Midnight at Marble Arch (33 page)

O
N THE MORNING OF
the second day of Alban Hythe’s trial, Knox sent a message to Pitt to meet him at the home of a Mr. Frederick Townley, on Hunter Street, just off Brunswick Square. The footman had instructions to admit him as soon as he arrived.

It was a damp, hazy day, already warm at half-past nine, with a very fine drizzle falling. As Knox had been promised, a grim-faced footman opened the door so immediately after Pitt’s pulling of the bell that he had to have been waiting for him. He was shown into the morning room, where Knox and a very clearly distressed Frederick Townley were waiting.

Knox introduced Pitt with his full title.

Townley was gaunt, middle-aged, with dark hair receding at the brow. At the moment he was restless, fidgeting, and unable to control his nerves.

“I’ve told you, Mr. Knox, I was in error,” he said urgently, looking
at Knox, then at Pitt, then back again. “I do not wish to make any such complaint. You may say anything you please. I withdraw the complaint. I have no idea in the world why you should think to involve Special Branch. It is completely absurd.” He turned to Pitt. “I apologize to you, sir. This is just a domestic matter. In fact, it is no more than a misunderstanding.”

Pitt looked at the man’s face and saw fear and grief, which at this moment were overridden by acute embarrassment.

“I’m sorry.” Townley regarded Pitt with discomfort. “You have been disturbed unnecessarily. Now I must return to my family. I would like to hope you understand, but at this point it really makes no difference to me. Good day to you, gentlemen.”

“Mr. Townley!” Knox said with asperity. “I may not have the authority to require a statement from you, if you choose to let this matter go unreported, but Commander Pitt cannot ignore it if the safety of the realm is in question.”

Townley’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “Don’t be absurd, man! How can my daughter’s … misfortune possibly concern the safety of the realm? I don’t know what it is you want, but I am laying no complaint whatever. You have wasted this gentleman’s time.” He gestured toward Pitt. “Please excuse me.” Again he moved toward the door, lurching a little and regaining his balance with a hand on the jamb. “My footman will be happy to see you out,” he added, as if he thought his meaning might have been unclear.

“If you do not speak the truth, Mr. Townley, whether in the form of a complaint or not, then an innocent man may hang,” Knox said peremptorily.

Townley swung around and glared at him. “Not because of anything I have said, sir!”

“Because of what you know, and have not said,” Knox retorted. “Silence can lead to damnation as much as speech, and still cost a man his life.”

“Or a woman her reputation!” Townley snapped back. “I look after my own, sir, as does any decent man.”

“Have you a son also, Mr. Townley?” Pitt said suddenly.

Townley stared at him with disbelief. “And what is that to you, sir? None of this … this supposed affair has anything to do with him.”

“I have a son and a daughter also,” Pitt told him. “They are children still, but my daughter is fast turning into a woman. It seems to me that she grows more and more like her mother with every few months that pass.”

Townley tried to interrupt him, but Pitt overrode him.

“Because of an incident involving someone she knew, my daughter has asked me, and her mother, very urgent and awkward questions about rape. She wishes to know what it is, and why people are so terribly upset about it. We have tried to answer her both delicately and honestly, bearing in mind that she is only fourteen.”

“I wish you well, sir,” Townley said, succeeding in interrupting this time. His face was gray-white and he seemed to have trouble forming his words coherently. “But that is of no concern to me.”

“And I look at my son,” Pitt went on, disregarding the interruption. “He is nearly twelve, and has no idea what we are talking about. How do I explain it all to him, so that his behavior toward women is never coarse or, worse still, violent? But perhaps more terrible than that, how do I protect him from being accused of something he did not do? What father, what mother, would see their son at the end of the hangman’s rope, jeered at by the crowd, insulted, and abused, for a hideous crime of which he was innocent, but could not prove himself so?”

Townley was trembling where he stood, his fists clenching and unclenching. “Then you will understand, sir, why I make no complaint. You have answered your own question.” He took a shaky step closer to the hallway and his escape.

“Mr. Townley!” Pitt said as if it were a command.

“You have my answer,” Townley said between his teeth.

