It took him two and a half hours to find Inigo Charrington, by which time it was past noon and Inigo was at the dining table in his club. Pitt was obliged to wait in the smoking room, under the disapproving eye of a dyspeptic steward who kept clearing his throat with irritating persistence, till Pitt found he was counting the seconds each time, waiting for him to do it again.
Finally, Inigo came in and was informed in hushed tones of Pitt's presence. He came over to him, his face a mixture of amusement at the steward's dilemma-and his own as other eyes were raised to stare at him-and apprehension about what Pitt might want. '.
'Inspector Pitt?' He dropped rather sharply into the chair opposite. 'From the police?'
'Yes, sir.' Pitt regarded him with interest. He was slender, not more than thirty at the most, with an odd, quick-silver face and auburn hair.
'Something else happened?' Inigo said anxiously.
'No, sir.' Pitt regretted having alarmed him. Somehow he could not picture him having murdered his sister, or Mina either, to keep a scandal quiet. There was too much sheer humor in his face. 'No, nothing at all, that I am aware of. But we have still not found any satisfactory answer as to how Mrs. Spencer-Brown met her death. There seems no explanation, so far, that makes either accident or suicide possible.'
'Oh.' Indigo sat back a little. 'I suppose that means it could only have been murder. Poor soul.'
'Indeed. And I daresay a great deal more pain will be caused before the business is finished.'
Inigo looked at him gravely. 'I imagine so. What do you want me for? I don't think I know anything. I certainly didn't know Mina very well.' His mouth turned down in a sour smile. 'I didn't have any reason to kill her. Although I suppose you can hardly take my word for that! I wouldn't be likely to tell you so if I had!'
Pitt found himself smiling back. 'Hardly. What I was hoping for was information.' He could not afford to be direct. Inigo was far too quick; he would anticipate suspicion and cover any trace of real worth.
'About Mina? You'd do much better asking some of the women-even my mother. She's rather absentminded at times, and she gets her gossip a little twisted, but underneath it all she's a pretty shrewd judge of character. She may get her facts wrong, but her feelings are invariably right.'
'I shall ask her,' Pitt said. 'But she might speak considera shy;bly more freely to me if I had approached you first. Normally ladies such as Mrs. Charrington do not confide their opinions of their neighbors to the police.'
Inigo's face softened into mercurial laughter, gone in an instant.
'Very tactfully put, Inspector. I imagine they don't. Although Mama has a taste for the bizarre. I'll mention it to her this evening. She might surprise you and tell you all sorts of things. Although quite honestly, she isn't really a gossip. Not enough malice in her. She used to like to shock people occasionally when she was younger. Got bored with everyone repeating the same rubbish evening after evening at the same parties-just different dresses and different houses, but all the same con shy;versations. Bit like Tillie.'
'Tillie?' Pitt was lost.
'My sister-Ottilie. Better not repeat that. My father used to go into an apoplexy when I called her Tillie when we were children.'
'And she liked to shock people?' Pitt quickly asked.
'Loved it. Never heard anyone laugh like Tillie. It was beautiful, rich, the sort of laughter that you have to join in with even if you have no idea what was funny.'
'She sounds like a delightful person. I'm sorry I shall not meet her.' He found it was far more than a sympathetic platitude; he meant what he said. Ottilie was something good that he had missed.
Inigo's eyes widened for a moment as if he did not understand; then he let out a little sigh.
'Oh. Yes. You would have liked her. Everything seems rather colder now she's gone, not the same color in things. But that isn't what you're here for. What do you want to know?'
'I understand she died very suddenly?'
'Yes. Why?' -
'It must have been a great shock. I'm sorry.'
'Thank you.'
'Those fevers can be very sudden-no warning,' he tried experimentally.
'What? Oh yes, very. But this must be wasting your time. What about Mina Spencer-Brown? She certainly didn't die of a fever. And Tillie wasn't given belladonna for treatment, I can assure you. Anyway, we were in the country at the time, not here.'
'You have a country house?'.'
'Abbots Langley, in Hertfordshire.' He smiled. 'But you won't find any belladonna there. We all have excellent digestions- need to, some of the cooks we've had! If Papa chooses them, we have all soups and sauces, and if Mama does, then pies and pastries.'
Pitt felt intrusive. How could anyone like being a Peeping Tom?
'I wasn't thinking of belladonna,' he said honestly. 'I am looking for reasons. Somewhere Mrs. Spencer-Brown must have given somebody cause to want her dead. Finding the belladonna is less important.'
'Is it?' Inigo's eyebrows rose. 'Don't you want to know who, more than why?'
'Of course I do. But anyone could make belladonna out of deadly nightshade. There's plenty of it about in these old gardens. It could have been picked anywhere. It's not like strychnine or cyanide that most people would have to buy.'
Inigo winced. 'What a terrible thought-going out to get something to kill people.' He paused for a moment. 'But I honestly haven't any idea why someone should kill Mina. I didn't especially like her. I always thought she was too'-he searched for the word he wanted-'too deliberate, too clever. All head and no heart. She was thinking all the time, never missed anything. I prefer people who are either stupider or less permanently interested. Then if I do something idiotic it can be decently forgotten.' He smiled a little crookedly. 'But you hardly go out and distill poison for someone because you don't like them very much. I couldn't even say I disliked her-just that I was not entirely comfortable when she was there, which wasn't very of ten.'
It all fitted so easily with what Charlotte had said, slid into the pattern and coalesced: a watcher, a listener, adding everything together in her mind, working out answers, understanding things that were intimate.
But how, and for whom, had 'not entirely comfortable' changed into 'intolerable'?
He wanted to think of a useful question, something to make Inigo believe he was asking about Mina, not Ottilie.
'I never saw her alive. Was she attractive-to men?'
Inigo's face creased with spontaneous laughter.
'Not very subtle, Inspector. No, she wasn't-not to me. I like something a little less schooled, and with more humor. If you ask around the Place, no doubt you will be told my taste runs to the warmhearted, slightly eccentric, for entertainment. And if I were to marry-I really don't know who the woman would be. Someone I really liked- certainly not Mina!'
'You mistake me,' Pitt said with a dry smile. 'I was think shy;ing of a possible lover, even a rejected one. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but I've found men take it no less kindly, especially vain and successful men. There are many people who believe that loving someone puts the person into some sort of debt to you and gives you certain rights. More than one man has killed a woman because he thought she wasted herself on someone unworthy of her-someone other than himself, that is. I've known men with the notion that they somehow owned a woman's virtue, and if she stained it she had offended not against herself or against God-but against him!'
Inigo stared into the polished surface of the table and smiled very slowly over something he was not prepared to share with Pitt, something at the same time funny and bitter.
'Oh, indeed,' he said sincerely. 'I believe in feudal times if a woman lost her virginity she had to pay a fine to the lord of the manor, because she was then worth much less to him come the time someone wished to marry her and naturally had to pay the lord for the privilege. We haven't changed so much! We're far too genteel to pay in money, of course, but we still pay!'
Pitt would like to have known what he meant, but to ask would have been vulgar, and he probably would not have been answered.
'Could she have had a lover?' He went back to the original question. 'Or an admirer?'
Inigo thought for a few moments before replying.
'Mina? I've never considered it, but I suppose she could have. The oddest people do.'
