She heated the teapot and measured out the tea.
“Theodora von Schenck has an income, lately acquired, which nobody can account for. Her husband left her nothing, nor did anyone else, apparently. When she came to Rutland Place, she had nothing but the house. Now she has coats with sable collars, and Mina perhaps put forward some very interesting speculations as to where they might have come from.”
“Like what?” he inquired.
She jiggled the teapot impatiently while the kettle blew faint halfhearted whiffs of steam, hot but not yet boiling.
“A brothel,” Charlotte answered. “Or a lover. Or blackmail? There are all sorts of things worth killing to hide, where money is concerned. Maybe Theodora was blackmailing people with Mina’s information and they had a fight over the money.”
He smiled sourly. “Indeed. Your Mina seems to have had a most uncharitable turn of imagination, and a tongue to go with it. Are you sure that is what she said, and not what you are thinking for her?”
“Alston remarked several times on how perceptive she was of other people’s characters, especially the less pleasant aspects of them. But he also said that she never spoke of them to anyone but him.” She reached for the kettle at last. “However, that is the less likely possibility of the two, I think. The other possibility I remember Mina mentioning myself, and with a kind of relish, as if she knew something.” She poured the water onto the tea and put on the lid, then brought the pot to the table and set it on the polished pewter stand. She let it brew while she went on: “It has to do with the death of Ottilie Charrington, which was sudden and unexplained. One week she was in perfect health, and the next the family returned from a holiday in the country and said she was dead. Just like that! No one ever said from what cause, no one was invited to any funeral, and she was never mentioned again. Mina apparently hinted that there was something very shameful about it—perhaps a badly done abortion?” She shivered and thought of Jemima asleep upstairs in her pink cot. “Or she was murdered by a lover, or in some unbearable place, like a brothel. Or possibly even she did something so terrible that her own family murdered her to keep it silent!”
Pitt looked at her gravely, without speaking.
She poured the tea and passed him his cup.
“I know it sounds violent, and unlikely,” she went on. “But then I suppose murder always is unlikely—until it actually happens. And Mina was murdered, wasn’t she? You know now that she didn’t kill herself.”
“No.” He sipped the tea and burned his mouth; his hands were too numb for him to have realized its heat. “No, I think someone else put poison into the cordial wine we found in her stomach in the autopsy. We found the dregs in the empty bottle in her bedroom, and a glass. It was just chance she took it when she did; it could have been anytime she felt like it. It could have been anyone who put it there, anytime.”
“Not if they wanted to silence her,” Charlotte pointed out. “If you are afraid of someone, you want them dead before they speak, which means as soon as possible. Thomas, I really do believe she was a Peeping Tom. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. She peeped once too often and saw something that cost her her life.” She stared down into her tea, watching the vapor curl off it and rise gently. “I wonder if people who get murdered are usually unpleasant, if they have some flaw in them that invites murder? I mean people that aren’t killed for money, of course. Like Shakespearean tragic heroes—one fatal deformity of soul that mars all the rest that might have been good.” She stirred her tea, although there was no sugar in it. The steam curled thicker. “Curiosity killed the cat. If Mina had not wanted to know so much about everybody ... I wonder if she knew about Monsieur Alaric, and Mama’s locket?” Oddly enough, she was not afraid. Caroline was foolish, but there was neither the viciousness nor the fear in her to make her kill. And Paul Alaric had no reason to.
He looked up sharply, and too late she realized she had not mentioned Alaric’s name before. Of course Pitt could not have forgotten him from Paragon Walk. At one time they had suspected him of murder . . . or worse!
“Alaric?” he said slowly, searching her face.
She felt herself flush, and was furious. It was Caroline who was behaving foolishly; she, Charlotte, had done nothing indiscreet.
“Monsieur Alaric is the man whose picture Mama has in the locket,” she said defensively, looking straight back at him. And then because his eyes were too clear, too wise, she turned away and stirred her sugarless tea vigorously once again. She tried to sound casual. “Did I not mention that?”
“No.” She knew he was still watching her. “No—you didn’t.”
“Oh.” She kept her eyes on the swirling tea. “Well, he is.”
There were several moments of silence.
“Indeed?” he said at last. “Well, I’m afraid we didn’t find the locket—or any of the other stolen things, for that matter. And if Mina was a Peeping Tom, stealing for the sake of a sick need to know about other people, to possess something of them—” He saw her shudder, and he gave a sigh. “Isn’t that what you are saying? That she was abnormal, perverted?”
“I suppose so.”
He tried his tea again. “And of course there is the other possibility,” he added. “Maybe she knew who the thief was.”
“How tragic, and ridiculous!” she said with sudden anger. “Someone dying over a few silly things like a locket and a buttonhook!”
“Lots of people have died for less.” The rookeries came to his mind with their teeming misery and need. “Some for a shilling, some by accident for something they didn’t have, or in mistake for somebody else.”
She sipped her tea. “Are you going to investigate it?” she said at last.
“There’s no choice. I’ll see what I can find out about Ottilie Charrington. Poor soul! I hate digging through other people’s wretched tragedies. It must be bad enough to lose a daughter, without the police unburying every indiscretion, putting every love or hate under a magnifying glass. No one wants to be seen so clearly!”
But the following morning the necessity was just as plain. If Charlotte was right and Mina had been inquiring, peeping at other people, then it was more than probable that some knowledge gained that way had been the cause of her death. He had heard before of people, outwardly normal people, often respectable, who were diseased with a