“I am not asking that you lay a complaint,” Pitt said, quietly now. “Only that, man to man, you tell me the truth. You can deny it afterward. I will not ask you to sign anything, or to swear anything. I need to know, because the daughter of a foreign ambassador was also a victim recently. That is why Special Branch has become involved.”

Townley hesitated. “I will not testify!” he said, his voice a little shrill.

“I’m not sure that I would if it were my daughter,” Pitt admitted. “I’d do what I thought was best for her.”

“I will not allow you to speak to her,” Townley warned. “Even if I was so inclined, her mother would not. Seeing the doctor … was bad enough.”

Pitt drew in his breath to say he understood, but realized he had no idea. Instead he simply asked what she’d told them had happened.

Townley closed his eyes and said in a flat hesitant voice, “Alice is nearly seventeen. She was at a ball in the house of a friend. I will not tell you her family’s name. There were naturally young gentlemen present also. She enjoys dancing and is particularly skilled. She was flattered when a young man in his early twenties asked her to dance, imagining he thought her older, more sophisticated, which she has a great desire to be. To … to get to the point …” He gulped. “He spoke pleasantly to her, inviting her to see one of the galleries in the house where there were some remarkable paintings. Alice likes … art. She suspected nothing and went with him.”

Pitt felt himself clenching inside.

“He took her first to one gallery with some art as lovely as he had said it would be,” Townley continued. “Then promised more works, even better, but said they were in another part of the house … a private part where they should not trespass, but he said they would touch nothing, merely look at the paintings.”

Pitt almost said it for him, to break the unbearable tension, and to save the man from having to say it himself. Then Knox moved a fraction, no more than shifting his weight from one foot to the other, but reminding Pitt of his presence. Pitt let out his breath without speaking.

“He … violated her,” Townley said hoarsely. “She had not the power to fight him off. He left her bleeding and bruised on the floor. She had hit her head, and was knocked senseless for a while. When she came to she climbed to her feet, and was staggering to the door when a different young man met her. He assumed that she had taken
too much wine, and rather than tell him the truth, that she … had lost her virginity, she said it was true, she was inebriated, and she accounted for her bruises and the blood by saying she had fallen down some steps. That was the story she gave her hostess too, and no one pressed her further.” Townley’s chin lifted and he glared at Pitt, then at Knox. “And that is the story I shall tell if I am pressed. I will swear to it under oath.”

“Did she say who the young man was who assaulted her?” Pitt asked.

“It will do you no good,” Townley said bluntly.

“Possibly not, but I wish to know,” Pitt insisted. “It would be very much better if she tells me than if I have to investigate all the balls in London last night to find out who attended which. People will inevitably ask why I need to know.”

“You are a brutal man,” Townley said icily, but his eyes filled with tears.

Pitt was silent for a moment. Would it really help to know? Yes, it would. Not just for Rafael Castelbranco, but for all other young women. He needed to get Neville Forsbrook off the streets—if he could just be certain it was he.

“Please?” he said.

Wordlessly, Townley led them upstairs and across a wide landing, to a door with a porcelain floral handle. Townley knocked, and when his wife answered, he told her that this was unavoidable. At his insistence, she allowed Pitt inside, but not Knox.

The girl propped up in the bed was white-faced, except for the tearstains on her cheeks, and the pink on the rims of her eyes. Her long honey-brown hair was loose around her shoulders. Her features were soft, but in a year or two would also reflect a considerable strength.

Pitt’s step faltered as he walked across the carpet and stood near the bed, but not too close.

“My name is Thomas Pitt,” he said quietly. “I have a daughter who will be your age soon. She looks quite a lot like you. I hope she will be as lovely. I understand you like paintings?”

She nodded.

“Yesterday evening you were shown some particularly beautiful ones, is that correct?”

Again she nodded.

“Were they portraits or landscapes?”

“They were mostly portraits, and some animals, very out of proportion.” She almost smiled. “Horses whose legs looked so thin I don’t know how they could stand on them.”

Pitt shook his head. “I’ve seen some like that. I don’t like them very much. I like to see horses with movement in the lines rather than standing still. Who showed you these pictures?”

