Resurrection Row (21 page)

“Major Rodney has two pictures?” Pitt was surprised. He would not have imagined Major Rodney as a man who cared for, or could afford, such an indulgence in art.

“Why not?” she asked, eyebrows raised. “One of himself, and one of Miss Priscilla and Miss Mary Ann together.”

“I see. Thank you, ma’am. You have been very helpful.”

“I don’t see how!”

He was not quite sure of himself, but at least there were other places to search, and in the morning he would call on Major and the Misses Rodney. He excused himself and set out in the returning fog to go back to the police station, and then home.

If Lady Cantlay had been startled to hear of Godolphin Jones’s murder, Major Rodney was shattered. He sat in the chair like a man who has nearly been drowned. He gasped for breath, and his face was mottled with red.

“Oh, my God! How absolute appalling! Strangled, you say? Where did they find him?”

“In another man’s grave,” Pitt replied, unsure again whether to reach for the bell and call a servant. It was a reaction he had been totally unprepared for. The man was a soldier; he must have seen death, violent and bloody death, a thousand times. He had fought in the Crimea, and from what Pitt had heard of the tragic and desperate war, a man who had survived that ought to be able to look on hell itself and keep his stomach.

Rodney was beginning to compose himself. “How dreadful. How on earth did you know to look?”

“We didn’t,” Pitt said honestly. “We found him quite by chance.”

“That’s preposterous! You can’t go around digging up graves to see what you will find in them—by chance!”

“No, of course not, sir.” Pitt was awkward again. He had never known himself so clumsy. “We expected the grave to have been robbed, to be empty.”

Major Rodney stared at him.

“We had the corpse whose grave it was!” Pitt tried to make him understand. “He was the man we first took to be Lord Augustus—on the cab near the theatre—”

“Oh.” Major Rodney sat upright as though he were on horseback in a parade. “I see. Why didn’t you say so to begin with? Well, I’m afraid there is nothing I can tell you. Thank you for informing me.”

Pitt remained seated. “You knew Mr. Jones.”

“Not socially, no. Not our sort of person. Artist, you know.”

“He painted your picture, did he not?”

“Oh, yes—knew him professionally. Can’t tell you anything about him. That’s all there is to it. And I won’t have you distressing my sisters with talk about murders and death. I’ll tell them myself, as I see fit.”

“Did you have a picture painted of them, also?”

“I did. What of it? Quite an ordinary thing to do. Lots of people have portraits.”

“May I see them, please?”

“Whatever for? Ordinary enough. But I suppose so, if it’ll make you go away and leave us alone. Poor man.” He shook his head. “Pity. Dreadful way to die.” And he stood up, small, slight, and ramrod stiff, and led Pitt into the withdrawing room.

Pitt stared at the very formal portrait on the far wall above the sideboard. Instantly he disliked it. It was grandiloquent, full of scarlets and glinting metal, a child in an old man’s body playing at soldiers. Had it been intended as ironic it would have been clever, but again the colors were unsubtle and a little cloudy.

He went up to and found his eye drawn without consciousness to the left corner. There was a small caterpillar, totally irrelevant to the composition but cleverly masked in the background, a brown-bodied creature in a brown, mottled shadow.

“And I believe there is also one of your sisters?” He stepped back and turned to face the major.

“Can’t think what you want to see it for,” the major said with surprise. “Quite ordinary painting. Still, if you like—”

“Yes, please,” Pitt went after him into the next room. It was on the facing wall, between two jardinieres, a larger work than the first. The pose was fussy, the scenery cluttered with far too many props, the colors a little better but with too much pink. He looked in the left corner and found the same caterpillar, exactly the same stylized hair and legs, but green-bodied, to hide against the grass.

“What did you pay for them, sir?” he asked.

“Sufficient, sir,” the major said huffily. “I cannot see that it concerns your investigation.”

Pitt tried to visualize the figures after the caterpillars in the little book, but there had been so many of them, more caterpillars than anything else, and he could not remember them all.

“I do need to know, Major. I would prefer to ask you personally than have to discover by some other means.”

“Damn you, sir! It is not your business. Inquire as you like!”

Pitt would get nowhere by pressing the point, and he knew it. He would find the figures in the notebook in the column under £350, in line with the beetle, and total all those next to caterpillars. He would then try Major Rodney with that sum and observe his reaction.

