“You are in charge of the matter, after all?” she asked, still standing, one hand resting on the back of the tapestried chair.
“I was given it this morning.”
“I am glad. It would have been harder to face someone I did not know.”
It was a delicate compliment and he accepted it as such, thanking her by expression rather than words.
She walked over towards the fire and the mantel shelf, above which was a particularly fine Dutch oil painting of cows in an autumn field, the sky warm with golden light behind them. She looked at it for a moment or two before turning to face him.
“What can I tell you, Mr. Pitt? He did not confide his intentions to me, but I assumed from what he did say that he had found some grounds on which to re-enquire into the case. If indeed he was … killed”—she swallowed, finding the word difficult—“then I have to assume it had some connection with that. It was a hideous case— bestial—blasphemous. There was terrible public outcry at the time.” She shivered and her lips tightened at the memory. “You must remember it. It was in all the newspapers, I am told.”
“Who was Kingsley Blaine?” he asked. He could still recall the sense of horror he had felt when she had spoken of Farriers’ Lane, but very little else came back to him, no details, no people behind the names.
“A fairly ordinary young man of good enough family,” she replied, standing close to the mantel and staring beyond Pitt towards the window. The curtains were drawn closed now because of the mourning of the house. “Money, of course, but not of the aristocracy. He and his friend, Devlin O’Neil, went to the theater that night. Some say they had a difference of opinion, but it proved later to be of no importance. It was only money, a small debt or something. Nothing very large.” She looked at the garnet ring on her finger and turned it slowly in the light.
“But Mr. O’Neil was suspected for a while?” Pitt asked.
“Only as a matter of course, I think,” she replied.
“But Mr. Stafford went to see him yesterday?”
“Yes. I don’t know why. Perhaps he thought he might know something. After all, he was there that evening.”
“How did Aaron Godman come into the story?”
She let her hands fall and stared towards the window again, as if she could see through the curtains to the garden and the street beyond.
“He was an actor. He was playing in the theater that night. They say he was gifted.” Her voice altered very slightly but it was an expression he could not gauge. “Blaine was having an affaire with Tamar Macaulay, and he stayed late backstage. As he was leaving someone handed him a note asking him to go and meet O’Neil at some gambling club. He never got there, because as he was passing through Farriers’ Lane, on the way, he was murdered, and crucified to the door in the stable yard—with farrier’s nails.” She shuddered and swallowed as though there were an obstruction in her throat. “They said he was pierced in the side, as Our Lord was,” she went on very quietly indeed. “One of the newspapers said that they had made a crown of old nails and placed it on his head.”
“I recall it now,” Pitt confessed. “But I had forgotten that particular horror.”
She spoke very quietly, her voice subdued, full of fear, and close, with a drawing in of her body as if the emotion were still as sharp in her as it must have been five years ago.
“It was very ugly, Mr. Pitt. It was as if something had come out of a nightmare and taken living form. Everyone I know was just as appalled as we were.” Unconsciously she included her husband. “Until Godman was hanged, we could think of little else. It intruded into everything like a darkness, as if it could come out of Farriers’ Lane and that hideous yard, and slash and crucify us all!” She shuddered as though even this room were somehow not safe.
“It is finished, Mrs. Stafford,” Pitt said gently. “There is no need to be concerned anymore, or to let it disturb you.”
“Is it?” She swung around, facing him. Her dark eyes were wide, still full of fear, and her voice had a hard, frightened edge to it. “Do you think so? Isn’t that why Samuel was killed?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “Mr. Livesey seems to think that Mr. Stafford was quite satisfied that the verdict was correct. He simply wanted to find further proof of it so even Tamar Macaulay would be convinced and let it rest. In the public good.”
She stood very still, her body stiff under its black gown.
“Then who killed Samuel?” she said quietly. “And for heaven’s sake, why? Nothing else makes any sense. And it was immediately after that woman came here, and he went to speak to O’Neil and Joshua Fielding about the evidence. Do you—do you think maybe one of them really killed Kingsley Blaine, and they are afraid Samuel knew something about it—and that he was going to prove it?”
“It is possible,” he conceded. “Mrs. Stafford, can you think of anything he may have said which would help us to find out what he knew? Even what he intended, would help.”
She was silent for several moments, her face heavy with concentration.
Pitt waited.
“He seemed to feel it was extremely urgent,” she said finally, a deep line of anxiety between her brows. “He would not have gone to Devlin O’Neil again, someone so close to the murdered man’s family, and a personal friend, unless he felt he had new information or evidence. I—I just know, from his manner, that he had learned something.” She stared at him with fierce concentration. “It is only natural that he did not discuss it with me. It would have been improper. And of course I did not know the details anyway. All I knew was what was public knowledge. Everyone was talking about it. One could not bump into a friend or acquaintance anywhere, even at the opera or the dinner table, without it creeping into the conversation after a few moments. There was terrible anger everywhere, Mr. Pitt. It was not an ordinary crime.”
“No.” Pitt thought of the dark air of fear and prejudice which would blow from the bloodstained Farriers’ Lane, even into the withdrawing rooms of London and the discreet, plush lined gentlemen’s clubs with a clink of crystal and the aroma of cigar smoke.
“It wasn’t, I assure you!” There was an urgency in her now, as if she thought he doubted her. “I have never
