don’t.’
‘Would it matter?’ She was puzzled, her embroidery still ignored. ‘I mean would it matter to Somerset? If it were someone he knew, or cared about, surely it would be the last thing he would want exposed publicly, wouldn’t it?’
Pitt considered the possibility of the woman being someone Carlisle disliked, but as soon as the thought formed in his mind he discarded it. Carlisle was unpredictable in many ways — eccentric at times, to say the least — but he would not have descended to using his privilege of parliamentary questions for the purpose of conducting a private vendetta.
Charlotte was watching him. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Talbot’s involvement troubles me, but I can’t put my finger on it. Carlisle dislikes him profoundly. It’s there in his manners and his voice, polite and perfectly controlled so there’s nothing to get hold of. I don’t like Talbot either, and I’m perfectly sure he doesn’t like me. But as far as I know, it’s just because I’m not the sort of gentleman he thinks should hold this position.’ He felt suddenly self-conscious saying this. Charlotte was the daughter of a family of both very comfortable means and long accepted social position — not high society like Vespasia, but far beyond the servant status of his own family. A generation earlier he would have been her footman, not her husband. He was more conscious of it than she. Talbot’s attitude had brought it back again to the forefront of his mind.
‘Then he’s a fool,’ Charlotte said angrily. ‘It is too important a position to appoint people because of who their fathers were. We can’t afford anything but the best. To try to undermine that is disloyal to the country. Of which I shall remind him, should he be rash enough to make such a remark in my presence.’
He laughed, but it was a little lopsided. He knew that she was perfectly capable of doing exactly that.
‘Are you going back to Carlisle?’ she asked.
‘Not until I have something specific to ask him,’ he answered. ‘We know each other too well for me to fool him for an instant. I wish I were as good a judge of him!’
‘I’m glad you’re not much like him,’ she said gently.
Pitt was in his office in the morning, reading through reports from various officers around the country, when, after a brisk knock on the door, Stoker came in. Today there was nothing stoic about him. His usually bleak, rather bony face was alight with satisfaction. His eyes shone.
Pitt was in no mood for preamble. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘I found Harry Dobson,’ Stoker said immediately. ‘He’s set up in his own workshop now, that’s why we couldn’t find him. Ordinary sort of bloke, but decent. I checked on him. No record with the police. Pays all his debts. Nothing bad known about him-’
‘Get to the point, Stoker. Where is Kitty Ryder?’ Pitt interrupted.
‘That’s it. She ran off from Shooters Hill with Dobson because she knew something that scared her so badly she thought she’d be killed if she stayed. Wouldn’t tell Dobson what it was, but it was bad enough that when the hat with the red feather in it was found, she thought someone was after her again and she moved off. Wouldn’t tell him where she was going. Maybe she hadn’t decided.’ His face tightened. ‘Or she meant to keep on moving, too scared to stay in one place.’
‘That’s what Dobson told you?’ Pitt asked.
‘I believe him,’ Stoker insisted. There was absolute certainty in his voice, in his face and in the way he stood square in front of Pitt’s desk. ‘I think he cares about her, and to be honest I don’t think he’s got the wits to lie anyway. It fits in with everything else we know.’
‘Still leaves a lot unanswered,’ Pitt said unhappily. What was she frightened of? Who did she think was pursuing her? Like Stoker, he wanted to believe that she was alive. He also wanted to believe that Kynaston had not harmed her, and the body in the gravel pit was someone they did not know — and, of course, if he were honest with himself, something that the local police could deal with.
‘Sir?’ Stoker said a little sharply.
Pitt brought his attention back to the moment. ‘I suppose you checked with the locals that at least some of them had seen her with Dobson after the night she disappeared?’
‘Yes, sir. Only got one, but I didn’t find Dobson till yesterday late afternoon. I was lucky he was still working.’
‘Late?’ Pitt said curiously.
‘Yes, sir. About seven o’clock.’ There was a very faint colour in Stoker’s lean cheeks.
‘Your own time,’ Pitt remarked.
Now the colour was deeper. ‘I thought it mattered, sir,’ he said a little defensively.
Pitt leaned back in his chair and regarded Stoker with interest and a growing sense of sympathy. This need to follow up a missing person, even in his own time, was a side of Stoker he had not seen before. It was interesting that Stoker was embarrassed about it, too. Far from feeling irritation or contempt for him, Pitt liked him the better for it. It showed a gentleness, a vulnerability he had not thought Stoker possessed.
‘It probably does,’ he agreed. ‘Then the question is, what did she learn that was so terrible, or she thought was so terrible, that she fled without taking anything with her, or giving notice to anyone? And why has she not got in touch with the Kynaston house, or the police, to say that she’s alive and well?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Stoker said, regaining a little of his composure. ‘It’s pretty plain from what she said to Dobson that she thought someone had come after her, and she wouldn’t tell Dobson who. But nobody does that about an affair, whoever it’s with.’
‘No,’ Pitt conceded. ‘In fact I wonder now if Kynaston confessed to one at all only in order to satisfy our curiosity and get us to stop looking for anything further.’
Stoker bit his lip. ‘Can’t get away from that one, sir.’
‘For heaven’s sake, sit down!’ Pitt told him. ‘We’ve got to go back to the beginning on this. Did Dobson say if the blood and hair on the areaway steps were hers? If they were, how did they get there? I assume he didn’t fight with her? Were they put there to mislead? Did someone try to stop her? Who? It’s hard to believe it was any kind of coincidence.’
Stoker coloured again. ‘I didn’t ask him. I’ll go back and do that. Most likely seems to me that it was some kind of accident. Maybe she tripped.’
‘One accident I can believe in,’ Pitt answered. ‘Two I can’t. Whose body was it in the gravel pit? The local police can’t find anyone missing, and they’ve checked for several miles around. Whoever it is, poor woman, she died violently, then was kept somewhere for several days between the time of her death and the time she was found in the gravel pit. And she was appallingly mutilated. There’s no accident whatever in that.’
‘No, sir. Someone’s playing a very funny game with us. The stakes must be high.’
‘Very high,’ Pitt said gravely. ‘And I’m not sure we even know who the players are.’
‘Is Mr Carlisle a player, or a pawn?’ Stoker asked.
‘That’s another thing I don’t know,’ Pitt replied. ‘I’ve known him a long time. I think it will be wise to assume he’s a player.’
‘On whose side?’
‘Ours — I hope.’
‘And Mr Kynaston?’
‘I think that is where we begin. Delegate everything else for the time being.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Chapter Eleven
Pitt had sat up very late the previous evening, rereading all the papers he had on the Kynaston case. He thought of it in those terms because the root of it lay in Kynaston’s house. He had finally gone to bed at about half-past one, when the pages were swimming before his eyes and he was only wasting time looking at them.
He was jerked out of sleep by Charlotte’s hand on his shoulder, gentle but quite firm, shaking him. He