The major snorted, satisfied with his victory. “Now, if that is all, Inspector?”

Pitt debated whether to insist on seeing the Misses Rodney now and decided there was little to learn from them. He could more profitably go and question the other person who had bought a Jones portrait, Lady St. Jermyn. He accepted the major’s dismissal and, a quarter of an hour later was standing rather uncomfortably in front of Lord St. Jermyn.

“Lady St. Jermyn is not at home,” he said coolly. “Neither of us can help you any further with the affair. It would be best left, and I counsel you to do so from now on.”

“One cannot leave murder, my lord,” Pitt said tartly. “Even did I wish to.”

St. Jermyn’s eyebrows rose slightly, not surprise so much as contempt. “What has made you suddenly believe that Augustus was murdered? I suspect a prurient desire to inquire into the lives of your betters.”

Pitt ached to be equally rude; he could feel it like a beat in his head. “I assure you, sir, my interest in other people’s personal lives is purely professional.” He made his own voice as precise and as beautiful as St. Jermyn’s, coolly caressing the words. “I have no liking either for tragedy or for squalor. I prefer private griefs to remain private, where public duty permits. And as far as I know, Lord Augustus died naturally—but Godolphin Jones was unmistakably strangled.”

St. Jermyn stood absolute still; his face paled and his eyes widened very slightly. Pitt saw his hands clasp each other hard. There was a moment’s silence before he spoke.

“Murdered?” he said carefully.

“Yes, sir.” He wanted to let St. Jermyn say all he would, not lead him and make his answers easy by suggesting them. The silence was inviting.

St. Jermyn’s eyes stayed on Pitt’s face, watching him, almost as if he were trying to anticipate.

“When did you discover his body?” he asked.

“Yesterday evening,” Pitt answered simply.

Again St. Jermyn waited, but Pitt did not help him. “Where?” he said at last.

“Buried, sir.”

“Buried?” St. Jermyn’s voice rose. “That’s preposterous! What do you mean ‘buried’? In someone’s garden?”

“No, sir, properly buried, in a coffin in a grave in a churchyard.”

“I don’t know what you mean!” St. Jermyn was growing angry. “Who would bury a strangled man? No doctor would sign a certificate if the man was strangled, and no clergyman would bury him without one. You are talking nonsense.” He was ready to dismiss it.

“I am relating the facts, sir,” Pitt said levelly. “I have no explanation for them, either. Except that it was not his own grave; it was that of one Albert Wilson, deceased of a stroke and buried there in the regular way.”

“Well, what happened to this—Wilson?” St. Jermyn demanded.

“That was the corpse that fell off the cab outside the theatre,” Pitt replied, still watching St. Jermyn’s face. He could see nothing in it but dark and utter confusion. Again for several moments he said nothing. Pitt waited.

St. Jermyn stared at him, eyes clouded and unreadable. Pitt tried to strip away the mask of authority and assurance and see the man beneath—he failed entirely.

“I presume you have no idea,” St. Jermyn said at last, “who killed him?”

“Godolphin Jones? No, sir, not yet.”

“Or why?”

For the first time Pitt overstepped the truth. “That’s different. We do have a possible idea as to why.”

St. Jermyn’s face was still very pale, nostrils flared gently as he breathed in and out. “Oh? And what may that be?”

“It would be irresponsible of me to speak before I have proof.” Pitt evaded it with a slight smile. “I might wrong someone, and suspicion once voiced is seldom forgotten, no matter how false it proves to be later.”

St. Jermyn hesitated as if about to ask something further, then thought better of it. “Yes—yes, of course,” he agreed. “What are you going to do now?”

“Question the people who knew him best, both professionally and socially,” Pitt replied, taking the opening offered. “I believe you were one of his patrons?”

St. Jermyn gave an answering smile, no more than a slight relaxation of the face. “What a curious word, Inspector. Hardly a patron. I commissioned one picture, of my wife.”

“And were you satisfied with it?”

“It is acceptable. My wife liked it well enough, which was what mattered. Why do you ask?

“No particular reason. May I see it?”

