Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [115]
“Yes, but you can’t pick primroses by the bunch day after day from a private garden.”
“Can’t you? How do you know so much about gardens, Pitt? Don’t have a garden, do you? When do you find the time?” He looked round. “Mind, you’ll have more when you’re promoted after we tie up this case.”
Pitt smiled thinly. “Yes—yes I will. Actually, we do have a small garden, but Charlotte does more in it than I do. I grew up in the country.”
“Did you?” Drummond’s eyebrows rose. “I didn’t know that. Somehow I thought you were a Londoner. Amazing how little we know about people, even though we see them every day. So she bought primroses?”
“Yes, probably from the same source as other flower sellers. One of the markets. We can send men out to search.”
“Good; arrange it. And questioning the M.P.s, I’ll go out on that again too. Which of the people we know would be capable of passing as a street vendor? Surely not Lady Hamilton?”
“I doubt it, and I don’t think Barclay Hamilton could pass himself off as a woman—he’s far too tall, apart from anything else.”
“Mrs. Sheridan?”
“Possibly.”
“Helen Carfax?”
Pitt shrugged, the question was too hard. He could not visualize the pale, unhappy woman he had seen after her father’s death, so torn with fears, so painfully in love with her husband, so wounded by his every small indifference, having the confidence and efficiency to acquire flowers and then stand on a street comer selling them to passing strangers so that she might commit murder. He remembered Maisie Willis’s voice, casual, broad, idiosyncratic.
“I doubt she could master selling,” he said frankly. “And James Carfax is the same as Barclay Hamilton, too tall not to be noticed.”
“Florence Ivory?”
Florence had left her husband and found shelter for herself and her child, until Africa Dowell had taken her in. Perhaps she had also worked at something.
“Yes, I imagine she might. She certainly has the imagination and intelligence to do it, and the willpower.”
Drummond leaned forward.
“Then, Pitt, we’ve got to catch her. We’ve got grounds to search her house now. We may find the clothes—if she means to do it again we almost certainly will. Dear God, she must be mad!”
“Yes,” Pitt agreed with cold unhappiness. “Yes, I daresay she is, poor soul.”
But the minutest search yielded only much-mended work clothes, gardening gloves, and kitchen aprons—nothing that would have dressed a flower seller—and only baskets and trugs for flowers, no trays such as street vendors use.
The third questioning of the members of Parliament produced a little more. Several men, when specifically pressed, recalled a different flower seller on the nights of the murders, but they could describe only the roughest details: she was rather larger than Maisie Willis, and taller they thought, but not much else. What they really recalled was that she had sold primroses instead of violets.
Was she very muffled with scarves or shawls?
Not particularly.
Was she young or old, dark or fair?
Definitely not young, nor, they thought, very old. Perhaps forty, perhaps fifty. For heaven’s sake, who spends their time estimating the age of flower sellers?
A big woman, they all agreed, bigger than Maisie Willis. Then it was certainly not Florence Ivory. Africa Dowell padded out a little, her face grimed and made up to hide her fine fair skin, her hair bound in an old scarf or hat, a little dirt judiciously rubbed in?
He returned to Bow Street and met with Drummond to share his findings and consider the next step.
Drummond looked tired and beaten. The bottoms of his trousers were wet, his feet were cold, and he was exhausted with talking, with searching for a courteous way of asking over and over again questions that had already been answered with negatives, worn out with weighing, measuring and sifting every fragment of memory, every fact or suggestion, and knowing at the end of it no more than the beginning.
“Do you think she’ll do it again?” he asked.
“Only God knows,” Pitt replied, not blasphemously—he meant it. “But if she does, this time we know what