The Hyde Park Headsman - Anne Griffin Perry [138]
Still, let him wonder!
She reached the end of the Row and saw its rather gravelly surface stretching out in front of her beneath the trees. A good sharp canter was precisely what she needed. She leaned a little forward and patted her horse, giving it a word of encouragement. Its ears pricked at the change in her tone. All morning so far she had regaled it with the injustices done her. Now she urged it into a trot, and then a canter.
She rode well and she knew it. It added to her enjoyment of the sharp spring sunshine, the long shadows across the Row and the sheen of dew on the park grass beyond. There was hardly anyone else around, even in Knightsbridge, which she could see beyond the edge of the park; there was only an occasional late reveler returning home, or very early risers like herself, enjoying the cold, bare sunlight and the virtual solitude.
At the far end she turned and cantered back towards Hyde Park Corner, feeling the wind in her face and at last beginning to smile.
Three quarters of the way down she slowed to a walk. She knew better than to offer her horse a drink at the trough while it was still warm, but she would dearly like to splash her own face with its coolness. She dismounted, leaving the reins loose, and took a couple of steps to the trough. She bent down absently, her mind still on her husband’s offense, then with her hands in the water she turned her head and looked.
The water was red-brown.
She withdrew sharply with a cry of revulsion. The whole trough was cloudy with some dark fluid, far too dark to be water. There was also something else in it, something large which she could not see because of the murkiness.
“Oh really!” she said angrily. “This is too bad! Who would do such a stupid thing? Now it’s filthy!” She stepped back, and it was only as she stood up that she saw the odd object on the far side of the trough. It was so odd in its appearance that she looked more closely.
For a breathless instant she did not believe it. Then when it sank on her incredulous brain that it was truly what it seemed, she slid with a splash into the trough, face first.
The cold water choked her and in an effort to get her breath she pulled herself up again, gasping and gagging; the whole of the top of her body was soaked, and now thoroughly cold. She was too horrified even to scream, but crouched in silence, half arched over the edge of the trough, shaking violently.
There was a thud of hooves behind her, a scatter of pebbles, and a man’s voice spoke.
“I say, ma’am, are you all right? Had a fall? May I—” He stopped abruptly, having seen the object. “Oh my God!” He gulped and caught his breath in a choking cough.
“The rest of him is in there.” Amanda gestured weakly towards the trough, where now a liveried knee was protruding from the bloody water.
* * *
Tellman looked down at Pitt in his chair with a dark, grim expression in his lantern face.
“Yes?” Pitt asked, his heart sinking.
“There’s been another,” Tellman said, staring back without wavering. “He’s done it again. This time you’ll have to arrest him.”
“He …?”
“Carvell. There’s another headless corpse in the park.”
Pitt’s heart sank even further. “Who is it?”
“Albert Scarborough, Carvell’s butler.” A shadow of bitter humor touched Tellman’s face. “Lady Kilbride found him in the horse trough. Or to be more accurate, all of him except his head,” he amended. “His head was behind it.”
“Horse trough where?”
“Rotten Row, a hundred yards or so short of Hyde Park Corner.”
Pitt tried to force the horror of it from the front of his mind and concentrate on the practical elements of the case. “Some distance from Green Street,” he observed. “Any idea how he got there?”
“Not yet. He was a big fellow, so there is no way Carvell could have carried him. Might have walked there.”
Pitt opened his