“If you wish, although I doubt you will learn anything from it. It is very ordinary.” He turned and walked out of the door into the hallway, leaving Pitt to follow. The picture was in an inconspicuous place on the stair wall, and, looking at the quality of it compared with the other family portraits, Pitt was not surprised. His eye scanned the face briefly, then went to the left-hand corner. The insect was there, this time a spider.

“Well?” St. Jermyn inquired with a touch of irony in his voice.

“Thank you, sir.” Pitt came down the stairs again to stand level with him. “Do you mind telling me, sir, how much you paid for it?”

“Probably more than it’s worth,” St. Jermyn said casually. “But my wife likes it. Personally, I don’t think it does her justice, do you? But then you wouldn’t know; you haven’t met her.”

“How much, sir?” Pitt repeated.

“About four hundred and fifty pounds, as far as I can remember. Do you want the precise figure? It would take me some time to find it. Hardly a major transaction!”

The vast financial difference between them was not lost on Pitt.

“Thank you, that will be near enough.” He dismissed it without comment.

St. Jermyn smiled fully for the first time. “Does that further your investigations, Inspector?”

“It may do, when compared with other information.” Pitt walked on to the front door. “Thank you for your time, sir.”

When he got home, cold and tired, Pitt was welcomed by the fragrance of steaming soup and dry laundry hanging from the ceiling. Jemima was already asleep, and the house was silent. He took his wet boots off and sat down, letting the calm wash over him, almost as capable of being felt with body as was the heat. For several minutes Charlotte said no more than a welcome, an acknowledgment of his presence.

When at last he was ready to talk, he put down the soup bowl she had given him and looked across at her.

“I’m making noises as if I knew what I was doing, but honestly, I can’t see sense in any of it,” he said with a gesture of helplessness.

“Whom have you questioned?” she asked, wiping her hands carefully and picking up an oven cloth before opening the door and reaching in for a pie. She pulled it out and put it quickly on the table. The crust was crisp and pale gold, a little darker in one corner, in fact, perilously close to burnt.

He looked at it with the beginning of a smile.

She saw him. “I’ll eat that corner!” she said instantly.

He laughed. “Why does it do that? Scorch one corner!”

She gave him a withering look. “If I knew that, I would prevent it!” She turned out the vegetables smartly and watched the steam rise with appreciation. “Whom have you seen about this artist?”

“Everyone in the Park who has portraits by him—why?”

“I just wondered.” She lifted the carving knife and held it in the air, suspended over the pie while she thought. “We had an artist paint a picture of Mama once, and another for Sarah. They were both full of compliments, told Sarah she was beautiful, made all sorts of outrageously flattering remarks; said she had a quality of delicacy about her like a Bourbon rose. She floated round insufferably with her head in the air, looking sideways at herself in all the mirrors for weeks.”

“She was good-looking,” he replied. “Although a Bourbon rose is a little extravagant. But what is the point you are making?”

“Well, Godolphin Jones made his money by painting pictures of people, which in a way is the ultimate vanity, isn’t it, having your face immortalized? Maybe he flattered them all like that? And if he did, I would imagine a fair few of them responded, wouldn’t you?

Suddenly he perceived. “You mean an
affaire,
or several
affaires
? A jealous woman who imagined she was something unique in his life and discovered she was merely one of many, and that the sweet images were just part of his professional equipment? Or a jealous husband?”

“It’s possible.” She lowered her knife at last and cut into the pie. Thick gravy bubbled through, and Pitt totally forgot about the scorched piece.

“I’m hungry,” he said hopefully.

She smiled up at him with satisfaction. “Good. Ask Aunt Vespasia. If it was anyone in the Park, I’ll bet she knows, and if she doesn’t, she will find out for you.”

“I will,” he promised. “Now, please get on with that and forget about Godolphin Jones.”

But the first person he saw the following day was Somerset Carlisle. By now, of course, everyone in the Park knew of the discovery of the body, and he no longer had any element of surprise.

“I didn’t know him very well,” Carlisle said mildly. “Not much in common, as I dare say you know? And I certainly had no desire to have my portrait done.”

“If you had,” Pitt said slowly, watching Carlisle’s face, “would you have gone to Godolphin Jones?”

Carlisle’s expression dropped a little in surprise. “Why on earth does it matter? I’m a bit late now, anyway.”