Still thinking about it, without having consciously made any decision, he began to walk again. The rain was gathering in vehemence and ran in cold streaks inside his collar and down his flesh, making him shudder. He was glad to reach the Charringtons’ doorstep.
The butler received him with faint displeasure, as if he were a stray driven in by the inclement weather rather than a person who had any place there. Pitt considered the hair plastered over his forehead, the wet trousers flapping around his ankles, and the one bootlace broken, and decided that the butler’s look of disapproval was not unwarranted.
Pitt forced himself to smile. “Inspector Pitt, from the police,” he announced.
“Indeed!” The butler’s look of polite patience vanished like sun behind a cloud.
“I would like to see Mrs. Charrington, if you please,” Pitt continued. “It is with regard to the death of Mrs. Spencer-Brown.”
“I don’t believe—” the butler began, then looked more closely at Pitt’s face and realized protestations were only going to prolong the interview, not end it. “If you come into the morning room, I will see if Mrs. Charrington is at home.” It was a fiction Pitt was well used to. It would be discourteous to say, “I will ask her if she will see you,” although he had been told so bluntly often enough.
He had barely sat down when the butler returned to escort him to the withdrawing room, where there was a fine fire dancing in the grate and three bowls of flowers in jardinières by the wall.
Ambrosine sat bolt upright on the green brocade love seat and looked Pitt over from hair to boots with interest.
“Good morning, Inspector. Do be good enough to sit down and remove your coat. You seem more than a little wet.”
He obeyed with pleasure, handing the offending garment to the butler, then arranging himself in an armchair so as to absorb the full benefit of the fire.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said with feeling.
The butler retired, closing the door behind him, and Ambrosine raised her fine eyebrows.
“I am told you are inquiring into poor Mrs. Spencer-Brown’s death,” she said. “I am afraid I know nothing whatsoever of interest. In fact, how little I know is quite amazing in itself. I would have expected to hear something. One has to be remarkably clever to keep a secret in Society, you know. There are many things that are not spoken of which would be in unforgivable taste to mention, but you will usually find that people know, all the same. There is a certain smugness in the face!” She looked at him to see if he understood, and was evidently satisfied that he did. “It is infinitely pleasing to know secrets, especially when others are aware that you do—and they do not.”
She frowned. “But I have not observed this attitude lately in anyone but Mina herself! And I never really knew whether she had any great knowledge or merely wished us to think so!”
He was equally puzzled. “Do you not think that someone might be prepared to speak now that a death is involved,” he said, “to avoid misunderstandings, and perhaps even injustice?”
She gave a weary little smile. “What an optimist you are, Inspector. You make me feel very old—or at least as if you must be very young. Death is the very best excuse of all to hide things forever. Few people have the least objection to injustice—the world is run on it. And, after all, it is part of the creed: ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum.’ ”
He waited for her to explain, although he thought he knew what she meant.
“‘Speak no ill of the dead,’ ” she said bleakly. “Of course I mean Society’s creed, not the Church’s. A very charitable idea, at first glance, but it leaves all the weight of the blame upon the living—which, of course, is what it is designed to do. Whoever took any joy from hunting a dead fox?”
“The blame for what?” he asked her soberly, forcing himself not to be diverted from the issue of Mina.
“That depends upon whom we are discussing,” she replied. “In the case of Mina, I really do not know. It is a field in which I would have expected you to be far more knowledgeable than I. Why are you concerned in the matter at all? To die is not a crime. Of course I appreciate that to kill oneself is—but since it is obviously quite unprosecutable, I fail to see your involvement.”
“My only interest is to make certain that that is what it is,” he answered. “A matter of her having taken her own life. No one appears to know of any reason whatsoever why she should have done so.”
“No,” she said thoughtfully. “We know so little about each other, I sometimes wonder if we even know why we do the important things. I don’t suppose it is the reason that appears— like money, or love.”
“Mrs. Spencer-Brown seems to have been very well provided for.” He tried a more direct approach. “Do you suppose it could have been anything to do with an affaire of love?”
Her mouth quivered with a suppressed smile.
“How delicate of you, Inspector. I have no idea about that, either. I’m sorry. If she had a lover, then she was more discreet than I gave her credit for.”
“Perhaps she loved someone who did not return her feelings?” he suggested.
“Possibly. But if all the people who ever did were to kill themselves, half of London would be occupied burying the other half!” She dismissed it with a lift of her fingers. “Mina was not a melancholy romantic, you know. She was a highly practical person, and fully acquainted with the realities of life. And she was thirty-five, not eighteen!”
“People of thirty-five can fall in love.” He smiled very slightly.
She looked him up and down, judging him correctly to within a year.
“Of course they can,” she agreed, with the shadow of an answering smile. “People can fall in love at any age at all. But at thirty-five they have probably had the experience several times before and do not mistake it for the end of the world when it goes amiss.”
“Then why do you think Mrs. Spencer-Brown killed herself, Mrs. Charrington?” He surprised himself by being so candid.
“I? You really wish for my opinion, Inspector?”
“I do.”
“I am disinclined to believe that she did. Mina was far too practical not to find some way out of whatever misfortune she had got herself into. She was not an emotional woman, and I never knew anyone less hysterical.”
“An accident?”
“Not of her making. I should think an idiotic maid moved bottles or boxes, or mixed two things together to save room and created a poison by mistake. I daresay you will never find out, unless your policeman removed all the containers in the house before the servants had any opportunity to destroy or empty them. If I were you, I shouldn’t worry myself—there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it, either to undo it or to prevent it happening again somewhere else, to somebody else.”
“A domestic accident?”
“I would think so. If you had ever been responsible for the running of a large house, Inspector, you would know what extraordinary things can happen. If you were aware what some cooks do, and what other strange bodies find their way into the larder, I daresay you would never eat again!”
He stood up, concealing an unseemly impulse to laugh that welled up inside him. There was something in her he liked enormously.
“Thank you, ma’am. If that is indeed what happened, then I expect you are right—I shall never know.”
She rang the bell for the butler to show Pitt out.
“It is one of the marks of wisdom to learn to leave alone that which you cannot help,” she said gently. “You will do more harm than good threshing all the fine chaff to discover a grain of truth. A lot of people will be frightened, perhaps made unemployable in the future, and you will still not have helped anyone.”
He called on Theodora von Schenck and found her an utterly different kind of woman: handsome in her own way, but entirely lacking the aristocratic beauty of Ambrosine or the ethereal delicacy of Eloise. But more surprising than her appearance was the fact that, like Charlotte, she was busy with quite ordinary household chores. When Pitt arrived, she was counting linen and sorting into a pile the things that required mending or replacement. In fact, she did not seem to be ashamed that she had put some aside to be cut down into smaller articles, such as pillowcases from worn sheets, and linen cloths for drying and polishing from those pieces that were smaller or more worn.