Funeral in Blue (17 page)

“You think I can’t mean it, don’t you?” he asked with a sharp gesture at the room around him, which was obviously that of a wealthy man. “My family had money. My father died quite young, and he was generous to Amelia as well as to me. She was an heiress when she married.” He left the conclusion for her to draw, a challenge in his eyes, hard and bright.

Of course, when she married everything she owned would automatically have become her husband’s. It was the law; everyone knew that. Only unmarried women owned anything.

“I see,” she said very quietly.

“Do you?” he demanded. “He took her to Europe, first to Paris, then to Italy. We did not know that he spent everything and left her with barely a roof over her head, or that she was living on the few meals offered her by compassionate friends, most of whom had little more than she did. And she was too proud to tell us that the husband she adored was a wastrel and had deserted her in every practical sense. She died in Naples, alone and destitute.”

She felt the loss as if he had been able to transfer it to her physically. Her imagination painted a terrible picture of the woman in the portrait being thin to gauntness, racked with fever, lips bloodless, skin flushed and sweating, alone in an ill-furnished room in a foreign land.

“I’m so sorry,” she said in little more than a whisper. “I’m not surprised you cannot forget it . . . or forgive. I don’t imagine I could, either.”

“That’s why I fight for women to retain some rights in their property,” he said harshly. “The law is blind. It gives them no protection. We speak publicly as if we honor and cherish our women, give them safety from the ills and strife of the world, the dark and the sordid battles of trade and politics, the uses and abuses of power—and yet we leave them open to being mere vehicles for gaining money that was intended for their protection from hunger and want, and the law offers nothing!”

“A law for married women to keep rights in their own property?” she said, filled with a sudden blaze of understanding.

“Yes! Both inherited and earned. That swine sent Amelia out to work to provide for his extravagances, but the law gave him the right to her wages even so.” The outrage in him was palpable, like a thing in the air.

She shared it—not the passion, because she had not been touched by it personally as he had, but in her mind the injustice was as great, and the need to amend it. “I see,” she said, and she meant it.

He drew in breath to argue, then looked at her more closely. “Yes, perhaps you do. I apologize. I was about to deny that possibility. I know you have also fought for reform, and often against extraordinary blindness. We are both seeking to protect those who are vulnerable and need the strong to defend them.” There was fury in his voice, and also a ring of pride.

Callandra was glad to hear it. The willingness to fight and courage were exactly what she needed, and her pity for his loss was now touched with admiration as well. “Do you have hope of achieving such a thing?” she asked with some eagerness.

He smiled very slightly. “I’ve worked towards it for the greater part of my career, and with the recent change in government I believe that it is within sight. There is a by-election coming up. If I can do this, I will have benefited both men and women, though they may not at first accept that. But surely justice is a boon for all.”

“Of course it is,” she agreed wholeheartedly.

There was a momentary interruption as the maid brought in the tray with the tea and set it out on the low table for them. She poured and then left.

Callandra was surprised how welcome the hot, fragrant drink was after all, and the tiny sandwiches of cucumber, and egg and cress. It gave her time to compose her thoughts.

She must address the purpose of her visit. He could not for a moment have thought she came simply to talk of good causes, however urgent.

She put down her cup. “As you know, I have engaged Mr. Monk to learn all the truth he can as to the events in Acton Street.” It was a rather overdelicate way of phrasing it, and the moment it had passed her lips, she wished she had been more frank. “I am afraid that much of what he has discovered is not what either you or I would have wished.”

His attention upon her was absolute, his eyes unwavering. “What has he discovered, Lady Callandra? Please be candid with me. Elissa was my daughter; I cannot afford to know less than the truth.”

“Of course not. I apologize if I seemed to be prevaricating,” she said sincerely. “We believed Dr. Beck could account for his time, that he was elsewhere with a patient, sufficiently far away to have made his involvement impossible. Unfortunately, he was mistaken in the times. I do not believe for an instant that he has any guilt at all, but he cannot prove it. Since he was her husband, naturally the police have to consider him suspect.”

