Resurrection Row - Anne Perry [70]
“Major Rodney has two pictures?” Pitt was surprised. He would not have imagined Major Rodney as a man who cared for, or could afford, such an indulgence in art.
“Why not?” she asked, eyebrows raised. “One of himself, and one of Miss Priscilla and Miss Mary Ann together.”
“I see. Thank you, ma’am. You have been very helpful.”
“I don’t see how!”
He was not quite sure of himself, but at least there were other places to search, and in the morning he would call on Major and the Misses Rodney. He excused himself and set out in the returning fog to go back to the police station, and then home.
If Lady Cantlay had been startled to hear of Godolphin Jones’s murder, Major Rodney was shattered. He sat in the chair like a man who has nearly been drowned. He gasped for breath, and his face was mottled with red.
“Oh, my God! How absolute appalling! Strangled, you say? Where did they find him?”
“In another man’s grave,” Pitt replied, unsure again whether to reach for the bell and call a servant. It was a reaction he had been totally unprepared for. The man was a soldier; he must have seen death, violent and bloody death, a thousand times. He had fought in the Crimea, and from what Pitt had heard of the tragic and desperate war, a man who had survived that ought to be able to look on hell itself and keep his stomach.
Rodney was beginning to compose himself. “How dreadful. How on earth did you know to look?”
“We didn’t,” Pitt said honestly. “We found him quite by chance.”
“That’s preposterous! You can’t go around digging up graves to see what you will find in them—by chance!”
“No, of course not, sir.” Pitt was awkward again. He had never known himself so clumsy. “We expected the grave to have been robbed, to be empty.”
Major Rodney stared at him.
“We had the corpse whose grave it was!” Pitt tried to make him understand. “He was the man we first took to be Lord Augustus—on the cab near the theatre—”
“Oh.” Major Rodney sat upright as though he were on horseback in a parade. “I see. Why didn’t you say so to begin with? Well, I’m afraid there is nothing I can tell you. Thank you for informing me.”
Pitt remained seated. “You knew Mr. Jones.”
“Not socially, no. Not our sort of person. Artist, you know.”
“He painted your picture, did he not?”
“Oh, yes—knew him professionally. Can’t tell you anything about him. That’s all there is to it. And I won’t have you distressing my sisters with talk about murders and death. I’ll tell them myself, as I see fit.”
“Did you have a picture painted of them, also?”
“I did. What of it? Quite an ordinary thing to do. Lots of people have portraits.”
“May I see them, please?”
“Whatever for? Ordinary enough. But I suppose so, if it’ll make you go away and leave us alone. Poor man.” He shook his head. “Pity. Dreadful way to die.” And he stood up, small, slight, and ramrod stiff, and led Pitt into the withdrawing room.
Pitt stared at the very formal portrait on the far wall above the sideboard. Instantly he disliked it. It was grandiloquent, full of scarlets and glinting metal, a child in an old man’s body playing at soldiers. Had it been intended as ironic it would have been clever, but again the colors were unsubtle and a little cloudy.
He went up to and found his eye drawn without consciousness to the left corner. There was a small caterpillar, totally irrelevant to the composition but cleverly masked in the background, a brown-bodied creature in a brown, mottled shadow.
“And I believe there is also one of your sisters?” He stepped back and turned to face the major.
“Can’t think what you want to see it for,” the major said with surprise. “Quite ordinary painting. Still, if you like—”
“Yes, please,” Pitt went after him into the next room. It was on the facing wall, between two jardinieres, a larger work than the first. The pose was fussy, the scenery cluttered with far too many props, the colors a little better but with too much pink. He looked in the left corner and found the same caterpillar, exactly the same