Bethlehem Road Read online

  “James—” Helen started down the stairs, her hand white, on the bannister. Pitt waited well behind because he could hardly see her black skirts on the gaslit stair and feared lest he might tread on them. “James, he came back to see if he could find a threatening letter I told him Father had received.”

  “We’ll look for it!” James was not to be so easily soothed. “If we find it we’ll inform you. Now good day to you, sir—the footman will show you out.”

  Pitt ignored him and turned to Helen. “With your permission, ma’am, I would like to speak to the footmen and coachmen.”

  “Whatever for? “ Clearly James still considered his presence a trespass.

  “Since Mr. Etheridge was attacked in the street, sir, it is possible he was followed and watched some time beforehand,” Pitt replied levelly. “On recollection one of them may bring something helpful to mind.”

  Anger stained James’s cheeks with color; he should have seen that point himself. In many ways he was younger than the thirty or so years Pitt judged him to be. His sophistication was a thin skin over his emotions, over the rawness of someone unproved in his own eyes. Perhaps his father-in-law’s complete control of the household had oppressed him more than he could admit to himself.

  Helen put her hand on her husband’s arm, her fingers resting very lightly, as if she were half afraid he might brush her off and she wanted to be able to pretend not to have noticed.

  “James, we have to help all we can. I know they may never catch this madman, or anarchist, whoever it is, but—”

  “That hardly needs to be said, Helen!” He looked at Pitt; they were much of a height. “Question the outside staff, if you must—and then leave us alone. Let my wife mourn in private, and with some decency.” He did not put his hand over hers, as Pitt would have done in his place. Instead he moved away from her hand, and then put his arm round her shoulders, holding her by his side for a moment. Pitt saw Helen’s face relax and a soft pleasure relax her features. To Pitt it was a colder gesture than the touching of hands would have been, a masked thing, kept apart by layers of cloth. But one does not know what happens in the relationships of others. Sometimes what seems close hides voids of loneliness whose pain outsiders can never conceive: others who sound to be remote, pursuing their own paths without regard, actually understand each other and silences exist because there is no need for speech, as quarrels are the strange coverings of enfolding warmth and intense loyalties. Perhaps James and Helen Carfax’s love was not as one-sided as he had imagined, not so full of pain for her, nor so cramping and unwelcome to him.

  He excused himself and went through the green baize door to the servants’ quarters, explaining to the butler who he was, and that he had Mr. Carfax’s permission to speak to them. He was met with cool suspicion.

  “Mrs. Carfax told me her father had received a threatening letter,” he added. “She naturally wished me to pursue it, to discover anything I can.”

  The watchfulness relaxed. The thought of James Carfax giving or withholding permission in the household was obviously so unfamiliar to them it had not registered. The mention of Helen, however, was different.

  “If we knew anything we’d have told you,” the butler said grimly. “But if you want to ask anyone, then of course I’ll see that they’re brought, and that they answer you as best they can.”

  “Thank you.” Pitt had thought of several questions, not that he expected helpful answers to any of them, but it gave him an opportunity to make a better judgment of the household. The cook offered him a cup of tea, for which he was grateful, and during the conversation he saw the extent of the establishment. Etheridge had kept ten maids altogether, including an upstairs maid, a downstairs maid, the tweeny, a lady’s maid for Helen, laundresses, a parlourmaid, a kitchenmaid, and scullery maids. And of course there was a housekeeper. There were two footmen, both six feet tall and nicely matched, a butler, a valet, a bootboy, and outside, two grooms and a coachman.

  He watched them all relax and become easier as he told them one or two mildly humorous stories of his experience and shared tea and some of the cook’s best Dundee cake, which she kept for the servants’ hall. He observed the lady’s maid more closely than the rest of them. She accepted some good-natured teasing because her position in the servants ranking was higher, despite her being only twenty-five or twenty-six, but as soon as he turned the subject towards Helen and James there was a very slight alteration in the angle of her chin, a tightening of the muscles in her shoulders, a carefulness in her eyes. She knew the pain of a woman who loves more than she is loved, and she was not going to betray it to the rest of the servants, still less to this intrusive policeman.

