Southampton Row - Anne Perry [82]
Tellman stepped in, frowning, his lantern jaw set tight and hard. He glanced around as if for a moment he had forgotten that Gracie would not be there. He looked forlorn, as if he too had been abandoned.
Pitt followed him back to the kitchen. “What is it?” he repeated as Tellman went to the far side of the table and sat down, ignoring the kettle and not even looking for cake or biscuits.
“We might have found the man written in the diary as a pic-ture . . . what did you say . . . a cartouche?” he replied, his voice flat, struggling to keep all expression out of it, leaving Pitt to make all his own judgments.
“Oh?”
The silence in the room was heavy. A dog was barking somewhere in the distance, and Pitt could hear the slithering sound of a bag of coal being emptied into a cellar chute next door. He felt a curious, sinking sensation. There was a premonition of tragedy in Tellman’s face, as if already a weight of darkness had settled inside him.
Tellman looked up. “He fits the description,” he said quietly. “Height, age, build, hair, even voice, so the informant says. I suppose he would, or Superintendent Wetron wouldn’t have passed it on to us.”
“What makes him think it’s this man rather than any of a thousand others who also fit the description?” Pitt asked. “All we have is middle height, probably in his sixties, neither thin nor fat, gray hair. There must be thousands of men like that, tens of thousands within train distance of Southampton Row.” He leaned forward across the table. “What is the rest, Tellman? Why this man?”
Tellman did not blink. “Because he’s a retired professor, apparently, who just lost his wife after a long illness. All their children died young. He has nobody else, and he’s taken it very hard. Sort of . . . started behaving oddly, wandering around talking to young women, trying to recapture the past. His dead children, I suppose.” He looked wretched, as if he had been caught intruding on someone’s acute private embarrassment, like a voyeur. “He’s got himself talked about . . . a bit.”
“Where does he live?” Pitt asked unhappily. Why on earth did Wetron think this unfortunate man had anything to do with Maude Lamont’s death? “Is it near Southampton Row?”
“No,” Tellman said quickly. “Teddington.”
Pitt thought he had misheard. Teddington was a village miles up the Thames, beyond Kew, beyond even Richmond. “Where did you say?”
“Teddington,” Tellman repeated. “He could come in on the train quite easily.”
“Why on earth should he?” Pitt asked incredulously. “Aren’t spirit mediums common enough? Why Maude Lamont? She’s rather expensive for a retired teacher, isn’t she?”
“That’s it.” Tellman was totally miserable. “He’s still noted as a deep thinker and very highly respected. Writes the definitive textbooks on some things. Obscure, but then it would be, to most of us. But his own people think the world of him.”
“Having the means doesn’t explain coming all the way into the city to consult a spirit medium whose sessions go on till nearly midnight,” Pitt argued.
Tellman took in a deep breath. “It might if you were a senior sort of clergyman whose reputation rested on your insight into the Christian faith.” Again the pity and contempt struggled in his face. “If you took to looking for answers from women who spit up eggs and cheesecloth and tell you it’s ghosts, I should think you’d be looking to go as far away from home as possible. Personally, I’d want it to be another country! I’m not surprised he came and went by the garden door, and wouldn’t even tell Miss Lamont his name.”
Suddenly it was tragically clear to Pitt. It answered all the anomalies of secrecy, evasion, and why he was so frightened of anyone guessing his identity that he would not even name those spirits he wanted to find. It was tragic, yet so fallible and, with a little imagination, easily understood. He was an old man left bereaved of all things he had loved. The final blow of his wife’s death had been too much for his balance. Even the strongest have a dark night of the soul somewhere in the long journey of life.
Tellman