Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [134]
“I did,” she admitted, and saw him stiffen. His eyes lifted instantly and met hers, searching, startled. “Now I’m not sure,” she finished. “Why should anyone wish to kill you? And please don’t give me an evasive answer. This is too serious to play games with words. Clemency and Amos Lindsay are dead already. Are you sure there will be no more? What about Mrs. Turner and Mr. Oliphant?”
He winced as if she had struck him, and the pain in his eyes was dark, the tightening of his lips undisguised. The knife and fork slid from his hands.
“Do you imagine I haven’t thought? I’ve been through every case I have treated in the last five years. There isn’t a single one that it would be even sane to suspect of murder, let alone anything one would pursue.”
There was no point in turning back now, even though no doubt Thomas had already asked exactly the same questions.
“Every death?” she said quietly. “Are you sure absolutely every death was natural? Couldn’t one of them, somewhere, be murder?”
A half-unbelieving smile curled the corners of his lips.
“And you think whoever did it may fear I knew—or may come to realize that—and is trying to kill me to keep me silent?” He was not accepting the idea, simply turning over the possibility of it and finding it hard to fit into the medicine he knew, the ordinary domestic release or tragedy of death.
“Couldn’t it be so?” she asked, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice. “Aren’t there any deaths which could have been profitable to someone?”
He said nothing, and she knew he was remembering, and each one had its own pain. Each patient who had died had been some kind of failure for him, small or great, inevitable or shocking.
A new thought occurred to her. “Perhaps it was an accident and they covered it up, and they are afraid you realized the truth, and then they became afraid you would suspect them of having done it intentionally.”
“You have a melodramatic idea of death, Mrs. Pitt,” he said softly. “Usually it is simple: a fever that does not break but exhausts the body and burns it out; or a hacking cough that ends in hemorrhage and greater and greater weakness until there is no strength left. Sometimes it is a child, or a young person, perhaps a woman worn down by work and too many childbirths, or a man who has labored in the cold and the wet till his lungs are wasted. Sometimes it’s a fat man with apoplexy, or a baby that was never strong enough to live. Surprisingly often in the very end it is peaceful.”
She looked at his face, the memories so plain in his eyes, the grief not for the dead but for the confusion, anger and pain of those left behind; his inability to help them, even to touch the loneliness of that sudden, awful void when the soul of someone you love leaves the shell and gradually even the echo of life goes and it becomes only clay in the form of a person but without the substance—like a cold hearth when the fire is gone.
“But not always,” she said with regret, hating to have to pursue it. “Some people fight all the way, and some relatives don’t accept. Might there not be someone who felt you did not do all you could? Perhaps not from malice, simply neglect, or ignorance?” She said it with a small, sad smile, and so gently he could not think that she believed it herself.
A pucker formed between his brows and he met her eyes with a mild amusement.
“No one has ever showed anything beyond a natural distress. People are often angry, if death is unexpected; angry because fate has robbed them and they have to have something to blame, but it passes; and to be honest no one has suggested I could have done more.”
“No one?” She looked at him very carefully, but there was no evasion in his eyes, no faint color of deceit in his cheeks. “Not even the Misses Worlingham—over Theophilus’s death?”
“Oh—” He let out his breath in a sigh. “But that is just their way. They are among those who find it hard to accept that someone as … as full of opinion and as sound as Theophilus could die. He was always so much in evidence. If there was any subject under