He thought of the peaceful countryside of his youth, to some boring and bare of idea or adventure. Now it seemed like a place of lost peace. The world was changing too rapidly, like a train careering toward the horizon, out of control, threatening to crash.
He arrived at the Tyndale house, alighted, and paid the driver. He stood on the pavement and stared around him as the hansom moved away. It was a quiet neighborhood, and a little shabby. A million people lived in houses like these, outwardly much the same, inside each one unique, with the possessions and the record of one family, perhaps several generations of it.
He walked up to the door of number fifty-seven and knocked. As he stepped back, so as not to threaten whoever opened it, he noticed that the bricks needed repointing in half a dozen places. A slate in the roof was loose, but well away from the door. If it fell it would land harmlessly in the garden, in among the perennial flowers, which were now neatly cut back, ready to grow again next year.
The door opened and a maid looked out curiously. She was young, not more than fifteen or sixteen. She reminded him of Gracie, when he and Charlotte had first married. One young girl was all the domestic help they could afford. He found himself smiling at the memory.
“Yes, sir? Can I ’elp yer?” she asked.
“Good morning. My name is Commander Pitt, of Special Branch. Will you please ask Mrs. Tyndale if she can spare me a little of her time? It is important.”
It took the maid a moment to grasp what he had said, but after the initial amazement, she nodded, dropped an awkward curtsy, and asked him in. She left him in a rather chilly parlor, and went off very swiftly to fetch her mistress.
Pitt looked around. One could tell a great deal about both past and present from the parlor of a family home, or, in wealthier houses, from the morning room. It was usually a mixture of what one wished people to believe was part of one’s ordinary life: the books, the pictures, the ornaments, the best furniture; and also the things one thought well of, but did not actually find comfortable: straight-backed chairs, vases given as gifts by relatives one could not afford to offend, books one ought to have read but never would.
Mrs. Tyndale came in five minutes later. She was a slender woman with a grave, interesting face and a streak of white across the front of her dark hair. When she spoke, her voice was husky, and had a faint foreign accent he could not place. Instantly she shattered all his preconceptions.
“Good morning, Commander,” she introduced herself. “I am Eva Tyndale. What can I do for you?”
He answered her quite candidly. “I apologize for intruding on you, but recent events have obliged me to look into police conduct at the time of your husband’s death. I am sorry to have to raise the matter again. This should have been done at the time, but it wasn’t.”
She raised fine, black eyebrows. “Recent events?”
“The death of three policemen and injury of two more in the bombing at Lancaster Gate.”
“Oh. I see.” She made a very slight gesture with one hand, inviting him to sit down. “I have no idea how I can help. I did read enough about it to realize that they were the same men who investigated the shooting of my husband. I had assumed it was coincidence. Presumably they often work together, and their job is a dangerous one. But how does my husband’s death concern Special Branch? He was killed by accident, by a young man addicted to opium. Why is Special Branch involved in that?”
“Because there is a possibility that the two events are connected,” Pitt answered levelly. “If not in fact, then in someone’s imagination.”
“My husband was there purely by mischance.” She sat in the chair opposite him, her hands folded gently in her lap, very white against the black of her dress. She was not beautiful, but there was an intensity of character in her face that held his attention, and he found it pleasing. He regretted having to ask this of her. It had to be painful.
“Mr. Tyndale did not normally pass that way?” he asked.
“Seldom. He had come home and gone out again, to look for our dog, which had chased a cat and disappeared.” She took a deep breath and quite openly steadied her voice, keeping her self-control with difficulty as memory of that night returned. “He never came back. But the dog came home an hour or two later. It has an absurdity about it, doesn’t it? Life can be both tragic and ridiculous at the same time.”
“Indeed. The police record says very little about him…” he began.
A bitterness made her face bleak for an instant, then she mastered it. “They asked a great deal at the time, but all in an effort to find out if he could have been the dealer in opium their trap was set to catch. Apparently that man never came…if he existed at all. The young man was arrested and charged with shooting my husband to death.” She twisted her hands in her lap, just a tiny movement. “He denied it. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I can think of no reason in the world why he would shoot James. Or the drug seller either, for that matter.” She gave Pitt a small, sad smile. “I would have thought it far more likely he would shoot one of the policemen, or even more than one, and then make his escape. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” Pitt admitted. “But then I am on the scene a couple of years too late. I understand your husband dealt in books, Mrs. Tyndale?”
“Yes, he sold rare books and manuscripts,” she replied.
Pitt had already looked around the room and seen that a once very comfortable style of life had suffered a little since Tyndale’s death. There was a slight shabbiness, obvious from cushions worn and not replaced, net curtains carefully mended, the loose slate on the roof, old paint here and there, a cracked paving stone in the garden. How wide a tragedy can spin its web.
“Did Inspector Ednam, or any of his men, ask you about your husband’s business, or his habits at the time? Anything about him?”
“Are you suggesting there was something to hide?” she said, almost without expression. How many times had she fended off the intrusive questions of neighbors? Why Tyndale, why not their husbands, or sons? It is easier to think misfortune is somehow deserved; then you can make yourself safe from it.
“No, Mrs. Tyndale. I am wondering if they did not ask precisely because they knew your husband’s death was completely random, exactly as you said. There has been some suggestion that Lezant shot him deliberately. But since he had never met him that seems very unlikely.”
“Then why would he?” At last the pain came through her voice.
“There is a young man, another one, who says he was there also, and escaped. He claims that Lezant did not shoot your husband, but one of the police did. He always claimed so throughout the trial right until Lezant’s own death, but he was not believed.”
“Except by you?” Mrs. Tyndale asked, her eyes widening.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “There are questions unanswered, things that don’t appear to make sense, as you have pointed out.”
She looked at him steadily, and then averted her eyes. He caught the bright light on tears for an instant. Then she moved and the shadow changed.
“I would be grateful if you proved without any doubt that my husband was a chance victim and nothing more. It is all I can do for him now.”
“Has anyone suggested otherwise, apart from the police, who are now under far closer scrutiny?”
She looked back at him. “Those who wish to protect the police,” she answered. “I can understand why. We all need to believe the police are strong, honest, brave, everything that will stand between us and the violence and darkness we are afraid of, whether it is real or not.”
He knew exactly what she meant.
He spoke with her another twenty minutes, learning more of James Tyndale, and then excused himself and left. He would check everything she had said, but the more he considered it, the less did he believe that Tyndale was anything more than a bystander caught fatally in someone else’s disaster.