Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [36]
“Please don’t destroy anything, Mrs. Carfax. It would be better if you were to lock your father’s study.”
“Of course. Now if you will excuse me, I must be alone.”
Pitt stood to attention. It was an odd gesture, but he felt a profound sympathy for her, not only because she had lost her father in violent and peculiarly public circumstances, but because of some other pain he sensed in her, a loneliness that had something to do with her husband. He thought perhaps she loved him far more than he did her, and she knew it, and yet there was also something beyond that, another wound he could only guess at.
The footman showed him out, and he went down the steps into the quiet lamplit street with a deep feeling that there were other tragedies to be revealed.
5
THE FOLLOWING DAY constables set about finding any witnesses who might have seen anything from which a fact could be deduced: a more exact time, whether the attacker had come from the north side of the bridge or the south, which way he had gone afterwards, whether by cab or on foot. There was little they could do until the evening, because those who frequented the streets close to midnight were in their own homes, shops, or lodgings through the day, which could be almost anywhere, and even the members of Parliament were at home or in offices and ministries.
By midweek they had found four of the cabbies who had crossed the bridge between half past ten and eleven o’clock. None of them had seen anything that was of any help, nothing out of the ordinary, no loitering figures except the usual prostitutes, and they, like Hetty Milner, were merely pursuing their trade. One had seen a man selling hot plum duff, but he was a regular, and when the police met the man in the early evening he could tell them nothing further.
Other members of Parliament had spoken with Etheridge shortly before they all left the House and went their several ways. None had seen him approached by anyone or could remember his actually walking towards the bridge. They had been busy in conversation themselves, the night was dark, it was late, and they were tired and thinking of home.
All that the day’s labor, walking, questioning, and deduction produced by midnight was the confirmation of a very ordinary evening. No unusual person had been noticed, nothing had disturbed Etheridge or caused him to behave other than after any late night sitting of the House. There had been no quarrels, no sudden messages, no haste or anxiety, no friends or acquaintances with him except other members.
Etheridge had been found dead by Harry Rawlins within ten minutes of his last words to his colleagues outside the entrance of the House of Commons.
Pitt turned his attention to the personal life of Etheridge, beginning with his financial affairs. It took him only a couple of hours to confirm that he had been an extremely wealthy man, and there was no heir apart from his only child, Helen Carfax. The estate was in no way entailed, and the house in Paris Road and the extremely fine properties in Lincolnshire and the West Riding were freehold and without mortgage.
Pitt left the solicitors’ offices with no satisfaction. Even in the spring sunshine he felt cold. The lawyer, a small, punctilious man with spectacles on the bridge of his narrow nose, had said nothing of James Carfax, but his silences were eloquent. He pursed his mouth and gazed at Pitt with steady sadness in his pale blue eyes, but his discretion had been immaculate; he told Pitt only what was in due course going to become public knowledge when the will was probated, not that Pitt had expected anything else. Families of Etheridge’s standing did not employ lawyers who betrayed their clients’ trust.
Pitt took a quick lunch of bread, cold mutton, and cider at the Goat and Compasses and then hired a hansom through Westminster and across the bridge back to Paris Road. It was an acceptable hour to call, and even if Helen Carfax were not well enough to receive him herself, it would not matter; his primary