“He wasn’t going to steal them,” she said quickly. “At least I don’t think. He has lots of money anyway … or his father does. He could just buy them.”

“Maybe he was thinking of offering to buy them,” Pitt said kindly, then, just as soft, “Who was he?”

“Do … do I have to tell you?”

“No, not if you really don’t want to.” The minute the words were out, he regretted them. Narraway wouldn’t have been so weak.

“It was Neville Forsbrook,” she whispered.

He let his breath out in a sigh. “Thank you, Alice. I appreciate knowing. And thank you for letting me visit with you.”

“It’s all right.” She gave him a tiny, uncertain smile.

He thanked Mrs. Townley as well and walked onto the landing, Townley at his heels. The door closed behind them with a faint click.

Townley stood on the landing by the window, surrounded by vases of carefully arranged flowers. His face was ravaged with fear and grief.

“Thank you,” he echoed. “Now that is the end of it.”

Pitt nodded and followed Knox down the stairs.

A
LICE
T
OWNLEY
’
S FACE HAUNTED
Pitt as he walked away from the house. It was as if he had met a ghost of Angeles Castelbranco, and what troubled him like an open wound was the fact that in his own mind he was certain that there would be other girls in the future, perhaps not lucky enough to escape with their lives. Perhaps
Pamela O’Keefe had been one of them? They would probably never know.

He could not blame Townley for wanting to protect his daughter. Had it been Jemima, Pitt doubted he would try to prosecute. In fact, if he were honest, he knew he would not. Whatever Forsbrook went on to do, one protected one’s own child first.

Alice Townley had been violated, but not seriously injured, certainly not beaten as Catherine had been. Pamela O’Keefe had been murdered, her neck broken. Why the difference? What injuries had Angeles Castelbranco sustained?

Were there two different men, then? One Neville Forsbrook, the other—Alban Hythe? Perhaps—perhaps not.

Had Pamela O’Keefe’s death been an accident? Had Forsbrook forced himself on her, and in the violence of her struggle snapped her neck? Was he terrified, then? Or exhilarated?

Was the difference in his perception of the woman, or in the way they reacted to him? Did he need their fear to excite him?

Pitt knew he must check on the degree of violence, the bruises of self-defense, and note all the differences and the similarities.

I
T WAS NOT DIFFICULT
to find Brinsley; he was in the police morgue performing a post-mortem on another body, a man stabbed in a barroom fight. Pitt waited half an hour until he was finished. He came out of the autopsy room cold, his hands still wet. He carried a faint odor of carbolic with him.

“Commander Pitt, Special Branch,” Pitt introduced himself.

“What can I do for you, Commander?” Brinsley asked. “Tea? I’m tired and I’m cold and I’ve still a long evening ahead of me.”

“Thank you,” Pitt accepted. “I’m looking into several rapes, to see if I can compare them to one that concerns me particularly. I need to know if they’re related.”

Brinsley reached his office and put a kettle onto a small burner. It was only moments before it boiled and he made tea for them both in a round-bellied china pot.

“Look for similarities,” Brinsley said with a shrug. “I assume you have no testimony, no description?”

“I have some, but if it is accurate, the man seems to be far more violent with some women than with the others.”

“Interesting,” Brinsley said thoughtfully. “Usually they escalate with time. Are you certain it’s all one man?”

“No, I’m not. Can you describe the injuries to Catherine Quixwood?”

“They were very grave, but not fatal,” Brinsley replied. “She was deeply bruised on her body, upper arms, more so still upon her thighs, and there was tearing of her genital organs by forceful penetration.” His mouth twisted in a grimace. “There was also a fairly deep bite on her left breast. The man’s teeth had torn the skin and left distinct bruise marks, which became more pronounced after her death.”

“Thank you,” Pitt said quietly. “Was there anything about these injuries that would be distinct to the man who inflicted them?”

“If it was the same man, I’d say he was more deeply sunk in his state of … depravity … with Catherine. I can’t imagine any victim beaten more terribly than she was.”

“But that crime happened first,” Pitt said unhappily.

“Then it seems you have at least two rapists.” Brinsley shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you anyway.” Pitt turned to leave, his tea only half-drunk. His throat felt too tight to swallow.