  It was all Pitt had wanted, and when he had eaten the last crumb of his cake, he thanked them, complimented them, and went outside to find the coachman, who was busy cleaning harness in the mews.

  Pitt asked the coachman if he’d noticed anyone taking an unusual interest in Etheridge’s journeys, but he did not expect to learn anything. What he wanted to know was where James Carfax went, and how often.

  When he left in the late afternoon he was in time to catch a hansom back across the river to St. James’s and the famous gentlemen’s club of Boodle’s, where the coachman had said James Carfax was a member. The man had been discreet, naming only the places where such a young man might be presumed to go: his club, very occasionally his place of business, the theaters, balls and dinners of the usual social round, and in the summer the races, regattas, and garden parties which all Society attended, if they had the rank to be invited and the money to accept.

  It was growing dark when Pitt found the doorman at Boodle’s and with a mixture of flattery and pressure, elicited from him that Mr. James Carfax was indeed a regular visitor to the premises, that he had many friends among the members and they often sat far into the night playing cards, and yes, he supposed they drank a fair bit, as gentlemen will. No, he did not always leave in his own carriage, at times he dismissed it and left in the vehicle of one or another of his friends. Did he return home? Well it was not for him to say where a young gentleman went when he left.

  Was Mr. Carfax overall a winner at cards, or a loser? He had no idea, but certainly he paid his debts, or he would not remain a member, now would he?

  Pitt agreed that he would not and had to be content with that, although the thoughts that disturbed him were growing in his mind, and nothing he had learned dispelled them.

  There was one more thing he could do before going home. He took another cab, from St. James’s down the Buckingham Palace Road and south to the Chelsea Embankment to Barclay Hamilton’s house close to the Albert Bridge. There was no use asking any professional or social acquaintance of James Carfax the sort of thing he wished to know. But Barclay Hamilton had recently lost his own father to the same grotesque death as Helen Carfax’s father had met with. He could reasonably be pressed with questions more direct and might be free to answer them without fear of the social condemnation others might feel, the sense of having betrayed those who implicitly trusted him.

  He was received with some surprise, but civilly enough. Now that he had the opportunity to see Barclay Hamilton on his own, and not in the circumstances of the immediate impact of bereavement, Pitt found him a man of quiet charm. The brusqueness of his manner at their first meeting had completely vanished, and he invited Pitt into his sitting room with as much curiosity as it was courteous to show.

  It was not a large room, but graciously furnished, obviously for the comfort of its owner rather than to impress others. The chairs were old, the red and blue Turkey rug was worn in the center but at the outer edges still retained its stained glass vividness. The pictures, mostly watercolors, were not expensive, perhaps even amateur, but each had a mood and a delicacy that suggested they had been chosen for their charm rather than for monetary value. The books in the glass-fronted cases were arranged in order of subject, not to please the eye.

  “I don’t let my housekeeper touch anything
in here, except to dust it,” Hamilton said, following Pitt’s gaze with a faint smile. “She complains, but obeys. She is greatly put out that I will not allow her to decorate the back of every chair with an antimacassar and put family photographs all over the table. I will permit one of my mother—that is enough. I don’t care to feel stared at by an entire gallery.”

  Pitt smiled back. It was a man’s room, and it reminded him of his own bachelor days, although his lodgings had consisted of only one room and had been far from the elegance of Chelsea. It was only the masculinity of it that held the echo, the mark of a single owner, a single taste, a man free to come and go as he pleased, to drop things where he liked without regard for another’s convenience.

