Silence in Hanover Close - Anne Perry [111]
“Of course it has,” he agreed. He reached out across the table and took her hands, quite gently. It was in no way a familiarity, just friendship, and she found herself gripping him back, hard, hanging on. “Do you want me to fetch Emily?” he asked.
“Yes—please do. I don’t trust myself to go to the Yorks’.” She searched for an excuse. “You’ll have to tell her it’s family illness or something. I don’t know how you’ll explain knowing her, but you can scrape up a good lie before you get there.” The thought of seeing Emily was such a relief, almost like someone lighting a fire in a cold room. Perhaps she would even come and stay with Charlotte. They could work together, as they had done in the past on other cases, ones that mattered infinitely less than this.
“Then what would you like me to do?” he asked. “I’ve never tried detecting before, and this is a damn sight too important for amateurs, but I’ll do whatever I can.”
“I don’t know where to begin,” she said, her misery returning. “Cerise is dead. Apart from the murderer she may be the only one who knew the truth.”
“Well, at least we know she wasn’t the murderer herself,” he pointed out. “Someone killed her, and it would be too much to assume it’s coincidence, just as Thomas found her. And we must suppose someone, almost certainly the same person, killed poor Dulcie.”
She stared at him. “That means someone in the York house, or one of the Danvers, or Felix or Sonia Asherson.”
“That’s right.”
“But what would any of them be doing in a place like Seven Dials?”
“Murdering Cerise to keep her silent,” he answered very quietly, his face more somber than she had ever seen it. There was an anger in him, a weight she had not found before. “I think that means they knew where she was all the time,” he went on. “They could hardly have run into her by chance.”
“One of the Yorks, the Danvers, or the Ashersons,” she said again. “Emily—” She stopped. Emily was alone in the York house, unable to defend herself except by a disguise of ignorance, and Pitt was imprisoned in Coldbath Fields awaiting trial for murder. Both could end in death.
But Emily was free; at least she could fight for herself!
But surely justice—! The truth? Ballarat would—
She must stop behaving like a child, deceiving herself into comfort, finding excuses to avoid the painful. Ballarat would do nothing.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said quietly. “Don’t ask Emily to come home. The only way she can help Thomas is by staying where she is. Whoever murdered Cerise, and Robert York and Dulcie, is in Hanover Close, and the only way we are going to find that person is by watching them so closely we see what emotions lie behind the facades, who is frightened, who is lying.”
He sat still. For a moment she was afraid he was going to argue, point out the dangers to Emily, perhaps even tell her all the accidents that could be made to happen; but he said nothing.
“You and I can keep going as often as possible,” she went on. “But we can never see them in their unguarded moments as she can. Have you any idea how much a woman trusts her lady’s maid?”
For the first time he smiled. “I imagine about as much as a man trusts his valet,” he answered. “Or perhaps a trifle more: women spend more time at home, and on the whole give more attention to appearance.”
There was another aspect that needed explaining, Charlotte realized.
“Jack, she probably won’t see a newspaper. Maids don’t, especially if