Pitt stood in the fine hallway, looking about him, not at the pictures and the sheen on the parquet flooring, but at the stairway and the landing across the top, and then at the chandelier hanging from the ceiling with its dozen or so lights.
Lily came through the green baize door looking anxious and still profoundly shaken.
“Y-you want to see me, sir? I didn’t know anything, I swear, or I’d have told you then. I don’t know where the mistress went. She never said a thing to me. I didn’t even know she was going out!”
“No, I know that, Lily,” he said as gently as he could. “I want you to think back very carefully. Can you remember where you were when you saw her leave? Tell me exactly what you saw … absolutely exactly.”
She stared at him. “I just came along the landing after turning down the beds an’ looked down to the hallway….”
“Why?”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“Why did you look down?”
“Oh-I suppose ’cause I saw someone moving across towards the door….”
“Exactly what did you see?”
“Mrs. Chancellor going to the front door, sir, like I said.”
“Did she speak to you?”
“Oh no, she was on ’er way out.”
“She didn’t say good night, or tell you when she expected to come back? After all, you would have to wait up for her.”
“No sir, she didn’t see me ’cause she didn’t turn ’round. I just saw her back as she went out.”
“But you knew it was her?”
“O’ course I knew it was her. She was wearin’ her best cloak, dark blue velvet, it is, lined with white silk. It’s the most beautiful cloak….” She stopped, her eyes filling with tears. She sniffed hard. “Yer didn’t ever find it, did you, sir?”
“Yes, we found it,” Pitt said almost in a whisper. He had never before felt such a complex mixture of grief and anger about any case that he could recall.
She looked at him. “Where was it?”
“I don’t think you need to know that, Lily.” Why hurt her unnecessarily? She had loved her mistress, cared for her in her day-to-day life, been part of it in all its intimacies. Why tell her it had been pushed down into the sewers that wove and interwove under London?
She must have understood his reasons. She accepted the answer.
“You saw the back of Mrs. Chancellor’s head, the cloak, as she went across the hall towards the front door. Did you see her dinner gown beneath it?”
“No sir, it comes to the floor.”
“All you could see would be her face?”
“That’s right.”
“But she had her back to you?”
“If you’re going to say it weren’t her, sir, you’re wrong. There weren’t no other lady her height! Apart from that, there weren’t no other lady here, sir, then nor ever. Mr. Chancellor isn’t like that with other ladies. Devoted, he was, poor man.”
“No, I wasn’t thinking that, Lily.”
“I’m glad….” She looked uncomfortable. Presumably she was thinking of Peter Kreisler, and the ugly suspicions that had crossed their minds with regard to Susannah.
“Thank you, Lily, that’s all.”
“Yes sir.”
As soon as Lily had gone the footman appeared from the recess beyond the stairs. No doubt he had been waiting there in order to conduct Pitt to his master.
“Mr. Chancellor asked me to take you to the study, Superintendent,” he instructed Pitt, leading the way through a large oak door, along a passage into another wing of the house, and knocking on another door. As soon as it was answered, he opened it and stood back for Pitt to enter.
This was very different from the more formal reception rooms leading off the hall where Pitt had seen Chancellor before. The curtains were drawn closed over the deep windows. The room was decorated in yellows and creams, with touches of dark wood, and had an air of both graciousness and practicality. Three walls had bookcases against them, and there was a mahogany desk towards the center, with a large chair behind it. Pitt’s eyes went straight to the humidor on top.
Chancellor looked strained and tired. There were shadows around his eyes, and his hair was not quite as immaculate as when Pitt had first known him, but he was perfectly composed.
“Further news, Mr. Pitt?” he said with a lift of his eyebrows. He only glanced at Pitt’s grimy clothes and completely disregarded the odor. “Surely anything now is academic? Thorne has escaped, which may not be as bad as it first appears. It will save the government the difficulty of coming to a decision as to what to do about him.” He smiled with a slight twist to his mouth. “I hope there is no one else implicated? Apart from Soames, that is.”
“No, no one,” Pitt replied. He hated doing this. It was a cat-and-mouse game, and yet there was no other way of conducting it. But he had no taste for it, no sense of achievement.
“Then what is it, man?” Chancellor frowned. “Quite frankly, I am not in a frame of mind to indulge in lengthy conversation. I commend you for your diligence. Is there anything else?”
“Yes, Mr. Chancellor, there is. I have learned a great deal more about the death of your wife….”
Chancellor’s eyes did not waver. They were bluer than Pitt had remembered them.
“Indeed?” There was a very slight lift in his voice, an unsteadiness, but that was only natural.
Pitt took a deep breath. His own voice sounded strange in his ears when he spoke, almost unreal. The clock on the Pembroke table by the wall ticked so loudly it seemed to echo in the room. The drawn curtains muffled every sound from the garden or the street beyond.
“She was not thrown into the river and washed up by chance of tide at Traitors Gate….”
Chancellor said nothing, but his eyes did not leave Pitt’s.
“She was killed before, early in the evening,” Pitt went on, measuring what he was saying, choosing his words, the order in which he related the facts. “Then taken in a carriage across the river to a place just south of London Bridge, a place called Little Bridge Stairs.”
Chancellor’s hand closed tight above the desk where he was sitting. Pitt was still standing across from him.
“Her murderer kept her there,” Pitt continued, “for a long time, in fact until half past two in the morning, when the tide turned. Then he placed her in the small boat which is often tied up at the steps, the boat he had seen when crossing London Bridge. It is a few hundred yards away.”
Chancellor was staring at him, his face curiously devoid of expression, as if his mind were on the verge of something terrible, hovering on the brink.
“When he had rowed out a short way,” Pitt went on, “he put her over the stem, tied across her back and under her arms with a rope, and rowed the rest of the way, dragging her behind, so her body would look as if it had been in the water a long time. When he got to the far side, he laid her on the slipway at Traitors Gate, because that was where he wished her to be found.”
Chancellor’s eyes widened so imperceptibly it could have been a trick of the light.
“How do you know this? Do you have him?”
“Yes, I have him,” Pitt said softly. “But I know it because the carriage was seen.”
Chancellor did not move.
“And during the long wait, he smoked at least two cigars,” Pitt went on, his eyes going for a moment to the humidor a few inches from Chancellor’s hand, “of a curiously aromatic, pungent brand.”
Chancellor coughed and caught his breath. “And you … worked all this out?”
“With difficulty.”
“Was …” Chancellor was watching Pitt very closely, measuring him. “Was she killed in the hansom cab? Was she ever really going to Christabel Thorne’s?”
“No, she was never going to Christabel Thorne’s,” Pitt replied. “There was no hansom cab. She was murdered
