Tellman stiffened, his resentment still clear in his eyes and the hard set of his face. His jaw was tight and there was a tiny muscle ticking in his temple. “Don’t have a lot to show for it, though, do we?”
Pitt felt himself flush. The criticism was fair, but it still hurt, and the fact that in Special Branch he was out of his depth, and aware of it, and someone else had his position in Bow Street, made it worse. He did not dare to think of failure, but it was always at the back of his mind, waiting for an unguarded moment. When he was at home in the empty house, weary and without any clear idea where to look next, it was a black hole at his feet and falling into it was a possibility all too real.
“I’ll go,” he said curtly. “You’d better do more to find out how she got her blackmail material. Was it all watching and listening, or did she do some active research? It may help to know.”
Tellman appeared undecided, one emotion conflicting with another in his face. It looked like anger and guilt, perhaps regret for having said aloud what was in his mind. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he muttered, and turned to leave.
Sitting in the train to Teddington, Pitt turned over in his mind all the possible lines of enquiry about Francis Wray. Always at the forefront was the leaflet he had seen on the table advertising Maude Lamont, and the fury in Wray’s face at mention of spirit mediums. He denied to himself that the old man was so emotionally disturbed by the death of his wife he had lost mental balance, and perhaps he had, in the first depth of his grief, abandoned a lifetime’s faith and gone to a medium. He certainly would not be unique in that, not even unusual. And with the vehemence of his conviction that it was sin, he would then have equated the medium with the offense, and have tried to rid himself of his self-loathing by destroying her! And the more that thought intruded into Pitt’s mind, the more fiercely he tried to deny it.
When he reached Teddington he got off the train, but this time he avoided Udney Road and went to High Street. He loathed asking the villagers about Francis Wray, but there was no choice left to him. If he did not, then Wetron would send others who would be even clumsier, and cause more pain.
He had to use an invention. He could hardly say outright, “Do you think Mr. Wray has lost the hold of his sanity?” He framed instead questions as to things having been lost, lapses of memory, other people’s concern that Wray was unwell. It was not as difficult as he had expected simply to find the words, but forcing himself to pry into the way the old man’s grief had affected him was one of the most offensive things he had ever done, not to the people he spoke to, but to himself.
The answers all carried the same elements. Francis Wray was deeply liked and admired, perhaps
Pitt did manage to draw something from one of these friends, another man roughly Wray’s age, and also a widower. Pitt found him in his garden tying up the most magnificent pink hollyhocks, well above the height of his own head.
“It’s only a matter of concern,” Pitt explained himself. “There is no complaint.”
“No, of course,” Mr. Duncan answered, pulling off a length of string from the ball and cutting it awkwardly with his secateurs. “I am afraid when we get old and lonely we tend to make nuisances of ourselves without realizing it.” He smiled a little ruefully. “I daresay I did so myself the first year or two after my wife died. Sometimes we can’t bear to speak to people, and others we can’t leave them alone. I’m glad you see no need to do more than ascertain that there was no offense intended.” He cut off another length of string, and looked apologetically at Pitt. “Young ladies can misunderstand the desire for their company, no doubt with cause, now and again.”
Reluctantly, Pitt introduced the subject of seances.
“Oh dear, how unfortunate!” Mr. Duncan’s face filled with alarm. “I am afraid he feels very strongly against that kind of thing. He was here when we had a local tragedy, quite a number of years ago now.” He chewed his lip, ignoring the hollyhocks. “A young woman had a child-out of wedlock, you know. Penelope, her name was. The child died almost immediately, poor little thing. Penelope was distraught with grief and went to a spirit medium who promised to put her in touch with her dead child.” He sighed. “Of course, the woman was a complete fraud, and when she discovered it, poor Penelope went quite wild with grief. It seems she thought she had spoken with the child, and that it had gone on to a far better place. She was comforted.” The muscles in his face tightened. “And then the deception drove her right out of her senses. I am afraid she took her own life. It was very dreadful, and poor Francis saw it all and was helpless to prevent any of it.
“He argued to have the child buried properly, but of course he lost, since it was illegitimate and unbaptized. He was very put out with the local minister over that. The feeling lasted for quite a while. Francis would have baptized the child regardless, and taken the consequences. But of course he didn’t have the power.”
Pitt tried to think of something to say that expressed the emotions boiling up inside him, and found nothing that touched the anger or the futility he felt.
“And of course he comforted her the best he could,” Duncan continued. “He knew the wretched medium was a fraud, but Penelope wouldn’t listen. She was desperate to have any belief at all that her child still existed somewhere, poor creature. She wasn’t very old herself. Of course, Francis has had something of a passion against all kinds of spiritualist activity ever since then. From time to time he has launched something of a crusade.”
“Yes,” Pitt said, pity twisting inside him with a hard, empty pain. “I can understand his feelings. There can be little more bitterly cruel, even if possibly it is not meant so.”
“Yes.” Duncan nodded. “Yes, indeed. One cannot blame his anger. I think I felt much the same myself at the time.”
Pitt thanked him and excused himself. There was nothing more to learn from other people. It was time he faced Wray again and pressed him further to account more precisely for his whereabouts on the evenings Cartouche was recorded in Maude Lamont’s diary as having been at Southampton Row.
At Udney Road, Mary Ann welcomed him in without question, and Wray himself met him in the study doorway with a smile. He did not even ask Pitt if he would stay for tea, but sent Mary Ann straightaway to prepare it, with sandwiches and fruit scones with greengage jam. “It was an excellent crop last year,” he said enthusiastically, leading the way back into the study and offering Pitt a chair. He blinked and his voice dropped and became suddenly very gentle. “My wife was extremely good at making jam. Greengage was one of her favorites.”
Pitt felt wretched. He was sure guilt must be written in his face at the thought of probing the grief of this man who so obviously liked and trusted him, and had not the remotest suspicion that Pitt was here not in friendship but in pursuit of his job.
“Perhaps I should not take it?” he said unhappily. “Would you not rather keep it for. .” He was not sure what he wanted to say.
“No, no,” Wray assured him. “Not at all. I am afraid the raspberry is all gone. I rather indulged myself. I should be delighted to share this with you. She really was very good.” Sudden concern filled his eyes. “Unless, of course, you do not care for it?”
“Oh, I do! I like it very much!”
“Good. Then we shall have it.” Wray smiled. “Now, tell me why you are here, and how you are, Mr. Pitt. Have you found this unfortunate man who was consulting the medium who died?”
Pitt was not ready to pursue it yet. He had thought his plan was clear, and now it was not. “No. . no, I haven’t,” he replied. “And it is important that I do. He may have knowledge which would make it much plainer why she was killed, and by whom.”
“Oh dear.” Wray shook his head. “How very sad. Evil always comes of such things, you know. We should not meddle with them. To do so, even in the imagination of innocence, is to awaken the devil to our weaknesses. And never doubt it, Mr. Pitt, it is an invitation he will not pass by.”
Pitt was embarrassed. It was an area of thought he had never considered, perhaps because his faith was more of morality than the metaphysics of God or Satan, and certainly he had never considered belief in calling upon spirits. Yet Wray was in deadly earnest; no one looking at the passion in his face could mistake it.
Pitt compromised. “It seems likely that she was in the practice of a very human evil, Mr. Wray, namely that of blackmail.”
Wray shook his head. “A kind of moral murder, I think,” he said very quietly. “Poor woman. She has forfeited
