Callander Square - Anne Perry [1]
The constable gasped; he could not utter a coordinated sentence for his lack of breath.
“A body—sir. In Callander Square. Pitiful, sir—it is. They just found it now—the gardeners—dug it up. In the middle. Planting a tree, or something.”
Pitt’s face puckered in surprise.
“Callander Square? Are you sure? You haven’t got lost again, have you?”
“Yes, sir. No, sir, right in the middle. Callander Square, sir. I’m positive. You’d better come and see.”
“Buried?” Pitt frowned. “What sort of body?”
“A baby, sir.” McBeath closed his eyes and suddenly he looked quite ill. “A very small baby, sir, like newborn, I think. Reminds me of my kid sister, when she was born.”
Pitt breathed out very slowly, a sort of private sigh.
“Sergeant Batey!” he said loudly.
The door opened and a uniformed man looked in.
“Yes, sir?”
“Get an ambulance and Doctor Stillwell and come to Callander Square.”
“Someone been attacked, sir?” His face brightened. “Robbed?”
“No. Probably only a domestic tragedy.”
“A domestic tragedy?” McBeath’s voice rose in outrage. “It’s murder!”
Batey stared at him.
“Probably not,” Pitt said calmly. “Probably some wretched servant girl seduced, kept it to herself, and gave birth alone, and the child died. She’d bury it and tell no one, nurse her grief to herself, so she wouldn’t be put out on the streets with no job, and no character to get another. God knows how many times it happens.”
McBeath looked pale and pinched.
“Do you think so, sir?”
“I don’t know,” Pitt answered him, going toward the door. “But it wouldn’t be the first time, nor the last. We’d better go and see.”
It took Pitt the last half hour of daylight to look at the little body, poke round in the crumbly soil to see if there were anything else, to help identify it, and find the second, misshapen, cold little body. He sent the doctor and the ambulance away with them both, and a shaking, white-faced McBeath home to his rooms, then Batey and his men to post guard in the gardens. There was nothing else he could do that night until the doctor had given him some information: how old the babies had been, how long ago they had died, as near as could be estimated, and if possible what had been wrong with the second, deeper buried one to cause that misshapen skull. It was too much to hope they could tell now from what they had died.
He arrived at his own home in the dark and the fine, clinging dampness of fog. The yellow gaslights were welcoming, promising warmth not only to the body, but to the mind, and the raw, vulnerable feelings.
He stepped inside with an acute sense of pleasure that nearly two years of marriage had not mellowed. In the spring of 1881 he had been called to the horrifying case of the Cater Street hangman, the mass murderer of young women, who garroted them and left their swollen-faced bodies in the dark streets. In that dreadful circumstance he had met Charlotte Ellison. Of course at that time she had treated him with the dignified coolness any such well-bred young woman would use toward a policeman, who was rather lower in the social scale than a moderately good butler. But Charlotte was a girl of terrifying honesty, not only toward others, causing a social chaos; but toward herself also. She had acknowledged her love for him, and found the courage to defy convention and accept him in marriage.
They were poor, startlingly so compared with the considerable comfort of her father’s home, but with ingenuity and her usual forthrightness she had dispensed with most of the small status symbols without which her erstwhile friends would have considered themselves bereft. Occasionally when his feelings were raw on the matter, she joked that the relief from pretense was a pleasure to her; and perhaps it was at least half true.
Now she came from the small drawing room with its sparse, well-polished furniture and autumn flowers in a glass vase. Her dress was one she had brought with her, wine colored, a little out of fashion now, but her face glowed and the lamplight picked out all the warm mahogany tones in her hair.
He felt a quick