“That is a regrettable comment upon human nature,” he said with a very slight tremor in his voice. “And more so upon the state of marriage. But I suppose it is true.” He ignored his tea, leaning a little forward across the table. He was a very tall man, and his knees were level with its surface. It was a feat of elegance that he could move without looking ungainly. “Please do not try to spare my feelings, Lady Callandra. You say you do not believe for an instant that my son-in-law could be guilty—why not?” He tried to smile, and failed. It was a twisted grimace of pain. “I do not, either, but then I have known him for many years. Why do you not?”

She drew in her breath to answer truthfully, then realized the danger not only to herself but, by implication, to Kristian also.

“Because I have watched his work in the hospital,” she said instead. “But it is only my opinion, and will carry no weight with the police, or anyone else. I had hoped Mr. Monk would find some other person with a strong motive, and perhaps some evidence to implicate him, but so far he has not done so. However, another possibility has come to my attention.” She hated telling him of the gambling. Already she was all but certain he did not know, at least not the extent of it.

Pendreigh put his cup down and pushed it a little further into the middle of the table. His hand was trembling very slightly. “It seems to me quite obvious that the artists’ model was the intended victim, and Elissa was simply unfortunate enough to have witnessed the crime. Surely that is what the police are really pursuing? Any consideration of Kristian must be merely a formality.”

“I imagine so. Nevertheless, I would prefer to have forestalled them before this,” she answered.

“Exactly what has Monk found?” he asked.

This was the moment she could not avoid. “That Mrs. Beck gambled,” she answered, watching his face. “And lost very heavily.” She saw his eyes widen and something within him flinch, so deep it was visible more as a shadow than a movement. But she was convinced in that instant that he had not known. No man could have lied with the skill to blanch the color from his skin, to convey such pain within, and yet not move at all. “I . . . I wish I had not had to tell you,” she stumbled on. “But the police are aware of it, and I am afraid it provides a very powerful motive. Many men have killed for less reason than to avoid ruin. It occurred to me that perhaps in desperation to pay debts she may have incurred an enmity . . .” She drew in her breath. “Somehow . . .” Did he understand enough not to need the ugly picture detailed?

He said nothing. He seemed too stunned to be able to respond. He stared into the distance, through her, as if seeing ghosts, broken dreams, things he loved taken from him.

“But I saw her regularly over the last half year since I moved to London!” he protested, still trying to push the reality from him. “She was just as well dressed as always. She never seemed in any . . . difficulty!”

Callandra wished she could have avoided reason and gone with hope, but there was none that stood the light. “She will have chosen the times when she was winning to call upon you,” she pointed out. “With skill and imagination one can appear well dressed. One has friends. There are pawnshops . . .”

Something died in his face. “I see.” The words were a whisper.

“I think she could not help it,” Callandra went on gently. She heard herself almost with disbelief. She was defending the woman who had driven Kristian to despair and the shadow of debtors’ prison. He was on the verge of being blamed for her murder. “Mr. Pendreigh . . .”

He recalled his attention and turned his eyes to her, but he did not speak.

“Mr. Pendreigh, we must do what we can to help. You have said you do not believe Dr. Beck is guilty. Then someone else must be.”

“Yes . . .” he said, then more abruptly, “Yes . . . of course.” He focused his attention with difficulty. “What about the artist, Allardyce? I should be loath to think it was he, but it has to be a possibility. Elissa was extremely beautiful . . .” For a moment his voice faltered, and he made an immense effort to bring it back into control. “Men were fascinated by her. It wasn’t just her face, it was a . . . a vitality, a love of life, an energy which I never saw in anyone else. Allardyce loved to paint her. Perhaps he wanted more than that, and she refused him. He might have . . .” He did not finish the thought, but the rest of it was obvious. It did not surprise her that he could not bear to put it into words.

But Monk had told her that Allardyce could account for his time. He had spent the evening at the Bull and Half Moon in Southwark, miles from Acton Street, on the other side of the Thames.

