Southampton Row - Anne Perry [30]
“I don’t know, but that’s the way she said it was.” She was tense, her body straight-backed, away from the chair, her hands clenched on the table in front of her.
“Have you ever attended a séance, Miss Forrest?”
“No!” The answer was instant and vehement. There was harsh emotion in her. Then she looked down, away from him. Her voice dropped even lower. “Let the dead rest in peace.”
With sudden, overwhelming pity he saw the tears fill her eyes and slide down her cheeks. She made no apology nor did her face move. It was as if for a few moments she were oblivious of him, locked in her own loss. Surely it was for someone dear to her, not for Maude Lamont, lying stiff and grotesque in the next room? He wanted someone who could comfort her, reach across the grief of unfamiliarity and touch her.
“Have you family, Miss Forrest? Someone we could notify for you?”
She shook her head. “I had only one sister, and Nell’s long dead, God rest her,” she answered, taking a deep breath and straightening up. She made an intense effort to control herself, and succeeded. “You’ll be wanting to know who they were that came last night. I can’t tell you ’cos I don’t know, but she kept a book with all that sort of thing in it. It’s in her desk, and no doubt it’ll be locked, but she wears the key on a chain around her neck. Or if you don’t want to get that, a knife’ll break it, but that’d be a shame; it’s a handsome piece, all inlaid and the like.”
“I’ll get the key.” He stood up. “I’ll need to talk to you again, Miss Forrest, but for the meanwhile, tell me where the desk is, and then perhaps make a cup of tea, for yourself at least. Maybe Inspector Tellman and his men would appreciate it, too.”
“Yes sir.” She hesitated. “Thank you.”
“The desk?” he reminded her.
“Oh! Yes. It’s in the small study, second door on the left.” She gestured with her hand to indicate where it was.
He thanked her, then went back to the parlor, where the body was, and Tellman standing staring out of the window. The police surgeon had left, but there was a constable standing in the small garden, banked around by camellia and a long-legged yellow rose in full bloom.
“Was the garden door barred on the inside?” Pitt asked.
Tellman nodded. “And you can’t get from the French doors to the street. It had to be one of them already in here,” he said miserably. “Must have left through the front door, which closes itself. And the maid said she had no idea, when I first asked her.”
“No, but she said Maude Lamont kept an engagement diary, and it’s in the desk in the small study, and the key is around her neck.” Pitt nodded towards the dead woman. “That might tell us quite a bit, even why they came here. Presumably she knew.”
Tellman frowned. “Poor devils,” he said savagely. “What kind of need draws someone to come to a woman like this and look for the kind of answers you should get from your church, or common sense? I mean . . . what do they ask?” He frowned, making his long face look forbidding. “‘Where are you?’ ‘What is it like there?’ She could tell them anything . . . and how would they know? It’s wicked to take money to play on people’s grief.” He turned away. “And it’s daft of them to give it.”
It took Pitt a moment to adjust from one subject to the other, but he realized that Tellman was struggling with an inner anger and confusion, and had been trying to evade the conclusion that one of those he pitied, against his will, had to have killed the woman sitting silently in the chair only a few feet away, having put a knee in her chest as she struggled to breathe, choking on the strange substance clogging her throat. He was trying to imagine the fury that had driven the murderer to it. He was a single man, unused to women in other than a formal, police setting. He was waiting for Pitt to touch the body, reach for the key where he would be clumsy and embarrassed to look.
Pitt walked over and gently lifted up the lace front of the gown, and felt under the sides of the plunging fabric