“My name is Maisie Dobbs.” Maisie opened the flap of her case and pulled a card from an inner compartment, not breaking eye contact with Sedgewick. “I’m a private investigator, and I think there is a connection between a case I am working on and your wife’s murder.”
For a few seconds, silent incredulity was visible on the man’s face: His lips seemed frozen open, his eyes did not even blink. Then Sedgewick began to laugh almost hysterically. He laughed and laughed and laughed, bending over, his hands on his knees before raising his head as he attempted to speak. The thin line between emotions was being breached. This man, who had so recently lost his wife, was indeed in crisis. Maisie was aware that a neighbor was standing on her front doorstep looking across at the house. Then, as she turned again to Sedgewick, she realized he was crying. She quickly helped him inside his home and closed the door behind her.
Maisie illuminated the hallway with electric light and, still holding Sedgewick’s arm, directed him to the back of the house, to the kitchen. Maisie connected a kitchen with warmth, but as she turned on another light, she felt her heart sink at the sight that confronted her. Helping Sedgewick to a chair, Maisie opened the curtains, unlocked and opened the back door to the garden, and looked back at the cups and saucers piled on the draining board, along with dirty saucepans and one or two plates. The dregs of stale brandy and half-smoked cigarettes swirled against one another in crystal glasses, perhaps originally given to celebrate the marriage of the young couple years earlier.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you must think me—”
“I don’t think anything, Mr. Sedgewick. You’ve been through a horrible time.”
“Tell me again who you are and why you are here.”
Maisie identified herself again and explained the purpose of her visit to the house of—as far as the authorities knew—the first victim of the “Heartless, Bloodless Killer,” named for his use of poison before the knife.
“I can’t see how I can help. I’ve spent hours, literally hours, with the police. I have spent every second of every day since my wife was murdered asking myself why and who. And, as you can imagine, for some time the police thought that I was the ‘who.’ They probably still do.”
“They have to explore all avenues, Mr. Sedgewick.”
“Oh yes, the police line, I know it.” Sedgewick rubbed his neck and as he did so, Maisie heard bones crack in his shoulder and back.
“Will you help me?” she asked.
Sedgewick sighed. “Yes, yes. If helping you ends up helping me, I’ll do what I can to answer your questions.”
Maisie smiled and, feeling once more like the nurse she had been so long ago, she reached out and squeezed Sedgewick’s hand. “I appreciate it, Mr. Sedgewick.”
The man seemed to falter, then continued. “Miss Dobbs, would you mind using my Christian name? I know it’s rather a cheek to ask . . . and I perfectly understand if you decline my request, but . . . I have been nothing but Sedgewick or Mr. Sedgewick for weeks now. My neighbors are avoiding me, and I have been given leave from my work until the killer”—he seemed about to double over again—“until the case is closed. My name is John. And I am a man who has lost his wife.”
They moved into the drawing room. Maisie watched John Sedgewick as he eased himself into an armchair beside the fireplace. She opened the curtains just enough to allow some natural illumination to enter. Sudden light might startle Sedgewick, who would feel a needle of sunray to be piercing and painful. The room was untidy, with unread newspapers in a pile, cigarette ends mounting in ashtrays, and dust layered on the mantelpiece, the small writing desk, and the side tables. Spent coals in the cold grate made the room even less inviting. As if pressed inward by his discomfort, Sedgewick sat forward on the edge of the chair, hunching his shoulders and gripping his elbows. Maisie shivered, remembering Maurice in the early days of her apprenticeship
Maisie allowed a silence to envelop them, a time in which she composed her body, cleared her thoughts and saw in her mind’s eye a connection forming between herself and the man opposite her. She imagined a stream of light emanating from the center of her forehead just above her nose, a bright thread that flowed toward her subject and bathed him with a luminous glow. Slowly the man who wanted to be addressed informally as John relaxed his shoulders and released his arms. He leaned back.
Maisie knew better than to breach his trust by commencing with a fusillade of questions that must have already been put to him by the police.
“John, would you like to tell me about your wife?” she asked softly.
Sedgewick exhaled and gave a sharp, ironic half laugh. “You know, Miss Dobbs, you are the first person to ask me that question in that manner. The police are more direct.”
Maisie inclined her head but did not speak, inviting him to continue.
“She was lovely, Miss Dobbs. A lovely girl. Funny, I always think of her as a girl. She wasn’t tall, not like you. No, Pippin—that’s what I called her, Pippin.” Sedgewick closed his eyes again and wrinkled his face against tears that welled up behind his eyelids. Recovering, he continued, “She was slight, not a big girl. And I know she wasn’t a girl anymore, but she was a girl to me. We married in 1920. I met her at my parents’ house, would you believe? She was visiting with her widowed mother, who knew my mother through the Women’s Institute, or the church Flowers Committee, something of that order.”
Sedgewick looked toward the garden, as if imagining that his dead wife would walk along the front path at any moment. Maisie knew that he held a vision of Philippa before him. An image began to form in her mind of a young woman in a plain, pale sea-green summer dress. She was wearing green cotton gloves to protect her fine hands while cutting roses in a myriad of colors, placing the blooms into a basket at her feet before looking up when she heard her husband’s footfall as he opened the gate and came toward her.
“I think our meeting was arranged by the mothers, actually.” Sedgewick smiled, a narrow smile of remembrance. “And we got on famously. She was shy at first—apparently she had been somewhat dark of mood since the war—but soon became quite buoyant. People said it was having a sweetheart that did it.”
Maisie made a mental note to delve a little deeper into the source of Philippa Sedgewick’s disquiet, but for now she wanted Sedgewick to be at ease with her as his confidante. She did not interrupt.
“We lived with her mother for a while after the wedding. It was a small affair in the village, nothing grand. Then