  It had been a good time in his life, a necessary time for growing from boy to man, but he looked back on it with a tolerance that held no yearning, no desire to recapture it. No house could be home to him without Charlotte in it, her favorite pictures, which he loathed, hanging on the wall, her sewing spread out, her books left lying on the tables, her slippers somewhere for him to trip over, her voice from the kitchen, the lights on, the warmth, her touch, familiar now but still exciting, still needed with an urgency, and above all, her sharing, the talk of her day, what had been right or wrong in it, what had been funny or infuriating, and her endless concern and curiosity about his work and what mattered to him in it.

  Hamilton was looking at him now, his eyes wide and puzzled. There was humor in his face, but a shadow about the bridge of the nose, a delicacy, as if he had seen his dreams the and had to rebuild with care over a loss that still pained.

  “What can I tell you, Inspector Pitt, that you do not already know?”

  “You have read of the death of Vyvyan Etheridge?”

  “Of course. I should not think there is a soul in the city who has not.”

  “Are you acquainted, either personally or by repute, with his son-in-law, Mr. James Carfax?”

  “A little. Not closely. Why? Surely you cannot think he has any connection with anarchists?” Again the fleeting smile, the knowledge of absurdity which amused rather than angered him.

  “You don’t think it likely?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Why not?” Pitt tried to put skepticism into his voice, as if it were the line of investigation he was pursuing.

  “Frankly, he hadn’t the passion or the dedication to be anything so total.”

  “So total?” Pitt was curious. It was not the reason he had expected: not moral impossibility but emotional shallowness. The perception said more of Hamilton than perhaps it did of James Carfax. “You do not think he would find it repugnant, unethical? Disloyal to his own class?”

  Hamilton colored faintly, but his candid eyes never left Pitt’s. “I would be surprised if he considered the question in that light. In fact, I doubt he has ever thought of politics one way or the other, except to assume that the system will remain as it is and ensure him the sort of life he wishes.”

  “Which is?”

  Hamilton lifted his shoulders very slightly. “As far as I know, lunching with friends, a little gambling, visiting the races and the fashionable parties, the theaters, dinners, balls—and discreet nights with a trollop now and then—perhaps a visit to the dogfight or a fistfight if he can find one.”

  “You have no high opinion of him,” Pitt said levelly, still holding his eyes.

  Hamilton pulled a slight face. “I suppose he is no worse than many. But I cannot believe he is a passionate anarchist in heavy disguise. Believe me, Inspector, no disguise could be so superb!”

  “Does he win at gambling?”

  “Not overall, according to the gossip I’ve heard.”

  “And yet he pays up. Does he have considerable private means?”

  “I doubt it. His family is not wealthy, although his mother inherited some honorary title. He married well, as you know. Helen Etheridge has tremendous expectations—I suppose now they are a reality. I imagine she pays whatever debts he runs up. He isn’t a heavy loser, so far as I know.”

  “Are you a member of Boodle’s?”

  “I? No—not my sort of interest. But I have several acquaintances who are. Society is very small, Inspector. And my father lived within a mile of Paris Road.”

  “But you have not lived in your father’s house for many years now.”

  All the ease and humor died out of Hamilton’s face, as if someone had opened a door and let in a blast of winter. “No.” His voice was tight, caught in his throat. “My father married again after my mother’s death. I was an adult; it was perfectly natural and suitable that I should find my own premises. But that can have nothing to do with James Carfax. I referred to it only to show you that in Society one cannot help knowing something about other people if they move in similar circles.”

  Pitt regretted having inadvertently caused him pain. He liked the man, and it had been no part of his search to touch an old wound that could hardly have any bearing either on Lockwood Hamilton’s death or Etheridge’s.

  “Of course,” he agreed, leaving the apology tacit in his voice; the less the wound was touched the sooner the thin skin would heal over it again. “Did you mention other women as a supposition from his general conduct, or have you some specific knowledge?”

  Hamilton breathed out, relaxing again. “No, Inspector. I regret my speculations were based solely on his reputation. It is possible I did him an injustice. I don’t like the man; please consider anything I say with that in view.”

  “You knew Carfax’s wife before her marriage?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Did you like Helen Etheridge, Mr. Hamilton?” Pitt asked it so candidly that it was robbed of implication.

