Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [40]
“Good afternoon, Dr. Shaw,” he said quietly. “I am sorry to intrude again, but there are many questions I need to ask.”
“Of course.” Shaw absentmindedly straightened the Ashanti spear, and then moved to the bookcase and leveled a couple of volumes. “But I’ve already told you everything I can think of.”
“Someone lit those fires deliberately, Dr. Shaw,” Pitt reminded him.
Shaw winced and looked at Pitt. “I know that. If I had the faintest idea, don’t you think I’d tell you?”
“What about your patients? Have you treated anyone for any disease that they might wish to conceal—”
“For God’s sake, what?” Shaw stared at him, eyes wide. “If it were contagious I should report it, regardless of what they wished! If it were insanity I should have them committed!”
“What about syphilis?”
Shaw stopped in mid movement, his arms in the air. “Touché,” he said very quietly. “Both contagious and causing insanity in the end. And I should very probably keep silence. I certainly should not make it public.” A flicker of irony crossed his face. “It is not passed by shaking hands or sharing a glass of wine, nor is the insanity secret or homicidal.”
“And have you treated any such cases?” Pitt smiled blandly, and had no intention of allowing Shaw to sidestep an answer.
“If I had, I should not break a patient’s confidence now.” Shaw looked back at him with candor and complete defiance. “Nor will I discuss with you any other medical confidence I may have received—on any subject.”
“Then we may be some considerable time discovering who murdered your wife, Dr. Shaw.” Pitt looked at him coolly. “But I will not stop trying, whatever I have to overturn to find the truth. Apart from the fact that it is my job—the more I hear of her, the more I believe she deserves it.”
Shaw’s face paled and the muscles tightened in his neck and his mouth pulled thin as if he had been caught by some necessary inner pain, but he did not speak.
Pitt knew he was wounding, and hated it, but to withhold now might make it worse in the close future.
“And if, as seems probable, it was not your wife the murderer was after,” he went on, “but yourself, then he—or she—will very possibly try again. I assume you have considered that?”
Shaw’s face was white.
“I have, Mr. Pitt,” he said very quietly. “But I cannot break my code of medical ethics on that chance—even were it a certainty. To betray my patients would not necessarily save me—and it is not a bargain I am prepared to make. Whatever you learn, you will have to do it in some other way.”
Pitt was not surprised. It was what he had expected of the man, and in spite of the frustration, he would have been at least in part disappointed had he received more.
He glanced at Lindsay’s face, pink in the reflected firelight, and saw a deep affection in it and a certain wry satisfaction. He too would have suffered a loss had Shaw been willing to speak.
“Then I had better continue with it in my own way,” Pitt accepted, standing a little straighter. “Good day, Mr. Lindsay, and thank you for your frankness. Good day, Dr. Shaw.”
“Good day, sir,” Lindsay replied with unusual courtesy, and Shaw stood silent by the bookshelves.
The manservant returned and showed him out into the autumn sunlight, thin and gold, and the wind scurrying dry leaves along the footpath. It took him half an hour’s brisk walk before he found a hansom to take him back into the city.
4
CHARLOTTE DID NOT enjoy the public omnibus, but to hire a hansom cab all the way from Bloomsbury to her mother’s home on Cater Street was an unwarranted extravagance; and should there be any little surplus for her to spend, there were better things that might be done with it. Particularly she had in mind a new gown on which to wear Emily’s silk flowers. Not, of course, that a cab fare