say that they did not both know already.
“What have your men found on the other clients?” Pitt asked after a moment or two.
“Nothing very much,” Tellman replied dourly. “All kinds of people; about the only thing they have in common is enough money and time to spend chasing after signs of those already dead. Some of them are lonely, some confused and needing to feel their husband or father still knows what’s going on and loves them.” His voice was getting lower and lower. “A lot of them are just interested, looking for a bit of excitement, want to be entertained. Nobody has a grudge worth doing something about.”
“Did you learn anything about the other ones who came through the garden door from Cosmo Place?”
“No.” There was a flicker of resentment in his eyes. “Don’t know any way of finding them. Where would we begin?”
“About how much did Maude Lamont earn for this?”
Tellman’s eyes were wide. “About four times as much as I do, even with promotion!”
Pitt knew exactly what Tellman would earn. He could imagine the volume of business Maude Lamont could take if she worked four or five days a week. “That is still rather less than running that house must have cost her, and maintaining a wardrobe like hers.”
“Blackmail?” Tellman said without hesitation. His face tightened to a mask of disgust. “It isn’t enough she dupes them, she has to make them pay for silence over their secrets?” He was not looking for any answer, he simply needed to find words for his bitterness. “There are some people who look to be murdered so hard it makes you wonder how they escaped it before!”
“It doesn’t make any difference to the fact that we must find out who killed her,” Pitt said quietly. “The fact of murder cannot go unanswered. I wish I could say that justice would always visit every act fairly and apportion punishment or mercy as it was deserved. I know it won’t. It will be mistaken in both directions. But allowing private vengeance, or escape from anything except threat to life, would be the gateway to anarchy.”
“I know!” Tellman said curtly, angry with Pitt for pointing out to him the helplessness he already understood quite clearly, as if he could not have found the words so easily to express it.
“Anything more from the maid?” Pitt ignored his tone.
“Nothing helpful. Seems a sensible sort of woman on the whole, but I think she may know more about those séances and how they were rigged than she’s telling us. Had to. She was the only one close. All the other staff, cook and laundress and gardener, all came in by the day and were gone before the private sessions ever began.”
“Unless she was equally deceived?” Pitt suggested.
“She’s a sensible woman,” Tellman argued, his voice sharper as he repeated himself. “She wouldn’t be taken in by tricks like pedals and mirrors and oil of phosphorous, all that kind of thing.”
“Most of us have a tendency to believe what we want to,” Pitt replied. “Especially if it matters very much. Sometimes the need is so great we don’t dare disbelieve, or it would break our dreams, and without them we die. Sense has little to do with it. It is survival.”
Tellman stared at him. He seemed on the point of arguing again, then he changed his mind and remained silent. It obviously had not occurred to him that Lena Forrest might also have doubts and loves, people now dead who were woven into the meaning of her life. He flushed very faintly at his omission, and Pitt liked him the better for it.
Pitt stood up slowly. “I’ll go and see this Mr. Wray,” he said. “Teddington! I suppose Maude Lamont was good enough to bring someone all the way from Teddington to Southampton Row?”
Tellman did not answer.
Pitt wasted no time thinking about how to approach the Reverend Francis Wray when he should find him. It was going to be wretched no matter what he said. It was best to do it before apprehension made him clumsier and even more artificial.
He made his way to the railway station and enquired about the best route to Teddington, and was told that he would have to change trains, but that the next train to begin his journey was due to leave in eleven minutes. He purchased a through ticket, thanked the man, and went to get a newspaper from the vendor at the entrance. Most of the space was taken up with election issues and the usual virulent cartoons. He did notice an advertisement for the upcoming exhibition of costermongers’ ponies and donkeys to be held at the People’s Palace in Mile-End Road in a couple of weeks’ time.
On the platform with him were two elderly women and a family obviously on a day out. The children were excited, hopping up and down and unable to stop chattering. He wondered how Daniel, Jemima and Edward were enjoying Devon, if they liked the country, or if they found it strange, if they missed their usual friends. Did they miss him? Or was it all too full of adventure? And of course Charlotte was with them.
He had been away from them too often lately, first in Whitechapel, and now this! He had hardly spoken to either Daniel or Jemima in a couple of months, not with time to reach towards the more difficult subjects, to listen to what was unsaid as well as the surface words. When this matter of Voisey was over, whether they knew who had killed Maude Lamont or not, he must make sure he took a day or two every so often just to spend with them. Narraway owed him at least that much, and he could not live the rest of his life running away from Voisey. That would be giving him victory without even the effort of a fight.
He dared not even think too closely of Charlotte; missing her left an ache in him too big to fill with thought or action. Even dreams left an ache that hurt too much.
The train came in in a roar of steam and the clatter of iron wheels on iron rails, with flying smuts, the smell and heat of power, and the moment of parting with her was as sharp as if she had left barely a moment ago. He had to force himself into the present, to open the carriage door and hold it for two elderly women, then follow them up the step and inside and find a seat.
It was not a long journey. Forty minutes and he was in Teddington. As Tellman had told him, Udney Road was only a block away from the station, and a few minutes’ walk took him to the neat gate of number four. He stared at it in the sun for several moments, breathing in the scents of a dozen flowers and the sweet, clean odor of hot earth newly watered. It was so full of memory, so domestic, that for an instant it overwhelmed him.
At a glance the garden looked random, almost overgrown, but he knew the years of care that had gone into its nurture and upkeep. There were no dead heads, nothing out of place, no weeds. It was a blaze of color, new with long familiar, exotic and indigenous side by side. Simply staring at it told him much of the man who had planted it. Was it Francis Wray himself, or an outdoor servant paid for the task? If it were the latter, whatever he earned, his real reward was in his art.
Pitt unfastened the gate and went in, closing it behind him, and walked up the path. A black cat lay stretched on the windowsill in the sun, a tortoiseshell strolled through the dappled shade of late crimson snapdragons. Pitt prayed he was here on a fool’s errand.
He knocked on the front door, and was admitted by a girl in a maid’s uniform, but who could not have been more than fifteen years old.