mind and threw her into a state of melancholia. If Byam had ever received that letter, he would have been far less surprised at her suicide.
“ ’ere-gimme it back!” Liza Cobb said sharply. “Yer read it.”
Had Laura Anstiss lived in a world of her own fantasy? The letter implied they had been lovers in a very physical sense. Anyone reading it would assume so. Had Anstiss seen either this, or some other like it?
“No,” he said levelly. “It is evidence in a murder case. I’ll keep it for now.”
“Yer thievin’ swine!” She lunged forward at him, but he was taller and heavier than she. He held out his other hand in a loose fist and she met it hard and retreated with ugly surprise in her face. “It’s mine,” she said between closed teeth.
“It was apparently never sent, so it belongs to Lady Anstiss,” he contradicted. “And since she is dead, presumably to her heirs.”
Her lip curled in a sneer. “Yer goin’ ter give it ter ’is lordship, are yer? I’ll bet-at a price. The more fool you! D’yer fink if it were that easy I wouldn’t ’a done that meself? I know ’im. You don’t. ’e’ll never pay yer. ’Orse-whip yer more like.”
“I’m going to give it to the police,” he said with a tight smile. “Which I am-Inspector Pitt of Bow Street. When the case is finished, if you’d like to come to Bow Street, you can try to claim it back.” And he turned on his heel and marched out, hearing her string of epithets and curses following him.
He walked briskly, pushing past the now wildly curious crowd. He was glad that the corner of small, open square lay across his way; the sight of the leaves against the sky was a clean and uncomplicated thing after the greed and the rage of the fishmonger’s shop and the woman in it. Reading the letter gave him a much clearer picture of why Byam had paid Weems for over two years. It was not the innocent passion he had implied, at least not in Laura Anstiss’s mind, and would not be read as such by any impartial person now.
If Frederick Anstiss hated Byam it would not be surprising. It would take a man of superhuman forgiveness not to feel betrayed by such emotions in his wife for his best and most trusted friend, and guest under his roof.
The square was crossed diagonally by a path and there were two couples strolling along, heads close in conversation, and a third couple standing facing each other in what was unmistakably an angry exchange. The man in a high winged collar was very pink in the face and clutched his cane fiercely, twitching it now and again, jabbing at the air. The woman was equally heated, but there was a certain air of enjoyment in her, and it served only to exacerbate her companion’s rage. After a few moments more he turned on his heel and strode off, and then as he passed a flower bush he lifted the cane high and sliced off a small branch in sheer temper. The action was so sudden and unforeseen it took Pitt by surprise.
Then startlingly he had a picture in his mind of Lord Anstiss standing in front of Weems’s desk in his office while Weems read that damning letter aloud, jeering, demanding money, and a stick going up in the air without warning, striking Weems on the side of the head, robbing him of his senses long enough for Anstiss to take up the blunderbuss, fill the powder pan and load it with gold coins, and fire it.
Or it might have been anyone else, any gentleman who quite normally carried a stick or a cane, and any other provocation. But the letter stayed in his mind, and the image of Anstiss’s face.
Had Weems, after two years of successful blackmail of Byam, tried his hand with Anstiss, and met a very different man; a man not plagued by guilt, but still burning with injury, humiliation and a long-hidden and unsatisfied hatred?
But why should he hide the hatred, if indeed he felt it? Friends drift apart; it would need no explanation, and Byam of all people would understand. He would never tell anyone the truth, in his own interest if not in Anstiss’s.
Pitt quickened his step.
Or was this the first time Anstiss had realized his wife’s guilt? Perhaps until then he had accepted Byam’s word for the innocence of the affaire, that it was simply an unwise friendship into which she alone had imagined love?
No one had thought to ask where Anstiss was on the night Weems was shot. He had never been a suspect; he was the injured party, not the offender.
The injured party.
He slowed down again unconsciously, the spring going out of his step. That was true. Anstiss was the one wronged. He had done nothing whatever to indicate a hatred of Byam or a desire to do anything but forget the whole matter. He did not seem a man to act in rage so uncontrollable as to commit murder.
No. If it was he who had struck Weems, and then shot him, there must have been a more powerful motive than simply to avoid paying a few guineas in blackmail over a letter which branded his long-dead wife as an adulteress.
He was well beyond the square now and walking quickly along the street towards the thoroughfare where he could get an omnibus home. It was early, but he wanted to speak to Charlotte.
The omnibus seemed ages in coming, and when it did, was hot and crowded. He sat squashed between two large ladies with shopping baskets, but he was unaware of them as he thought more and more of Anstiss and the terrible wound to his pride of his wife so obsessed with Byam. It was a passionate, immodest letter. There was something willful, almost commanding about it. It changed his view of Laura Anstiss entirely. He had imagined her as fragile, utterly feminine with a haunting beauty, and her suicide as a solitary grief, hugged to herself, a terrible loneliness. But the letter sounded far more robust, almost domineering, as though she expected to be obeyed, in fact had little doubt of it. Was she really such a spoilt beauty? Pitt thought he would not have liked her.
Perhaps Byam had been secretly nonplussed and had rejected her fairly roughly after once succumbing to physical temptation. That would explain his guilt even after so many years. He had betrayed Anstiss by making love to Laura, and then when he discovered her nature more fully, had rejected her pretty abruptly.
He reached home still preoccupied with his thoughts, and threw the door open. He called Charlotte’s name, and there was no answer. He went down the corridor and through the kitchen out into the garden.
“Thomas!” Charlotte swung around from the roses where she was snapping off the dead flower heads. “What has happened? Are you all right?”
He looked around. “Where are the children?”
“At school, of course. It’s only three o’clock. What is it?”
“Oh-yes, of course it is. I want to talk to you.”
She passed him the raffia trug for the flower heads and he took it obediently, holding it for her to continue.
“What about?” she asked, clipping off another head.
“Lord Anstiss.”
She must have caught the urgency in his voice. She stopped what she was doing, her hands motionless above the next rose. She looked at him.
“You think he is behind your secret society?” She put the secateurs in the basket and abandoned the task. “I think you are probably right. We had better go inside and talk about it.”
“No,” he said honestly, although even as he said it it ceased to be true. “I think he might have murdered Weems, but I am not totally sure why. I have bits of motives, but they none of them seem quite strong enough.”
She frowned, standing still by the rose bed. “Well, he surely wouldn’t kill someone just so the police would find the notes incriminating Mr. Carswell, and the police officers, even if he did want to take away the references to Lord Byam, who was his friend-and presumably in good favor with the society. He must be clever enough to think of a better way of doing that.” She shook her head. “One that wouldn’t be so dangerous to himself, or so extreme. It seems rather hysterical to me-and he certainly is not a panicky man, I am as sure of that as I am of anything about anyone. I would say he is cold-blooded, and quite in control of himself at all times. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes-but we could be mistaken. Sometimes very deep emotions lie under an outwardly calm face and manner.” He followed as she led the way inside and set the trug down on the kitchen table. Without asking she put the kettle on the hob and reached for cups and the teapot.
“Lord Byam might panic,” she replied. “I still don’t think Anstiss would. But I know that is not proof of anything. And he would need a very good reason indeed to do something so dangerous.”
“I know.” He sat down at the table.
“Have you had luncheon?” she asked.
