Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [9]
“A few minutes,” Pitt agreed. “Body was warm—but apart from that, if he’d been there longer, someone would have seen him sooner.”
“Who did find him?”
“Prostitute called Hetty Milner.”
Drummond smiled, a brief humor lighting his eyes, then dying immediately. “I suppose she tried to solicit a little business—and found her prospective client was a corpse.”
Pitt bit his lip to hide the shadow of a smile. “Yes—which was a good thing. If she hadn’t been so startled she wouldn’t have screamed; she’d have collected herself and walked straight on, and we might not have known about him for a lot longer.”
Drummond leaned forward, all the irony gone from his features, a thin line of anxiety between his brows. “What do we know, Pitt?” he asked.
Briefly Pitt summarized for him the events on the bridge, his visit to Royal Street, and finally his return to the station.
Drummond sat back and wiped his lips with his napkin. “What a mess,” he said grimly. “The motive could be almost anything—business or professional rivalry, political enmity, anarchist conspiracy. Or it could be the work of a random lunatic, in which case we may never find him! What do you think of a personal motive: money, jealousy, revenge?”
“Possible,” Pitt answered, remembering the widow’s stricken face and her gallant struggle to maintain composure, the cool civility between her and her stepson that might cover all manner of old wounds. “Very ugly. It seems a bizarre way to do it.”
“Smacks of madness, doesn’t it,” Drummond agreed. “But perhaps that doesn’t mean anything. Please God we can settle it soon, and without having to go into family tragedies.”
“I hope so,” Pitt agreed. He had finished his breakfast, and in the warm room he was overwhelmingly tired.
Cobb came in with the newspapers and handed them wordlessly to Drummond. Drummond opened the first and read from the headlines, “ ‘Member of Parliament Murdered on Westminster Bridge,’ ” and from the second, “ ‘Shocking Murder—Corpse on the Lamppost.’ ” He looked up at Pitt. “Go home and get some sleep, man,” he ordered. “Come back this afternoon when we have had a chance to find a few witnesses. Then you can start on the business associates, and the political ones.” He glanced at the papers on the table. “They aren’t going to give us much time.”
2
CHARLOTTE PITT HAD NOT yet heard about the murder on Westminster Bridge, and at the moment her mind was totally absorbed in the meeting she was attending. It was the first time she had been part of such an assembly. Most of those gathered had little in common with each other, except an interest in the representation of women in Parliament. Most had no thought beyond the wild and previously undreamed of possibility that women might actually vote, but one or two extraordinary souls had conceived the idea of women as members of that august body. One woman had even offered herself for election. Of course, she had sunk with barely a trace, a joke in the worst taste.
Now Charlotte sat in the back row of a crowded meeting hall and watched the first speaker, a stout young woman with a strong, blunt face and red hands, as she got to her feet and the muttering gradually fell to silence.
“Sisters!” The word stuck oddly on such a mixed company. In front of Charlotte a well-dressed woman in green silk hunched her shoulders a little, withdrawing from the touch and the association of those she was forced to be so close to. “We’re all ’ere for the same reason!” the young woman on the platform continued, her voice rich, and hardened with a strong northern accent. “We all believe as ’ow we should ’ave some say in the way our lives is run, wot laws is made an’ oo makes ’em! All kinds o’ men get a chance to choose their members o’ Parliament, an’ if ’e wants to get elected, that Member ’as to answer to the people. ’Alf the people, sisters, just ’alf the people—the ’alf that’s men!”
She went on speaking for another ten minutes, and Charlotte only half listened. She had heard the arguments before, and in her mind they were already irrefutable. What she had come