Cardington Crescent - Anne Perry [115]
“I will, sir, I certainly will.” The constable pulled his manacles out from under his coat and fastened them on Wigge’s bony wrists. “Now you come along o’ me, an’ any trouble an’ I’ll ’ave ter be rough wiv yer, an we wouldn’t want that, now, would we, Mr. Wigge?”
Wigge gave a screech of alarm, and the constable hoisted him up the stairs with marked lack of gentleness, leaving Pitt alone in the cellar. The air suddenly seemed heavy, acrid with the smell of uncounted tiny bodies burning in the hot, gray furnace. He felt overpowered by it, sick.
He collected two more constables from the nearest station, just in case Mrs. Mapes were not alone and should put up some sort of struggle. She was a big woman and, Pitt judged, something of a fighter. It would be foolish to go to Tortoise Lane alone to search that large house, where there might well be male employees or dependents, as well as at least half a dozen girls that he knew of plus an unspecified number of infants.
It was after seven by the time he stood on the sloping pavement again and knocked on the heavy door. One constable was half hidden in an alley, a dozen feet away, another in the street roughly parallel, where Pitt judged the back entrance would open.
He lifted his hand and knocked once, then again. It was several minutes before it opened, at first only a crack. But as the child saw who it was and recognized him from the morning, it swung all the way back. It was the girl he had seen on the stairs with the infants.
“May I see Mrs. Mapes?” He stepped in, then stopped, remembering he must not show his anger or he would betray himself and perhaps lose her. “Please?”
“Yes, sir. Come this way, sir.” She turned and walked along the corridor, her feet bare and dirty. “We bin expectin’ yer.” She did not look back, or notice that the other constable had followed Pitt in and closed the door. At the end of the passage she came to the overfurnished sitting room where Pitt had been in the morning, and knocked tentatively.
“Come!” Mrs. Mapes’s voice called loudly. “Wot is it?”
“Mrs. Mapes, ma’am, there’s the gennelman wivva money ’ere ter see yer, ma’am.”
“Send ’im in!” Her voice softened noticeably. “Send ’im in, girl!”
“Thank you.” Pitt moved past the girl into the sitting room, closing the door so Mrs. Mapes would not see the constable pass on his way to the kitchen and the back door to let in his companion. They had orders to search the house.
Mrs. Mapes was in a puce dress stretched tight over her jutting bosom, and her voluminous skirts filled the entire chair with taffeta that rustled every time she breathed. That she corseted her flesh into such a relentlessly feminine shape was a monument to her vanity and her endurance of acute and persistent discomfort. Her fat fingers were bright with rings, and her ears dangled with gold under the black ringlets.
Her face gleamed with delight when she saw Pitt. He noticed there was a tray in a space cleared for it on the sideboard, a decanter of wine, Madeira from the depth of the color, and two glasses, the price of which, if they were as good as they looked, would have fed the entire house-hold for a fortnight on better than the gruel they were getting at the moment.
“Well, Mr. Pitt, sir, you were ’asty an’ no mistake,” she said with a broad smile. “Makes me think yer was awantin’ ter come back. Yer got my money, ’ave yer?”
She was so normal, so guilelessly greedy, he had to force to his mind the memory of the bloody parcels, the fact that she regularly wrapped in paper the corpses of infants taken in trust into her care, and sent them to Septimus Wigge to dispose of in his furnace. How many of them had died of natural causes, how many of starvation and disease brought about by neglect? How many had she actively murdered?