Rutland Place - Anne Perry [22]
“I saw her! Thomas, I’m perfectly capable of putting together what I saw this afternoon, the locket, and what will happen if Papa finds out!”
“Then do what you can to make sure that he doesn’t. Warn her to be careful, by all means, and to forget the locket, but don’t do anything more. You will only make it worse.”
She stared back at him, into his light, clever eyes. This time he was wrong. He knew a lot about people in general, but she knew more about women. Caroline needed more than a warning. She needed help. And whatever Pitt said, Charlotte would have to give it.
She lowered her eyes. “I’ll warn her—about pursuing the locket,” she agreed.
He understood her better than she knew. He would not press her into a position where she was obliged to lie. He sat back, resigned but unhappy.
Chapter Three
PITT WAS TOO BUSY with his own duties to harass his mind with anxieties over Caroline. Previous cases had led him into association with people of similar positions in Society, but the circumstances in which he had seen them had necessarily been unusual, and he was aware that these past associations gave him little real understanding of their beliefs or their values. He understood even less of what might be acceptable to them in their relationships, and what would cause irreparable harm.
Pitt felt it was dangerous for Charlotte to get mixed up in the Rutland Place thefts, but he knew that most of his reaction sprang from his emotions rather than his reason: he was afraid she would be hurt. Now that she had moved from Cater Street and left her parents’ home, she had absorbed new beliefs, albeit some of them unconsciously, and she had forgotten many assumptions that used to be as natural to her as they still were to her parents. She had changed, and he was afraid that she had not realized how much—or that she had expected them to have changed also. Her loyal, fiercely compassionate, but blind interference could so easily bring pain to them all.
But he did not know how to persuade her from it. She was too close to see.
He was sitting at his brown wood desk at the police station looking at an unpromising list of stolen articles, his mind on Charlotte, when a sharp-nosed constable came in, his face pinched, eyes bright.
“Death,” he said simply.
Pitt raised his head. “Indeed. Not an uncommon occurrence, unfortunately. Why does this one interest us?” His mind pictured the alleys and creaking piles of rotting timber of the rookeries, the slums that backed onto the solid and spacious houses of the respectable. People died in them every day, every hour: some died from cold, some from disease or starvation, a few from murder. Pitt could afford to concern himself only with the last, and not always with them.
“Whose?” he asked.
“Woman.” The constable was as sparing with words as with his money. “Wealthy woman, good address. Married.”
Pitt’s interest quickened. “Murder?” he said, half hopeful, and ashamed of it. Murder was a double tragedy—not only for the victim and those who cared for her, but for the murderer also, and whoever loved or needed or pitied the tormented soul. But it was less gray, less inherently part of a problem too vast to begin, than death from street violence, or poverty, which was innate in the very pattern of the rookeries.
“Don’t know.” The constable’s eyes never moved from Pitt’s face. “Need to find out. Could be.”
Pitt fixed him with a cold stare.
“Who is dead?” he demanded. “And where?”
“A Mrs. Wilhelmina Spencer-Brown,” the constable answered levelly, a faint ring of anticipation in his voice at last. “Of number eleven Rutland Place.”
Pitt sat up. “Did you say Rutland Place, Harris?”
“Yes, sir. Know it, do you, sir?” He added the “sir” only to keep from being impertinent; usually he did without such extra niceties, but Pitt was his superior and he wanted to work on this job. Even if it was not murder, and it probably was not, a death in Society was still a great deal more interesting than the run-of-the-mill