Buckingham Palace Gardens - Anne Perry [98]
Over dinner they spoke of other things. Forbes was an interesting and hospitable host, and Narraway did not arrive home until close to midnight.
IN THE MORNING Narraway was back at the Palace facing Pitt. There was a tray with tea on the table and Pitt sat opposite him. He looked weary, trapped. More than that, there was a disillusion in him that Narraway had not seen before. Suddenly he realized how being here oppressed Pitt, who had witnessed violence and degradation often enough, but never before on this level. It was not that these murders were more brutal than others, it was that they were here in a place he had considered inviolate.
Perhaps it mattered also that the victims were women, the second one not wildly unlike Charlotte, at least in class and origin. Charlotte had something of the same warmth inside her, the same courage and quick tongue. She was just gentler, and perhaps immeasurably happier.
This was breaking Pitt’s ideals of his monarch, and threatening his feelings dangerously.
The ideals Narraway did not envy. He had lost his own illusions about people too long ago. Proximity had forced him into realism. It was hard to believe that Pitt had kept his naïveté so long. He must simply have refused to see what he did not wish. Narraway felt both impatience and pity for that.
Then he thought of Charlotte’s face, her eyes, the curve of her mouth and her throat, and was drenched with loneliness. In that instant he would have traded all the knowledge and understanding he had in return for the innocence in Pitt that made Charlotte love him. Was it innocence or hope?
And if the fact of these Palace murders crushed that, what was Pitt going to lose?
Pitt finished his tea and set his cup down, waiting for Narraway to speak. His eyes were dark-rimmed, his skin shadowed, and there were tiny cuts on his jaw where he had shaved clumsily. Did violent death still churn his stomach too, in spite of how well he hid it? Did he share Narraway’s sense of guilt for not preventing Minnie Sorokine’s death?
“Is Sorokine still locked in his room?” he asked.
“Yes. There was no alternative,” Pitt replied unhappily.
“Are you satisfied he killed her?” Narraway did not want to ask, but he needed the matter closed, and Pitt’s troubled face left him no choice. “Presumably she realized he had killed the first woman, and he could not afford to leave her alive because sooner or later she would betray him over it?”
Pitt spoke slowly. “That’s what it looks like.”
“Why aren’t you satisfied?” Narraway’s voice rose in spite of his effort to keep it level and under control. He was accustomed to anarchy, treason, and very considerable violence, but he had not met sexual aberration before. There was something uniquely repulsive about the intimacy of it, like the foul smell of some disease.
“There was no blood on him,” Pitt spoke carefully, as if picking his way through chaotic thoughts. “None at all, except the little from the scratches on his face. Nothing of the dark gore that came from her.”
Narraway’s stomach turned and he felt the chill of sweat on his skin. “He’d had all night to wash,” he pointed out.
Pitt shook his head. “There was shaving water in the jug and basin, but it was all clean. Nothing in it but soap. And what about his clothes?”
“He stripped to do it?” Narraway suggested. “There was no blood on anyone the first time either. It seems to be his pattern.”
Pitt frowned. “The first time he might have planned it, but the second was because she challenged him. He would hardly have told her to wait there while he stripped off, then came back and killed her!”
“Then what did he do?” Narraway demanded, frustration burning up inside him. Just as Pitt was still unfamiliar with the complexities of anarchy, so was he with the nature of murder.
“I don’t know,” Pitt replied. “He was distressed over her death, but he looked totally sane to me. He denied it.”
Narraway was startled. “Did you expect him to confess?”
Pitt pushed his hair out of his eyes with a clumsy hand. “It’s not just what he said,