Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [172]
“Thank you very much, Mr. Waterson. Have you any idea how I might find her?”
Waterson’s blue eyes opened wider. “Now?”
“If you please?” Pitt took the last biscuit. They were remarkably good.
“Well, let me see …” Waterson looked up at the ceiling again and concentrated for several minutes. “I don’t know myself, but it is possible Mrs. Fothergill, the housekeeper at number twenty-five, may know. I believe she was some sort of cousin. If you wish, I will write you a note of introduction.”
“That is very civil of you,” Pitt said with surprise and gratitude. “Really very civil.”
He spent another quarter of an hour sharing a little harmless gossip with Waterson, who seemed to have an ungentlemanly interest in detection, about which he was embarrassed, but it did little to dim his delight. Then Pitt took his leave and visited the house across the street Waterson had indicated. There he found Mrs. Fothergill, who was able with much shaking of her head and tutting to redirect him to yet another possible source of information as to Liza Cobb’s present whereabouts.
Actually it took him till the following noon before he found her behind the counter in an insalubrious fishmonger’s off Billingsgate. She was a large woman with raw hands and a coarse face which might have been handsome twenty years ago, but was now rough-skinned, fleshy and arrogant. He knew instantly that he had the right person. There was a look about her that reminded him sickeningly of the half of Weems’s face which the gold coins had left more or less intact.
He stood in front of the counter between the scales and the wooden slab and knife on which the fish were cut, and wondered how to approach her. If he were too direct she would simply leave. The door to the interior of the shop was behind her, and the counter between her and Pitt.
Perhaps she was as greedy as her relative.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” he said with a courtesy that came hard to him.
“Arternoon,” she said with slight suspicion. People did not customarily address her so.
“I represent the law,” he said more or less truthfully. Then as he saw the dislike in her pale eyes, “It is a matter of finding the heir, or heiress, to a gentleman recently deceased,” he went on. Yes, it was the eyes that were like Weems. “And if I may say so, ma’am, you bear such a resemblance to the gentleman in question, I think my search ends right here.”
“I ain’t lorst anyone,” she said, but the edge was gone from her voice. “ ’Oo’s dead?”
“A Mr. William Weems, of Clerkenwell.”
Her face hardened again and she glanced angrily at the queue of women beginning to form behind Pitt, faces curious. “ ’E were murdered,” she said accusingly. “ ’ere! ’Oo are yer? I don’t know nuffin’ abaht it. I don’t get nuffin’ ’cause ’e’s dead.”
“There’s his house,” Pitt said truthfully. “It seems you may be his only relative, Miss—er, Miss Cobb?”
She thought for several seconds, then eventually the vision of the house became too strong.
“Yeah, I’m Liza Cobb.”
“Naturally I have one or two questions to ask you,” Pitt continued.
“I don’t know nuffin’ abaht ’is death.” She glared not at him but at the women behind him. “ ’ere—you keep your ears to yerself,” she said loudly.
“I have nothing to ask you about Mr. Weems’s death,” Pitt replied soothingly. “What I want to ask you goes back long before that. May we speak somewhere a little more private?”
“Yeah, we better ’ad. Too many ’round ’ere can’t mind their own business.”
“Well I’m sure I don’t care if you got relations