Rutland Place - Anne Perry [47]
“No,” she said thoughtfully. “We know so little about each other, I sometimes wonder if we even know why we do the important things. I don’t suppose it is the reason that appears— like money, or love.”
“Mrs. Spencer-Brown seems to have been very well provided for.” He tried a more direct approach. “Do you suppose it could have been anything to do with an affaire of love?”
Her mouth quivered with a suppressed smile.
“How delicate of you, Inspector. I have no idea about that, either. I’m sorry. If she had a lover, then she was more discreet than I gave her credit for.”
“Perhaps she loved someone who did not return her feelings?” he suggested.
“Possibly. But if all the people who ever did were to kill themselves, half of London would be occupied burying the other half!” She dismissed it with a lift of her fingers. “Mina was not a melancholy romantic, you know. She was a highly practical person, and fully acquainted with the realities of life. And she was thirty-five, not eighteen!”
“People of thirty-five can fall in love.” He smiled very slightly.
She looked him up and down, judging him correctly to within a year.
“Of course they can,” she agreed, with the shadow of an answering smile. “People can fall in love at any age at all. But at thirty-five they have probably had the experience several times before and do not mistake it for the end of the world when it goes amiss.”
“Then why do you think Mrs. Spencer-Brown killed herself, Mrs. Charrington?” He surprised himself by being so candid.
“I? You really wish for my opinion, Inspector?”
“I do.”
“I am disinclined to believe that she did. Mina was far too practical not to find some way out of whatever misfortune she had got herself into. She was not an emotional woman, and I never knew anyone less hysterical.”
“An accident?”
“Not of her making. I should think an idiotic maid moved bottles or boxes, or mixed two things together to save room and created a poison by mistake. I daresay you will never find out, unless your policeman removed all the containers in the house before the servants had any opportunity to destroy or empty them. If I were you, I shouldn’t worry myself—there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it, either to undo it or to prevent it happening again somewhere else, to somebody else.”
“A domestic accident?”
“I would think so. If you had ever been responsible for the running of a large house, Inspector, you would know what extraordinary things can happen. If you were aware what some cooks do, and what other strange bodies find their way into the larder, I daresay you would never eat again!”
He stood up, concealing an unseemly impulse to laugh that welled up inside him. There was something in her he liked enormously.
“Thank you, ma’am. If that is indeed what happened, then I expect you are right—I shall never know.”
She rang the bell for the butler to show Pitt out.
“It is one of the marks of wisdom to learn to leave alone that which you cannot help,” she said gently. “You will do more harm than good threshing all the fine chaff to discover a grain of truth. A lot of people will be frightened, perhaps made unemployable in the future, and you will still not have helped anyone.”
He called on Theodora von Schenck and found her an utterly different kind of woman: handsome in her own way, but entirely lacking the aristocratic beauty of Ambrosine or the ethereal delicacy of Eloise. But more surprising than her appearance was the fact that, like Charlotte, she was busy with quite ordinary household chores. When Pitt arrived, she was counting linen and sorting into a pile the things that required mending or replacement. In fact, she did not seem to be ashamed that she had put some aside to be cut down into smaller articles, such as pillowcases from worn sheets, and linen cloths for drying and polishing from those pieces that were smaller or more worn.
However, for all her frankness, she was