Silence in Hanover Close - Anne Perry [135]
The constable shrugged. “If you say so, Mr. Pitt. But I’ll tell yer this: she’d scrubbed a few floors in ’er time. A look at ’er ’ands and ’er knees’d tell yer that. I seen too many women with them callouses not ter know. They didn’t come from prayin’, that’s for certain.”
Pitt stared at him. “You must be wrong!”
“No, Mr. Pitt. I looked at ’er proper, very careful, poor soul. It’s the job, an’ I knows ’ow ter do it. See, we ’ad no name for ’er”—a flash of pity crossed his face—“we still ’aven’t, come ter that.”
A staggering and dreadful new thought was beginning to take shape in Pitt’s mind: what if it were not the real Cerise he had found, but someone else, a helpless victim left there to fool him? Suppose the whole thing had been contrived to get rid of him, to land him precisely where he was now, in the Steel, helpless, entombed alive. Someone had murdered that wretched woman in order to cripple Pitt. Someone had been watching him, planning for him to arrive and be caught exactly where he was—while the real Cerise was still alive! Did Ballarat know that? Was he deliberately protecting her by turning away from the case, pretending he believed the obvious, and that Pitt was guilty?
Then how high did it go, this corruption, this treason?
No, he could not believe Ballarat had done it knowingly. He was too smug, too small in imagination. He had not the courage to play such a high game. He was complacent, insensitive, lacking imagination, a moral coward, a social climber, but he was English to the bone. In his own stubborn way he would have died before committing treason. If there were no England, what would be left for him to enjoy? What else was there to aspire to? No, Ballarat was being used.
But by whom?
“Are you all right, Mr. Pitt?” the constable said anxiously. “You look awful—taken back.”
“You’re sure about the calluses?” Pitt said slowly, trying to keep the despair out of his voice. “What about her face? Was it beautiful? At least, could you imagine she might have had grace, a kind of loveliness?”
The constable shook his head slowly. “ ’Ard ter say, Mr. Pitt.”
“The bones!” Pitt leaned forward impatiently. “I know about the swelling, the discoloration. But her bones. I can’t remember.” He waited, eyes fixed on the constable’s face.
“I’m sure about the calluses,” he said carefully. “And as well as I can reckon, sir, she were more or less ordinary, quite good, not plain, as yer might say, but nothin’ special neither. Why, Mr. Pitt? What is it you’re thinking?”
“That it wasn’t Cerise, Constable, it was some poor creature dressed in her clothes and murdered to implicate me. Cerise is still alive.”
“Gor’ blimey!” The constable breathed out slowly. There was only the faintest skepticism in his voice, a mere shadow of doubt in his plain, round face. “What do yer want me ter do, Mr. Pitt?”
“I don’t know, Constable, God help us. At the moment I have no idea.”
12
CHARLOTTE’S THOUGHTS WERE running parallel to Pitt’s, although at this point, of course, she did not know it. She began by assuming that Pitt was telling the absolute truth. He had looked for Cerise quite openly, and after dogged police work had been approached by someone who had led him to the house in Seven Dials, where he had arrived at precisely the right time to find her with her neck broken, and thus be caught in the appearance of having killed her himself.
Was that a coincidence, or had the killer organized her death to fall just that way, in one act silencing Cerise and disposing of Pitt? A stroke of superb fortune, or genius?
What had Cerise known that was worth the extraordinary risk of killing Dulcie to keep Pitt from her? Surely that had been a far more impulsive and dangerous murder. It must be something damning: the truth about Robert York’s death, or the identity of the spy—which were probably the same thing.
It still seemed most likely that Robert York had been Cerise’s lover, and she