Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [110]
She controlled her amazement with difficulty, and an idiotic desire to laugh.
“What has that to do with Cecily Antrim?”
“There were several obscene or blasphemous pictures of her in the shop,” he replied. “One of them was almost exactly like that. It couldn’t be a coincidence. It was the same dress, the same garlands of flowers. It looked to be even the same boat. He was killed, and then placed in exactly that pose. Whoever did it had to have seen the photograph.”
A cold prickle ran through her. “You think she was involved?” She thought how it would hurt Joshua. He admired her so much, her courage, her passion, her integrity. How could such a woman lend herself to pornography? It could not be for something as paltry as more money. Surely it had to be a willingness in the mind?
Pitt was looking at her, watching her face, her eyes, the hands now closed tightly in her lap.
“Were there a lot of these pictures?” she asked. “I mean, could they have been sold to many people or used for blackmail?”
“Some of the activities portrayed were . . . illegal.” He did not elaborate, but she guessed his meaning.
“The shop’s owner gave me a list of his customers,” he went on. “But there is nothing to say it is a complete list. We’ll investigate it.” His face was sad and tired in the gaslight. “Some of them will be dealers who sell them on. God knows where they’ll end.”
She felt tired herself, a little beaten by the cruelty and the squalor that she had quite suddenly encountered, invading her warm, bright world with dirt she could not dismiss. Most of all it was in the old lady’s wounds, so deep they had become woven into her nature. But this that Pitt told her of was part of the same thing, the same sickness of the mind and heart that took pleasure in pain.
“The trouble is,” Pitt went on quietly, “they could end up in anyone’s hands—young people, boys keen to learn a little about women . . . knowing nothing . . .”
Caroline could see in his eyes that he was thinking of himself long ago, remembering his own first stirrings of curiosity and excitement, and crippling ignorance. How appalling it would be for a boy to see something like the brutality Mrs. Ellison had described, or the pictures Cecily Antrim had posed for. Young men would grow up seeing women like that . . . willingly chained—just as young Lewis Marchand would have thought of her, twisted and repellent in her desire for pain, her acceptance of humiliation.
Was that blush in his face for anything he had conjured out of Hamlet, the taunting of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s text . . . or from Delbert Cathcart’s photograph? She had no moral choice but to go to the Marchands and warn them. The misery that could follow did not allow her the luxury of evading it, however embarrassing it might be.
“You must stop it, if you can,” she said aloud. “Thomas, you really must!”
“I know,” he replied. “We’ve taken all the pictures, of course. But that won’t prevent him from buying more. You can’t ever prevent it. A man with a camera can photograph anything he pleases. A man with a pencil or a paintbrush can draw whatever he likes.” His voice was dark, his lips delicate with revulsion. “Almost all we can do is see he doesn’t display them publicly. Unless the people photographed are abused, then of course we could act on that.” There was no lift in his voice, and she knew he felt beaten.
She thought of Daniel and Jemima, their innocent faces still looking at the world with no idea of cruelty, no knowledge of the ravages of physical appetite or how it could become so depraved that it consumed all honor or pity, or in the end even preservation of self.
She thought of Edmund Ellison, and Mariah in her youth, terrified, crouching in the dark,