Resurrection Row - Anne Perry [28]
She was surprised. Pitt had not told her it had been done. “You mean it is over?” she asked.
His eyebrows went up. “Yes. You didn’t know?”
“No. What did they find?”
He looked angry and unhappy. “They made it worse than before. It made their suspicions obvious, without proving anything. Alicia consented to it because Thomas told her it would put an end to all the speculation. But the answer was equivocal. It could have been natural heart failure, or it could have been an overdose of digitalis. And an overdose could have been accidental—his mother keeps it for her heart—or it could have been murder.”
Of course she knew he would say this, but now that he had, she did not know how to answer. She asked the obvious question.
“Is there any reason to suppose it was murder?”
“The damned corpse was dug up twice!” he said furiously, his helplessness breaking through in anger. “That isn’t exactly common, you know! Especially in that sort of society. Good God, Charlotte, have you forgotten what suspicion of murder did to us in Cater Street?”
“It stripped off the facade, so we saw all the weak and ugly things we had learned to hide from ourselves and each other,” she said quietly. “What are you afraid you will see here?”
He stared at her, something close to dislike in his face. She would have expected it to hurt her, and yet it did not, not closely, inside herself where real pain lived; rather, it was the distant ache one feels for someone unknown, whose misfortune one has seen before and known to expect.
“I’m sorry.” She meant it, not as an apology but as an expression of regret, even sympathy. “I really am sorry, but I don’t know of anything I can say or do to help.”
His anger vanished. He was caught; he knew all the disillusion, the malice, and the fear that almost inevitably would follow, and he was afraid.
He was still looking for an escape. “Can’t they leave it now?” he said quietly, his voice tight, his hands white on the wooden tabletop. “Alicia didn’t kill him; I didn’t; and the old lady wouldn’t have, unless she gave him a dose accidentally, and it was too much for him.” He looked up at Charlotte. “But no one can prove it; all they will do is raise a lot of doubts, make everyone look with suspicion at each other. Can’t Thomas just leave it now? Then there’ll be some hope that whoever did this wretched thing will give up, be convinced at last that there’s nothing to it?”
She did not know what to say. She would like to have believed him and accepted that it was simply either a natural death or an accident. But why the disinterment—twice? And why was he afraid? Was it no more than the shadow of Cater Street indelible in the memory, or was there growing in him a fear that Alicia could have become so in love with him, so frustrated by her husband that she had taken a simple, easily grasped opportunity and given him a fatal dose of his mother’s medicine? She looked at Dominic’s handsome face and felt as she sometimes did towards Jemima.
“He may do.” She wanted to comfort him; she had known him a long time, and he had been part of her life, part of the deepest of her emotions in those callow, vulnerable years before she met Pitt. Yet it would be both useless and stupid to lie. “But grave robbing is a crime,” she said clearly. “And if there is a chance he can find who did it, he will have to continue.”
“He won’t find out!” He spoke with such conviction she knew it was for himself he insisted, not for her.
“Probably not,” she agreed. “Unless, of course, they do it again? Or they do something else?”
It was a thought he had been trying to banish. Now she had brought it where it could not be denied.
“It’s insane!” he said hotly. It was the easiest way to explain it, the only acceptable way. Insanity did not have to have reason; by its very nature any incongruity could be explained and wiped away.
“Perhaps.”
He had finished his