Resurrection Row - Anne Perry [88]
Still there was no reply from whomever he was speaking to.
“You pretty thing.” He was still talking gently, softly. “You beautiful girl.”
She could not stay any longer overhearing a conversation that was obviously desperately private. She took a step to creep, in the lee of the tree trunk, till she was back on the path and could affect not to have noticed him.
Her foot cracked on a twig, and it broke loudly.
He stood up and came around, enormous in a greatcoat; square, like the tree itself.
Alicia shut her eyes, her face burning up with her distress for him. She was sure it must be scarlet. She would have given anything not to have been witness to his shameful conduct.
“Good morning, Lady Alicia,” he said with the softness she had heard in it before.
“Good morning, Mr. Smith,” she replied, swallowing hard. She must force herself to carry it off with some aplomb. He was an American and a social impossibility, but she should know how to conduct herself whatever the occasion.
She opened her eyes.
He was standing in front of her, holding a little calico cat that was stretching and curling under his arms. He saw her glazed look and glanced down at the animal, his fingers running gently over its fur. She could hear the little creature singing even from where she was.
The color rose up to his face also when he realized she had overheard him talking to it.
“Oh,” he said a little awkwardly. “Don’t mind me, ma’am. I often talk to animals, especially cats. I’m kind of fond of this one in particular.”
She breathed out a sigh of immense relief. She found she was grinning foolishly, a sudden, bubbling happiness inside her. She stretched out her fingers to touch the cat.
Virgil Smith was smiling, too, a shining tenderness in his face.
For the first time she recognized it and knew what it was. Only for a moment did it surprise her; then it seemed like something familiar, amazing and beautiful, like the leaves bursting open in the milky sunshine of spring.
10
PITT CONSIDERED WHAT might be reasonable, what he might expect to receive, and then requested three additional constables to help him with the enormous task of sorting and identifying the photographs in Godolphin Jones’s shop.
He was granted one, along with the one he already had.
He dispatched them both back to Resurrection Row with instructions to find a name for every face, and then an occupation and a social background, but not to allow any part of the picture to be seen other than the head and to ask no questions and to give no information as to where or in what circumstances the photographs had been found. This last instruction had been repeated to him by his superiors with much anxiety and a great deal of hemming and hawing as to whether there might not be some other way of tackling the whole matter. One superintendent even suggested tentatively that perhaps it would be advisable to overlook the tragedy as insoluble and turn their attention to something else. There was, for example, a nasty case of burglary that was still outstanding, and it would be a most useful thing if they could recover the property.
Pitt pointed out that Jones had been a society artist and that anyone who had lived in an area like Gadstone Park could not be murdered and then merely forgotten, or other residents of such areas would feel distinctly uneasy as to their own future safety.
The point was conceded him, unhappily.
Then Pitt himself went back to the Park and Major Rodney. This time he would not be put off by the major’s anger or protestations; he could no longer afford to be. If the murderer of Godolphin Jones had taken advantage of the grave robbings to hide his own crime, as St. Jermyn had suggested, then the death of Lord Augustus was irrelevant. There was no point in looking any further for sense or connection between Albert Wilson, Horrie Snipe, W. W. Porteous, and Lord Augustus, because there was none. As far as either motive or means was concerned, the murder of Godolphin Jones stood alone. The key to them surely