‘Good day, sir,’ Pitt replied. ‘Ma’am,’ he acknowledged both women. Then he and Stoker left, going out through the front door into the deserted street. Rain was beginning to come across the open land of the heath.
‘What do you make of that, sir?’ Stoker asked curiously, turning up his coat collar as he walked. His voice was light but when Pitt glanced at him he saw the doubt in his face. ‘There was a lot of blood on that step,’ Stoker went on. ‘More than a scratch, I reckon. If someone hit that girl it was pretty hard. She must be daft to go willingly with anyone who’d use her like that.’ Now the doubt had turned to anger.
‘Perhaps she cut herself on the glass,’ Pitt said thoughtfully. He pulled the brim of his hat down and his scarf tighter as the rain increased. He looked up at the sky. ‘Good thing you made a sketch of it before this started. In twenty minutes there’ll be nothing to see.’
‘There was blood on the glass,’ Stoker said. ‘And the hair. Torn out by the roots, from the look of it. Kynaston may be important to the navy, but he’s covering something up … sir.’
Pitt smiled. He knew Stoker’s subtle and quite delicate insolence. It was not directed at him personally, but more at their political masters, whom he knew Pitt occasionally disliked as much as he did himself. He was still nervous that Pitt might yield to them, and not absolutely certain whether Pitt’s predecessor in command had done so or not. But Victor Narraway was a very different kind of man, at least on the surface. He was a gentleman, beginning as a junior lieutenant in the army, then through university in law, and as devious as an eel. Stoker had never been comfortable with him, but his respect for him was boundless.
Pitt, on the other hand, was the son of country gamekeeper, risen through the ranks of the regular Metropolitan Police. He had been promoted sideways into Special Branch, much against his will, when he had offended certain very powerful people and lost his job as Superintendent in Bow Street. Pitt might think he was subtle, but to Stoker he was as clear as the rising sun.
Pitt was aware of all this as he replied, ‘I know that, Stoker. What I don’t know is if it is something we should be concerned about.’
‘Well, if there’s something messy going on in that house, and a maid gets the bad end of it, we should care,’ Stoker said with feeling. ‘Perfect set-up for a spot of blackmail.’ He left the rest of his thought implied.
‘You think Dudley Kynaston was having an affair with his wife’s maid, and knocked her around on his own kitchen steps in the middle of a winter night?’ Pitt asked with a smile.
Stoker flushed faintly and stared straight ahead, avoiding Pitt’s eyes. ‘Put it like that, no, sir. If he’s that crazy he wants putting in the madhouse, for everybody’s sake, including his own.’
Pitt was going to add that it was probably just what it looked like, but he wasn’t sure what it looked like. The maids had found nothing missing to account for the glass. There was too much blood for a graze, and actually there was no way of telling if it was even human, let alone if it was that of the missing maid — who seemingly had gone without even taking her hairbrush. And was it her hair, or only a similar colour?
Who knew the nature of a lovers’ quarrel, if that is what it was?
‘We’ll have the local police keep an eye on it, and let us know if she comes back,’ he said to Stoker. ‘Or if she turns up anywhere else, for that matter.’
Stoker grunted, not satisfied, but accepting that there was nothing more they could do. They trudged through the rain silently, heads down, feet sloshing on the wet pavement.
Pitt arrived home at Keppel Street comparatively early, although at this time of the year it was already completely dark. The streetlamps gleamed like beacons through the rain, haloed in light for a brief space, darkness swirling between them.
Pitt went up the steps to his front door and was about to hunt through his always overstuffed pockets for his key when it opened in front of him, bathing him in the glow of the inside lights and the warmth of the parlour fire where the passage door was open.
‘Evenin’ sir,’ Minnie Maude said with a smile. ‘D’yer like a cup o’ tea before dinner’s ready? My, yer in’t ’alf soaked!’ She looked him up and down with sympathy. ‘I reckon as it’s rainin’ stair rods out there.’
