Southampton Row - Anne Perry [108]
Pitt stared at Lena Forrest. “So you knew that at least this much was trickery.”
“I only just found out,” she said with a quiver in her voice.
“When?”
“After she was dead. I started to look. I didn’t tell you because it seemed . . .” She looked down, then quickly up again. “Well, she’s gone. I suppose she can’t be hurt. She doesn’t know anything now.”
“I think you’d better tell us what else you learned, Miss Forrest.”
“I don’t know anything else, just the chair. I . . . I heard of the things she did from someone who came by . . . with flowers, to say how sorry they were. So I looked. I never sat in on a séance. I was never there!”
Pitt could not draw anything more from her. Minute examination of the chair and the table, and a journey to the cellar, exposed a very fine mechanism, kept in perfect repair, also several bulbs for electric light, with which the house was fitted, and which worked from a generator also in the cellar.
“Why so many bulbs?” Pitt said thoughtfully. “Electric isn’t even in most of the house, only the parlor and the dining room. All the rest is gas, and coal for heat.”
“No idea,” Tellman confessed. “Looks like she used the electricity for the tricks more than anything else. In fact, come to think of it, there are only three electric lights altogether. Maybe she meant to get more?”
“And got the bulbs first?” Pitt raised his eyebrows.
Tellman shrugged his square, thin shoulders. “What we need to find out is what she knew about those three people that made one of them kill her. They all had secrets of one sort, and she was blackmailing them. I’d lay odds on that!”
“Well, Kingsley came because of his son’s death,” Pitt replied. “Mrs. Serracold wanted to contact her mother, so presumably hers is a family matter lying in the past. We have to be certain who Cartouche is, and why he came.”
“And why he wouldn’t even tell her his name!” Tellman said angrily. “For my money, that means he’s someone we’d recognize. And his secret is so bad he won’t risk that.” He grunted. “What if she recognized him? And that was why he had to kill her?”
Pitt thought about it for a few moments. “But according to both Mrs. Serracold and General Kingsley, he didn’t want to speak to anyone in particular . . .”
“Not yet! Perhaps he would have, once he’d really believed she could do it!” Tellman said with rising certainty. “Or perhaps when he was convinced she was genuine, he would have asked for someone. What if he was still testing her? From both witnesses, it sounds as if that was what he was trying to do.”
Tellman was right. Pitt acknowledged it, but he had no answer. The suggestion that it had been Francis Wray was not one that he believed, not if it included the possibility that it was he who had deliberately knelt on Maude Lamont’s chest and forced the egg white and cheesecloth down her throat, then held her until she choked to death, gasping and gagging as it filled her lungs, fighting for life.
Tellman was watching him. “We’ve got to find him,” he said grimly. “Mr. Wetron insists it’s this man in Teddington. He says the evidence will be there, if we look for it. He half suggested I send a squad of men over there and—”
“No!” Pitt cut across him sharply. “If anyone goes, I will.”
“Then you’d better go today,” Tellman warned. “Otherwise Wetron may—”
“Special Branch is in charge of this case.” Again Pitt interrupted him.
Tellman stiffened, his resentment still clear in his eyes and the hard set of his face. His jaw was tight and there was a tiny muscle ticking in his temple. “Don’t have a lot to show for it, though, do we?”
Pitt felt himself flush. The criticism was fair, but it still hurt, and the fact that in Special Branch he was out of his depth, and aware of it, and someone else