Rutland Place - Anne Perry [100]
“Mrs. Denbigh!” He wanted to silence her, to get rid of that glittering face with its girlishly soft lines and its hollow, hate-bright eyes. “Mrs. Denbigh, please don’t distress yourself again! I will go tomorrow and talk to Miss Lagarde. I shall take Sergeant Harris and we shall look for the evidence you say is there. If we find any proof at all, then we shall act accordingly. Now Sergeant Harris will accompany you to your carriage, and I suggest you take some sedative and go to your bed early. This has been a most terrible day for you. You must be exhausted.”
She stood in the middle of the floor staring at him, apparently weighing in her mind whether he was going to do as she intended.
“I shall go tomorrow,” he acceded a little more sharply.
Without replying, she turned and walked out, closing the door behind her, leaving him alone and unaccountably miserable.
There was no way he could avoid it, this duty that gave him no satisfaction at all, no sense of resolution. But then, murder always brought tragedy.
He dispatched Harris to search yet again, this time particularly bedrooms and dressing rooms, for any cordial wine similar to that which Mina had drunk, or any empty bottles like the one found in Mina’s room. He also took the precaution of showing Harris a picture of the deadly nightshade plant, so that he might look for it in the conservatory and outhouses. Neither its presence nor its absence would prove anything, however, except that it was a country plant and would be unusual in the middle of London. But the Lagardes had a country house; there might be nightshade in every hedge or wood in Hertfordshire, for all he knew.
Eloise received him dressed completely in black; the blinds were drawn halfway in traditional mourning, the servants white-faced and somber. She sat on a chaise longue close to the fire, but she looked as if its heat would never again reach her.
“I’m sorry,” Pitt said instinctively—not only for his intrusion but for everything, for her loneliness, for death, for being unable to do anything but add to the burden.
She said nothing. What he did, perhaps what anyone did, no longer mattered to her. She was in a desolation beyond his power to touch, for good or ill.
He sat down. He felt ridiculous standing, as if his hands and feet might knock something over.
There was no point in stringing it out, trying to be tactful. That somehow made it worse, almost obscene, as if he did not recognize death.
“Mrs. Spencer-Brown came to see you the day she died.” It was a statement; no one had ever denied it.
“Yes.” She was uninterested.
“Did you give her a bottle of cordial wine?”
She was staring into the flames. “Cordial wine? No, I don’t think so. Didn’t you ask that before?”
“Yes.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, Miss Lagarde, because the poison was in it.”
A smile passed over her face, as shadowy as a ripple of cold wind over water.
“And you think I put it there? I did not.”
“But you did give her the wine?”
“I don’t remember. I may have. Perhaps she was looking peaked and said she was tired, or something like that. We do have cordial wine. A neighbor in Hertfordshire gives it to us.”
“Do you still have any?”
“I expect so. I don’t like it, but Tormod did. It’s kept in the butler’s pantry—it’s safe there. It’s quite strong.”
“Miss Lagarde—” She did not appear to understand the consequence of what they were discussing. She was removed from it, as though it were all a story about someone else. “Miss Lagarde, it is a very serious