She nodded silently in agreement. There was no surprise in her face. Presumably she had already realized as much herself. She had had a week in which to think of it, and it must have crowded almost everything else out of her mind.
“Have you had any further thought as to why anyone should wish Miss Lamont any harm?”
She hesitated, doubt in her face. It was clear some deep emotion worked within her.
“Please, Miss Forrest,” he urged. “She was a woman who had opportunity to discover some of the most profound and vulnerable secrets in people’s lives, things that they may well have been desperately ashamed of, past sins and tragedies too raw to forget.” He saw the instant compassion in her face, as if her imagination reached out to such people and saw the horror of their memories in all their terrible detail. Perhaps she had served other mistresses with griefs, children dead, unhappy marriages, love affairs that tormented them. People did not always realize just how much a lady’s maid was privy to, and sometimes how much she knew of a woman’s most intimate life. Some might like to think of her as a silent confidante, others might be appalled that anyone else saw their most private moments and understood too much. Just as no man was a hero to his valet, so no woman was a mystery to her maid.
“Yes,” Lena said very quietly. “There are not many secrets from a good medium, and she was very good.”
Pitt looked at her, trying to read in her face, her eyes, whether she knew more than the bare words she was offering. It would have been difficult for Maude Lamont to have hidden from her maid any regular accomplice, either to fake manifestations or to gain personal information about prospective clients. A lover would also have given himself away sooner or later, even if only in Maude’s demeanor. Was Lena Forrest keeping such secrets out of loyalty to a dead woman, or self-preservation because if she betrayed them then who would employ her in such a sensitive position in the future? And she had to think very carefully about that. Maude Lamont was not here to give her a good reference as to her character or skills. Lena was coming from a house where a murder had been committed. Her outlook was, if not desperate, at the least extremely poor.
“Did she have regular callers who were not to do with séances?” Tellman asked. “We’re looking for those who gave her the information about people that she told them . . . things they wanted to hear.”
Lena looked down, as if embarrassed. “You don’t need a lot. People give themselves away. And she was very good at reading faces, understanding the things people don’t say. She was a terribly quick guesser. I can’t count the number of times I was thinking something, and she’d know what it was before I said it.”
“We’ve searched the house for diaries,” Tellman said to Pitt. “We found nothing other than lists of appointments. She must have committed everything to memory.”
“What did you think of her gifts, Miss Forrest?” Pitt said suddenly. “Do you believe in the power to contact the spirits of the dead?” He watched her closely. She had denied helping Maude Lamont, but surely there had been some assistance, and there was no one else here.
Lena took in a long, very deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “I don’t know. Seeing as I’ve lost my mother and my sister, I’d like to think they were somewhere I could speak to them again.” Her face was blurred with the depth of her emotion, which she kept only barely in control. It was profoundly obvious that her loss still racked her, and Pitt loathed having to reawaken it, and in front of others. Such grief should be afforded privacy.
“Have you ever seen manifestations yourself?” he asked. The answer to Maude Lamont’s murder lay at least in part in this house, and he had to find it, whether it affected Voisey or the election, or anything else. He could not let murder go, whoever the victim and whatever the reason.
“I used to think so,” she said hesitantly. “Long ago. But when you want something bad enough, like these people did . . .” She glanced sideways at the chairs where Maude’s clients sat at the séances. “Then perhaps you see it anyway, don’t you?”
“Yes, you can,” he agreed. “But you had no interest in the spirits these people wanted to contact? Think back to all you heard, all you know of what Miss Lamont was able to create. We’ve heard from other clients of voices, music, but the levitation seems to have happened only here.”
She looked puzzled.
“Rising up in the air,” Pitt explained. He saw a sudden flash of understanding in her eyes. “Tellman, take another look at the table,” he ordered. He turned back to Lena Forrest. “Do you ever remember seeing something different on the mornings after a séance, anything misplaced, a different smell, dust or powder, anything at all?”
She was silent for so long he was not sure if she was concentrating on something or if she simply did not intend to answer.
Tellman was sitting in the chair where Maude sat. Lena’s eyes were steady on him.
“Did you ever move the table?” Pitt asked suddenly.
“No. It’s fixed to the floor,” Tellman replied. “I tried to move it before.”
Pitt stood up. “What about the chair?” As he said it he walked over and Tellman rose and picked it up. He saw with surprise that there were four slight indentations on the floorboards where the feet had rested. Surely even the most continual use could not have made them. He moved to one of the other chairs and lifted it. There were no marks. He looked up quickly at Lena Forrest and caught the knowledge in her face.
“Where’s the lever?” he said grimly. “Your position is a very precarious one, Miss Forrest. Don’t jeopardize your future by lying to the police.” He hated making the threat, but he had no time to waste in trying to dismantle the woodwork to find the mechanism, and he needed to know how far she was involved. It might be crucial later.
She stood up, white-faced, and came around to the opposite side of the chair. She leaned over and touched the center of one of the carved flowers on the table edge.
“Press it,” he ordered.
She did, and nothing happened.
“Do it again!” he ordered.
She stood perfectly still.
Very gradually the chair began to rise, and glancing down Pitt saw that the floorboards immediately under it rose also, just those actually supporting the four feet. The rest remained where they were. There was no sound whatever. The machinery was so perfectly oiled it happened easily. When the chair was about eight inches above the rest of the floor it stopped.
Pitt stared at Lena Forrest. “So you knew that at least this much was trickery.”
“I only just found out,” she said with a quiver in her voice.
“When?”
“After she was dead. I started to look. I didn’t tell you because it seemed . . .” She looked down, then quickly up again. “Well, she’s gone. I suppose she can’t be hurt. She doesn’t know anything now.”
“I think you’d better tell us what else you learned, Miss Forrest.”
“I don’t know anything else, just the chair. I . . . I heard of the things she did from someone who came by . . . with flowers, to say how sorry they were. So I looked. I never sat in on a séance. I was never there!”
Pitt could not draw anything more from her. Minute examination of the chair and the table, and a journey to the cellar, exposed a very fine mechanism, kept in perfect repair, also several bulbs for electric light, with which the house was fitted, and which worked from a generator also in the cellar.
“Why so many bulbs?” Pitt said thoughtfully. “Electric isn’t even in most of the house, only the parlor and the dining room. All the rest is gas, and coal for heat.”