Cardington Crescent - Anne Perry [35]
“Inspector Pitt?” he said with a raised eyebrow. “Treves.” He held out his hand.
Pitt took it briefly. “Could it have been suicide?”
“Rubbish!” Treves replied dourly. “Men like George Ashworth don’t steal poison and take it in their coffee at seven o’clock on a sunny morning in someone else’s house—and certainly not over a love affair. If he’d ever have done it at all—which I doubt—it would have been in a fit of despair over a gambling debt he couldn’t pay, and he’d have blown his brains out with a gun. Gentlemanly thing to do. And he damn surely wouldn’t poison a nice little spaniel at the same time.”
“Spaniel? Mr. March said nothing about a spaniel.”
“He wouldn’t. He’s still trying to convince himself it’s suicide.”
Pitt sighed. “Then we’d better go up and see the body. The police surgeon will look at it later, but you can probably tell me all I need to know.”
“Enormous dose of digitalis,” Treves answered, walking towards the door. “Coffee would disguise it. I daresay your constable in the kitchen will have found that out. Poor fellow must have died very quickly. I suppose if you have to kill someone, short of a bullet through the head this would be about the most merciful and the most efficient way of doing it. I daresay you’ll find the old lady’s entire supply is gone.”
“She had a lot?” Pitt asked, following him across the hall and up the wide, shallow stairs to the landing and into the dressing room. He noted sadly that George apparently had been sleeping in a separate room from Emily. He knew perfectly well it was the custom among many people of affluence for husband and wife each to have their own bedroom, but he would not have cared for it. To wake in the night and know always that Charlotte was there beside him was one of the sweetest roots deep at the core of his life, an ever waiting retreat from ugliness, a warmth from which to go forth into the coldness of any day, even the most violent, the weariest and the most tragic.
But there was no time now to contemplate the difference in lives and how much or little it might mean. Treves was standing beside the bed and the sheet-covered body. Wordlessly he pulled the cover back, and Pitt stared down at the waxy, pale face. They were George’s features—the straight nose, broad brow—but the dark eyes were closed, and there was a blueness around the sockets. Everything was the right shape, exactly as he remembered him, and yet it did not seem to be George. Death was very real. Looking at him one could not imagine that the soul was present.
“No injury,” he said quietly. George was not really there, this was only a shell, but it seemed callous to speak in a normal voice in its presence.
“None at all,” Treves replied. “There was no struggle. Nothing but a man drinking coffee that had enough digitalis in it to give him a massive heart attack—and an unfortunate little dog getting a treat, and dying as well.”
“Which means it wasn’t suicide.” Pitt sighed. “George would never have killed the dog. It wasn’t even his. Stripe will get the details from the servants, find out where the coffee was, who could have reached it. I expect George was the only person to take coffee at that hour. Most people take tea. I’ll have to see the family.”
“Nasty,” Treves said sympathetically. “Domestic murder is one of the tragedies of our human condition. God knows what we do to each other in what is fondly imagined to be the sanctuary of our homes, and is too often a purgatory.” He opened the door onto the landing again. “The old lady is a selfish and autocratic old besom—don’t let her fool you she is in delicate health. There’s nothing the matter with her except old age.”
“Then why the digitalis?”
Treves shrugged. “She didn’t get it from me. She’s the sort who affects vapors and palpitations when her family thwarts her; it’s about the only hold she has over young Tassie. Without obedience dominion is empty, so she persuaded one of the other doctors in the area to