Southampton Row - Anne Perry [28]
Pitt followed the passage towards the back of the house, past several other doors, to the one at the end which was open, with a pattern of sunlight on a scrubbed wooden floor. He stopped in the entrance. It was a well-kept kitchen, clean and warm. There was a kettle steaming very slightly on the black cooking stove. A tall woman, a little thin, stood at the sink with her sleeves rolled up above her elbows and her hands in soapy water. She was motionless, as if she had forgotten what she was there for.
“Miss Forrest?” Pitt asked.
She turned slowly. She seemed in her late forties; her brown hair, graying at the temples, was pinned back off her brow. Her face was unusual, with beautiful bones around her eyes and cheeks, her nose straight but not quite prominent enough, her mouth wide and well-shaped. She was not beautiful; in fact, in a way she was almost ugly.
“Yes. Are you another policeman?” She spoke with a very slight lisp, although it was not quite an impediment. Slowly she lifted her hands out of the water.
“Yes, I am,” Pitt replied. “I’m sorry to ask you more questions when you must be distressed, but we cannot afford to wait for a better time.” He felt a trifle foolish as he said it. She looked completely in control of herself, but he knew that shock affected people in different ways. Sometimes when it was very profound, there were no outward signs at all. “My name is Pitt. Would you sit down please, Miss Forrest.”
Slowly she obeyed, automatically drying her hands on a towel left over a brass rail in front of the stove. She sat down on one of the hard-backed chairs near the table, and he sat on one of the others.
“What is it you want to know?” she asked, staring not at him but at some space over his right shoulder. The kitchen was orderly: there was clean, plain china stacked on the dresser, and a pile of ironed linen on one of the broad sills, no doubt waiting to be put away. More hung from the airing rail winched up near the ceiling. The coke scuttle was full on the floor by the back door. The stove was polished black. Light winked softly over the sides of the copper pans hanging from the cross beam, and there was a faint aroma of spices. The only thing missing was any sight or smell of food. It was a house no longer with any purpose.
“Was Miss Lamont expecting her clients separately or together?” he asked.
“They came one at a time,” she replied. “And left that way, for all I know. But they would all be together for the séance.” Her voice was expressionless, as if she were trying to mask her feelings. Was that to protect herself, or her mistress, perhaps from ridicule?
“Did you see them?”
“No.”
“So they could have come together?”
“Miss Lamont had me lift the crossbar on the side door to Cosmo Place, which she did for some people,” she replied. “So I took it that one of the discreet ones came last night.”
“People who don’t want anyone else to recognize them, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Are there many like that?”
“Four or five.”
“So you made arrangements for them to come in from Cosmo Place, instead of the front door on Southampton Row? Tell me exactly how that worked.”
She looked up at him, meeting his eyes. “There’s a door in the wall that leads into the Place. It has a lock on it, a big iron one, and they lock it behind them when they leave.”
“What is the bar you spoke of?”
“That falls across on the inside. It means even with a key you can’t get in. We keep it barred except when there is a special client coming.”
“And she sees such clients alone?”
“No, usually with one or two others.”
“Are there many like that?”
“I don’t think so. Mostly she went to clients’ houses, or parties. She only had special ones