and held her close, ignoring the fact that he was wetting her dress with the rain still sliding off him.
“Watching a very high-class brothel,” he replied, smiling into her hair. “And you’d be surprised who I saw going in there.”
She pushed him away but still gripped his shoulders. “Why do you care?” she demanded. “What case are you on now?”
“Still Godolphin Jones. Can we go into the kitchen? I’m frozen.”
“Oh!” She looked at herself in disgust. “And you’re soaking!” She turned and led the way smartly back to the kitchen and threw another piece of coal on the stove. One by one she took his wet outer clothes, then his boots and his new socks. Lastly, she made tea with the kettle that had been simmering all evening. Five times she had got up and put more water in it, waiting his return.
“What has Godolphin Jones got to do with brothels?” she asked when she sat down opposite him at last.
“I don’t know, except that most of the women he photographed also work in brothels.”
“You think one of them killed him?” Her face was full of doubt. “Wouldn’t it be pretty hard for a woman to strangle a man, unless she drugged him or hit him first? And why should she, anyway? Didn’t he pay them?”
“He was a blackmailer.” He had not told her about Gwendoline Cantlay or Major Rodney. “Blackmailers often get killed.”
“I’m not surprised. Do you think one of them might have received an offer of marriage, or something of that sort, and wanted her pictures destroyed?”
It was a motive that had not occurred to him. Prostitutes quite often did marry, in their heyday, before their looks were gone and they slowly drifted to lower and lower brothels, earning less and less, and disease began to catch up with them. It was a decided possibility.
“Why were you watching a brothel?” she continued. “What could that tell you?”
“First of all, I wasn’t sure that it was a brothel-”
“But it was?”
“Yes, or, more correctly, a set of apartments used for that purpose; rather more luxurious than a regular brothel, less communal.”
She screwed up her face but said nothing. “I thought I might find a procurer, or a pimp. He could have an excellent motive for getting rid of Godolphin Jones. Maybe Jones was poaching on his women, paying them higher rates and not giving the pimp his cut.”
She looked at him very steadily. The polished pans gleamed on the dresser behind her. One of them was a little askew, and she had missed the handle.
“I think that’s where we’ll find the murderer.” He stretched and stood up, easing his feet now that they were free of their boots. “It’ll have nothing to do with Gadstone Park at all. Or the grave robbers, for that matter, except that he made use of them. Come on up to bed. Tomorrow’ll come too soon as it is.”
In the morning she dished the porridge solemnly, then sat down opposite him instead of getting her own or bothering with Jemima.
“Thomas?”
He poured milk on the porridge and began to eat; there was no time to waste. They had been a little late up anyway.
“What?”
“You said Godolphin Jones was a blackmailer?”
“So he was.”
“Whom did he blackmail, and over what?”
“They didn’t kill him.”
“Who?”
The porridge was too hot, and he was obliged to wait. He wondered if she had done that on purpose.
“Gwendoline Cantlay, over an
“Could he blackmail a pimp or a procurer? I mean, what would they be afraid of?”
“I don’t know. I should think greed, professional rivalry is far more likely.” He tried the porridge again, a smaller spoonful.
“You said the houses where these women worked were better than ordinary brothels?”
“So they were. Pretty good addresses. What are you getting at, Charlotte?”
She opened her eyes very wide and clear. “Who owns them, Thomas?”
He stopped with the spoon halfway to his mouth.
“Owns them?” he said very slowly, the thought mushrooming in his mind as he stared at her.
“Sometimes the oddest people own property like that,” she went on. “I remember Papa knew someone once who made his money from property leased out as a sweatshop. We never had anything to do with him after we found out.”
Pitt poured milk on the rest of the porridge and ate it in five mouthfuls; pulled on his boots, still damp; grabbed his coat, hat, and scarf; and left the house as if it were a sinking ship. Charlotte did not need an explanation. Her mind was with him, and she understood.
It took him three hours to discover who owned those properties, and six more like them.
Edward St. Jermyn.
Lord St. Jermyn made his money from the rent of brothels and a percentage from each prostitute-and Godolphin Jones knew!
Was that the reason St. Jermyn had bought the picture from him? And then refused to pay him again-and again? That was most certainly a motive for murder.
But could Pitt prove it?
They did not even know what day the murder had been committed. Proving St. Jermyn had been in Resurrection Row would mean little. Jones had been strangled-any fit man, and many women, could have done it. There was no weapon to trace.
Jones was a pornographer and a blackmailer; there could be dozens of people with motives. St. Jermyn would know all these things, and Pitt would never even get as far as a warrant.
What he needed was a closer link, something to tie the two men together more irredeemably than Major Rodney or Gwendoline Cantlay or any of the women in the pictures.
The largest house had a landlady, no doubt the madame who kept the money, took the rents and the percentages and passed them to St. Jermyn, or whoever was his agent.
Pitt was outside in the street now, walking briskly. He knew where he was going and what he intended to do. He hailed a cab and climbed in. He gave the driver the address and slammed the door.
Then he sat back in the seat and planned his attack.
The house was silent in the empty street. A rising wind blew sleet out of a gray sky. A maid came up the areaway steps and then disappeared again. It could have been one of any number of well-to-do residences just before the midday meal.
Pitt dismissed the cab and went up to the front door. He had no warrant, and he did not think he could get one merely on the strength of his beliefs. But he did believe, with something growing toward certainty, that St. Jermyn had killed Godolphin Jones, and the reason had been Jones’s knowledge of the source of his income. It was certainly motive enough, especially if St. Jermyn was seeking to earn a high office for himself in government as a great reformer with his workhouse bill.
Pitt lifted his hand and knocked sharply on the door. He did not like what he was about to do; it was not his usual manner. But without it there was no proof, and he could not let St. Jermyn go, in spite of the bill. Although the thought was in his mind to put off collating the final evidence, if he should find it, until after the bill had been through the House. One murderer, even of St. Jermyn’s order, was not worth all the children in all the workhouses in London.
The door was opened by a smart girl in black with a white lace cap and apron.
“Good morning, sir,” she said with total composure, and it flashed through Pitt’s mind that perhaps the place did business even at midday.
“Good morning,” he replied with a bitter smile. “May I speak to your mistress, the landlady of these
