Paragon Walk - Anne Perry [87]
There were gates, of course, but he had already ascertained that Hallam’s was kept locked.
He followed the last of the funeral out of the gate and turned up the street, away from the graveyard and back toward the police station. He believed it was Hallam. It was possible, and the horror of it was in his face. But he had not enough to prove it. If Hallam were simply to deny it, to say someone had followed Fulbert and seized the chance to murder him and leave the body in Hallam’s house, there was nothing to prove him a liar. He could not arrest a man of Hallam Cayley’s social position without a better case than that.
If he could not prove Hallam guilty, the next best thing he could do was to disprove any other possibility. It was a thin case—and unsatisfactory.
At the police station one small question was answered— why Algernon Burnon had been so reluctant to name the person in whose company he claimed to have been on the evening Fanny was killed. Forbes had at last run her down, a handsome and cheerful girl who in a higher class of society might have called herself a courtesan, but from her usual clientele was no more than a tart. No wonder Algernon had preferred the odd glance of halfhearted suspicion to the surety that he had been paying for such indulgence while his fiancée was struggling for her life.
The day after, Pitt and Forbes went back to the Walk, quietly, going in by back doors and asking to see valets. No one’s clothes showed stains of damp or moss, and there was no discernible brick dust, just the general dust of a dry summer. There had been one or two small tears, but nothing unaccountable. But then one could so easily say one had caught it getting in or out of a carriage, or in one’s own garden. Rose thorns tore; one knelt on the grass to pick up a fallen coin or handkerchief.
He even went to Hallam Cayley’s garden and asked permission to look at the walls on both sides, and a highly nervous footman escorted him around step by step, watching him with increasing tension and unhappiness, as no mark or disturbance was found. If anyone had climbed over these walls lately, they had done it with a padded ladder placed so carefully it had not crushed the moss nor scratched a brick, and they had smoothed out the holes left by the feet of the ladder in the ground. Such care seemed impossible. How could he have hauled the ladder after him back to his own side without leaving great runnels in the moss on top of the wall? And once back, what then of the ladder marks in the ground? The summer had been dry, but the garden earth was still deep and friable enough to mark easily. He tried it with the weight of his own foot and left an unmistakable print.
There was a door in the farthest wall onto the path beyond the aspen trees at the end, but it was locked, and the gardener’s boy had the key and said it had never left him.
Hallam was out. Tomorrow Pitt would call and ask him about keys, if he had ever had another and given or lent it, but it was only a formality. He did not believe for a moment that anyone else had come along the pathway at the end and let themselves in to keep an appointment with Fulbert in Hallam’s house—and still less that it could have been a chance meeting.
He went home and told Charlotte nothing about it. He wanted to forget the whole affair and enjoy his own family, the peace and sureness of it. Even though Jemima was asleep, he demanded that Charlotte get her up, and then he sat in the parlor with her in his arms, while she blinked at him sleepily, unsure why she had been roused. He talked to her, telling her about his own childhood on the big estate in the country, exactly as if she understood him, and Charlotte sat opposite, smiling. She had some white sewing in her hands; he thought it looked like one of his shirts. He had no idea if she knew why he was talking like this—that it was to blot out Paragon Walk and what must be faced tomorrow. If she had, she was wise enough not to let him know.
There was nothing new at the police station. He asked to see his superior officers and told them