“It was not he,” she told Pendreigh. “The police can prove that.”

A sharp frown creased his forehead, making two deep lines like cuts between his brows. “Then we are back to the only answer which makes sense . . . Sarah Mackeson was the intended victim. If the police do not pursue that to the very end, then we must employ Monk to do so. There is something in her life, in her past, which has driven a past lover, a rival, a creditor, to quarrel with her in a way which ended in murder. The reason is there! We must find it!”

“I will speak to William, of course,” she agreed with a fervor which was meant to convince herself as much as Pendreigh. “He said that apparently she was a very handsome woman, and her life was a little . . . haphazard.” That was a euphemism she hoped he would understand. She did not wish to speak ill of her, and yet she hoped profoundly that the answer was as simple as that.

Pendreigh sighed. There was an unhappiness in him so profound it filled the room with grief more effectively than hanging every picture with crepe had done, or turning all the mirrors face to the wall and stopping the clocks.

“Rejection can make people behave irrationally,” she went on quietly. “Even far against anything they really wish for or believe. But remorse afterwards does not undo the act, nor bring back that which has been destroyed.”

He dropped his head into his hands, hiding his emotion. “No, of course not,” he said, his voice muffled. “We must save what we can from the tragedy.”

She was uncertain whether to rise to her feet now and excuse herself, or if it would be kinder to wait a few moments rather than force him to stand, as courtesy demanded, before he had had time to compose himself. She was actually hungry, and would like to have eaten more of the cucumber sandwiches, but it seemed an oddly heartless thing to do, and she left them. Instead she sat straight-backed, upright on the edge of the chair, waiting until he should be ready to bid her good-bye with the kind of dignity he could afterwards remember without embarrassment.

Monk and Runcorn were together in Runcorn’s office the following day. They were both tired and irritable after spending a morning and early afternoon plowing through steady rain from one gambling establishment to another in the path of Elissa Beck, and people like her, both men and women. The addiction to the excitement of chance and the small element of skill involved made no discrimination for age or wealth, man or woman. There was something in certain characters that, once they had tasted the thrill of winning, could not let it go, even when part of them was perfectly aware of the destruction it was causing. They saw their winnings as larger than they were, their losses as smaller, and always there was the hope that the next turn of the card would redeem it all.

“I don’t understand it,” Runcorn said desperately, staring at his sodden boots. He had been obliged to step in the gutter to pass a group of women talking to each other and oblivious of passersby. “It’s like a kind of madness. Why do people do it?”

Monk could understand it, at least in part, enough to feel a brush of fear at how easily he might have become one of them if his path in life had been a little different.

“A need to feel alive,” he said, and then, seeing the disgust and incomprehension in Runcorn’s face, wished he had held his tongue.

“Vermin!” Runcorn said savagely, yanking his boot off and massaging his cold, wet foot.

Monk looked up sharply, then realized Runcorn was referring to the debt collectors, not the gamblers.

“Wish we could catch a few of them and make a charge stick,” Runcorn went on. “I’d like to see ’em in the Coldbath Fields, on the treadmill, or passing the shot.” He was referring to the worst prison in London and the habitual punishments of walking inside a turning machine, where in order to remain upright a man had constantly to keep putting one foot in front of the other on a step which gave beneath his weight, spinning the wheel and pitching him forward again. Passing the shot was a useless exercise of bending to pick up a cannonball, straightening the back, and passing the ball to the next man, who put it down again. One could be forced to do it for hours until every muscle ached and movement was pain. It was all utterly purposeless, except to break the spirit.

“Yes,” Monk agreed with feeling. “So would I. But we haven’t found a jot of evidence to suggest any debt collector went after her. In fact, we can’t even find anyone who’ll admit she owed him. She got the money from somewhere . . . or someone.”

Runcorn looked up from the drawer where he was searching for dry socks. “You believe them?” he asked.

Monk did not need to think about it; he already had. “Yes. Not their words, their lack of fear or anger. The emotion isn’t there. If anything, they’re disappointed to lose a good customer. They thought she was worth more.”