‘Indeed it is,’ he agreed, dripping steadily on to the hall floor as the front door closed behind him. He looked at her freckled face and her piled-up red-brown hair, and for a moment he imagined the missing maid from Kynaston’s house and wondered where she was. Minnie Maude was handsome too, in her own way, tall and womanly; worldly-wise, domestically capable, and naïvely full of trust. He felt a tightness in his chest at the thought of her alone outside somewhere, perhaps hurt, cold to the bone, desperate for shelter. What on earth had happened to Kitty Ryder?
‘Yer a’right, sir?’ Minnie Maude’s anxious voice intruded on his thoughts.
Pitt eased himself out of his wet coat and took off his sodden boots. He gave her his hat and scarf as well.
‘Yes, thank you. And I will have a cup of tea. And I’ll have something to eat. I can’t remember what lunch was.’
‘Yes, sir. ’Ow about a couple o’ crumpets?’ she offered. ‘Wi’ butter?’
He looked at her. She was about nineteen, four years older than his daughter, Jemima, who was far too rapidly growing into a woman. Thank God Jemima wouldn’t be a servant living in somebody else’s house with only strangers to turn to.
‘Thank you,’ he replied. ‘Yes … bring them to me in the parlour, please.’ He wanted to add something more, but there really wasn’t anything to say that was appropriate.
After dinner, when Jemima and her younger brother, Daniel, had gone up to bed, he sat beside the fire in his usual chair, opposite Charlotte, who had abandoned her embroidery for the evening and sat with her boots off and her feet up, hidden by her skirts. The light from the gas brackets on the walls was a golden colour, muted a little by the glass. It softened the lines of everything it touched: the familiar books on the shelves on either side, the few ornaments, each with its own associations in the memory. The long curtains across the french windows on to the garden were drawn against the cold. He could not imagine anywhere more comfortable.
‘What is it?’ Charlotte asked. ‘You are making your mind up whether to tell me, so it can’t be a secret.’
In the past, when he was still in the police, he had shared many of his cases with her. In fact, some of them she had known to involve crime before he did. She had been something of a detective herself. She was acutely observant of human nature, and alarmingly fearless in pursuing what she felt was justice.
Of course, now so much more was secret and he could not share with her nearly as much as he used to, although he still would were he able. He was often tempted, only the cost restrained him. A betrayal of trust would damage him in his own eyes, and in hers. The loss of his position would destroy his career, and therefore also his ability to look after his family. He had faced that once when he was dismissed from the police, without the hope of ever being reinstated. He had powerful enemies, among them, unfortunately, the Prince of Wales, who would be only too delighted if Pitt’s entire career were called into question.
Charlotte was waiting for an answer. No secrets of state were involved. So far it was nothing but a rather unfortunate domestic incident.
‘Evidence of a fight on the areaway steps of a house on Shooters Hill,’ he replied. ‘And a missing lady’s maid. She was courting so it’s possible she eloped.’
‘I didn’t think there were houses up on Shooters Hill,’ she responded, frowning a little. ‘If I mustn’t know, then don’t tell me, but what you’ve said so far doesn’t make any sense.’
‘I know it doesn’t make any sense,’ he agreed. ‘Blood and hair on the steps, and broken glass … and a missing maid at a time of day when she should have been there, and always has been in the past.’
‘Why you?’ she said curiously. ‘If there’s a crime involved at all, isn’t it for the local police?’ Then her face lit with understanding. ‘Oh … it’s somebody important!’
‘Yes. And you’re quite right, if it’s anything at all, it belongs to the local police. You said Jemima needs a new dress?’
She tucked her feet up a little higher. The coals settled in the fire with a shower of sparks.
‘Yes, please … at least one.’
‘At least?’ He raised his eyebrows.
‘She’s going to the party at the Grovers’ as well,’ she explained. ‘It’s quite formal.’
‘I thought she didn’t want to go to that?’ He was momentarily confused.
