“I’m afraid Mrs. Spencer-Brown has died this afternoon, and the cause is not yet apparent.”
“Oh dear!” Caroline put her hand to her mouth in horror. “Oh, how dreadful! Does poor Alston—Mr. Spencer- Brown—know?”
“Yes. Are you all right?” Her face was very pale, but she seemed perfectly composed. “Would you like me to call the maid for you?”
“No, thank you.” Caroline sat on the sofa. “It was very civil of you to come to tell me, Thomas. Please sit down. I dislike having to stare up at you like that—you make me feel uncomfortable.” She took a breath and smoothed her skirts thoughtfully. “I presume from the fact that you are here it was not an entirely natural death? Was it an accident? Involving some kind of negligence, perhaps?”
He sat down opposite her.
“We don’t know yet. But it was not a carriage accident or a fall, if that is what you mean. It appears to have been poison.”
She was startled; her eyes widened in disbelief.
“Poison! That’s horrible—and ridiculous! It must have been a heart attack, or a stroke or something. It’s just a hysterical maid with too many penny novels in her bedroom—” She stopped, her hands clenched on her knees. “Are you trying to say it was murder, Thomas?”
“I don’t know what it was. It could have been—or an accident—or suicide.” He was obliged to go on. The longer he evaded it the more artificial it would seem, the more pointed. “Charlotte told me there have been a number of small thefts in the neighborhood, and that you have had the unpleasant sensation of being watched.”
“Did she?” Caroline’s body stiffened, and she sat upright. “I would prefer she had kept my confidence, but I suppose that is academic now. Yes, several people have missed small articles, and if you want to chastise me about not having called the police—”
“Not at all,” he said, more sharply than he intended. He resented the criticism of Charlotte. “But now that there is death involved, I would like to ask your opinion as to whether you believe it possible Mrs. Spencer-Brown could have been the thief?”
“Mina?” Caroline opened her eyes in surprise at the thought.
“It might be a reason why she should have killed herself,” he reasoned. “If she realized it was a compulsion she could not control.”
Caroline frowned.
“I don’t know what you mean—‘could not control’? Stealing is never right. I can understand people who steal because they are in desperate poverty, but Mina had everything she needed. And anyway none of the things that are missing are of any great value, just little things, silly things like a handkerchief, a buttonhook, a snuffbox—why on earth should Mina take those?”
“People sometimes take things because they cannot help it.” He knew even as he said it that explanation was useless. Her values had been learned in the nursery where good and evil are absolute, and although life had taught her complexity in human relationships, the right to property was one of the cornerstones of Society and order, the framework for all morality, and its precepts had never been questioned. Compulsions belonged to fear and hunger, were even accepted, if deplored, where certain appetites of the flesh were concerned, at least in men—not in women, of course. But compulsions of loneliness or inadequacy, frustration, or other gray pains without names were beyond consideration, outside the arc of thought.
“I still don’t know what you mean,” she said quietly. “Perhaps Mina knew who it was who had been taking things. She did give certain hints from time to time that she was aware of rather more than she felt she ought to say. But surely no one would murder just to hide a few wretched little thefts? I mean, one would certainly dismiss a servant who had stolen, but one might not prosecute because of the embarrassment—not only to oneself but to one’s friends. No one wishes to have to make statements and answer questions. But where murder is concerned one has no choice—the person is hanged. The police see to it.”
“If we catch them—yes.” Pitt did not want to go into the morality of the penal system now. There was no possibility of their agreeing on it. They would not even be talking of the same things; their visions would be of worlds that did not meet at the fringes of the imagination. She had never seen a treadmill or a quarry, never smelled bodies crawling with lice, or sick with jail fever, or seen fingers worked to blood picking oakum—let alone the death cell and the rope.
She sank deeper into the sofa, shivering, thinking of past terrors and Sarah’s death.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly, realizing where her memories were. “There is no reason yet to suppose it was murder. We must look first for reasons why she might have taken her own life. It is a delicate question to ask, but suicide is not a respecter of feelings. Do you have any idea if she had a romantic involvement of any nature that could have driven her to such despair?” At the back of his mind was beating Charlotte’s conviction of the depth of Caroline’s own affairs, and he felt it so loudly he almost expected Caroline to answer these thoughts instead of the rather prim words he actually spoke. He felt guilty, as if he had peeped in through someone’s dressing-room window.
If Caroline was surprised, she did not show it. Perhaps she had had sufficient warning to expect such a question.
“If she had,” she replied, “I certainly have heard no word of it. She must have been extraordinarily discreet! Unless—”
“What?”
“Unless it was Tormod,” she said thoughtfully. “Please, Thomas, you must realize I am giving voice to things that are merely the faintest of ideas, just possibilities—no more.”
“I understand that. Who is Tormod?”
“Tormod Lagarde. He lives at number three. She had known him for some years, and was certainly very fond of him.”
“Is he married?”
“Oh no. He lives with his younger sister. They are orphans.”
