Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [140]
He turned and went back towards the Battersea Bridge Road, away from the river and the soft mist curling up from it with the smell of the incoming tide. Autumn was in the air, and the smells of turned earth, wood smoke, chrysanthemums, the last mowing of the grass. When Orlando had come this way did he really think only to quarrel with Cathcart and then walk away? Why? He had no threat against him, no way to stop him from doing such a thing again as often as he wished to, until Cecily was no longer worth photographing, if that time ever came.
He would not have trusted to finding a weapon when he got there, he would have obtained it first. Pitt reached the center of the village, the shops and public houses, places where Orlando might have made enquiries or purchased something to use as a weapon.
It must have been something of considerable weight to land a blow sufficiently hard to kill a man. A length of plumbing pipe would do, or perhaps the handle of a garden implement.
He walked past a chemist’s shop with blue glass bottles in the window, and a grocer’s, and crossed the street. There was a small row of houses opposite a milliner and glovemaker. On the near side was a wine merchant. Would Orlando ask there? A bottle was an excellent weapon.
All Orlando had really needed to know was if Cathcart had any resident household staff. Laundry could be done easily enough by a woman who went in every day. Cooking was another matter.
Pitt had an advantage. He knew the answers already. There was only Mrs. Geddes. Orlando might have wasted much time before he had learned that. Also, Pitt did not have to be discreet.
He tried the laundry, the dairy, the greengrocer and the butcher. No one remembered anybody answering Orlando’s description. He might have been there, he might not. They could not say.
He was at the Crown and Anchor before one, and had a glass of cider waiting for Tellman when he arrived.
“Nothing missing,” Tellman said with a nod of thanks. He drank thirstily, looking towards the open door to the kitchen, from which drifted the smell of steak and kidney pudding. He was very partial to a good suet crust, as was Pitt himself. “Going to get some?” There was no need to specify what he meant.
In the early afternoon they started to consider where Orlando would have found or purchased a suitable weapon.
“Well, it won’t have been something you’d think of as meant for harm,” Tellman said, shaking his head. He looked profoundly unhappy, in spite of his excellent meal. “Who’d have thought people that clever would end up murdering someone?” he said miserably. “They’ve got a kind of . . . magic . . . in their minds. It really had me . . .” He stumbled for words to express the wonder he had felt, the excitement and awe at the world it had allowed him to glimpse and wooed him to enter. He had been more than willing to go. He would certainly not admit it to anyone at the Bow Street station, but he might one day go and watch a whole Shakespeare play, right from beginning to end. There was something about it. In spite of the fact that they were kings and queens and princes, the feelings in them were as real as those in the people he knew from day to day, it was just that they knew how to put them into those wonderful words.
Pitt knew no answer was necessary. He understood Tellman’s feelings. He shared them.
They went first to the ironmonger’s. It seemed the obvious place to start. The entire shop was crammed with every conceivable piece of equipment for the house, from watering cans to jelly molds, carriage foot warmers to chop covers and game ovens. There were gas lanterns, jelly bag stands, corkscrews and table gongs, toast racks, cake baskets, sardine boxes, butter coolers. There were also spades, forks, scythes, baby perambulators and a newly invented torpedo washer, which claimed to launder linens better than ever before. There were tin baths, carpenter’s tools and an array of knives for every purpose imaginable. He saw trussing needles, larding pins,