Paragon Walk - Anne Perry [0]
Anne Perry
for my mother
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
One
INSPECTOR PITT STARED down at the girl, and an overwhelming sense of loss soaked through him. He had never known her in life, but he knew and treasured all the things that now she had lost.
She was slight, with fair brown hair, a childish seventeen. Lying on the white morgue table, she looked brittle enough to have snapped if he had touched her. There were bruises on her arms where she had fought.
She was expensively dressed in lavender silk, and there was a gold and pearl chain around her throat—things he could never have afforded. They were pretty, trivial enough in the face of death, and yet he would like to have been able to give such things to Charlotte.
Thoughts of Charlotte, safe and warm at home, brought a sickness tightening in his stomach. Had some man loved this girl as he loved Charlotte? Was there someone right now for whom everything clean and bright and gentle had gone? All laughter snatched away, with the breaking of this fragile body?
He forced himself to look at her again, but his eyes avoided the wound in her chest, the stream of blood, now congealed and thick. The white face was expressionless, all surprize or horror ironed out of it. It was a little pinched.
She had lived in Paragon Walk, very rich and very fashionable, and no doubt also idle. He had nothing in common with her. He had worked ever since leaving the estate that had employed his father possessing nothing but a cardboard box with a comb and a change of shirt and an education shared with the son of the great house. He had seen the poverty and the despair that teemed just behind the elegant streets and squares of London, things this girl had never dreamed of.
He pulled a face as he remembered with a twist of humor how horrified Charlotte had been when he had first described them to her, when he was merely the policeman investigating the Cater Street murders, and she a daughter of the Ellison house. Her parents had been appalled even to have him in the establishment, let alone to address him socially. It had taken courage for Charlotte to marry him, and at the thought of it the warmth burst up inside him again, and his fingers clenched on the edge of the table.
He looked down at the girl’s face again, furious at the waste, the wealth of experience she would never know, the chances gone.
He turned away.
“Last night after dark,” the constable beside him said glumly. “Ugly business. Do you know Paragon Walk, sir? Very ’igh class neighborhood, that. Most of it is, around there.”
“Yes,” Pitt said absently. Of course, he knew it; it was part of his district. He did not add that he knew Paragon Walk especially, because Charlotte’s sister had her town house there and so it had remained in his mind. As Charlotte had married socially beneath her, so Emily had married above and was now Lady Ashworth.
“Not the sort of thing you’d expect,” the constable went on, “not in a place like that.” He made a slight click of disapproval with his tongue. “I don’t know what things is coming to, what with General Gordon killed by that there dervish, or whatever, in January, and now we got rapists loose in a place like Paragon Walk. Shockin’, I call it, poor young girl like that. Looks as innocent as a lamb, don’t she?” He stared down at her mournfully.
Pitt turned round. “Did you say raped?”
“Yes, sir. Didn’t they tell you that at the station?”
“No, Forbes, they did not,” Pitt was sharper than he meant to be, to cover the new misery. “They just said murder.”
“Oh, well, she’s been murdered, too,” Forbes added reasonably. “Poor creature.” He sniffed. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to go to Paragon Walk now it’s morning, like, and talk to all them people?”
“Yes,” Pitt agreed, turning to leave. There was nothing more he could do here. The means of death was obvious, a long, sharp-bladed knife at least an inch broad. There was only one wound, which had to have been fatal.
“Right,” Forbes followed him up the steps, his heavy feet