The Hyde Park Headsman - Anne Griffin Perry [112]
“If you want me to arrest Carvell, prove he had something to do with it,” Pitt demanded, his own voice angry and hard. “Where was he when Yeats was killed?”
“At a concert, sir,” le Grange chipped in. “But he can’t find anyone who saw him there. He can tell us what the music was, but anyone could get that from a program.”
“And when Arledge was killed?” Pitt went on.
“Home alone.”
“Servants?”
“No point. There’s a French door in the study. He could have gone out that way and none of the servants would have known. Come back the same way.”
“And Winthrop?”
“For a walk in the park, so he says,” Tellman replied with heavy disbelief.
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Pass anyone?”
“Not that he can recall. Anyway, he’d have to pass pretty close for anyone to recognize him at midnight. People don’t hang around the park at night these days—not as they used to.”
“Not even the women?” Pitt asked.
Tellman shrugged. “They’ve got to, poor cows. Can’t afford to stay in. But they’re scared.”
“Well go and see if you can find anyone who saw Carvell,” Pitt said. “Try some of the women. What about in the street on the way home? Someone might be able to place him at a particular time. Don’t his servants remember his coming home?”
“No sir. He kept rather odd hours, and preferred the servants to go to bed and leave him to it.” Tellman’s lips lifted in a faint sneer of distaste. “Presumably he preferred they did not see Arledge coming and going. Caught him out last time—if he was really there.”
“Try the other people in the park,” Pitt repeated. “Try Fat George’s girls. They work that end.”
“What’d that prove?” Tellman said with open disgust. “If no one saw him, that doesn’t prove he wasn’t there. And we can’t find anyone who will say they saw him in Shepherd’s Bush. Tried all the passengers on that last bus.”
“And I suppose you haven’t yet found where Arledge was killed either?” Pitt asked sardonically. “Seems you have quite a lot to do. You’d better get on with it.”
And with that he went up to his office and closed the door, but Tellman’s charges lingered with him. Was he being too fastidious in his prosecution of this case? Was he allowing the fact that he liked Carvell to influence his judgment as to the weight of the evidence? Pity, no matter how real, was not a factor he should allow to blind him. If it were not Carvell, then who? Bart Mitchell, over Winthrop’s abuse of his sister? But why kill Arledge? And why Yeats?
Or was it really some obsessed lunatic who killed seemingly at random from the dark chaos in his own mind?
He must learn more about Winthrop, and his marriage, and Bart Mitchell.
Emily looked at Charlotte’s new house with growing approval. There was something acutely satisfying about finding a house in a dilapidated state, then repairing it and decorating it to suit your own tastes. When she had married George she had moved into Ashworth House and found it in perfect order, everything maintained as it had been for generations. Every room had been added to by each succeeding chatelaine until by 1882 there had been little room for improvement or individual expression in any part of it. Even her own bedroom was curtained and mirrored in the taste of the previous incumbent, and it would have been wasteful to have altered it. Indeed, it was so lavish and so beautiful it could not have been bettered, it would simply have been Emily’s own choice rather than someone else’s.
Now, of course, Ashworth House was hers, and she shared it with Jack, but it still contained little that was of her creation or taste, even though she could find no fault with any of it. She was delighted for Charlotte, and also just a very