violated and killed his own sister, then stabbed to death his brother to keep his secret? Was that why Phoebe was disintegrating in terror before their eyes, descending from eccentricity into madness? Dear God, if it were, Pitt must catch him, prove it, and have him taken away. Pitt had never enjoyed hanging. It was commonplace, a part of society’s mechanics to purge itself of a disease, but still he found it repellent. He knew too much about murder, about the fear or the madness that impelled it. He had seen and smelled the grinding poverty, the unnumbered deaths from and diseases of starvation in the rookeries, and he knew there were forms of murder that never soiled the hands, long-distance extermination that blind society and profit never looked at. Death from hunger happened a hundred yards from death from obesity.
And yet he felt, if Afton were guilty, he could have sent him to the gallows without any personal pity.
The Frenchman, Paul Alaric, was there, if indeed he were French? Perhaps he came from one of the African colonies? He was far too smooth, too wry and subtle to be from the great wind-and-snow-driven plains of Canada. There was something incredibly old in him; Pitt could not conceive of him belonging to the New World. Everything about him spoke of centuries of civilization, roots deep enough to cling to the very core and heart of old cultures and rich, dark history.
He stood now with black head bent and the rising wind, sleek and beautiful even in this graveyard. He mirrored respect for the dead, courteous observance of custom. Was that all he was here for? Pitt had discovered no relationship between him and Fulbert except that of neighbors.
Could Alaric be the supreme actor? Was there unfulfilled hunger under that intelligent face, hunger so violent it had driven him to attack first Fanny and then the all-too-willing Selena? Or was Selena not really willing, when it came to the point?
He dared not dismiss it, it was his duty to consider everything possible, however unlikely. And yet he could not force himself to believe that Alaric was so different from every appearance. Over years of studying people, Pitt had become a skilled judge, and he had found most people do not hide much of themselves from a careful watcher, one who listens to every phrase, watches the eyes, the hands, the small deceptions to build the vanity, the tiny exhibitions of greed or ambition, the betrayals of essential selfishness, the straying eyes, the grubby innuendos.
Alaric might be a seducer, but a rapist Pitt could not believe.
That left Hallam Cayley. He was standing over the grave from Jessamyn, staring at her, as they at last began to shovel in the earth. The hard clay rubble clattered on the lid, sounding hollowly, almost as if there were no body inside. One by one they turned and walked away-the observances were over. Now it was the gravediggers’ duty to finish, fill in the earth and stamp it down. A fine misty rain hung on the wind, slicking the paths and making them dangerous.
Hallam walked behind Freddie Dilbridge. As Pitt moved from the yews, hurrying to keep pace with them, he saw Hallam’s face. He looked like a man in a nightmare; the pock marks in his skin seemed to have become deeper, and he was pallid and sweating. His eyes were puffed, and even at that distance Pitt could see the nervous twitch in one lid. Was it excess of drink that racked him, and if so what torture had driven him to it? Surely loss of a dead wife would not have ravaged him so? From all that he and Forbes had learned through questioning neighbors and servants, the marriage had been no more than ordinary, a fondness for each other, but not a passion so consuming as to leave this devastation in its wake.
In fact the more Pitt thought about it, the less likely did it seem. Hallam had only been seen to drink more than most men in the last year, certainly not since the time of his wife’s death. What had happened a year ago? He had so far discovered nothing.
He was level with them now, and Hallam turned for a moment and saw him. His face twisted with fear and recognition, as if the gravestone he was passing were his own, and he had read his name on it. He hesitated, staring at Pitt, then Jessamyn caught up with him. Her face was tight, all expression ironed out of it.
“Come, Hallam,” she said quietly. “Take no notice of him. He is here because it is his duty. It means nothing.” Her voice was quite flat. She had composed herself till every vestige of feeling was suppressed, controlled into what she wished it to be. She did not touch him, keeping herself apart, at least a yard from him. “Come,” she said again. “Don’t stand here. You’re holding everyone up.”
Reluctantly Hallam moved, not that he wished to obey or to leave so much as that there was no purpose in remaining.
Pitt stood still, watching their black-creped backs, as they wound up the damp path toward the lych-gate and out onto the street.
Could Hallam Cayley have raped Fanny? It was possible. Emily had said Fanny was boring, nondescript, not the sort of girl to excite anyone. But Pitt remembered the small white body lying on the morgue table. It had been very delicate, virginal, almost childlike, the bones small, the skin clear. Perhaps that very innocence had attracted. She would demand nothing; her own hungers would not have awoken yet; there would be no expectations to satisfy, no comparisons to be made with other lovers, not even with dreams, except the most limpid and unformed.
Jessamyn had said she was too guileless to interest, too young to be a woman. But perhaps Fanny had grown tired of being viewed as a child and had secretly started to think as a woman inside, while preserving outside the image everyone expected of her? Perhaps she had seen Jessamyn’s glamour and decided to grasp for a little of it herself. Had she practiced her budding arts on Hallam Cayley, imagining him safe, and found one dark evening that he was not, that she had gone too far, succeeded in her temptation?
It was believable. More believable than that she had tempted some servant.
The other possibility, of course, was that she had been mistaken for someone else, a maid. There were several kitchen girls and between maids who were not unlike her in build, even in face. Only the clothes were radically different. Would the fingers of an obsessed man in the dark feel the difference between Fanny’s silk and a servant girl’s wash-cotton?
He had no idea.
But Fulbert’s body had been found in Hallam’s house. The servants had let him in; no one denied that-but why had he gone there, if not to see Hallam? Had he waited till Hallam came home, as he had said he would do, and then been killed for his knowledge? Or could it have been a manservant, the footman or the valet, again because of what he knew. They could have killed Fanny; it was not impossible.
He had not forgotten that someone else could have come in. It was not likely they had been let in by a servant. Any servant would tell of it, only too glad to widen the circle of suspicion, away from themselves. But the garden walls were not high. A man of average agility could climb over without difficulty. His clothes would be marked, brick dust, moss stains. They would be got rid of, but Pitt should ask valets. He must get Forbes to check again.
There were gates, of course, but he had already ascertained that Hallam’s was kept locked.
He followed the last of the funeral out of the gate and turned up the street, away from the graveyard and back toward the police station. He believed it was Hallam. It was possible, and the horror of it was in his face. But he had not enough to prove it. If Hallam were simply to deny it, to say someone had followed Fulbert and seized the chance to murder him and leave the body in Hallam’s house, there was nothing to prove him a liar. He could not arrest a man of Hallam Cayley’s social position without a better case than that.
If he could not prove Hallam guilty, the next best thing he could do was to disprove any other possibility. It was a thin case-and unsatisfactory.
At the police station one small question was answered- why Algernon Burnon had been so reluctant to name the person in whose company he claimed to have been on the evening Fanny was killed. Forbes had at last run her down, a handsome and cheerful girl who in a higher class of society might have called herself a courtesan, but from her usual clientele was no more than a tart. No wonder Algernon had preferred the odd glance of halfhearted suspicion to the surety that he had been paying for such indulgence while his fiancee was struggling for her life.
The day after, Pitt and Forbes went back to the Walk, quietly, going in by back doors and asking to see valets. No one’s clothes showed stains of damp or moss, and there was no discernible brick dust, just the general dust of a dry summer. There had been one or two small tears, but nothing unaccountable. But then one could so easily say one had caught it getting in or out of a carriage, or in one’s own garden. Rose thorns tore; one knelt on the grass to pick up a fallen coin or handkerchief.
He even went to Hallam Cayley’s garden and asked permission to look at the walls on both sides, and a highly
