Traitors Gate - Anne Perry [164]
Chancellor did not move.
“And during the long wait, he smoked at least two cigars,” Pitt went on, his eyes going for a moment to the humidor a few inches from Chancellor’s hand, “of a curiously aromatic, pungent brand.”
Chancellor coughed and caught his breath. “And you … worked all this out?”
“With difficulty.”
“Was …” Chancellor was watching Pitt very closely, measuring him. “Was she killed in the hansom cab? Was she ever really going to Christabel Thorne’s?”
“No, she was never going to Christabel Thorne’s,” Pitt replied. “There was no hansom cab. She was murdered here in this house.”
Chancellor’s face tightened, but he did not move. His hand on the desk opened and closed, but he did not touch the cigar box.
“Her maid saw her leave,” he said, swallowing with difficulty.
“No, Mr. Chancellor, she saw you leave, wearing Mrs. Chancellor’s cloak,” Pitt corrected him. “She was a very tall woman, as tall as you are. You walked along the street to the manhole at the corner of the square, then you opened it and pushed the cloak down. You returned here and went upstairs saying you had put her in the hansom. You rang the bell and ordered your own carriage. Shortly after that you contrived an accident in which you scalded your coachman’s arm, and while everyone was attending to that, you carried Mrs. Chancellor’s body downstairs and put it into your own carriage, which you drove east and south until you crossed the river, as I have already said, and waited until the tide turned, so you could leave her at Traitors Gate, when the water would not rise any further and take her away again.”
Pitt reached forward and opened the cigar box, taking out one of the rich cigars. The aroma of it was sickeningly familiar. He held it to his nose, and looked over it at Chancellor.
Suddenly the pretense was gone. A passion flooded Chancellor’s face that was so savage and so violent it altered him utterly. The assurance, the urbanity, were vanished, his lips drawn back revealing his teeth, his cheeks white; there was a burning outrage in his eyes.
“She betrayed me,” he said harshly, his voice still high with the incredulity of it. “I loved her absolutely. We were everything to each other. She was more than just my wife, she was my companion, my partner in all my dreams. She was part of everything I did, everything I’ve admired. She always believed exactly as I did … she understood … and then she betrayed me! That’s the worst sin of all, Pitt … to betray love, to betray trust! She fell away, she couldn’t trust me to be right. A few rambling, ill-informed, hysterical conversations with Arthur Desmond, and she began to doubt! To doubt me! As if I didn’t know more about Africa than he did, than all of them! Then Kreisler came along, and she listened to him!” His voice was rising with the fury which consumed him till it was close to a shriek.
Pitt moved a step forward but Chancellor ignored him. The wound he felt engrossed him so he was barely aware of Pitt as anything more than an audience.
“After all I had told her, all I had explained,” he went on, risen to his feet now behind the desk, staring at Pitt, “she didn’t trust me, she listened to Kreisler—Peter Kreisler! A mere adventurer! He sowed a few seeds of doubt in her, and she lost her faith! She told me she was going to have Standish remove his backing from Rhodes’s venture. That in itself wouldn’t have mattered….”
He laughed savagely, a wild note of hysteria rising in it. “But when people knew about it … that my own wife no longer supported me! Dozens would have withdrawn—hundreds! Soon everyone would have doubted. Salisbury’s only looking for an excuse. I would have looked a complete fool, betrayed by my own wife!”
He threw himself back into the chair and pulled the desk drawer open, still staring at Pitt. “I never thought you’d work it out! You liked her … you admired her! I didn’t think you’d ever believe she was a traitor to her husband, to all we had both believed, even though I left her at Traitors Gate. It was the perfect