Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [105]
The pictures that he had in the room above were a good deal more explicit than those in the front of the shop. Many women had abandoned gowns altogether and were posed with little more than a few wisps of fabric, a feathered fan or a posy of flowers. They were handsome women in early or middle youth, with firm, high breasts and rich thighs. Some of the poses were more erotic than others.
“All quite harmless, really,” Unsworth said, watching Pitt guardedly.
“Yes, they are,” Pitt agreed, conscious of Tellman at his elbow exuding disapproval. In his opinion women who sold themselves for this kind of picture were of the same general class as those who sold themselves in prostitution, only these girls were young and well fed and far from any outward sign of poverty or despair.
Unsworth relaxed. “Y’see?”
Pitt looked at them more carefully. He saw half a dozen or so which could have been Cathcart’s. The quality was there, the subtlety of light and shade, the more delicate suggestion of something beyond the mere flesh. One woman had a bunch of lilies in her hands half obscuring her breasts. It was a highly evocative mixture of purity and license. Another woman with rich dark hair lay sprawled on a Turkish carpet, a brass hookah behind her, as if she was about to partake of the smoke from some pungent herb. The longer he looked at it, the more certain Pitt became that it was Cathcart’s work. The symbolism was there, the skill of suggestion, as well as the practiced use of the camera itself.
But none of these, good as they were, were worth the price of Lily Monderell’s teapot, let alone the watercolor.
“Yes, I see,” he said aloud. “Now how about the others, the expensive ones? Do you bring them to me, or do I have to look for them myself ?”
Unsworth hesitated, clearly torn as to how much he could still hope to get away with.
Pitt turned to Tellman. “Sergeant, go and see if you can find—”
“All right!” Unsworth said loudly, his face dark, his voice edged with anger. “I’ll show ’em to yer meself ! Yer an ’ard man! Wot’s the ’arm in a few pictures? Nobody’s ’urt. Nobody’s in it as doesn’t wanter be. It ain’t real!”
“The pictures, Mr. Unsworth,” Pitt said grimly. He would not argue realities of the mind with him.
Ungraciously Unsworth produced the pictures, slamming them down on the table in front of Pitt, then stood back, his arms folded.
These were different. Innocence was gone completely. Pitt heard Tellman’s intake of breath between his teeth and did not need to turn sideways to know the expression on his face, the revulsion, the hurt inside. Some of them still possessed an art, albeit a twisted one. In the first four the women were leering, their bodies in attitudes of half ecstasy already, but vulgar, totally physical. There was no suggestion of tenderness, only appetite.
He flipped through them quickly. He would rather not have looked at all. Each one of these women had not so long ago been a child, searching for love, not lust. They may have been used rather than cared for, they may have been lonely or frightened or bored, but they had still been outside the adult world of selfish, physical use of one person by another merely to relieve a hunger.
Except, of course, for those who long knew abuse from the very people who were supposed to protect them. And looking at some of these sad, worldly eyes, that might have described a few of them. There was already a self-disgust in some that was harsher than any of the physical degradations.
Others were worse again, mimicking pain inflicted for pleasure, with the implication that it held some kind of secret joy reached only by breaching all the barriers. Some were obscene, some blasphemous. Many women were dressed in mockery of those in holy orders, nuns with skirts torn open, hurled to the ground, or over the banisters of stairs, as if rape was on a level with martyrdom and a kind of religious ecstasy was achieved by submission