Paragon Walk - Anne Perry [6]
Pitt swallowed and tried to compose his face.
“Yes, ma’am. At what time, please?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“You must have some idea, Aunt Vespasia,” Emily interrupted. “It was after dinner.”
“If I say I have no idea, Emily, then I have no idea. I don’t watch clocks. I don’t care for them. When one gets to my age, one doesn’t. It was dark, if that is of any help.”
“A great help, thank you.” Pitt calculated quickly. It must have been after ten, at this time of the year. And Jessamyn Nash had sent the footman for the police at a little before quarter to eleven. “What did she come for, ma’am?” he asked.
“To get away from an excessively boring dinner guest,” Vespasia replied immediately. “Eliza Pomeroy. Knew her as a child, and she was a bore even then. Talks about other people’s ailments. Who cares? One’s own are tedious enough!”
Pitt hid a smile with difficulty. He dared not look at Emily.
“She told you that?” he inquired.
Vespasia considered whether to be patient with him— because he was foolish—and decided against it. The thought was plain in her face.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she said smartly. “She was a child of quite moderate breeding, neither good enough nor bad enough to be frank. She said she was returning some book or other.”
“You have the book?” He did not know what made him ask, except habit to check every detail. It was almost certainly immaterial.
“I should imagine so,” she replied with slight surprize. “But I never lend books I expect to require again, so I couldn’t say. She was an honest child. She hadn’t the imagination to lie successfully, and she was one of those comfortable people who know their own limitations. She would have done quite nicely, had she lived. No pretensions and no spite, poor little creature.”
The humor and the pleasantness vanished as suddenly as winter sun, leaving a chill in the room behind it.
Pitt felt obliged to speak, but his voice was remote, and it sounded trivial, meaningless.
“Did she make any remark about calling upon anyone else?”
Vespasia seemed to have been touched by the same coldness.
“No,” she said solemnly. “She had stayed here long enough to serve her purpose. If Eliza Pomeroy had chanced still to be at the Nashes, she could quite easily have excused herself and gone straight up to bed without discourtesy. From her conversation before leaving here, I gathered she intended to go straight home.”
“She took her leave of you some time after ten?” Pitt confirmed. “How long do you judge she was here?”
“A little above a half an hour. She came in the early dusk and left when it was fully dark.”
That would be roughly quarter to ten until about quarter past, he thought. She must have been attacked somewhere in the short journey down Paragon Walk. They were large houses with broad frontages, carriageways, and shrubbery deep enough to hide a figure, but even so there were only three between Emily’s and the Nashes’. She could not have been on the street for more than minutes—unless she had called somewhere else after all?
“She was engaged to marry Algernon Burnon?” His mind searched for possibilities.
“Very suitable,” Vespasia agreed. “A pleasant enough young man of quite adequate means. His habits are sober and his manners good, if a trifle boring, so far as I know. Altogether a suitable choice.”
Pitt wondered inwardly how much good sense appealed to seventeen-year-old Fanny.
“Do you know, ma’am,” he said aloud, “if there was anyone else who especially admired her?” He hoped his meaning was plain under such genteel disguise.
She looked at him with a slight puckering of her eyebrows, and over her shoulder he could see Emily wince.