'Helen Carfax?'
Pitt shrugged, the question was too hard. He could not visualize the pale, unhappy woman he had seen after her father's death, so torn with fears, so painfully in love with her husband, so wounded by his every small indifference, having the confidence and efficiency to acquire flowers and then stand on a street corner selling them to passing strangers so that she might commit murder. He remembered Maisie Willis's voice, casual, broad, idiosyncratic.
' 'I doubt she could master selling,'' he said frankly.' 'And James Carfax is the same as Barclay Hamilton, too tall not to be noticed.'
'Florence Ivory?'
Florence had left her husband and found shelter for herself and her child, until Africa Dowell had taken her in. Perhaps she had also worked at something.
'Yes, I imagine she might. She certainly has the imagination and intelligence to do it, and the willpower.'
Drummond leaned forward.
'Then, Pitt, we've got to catch her. We've got grounds to search her house now. We may find the clothes-if she means to do it again we almost certainly will. Dear God, she must bemad!'
'Yes,' Pitt agreed with cold unhappiness. 'Yes, I daresay she is, poor soul.'
But the minutest search yielded only much-mended work clothes, gardening gloves, and kitchen aprons-nothing that would have dressed a flower seller-and only baskets and trugs for flowers, no trays such as street vendors use.
The third questioning of the members of Parliament pro-262
duced a little more. Several men, when specifically pressed, recalled a different flower seller on the nights of the murders, but they could describe only the roughest details: she was rather larger than Maisie Willis, and taller they thought, but not much else. What they really recalled was that she had sold primroses instead of violets.
Was she very muffled with scarves or shawls?
Not particularly.
Was she young or old, dark or fair?
Definitely not young, nor, they thought, very old. Perhaps forty, perhaps fifty. For heaven's sake, who spends their time estimating the age of flower sellers?
A big woman, they all agreed, bigger than Maisie Willis. Then it was certainly not Florence Ivory. Africa Dowell padded out a little, her face grimed and made up to hide her fine fair skin, her hair bound in an old scarf or hat, a little dirt judiciously rubbed in?
He returned to Bow Street and met with Drummond to share his findings and consider the next step.
Drummond looked tired and beaten. The bottoms of his trousers were wet, his feet were cold, and he was exhausted with talking, with searching for a courteous way of asking over and over again questions that had already been answered with negatives, worn out with weighing, measuring and sifting every fragment of memory, every fact or suggestion, and knowing at the end of it no more than the beginning.
'Do you think she'll do it again?' he asked.
'Only God knows,' Pitt replied, not blasphemously-he meant it. 'But if she does, this time we know what to look for.' Drummond pushed the blotter and the inkstand away and sat on the edge of his desk. 'That could be weeks, months, or never.''
Pitt looked at him. The same thought was mirrored in both their faces.
Drummond put it into words. 'We must provoke her. We will have someone cross the bridge alone, after every late
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sitting. We will be close at hand; we can disguise ourselves as street vendors and cabbies.'
