Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [117]
“Did anybody see anyone else here this afternoon?” Pitt asked one more time. “Anyone at all?”
Pitt took down everything else they had to say, but it added nothing more. At midnight he left Ewart and a white-faced Constable Binns to continue searching for the customers the women had named and question them as to who they had seen and what they had heard. That was work for the local station.
Lennox had taken the body of Nora Gough in the mortuary wagon, and tomorrow he would perform an autopsy on her. Not that Pitt expected it to tell him anything different from the brief, sad story he already knew.
He arrived home at five minutes to one to find Charlotte standing in the hall, the parlor door open behind her, her face pale, eyes wide.
He closed the door. He had forgotten until this moment that he was still dressed in his Sunday best and had no coat with him. He had expected to be home long before this. Neither had he eaten.
“Was it the same?” she asked huskily.
He nodded. “Exactly the same.” He walked past her into the parlor and sat down in his easy chair, but forward, leaning on his knees, not relaxing.
She came in and closed the door with a click, then sat opposite him.
“You never told me what the first was like,” she said quietly. “Perhaps you should.”
He knew she did not mean that she could see any answer he did not, simply that the process of explaining would clarify his own mind, as it had so often before. There was no better way to learn what one meant than by trying to explain it to someone else who was not afraid to say they did not understand.
Carefully, hating every detail, he told her about finding the body of Ada McKinley, what it was like, what had been done to her. He watched her face, and saw the pain in it, but she did not look away.
“And this time?” she asked. “What was her name?”
“Nora Gough.”
“And it was exactly the same?”
“Yes. Broken fingers and toes. Water. Garter with the ribbon ’round her arm, the boots buttoned together.”
“That couldn’t be chance,” she said. “Who knew about all those things, apart from whoever did it?”
“Ewart, Lennox, he’s the police surgeon, Cornwallis, and the constable who was first called. And Tellman,” he answered. “No one else.”
“Newspapers?”
“No.”
“The women in the same house could have talked,” she pointed out. “People do, especially about something that frightens them. To share it diminishes it … sometimes.”
“Even they didn’t have all the details,” he said, remembering what Rose Burke had actually seen. “They didn’t know about the fingers and toes. In fact, Binns and Tellman didn’t either.”
She was sitting forward also, her knees close to his, her hands only inches away.
“Then it was the same person, wasn’t it,” she said softly. There was no criticism in her voice, nor did he see fear in her eyes, only sorrow.
“Yes,” he answered, biting his lip. “It must have been.” Neither of them added that it could not then have been Costigan, but it hung in the air between them, with all its dark pain and guilt.
Charlotte put her hands over his and held them.
“Was it Finlay FitzJames?” she asked, searching his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said frankly. “I found a handkerchief under Nora Gough’s pillow with his initials on it. They aren’t common. But it doesn’t prove he was there tonight.” He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “But her one customer tonight was seen. He was fair-haired and well-dressed. In other words, a gentleman.”
“Does Finlay FitzJames have fair hair?”
“Yes. Very handsome hair, thick and waving. And they mentioned that particularly tonight.”
“Thomas …”
Her voice had changed. He was aware she was about to tell him something he would not like, something which she found extremely difficult.
“What?”
“Emily was absolutely sure Finlay FitzJames was innocent. She knows his sister….”
He waited.
“She saw him the night Ada was killed, you know?” She looked up, her brow furrowed, her eyes dark and wide.
“Emily saw Finlay?” He was incredulous. “Why on earth didn’t she say so?”
“No … no,