He smiled ruefully. ‘I remember I was jealous. In her words, he sounded funny, impossibly brave, absolutely hare-brained — but not unrecognisable as the man I had known.’
He sighed and took another mouthful of the excellent meal. ‘He ended up in an Italian prison somewhere in the north, with both his shoulders dislocated. Must have hurt like hell. He never spoke of it. If you need to know, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I haven’t any idea what happened, or who did it. I could give half a dozen guesses as to why.’
Pitt avoided Rawlins’ eyes, looking instead down at his own plate. ‘Did you ever know him to commit violence against anyone?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps in the conviction that the end justified the means?’ He did not want the answer, and he almost denied the question in the next breath. He could feel his muscles tense, as though he were waiting for a blow.
‘I can’t tell you,’ Rawlins said quietly. ‘Not in a way that would be of any value. I never knew him choose violence, in fact as a student I saw him go to some lengths to avoid it. He was argumentative, but never quarrelsome. But I do know that he was a man of intense passions. I don’t believe anything would stop him doing something he believed to be necessary in a cause he cared about. He had too much imagination, and not enough sense of fear. He was an all-or-nothing sort of man. Judging by his speeches in Parliament, and the little I know of him now, he still is. Actually, I don’t think that kind of thing changes. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.’
‘Any friends I should worry about?’ Pitt asked casually.
‘Worry?’
‘Fringes of the communal underworld, that sort of thing?’
Rawlins smiled. ‘Carlisle? Quite possibly. He’s a man of eclectic tastes and peculiar loyalties. But if he makes a promise, he won’t break it.’
‘That’s rather what I thought,’ Pitt agreed.
They finished the meal speaking of other things. Rawlins was a pleasant man, intelligent and courteous. Pitt found him not only easy to like, but easier to believe than he would have wished.
Nothing he had heard in the course of the whole two days had painted a picture of Somerset Carlisle that was in any way different from the man he already knew, the man who had played such a grotesque and dangerous game with the corpses in Resurrection Row.
If anything, he was worse off, because it drew a picture of a man he not only liked, and was now compelled to admire, but one very capable of doing precisely what Pitt had feared.
Chapter Thirteen
Pitt arrived late at his office on the following morning, having been held up by a traffic accident on Euston Road. The whole thing had turned into chaos as everyone tried to find a way around it, and ended by getting jammed in a total impasse where no one had room to turn and extricate themselves.
Stoker was waiting for him, looking grave. ‘Don’t bother taking your coat off,’ he said as soon as Pitt was in through the door.
Pitt stopped. ‘Not another body!’
‘No, sir, still the same one. Whistler wants to see you. And if you don’t mind, sir, I’d like to come along too.’
Pitt had no objection to Stoker coming, but he was curious, and desperate for a little hope. ‘Why?’ he asked.
Stoker stared back at him, his dark grey eyes clear. ‘I want to know more about what kind of a man does this to a woman. I want to know who it is that Kitty Ryder thinks she’s running away from.’
‘You still think it has something to do with Kynaston?’ Pitt felt the knot tighten in his stomach.
‘I don’t know, sir, but it appears she thinks it has. If I could find her, I’d ask her why.’
‘No more progress with that?’ Pitt asked.
‘Not much.’ Stoker stopped, took a deep breath, and went on, ‘But I’m not giving up.’ There was a faint colour in his bony face, just a smudge of pink across his cheeks. He looked at Pitt defiantly, offering no explanations.
‘Well, if you succeed, you can ask her.’ Pitt jammed his hat on again. ‘But we can’t wait for that. We’d better go and see Whistler. Just what I feel like first thing on a cold wet morning, get stuck in a traffic jam, then a visit to the morgue. Come on!’ He led the way back out into the rain.
Pitt and Stoker had to wait several minutes to find a hansom. It was always like this on wet days. No one was willing to walk.
Finally they found a cab and splashed through the puddles to scramble inside, their sodden trouser legs flapping, coats flying open in the wind.
It was a long way from Lisson Grove to Blackheath, on the other side of the river and considerably further east.
‘If someone’s trying to make Kynaston look guilty of this, even if he isn’t, then it’s someone with a pretty good knowledge of his household,’ Stoker said after a few minutes. ‘And he knows Kynaston himself too. Either he knows why Kynaston keeps on lying, or he’s got some kind of a hold over him so he doesn’t tell us the truth.’ He sat huddled in his damp coat, looking sideways at Pitt in the grey daylight.
‘I’m afraid that’s unarguable,’ Pitt agreed. ‘What I need to know is, why? To what end? I wish I could think it was personal vengeance of some sort, but we haven’t found any kind of reason for it.’
They turned from Seymour Place right into Edgware Road then left and right again into Park Lane.
‘Well, I dare say Rosalind Kynaston would be pretty angry if she knew about the mistress,’ Stoker pointed out. ‘And she could have taken the watch and fob easily enough.’
‘She might hate him,’ Pitt replied reasonably, ‘but she wouldn’t ruin him. If she did, she’d be ruining herself at the same time. His disgrace would be hers as well. And if he lost his income, that’s also hers! You told me she comes from a respectable background, but she has no independent wealth. Unless you think she’s got a lover too! One who would marry her, in spite of whatever this does to her reputation? I suppose it’s possible, but I can’t see it as likely, can you?’
Stoker thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know women that well, sir. Not as you must, with a wife and a daughter …’
‘I’m not sure any man knows women,’ Pitt said drily. ‘Let us agree that perhaps my ignorance is not as total as yours. What about it?’
‘Mrs Kynaston doesn’t look to me like a woman who’s got a secret lover, sir.’ Stoker assiduously avoided his eyes. ‘I remember when my sister Gwen was first in love with her husband, didn’t know that much about him, but by heck, I knew she had something going on. Little things, like the way she did her hair, the way she took care with what she wore, not just some of the time, but all of it. That little secret smile, like the cat that got the cream. And even the way she walked with a little swish of her skirts, as if she knew she was going somewhere special.’
Pitt couldn’t help laughing, in spite of the cold and the discomfort inside the rattling hansom squashing them together. He had seen exactly what Stoker was describing in Charlotte, years ago when he had been courting her. He hadn’t understood it then: the happiness one moment, despair the next, but always the vitality. She had seemed to glow with life.
He had seen it in Emily too, when she was beginning to think seriously about Jack Radley. But that was another subject, and at the moment one of more pain than pleasure.
And, of course, now it was also beginning in Jemima. How quickly she was growing up. Pitt knew which young men she liked, and which held no interest for her. She was so pretty, brave and vulnerable, like her mother, imagining she was sophisticated, and as easy to read as an open book. Or was that only so to him, because he loved her, and would have protected her from every pain, if that were possible?
Charlotte’s father would have protected her from the social disasters, not to mention financial, of marrying a policeman! The only fate worse would have been not to marry at all, and that judgement call was a fine thing! Thank heaven her mother had more emotional sense!