  “Yes,” Hamilton said equally frankly. “But not romantically, you understand. I always felt her very young. There was something childlike in her; she was like a girl who keeps her dreams.” He smiled ruefully. “As if she had only just put her hair up and donned her first long skirts!”

  Pitt pictured Mrs. Carfax, her vulnerability and her obvious adoration for her husband, and silently agreed.

  “Unfortunately we all have to grow up,” Hamilton added with a small smile. “Perhaps women less so, on the whole.” Then he bit his lips as if he wished to take the words back. “Some women, anyway. I fear I cannot help you very much, Inspector. I don’t care for James Carfax very much, but I would swear he has no connection with anarchists, or any other political conspiracy, nor is he a madman. He is exactly what he appears, a rather selfish young man who is bored, drinks a little more than is wise, and likes to show off but has not the financial means to keep up with his friends without using his wife’s money, which galls him, but not enough to prevent him from doing it.”

  “And if his wife ceased to provide the money?” Pitt asked.

  “She won’t. At least,” he corrected himself, “I don’t believe she will, unless he becomes too rash in his behavior and hurts her too much. But I don’t think he’s fool enough for that.”

  “No, I don’t suppose so. Thank you, Mr. Hamilton. I appreciate your candor; it has probably saved me hours of delicate questions.” Pitt stood up. It was late and growing cold outside, and he wanted to go home. Tomorrow would come soon enough, and he had achieved little.

  Barclay Hamilton stood up also. He was taller than Pitt had remembered, and leaner. He looked embarrassed.

  “I apologize, Inspector Pitt. I have spoken more frankly than I had a right to. It is the end of the day, and I am tired. I was less than discreet, and possibly uncharitable towards Carfax. I should not have spoken my thoughts.”

  Pitt smiled broadly. “You did warn me that you did not like him.”

  Hamilton relaxed, a sudden lightness in his face evoking the young man he must have been eighteen years ago, when Amethyst Royce had married his father. “I hope we meet again, Inspector, in happier circumstances.” And instead of calling the manservant he held out his hand and shook Pitt’s as if they had been friends, not gentleman
and detective.

  Pitt left the house and walked slowly along the Embankment until he should find a cab and at last go home. The night air was raw, and there was a mist rising from the water. Somewhere far down the river by the Pool of London, ships’ foghorns were blaring out, muffled by distance and damp.

  Could James Carfax have murdered his father-in-law to speed his wife’s inheritance? Or, uglier and more painful than that, could Helen, in her anguish to keep her husband, have murdered her own father for his money, money she needed to give James the material things he counted so dear? To keep his attention, so she might pretend it was love? She could hardly have done it herself, but she might have paid someone else to do it. That might account as well for Sir Lockwood Hamilton’s murder: a paid assassin might have mistaken him for Etheridge, something a person who knew him well would not do on a lamplit bridge like Westminster.

  Tomorrow he must find out which picture she had sold, and for how much. It wouldn’t be as easy to discover what had happened to the money it had brought, but that too should be possible.

  Pitt went home tired after a long day, Helen’s face lingering in his mind, with its painful tenderness and the fear in her eyes.

  The following morning Pitt got up early and set out in the rain to report to Micah Drummond, and Charlotte received her first letter from Emily, postmarked Paris. She sat looking at it for several minutes without opening it. Half of her was eager to know that Emily was happy and well, the other half was stung by an envy for the excitement of laughter and adventure and the beginning of love.

  After propping it up against the teapot and staring at it while she ate two slices of toast and marmalade, a preserve which she made extremely well—it was her best culinary achievement—she finally succumbed.

  It was dated Paris, April 1888, and read:

  Dearest Charlotte,

  I hardly know how to begin to tell you everything that has happened. Crossing on the boat was miserable! The wind was cold and the sea rough! But once we reached dry land it all changed completely. The coach drive from Calais to Paris made me think of every adventure I’ve ever read about musketeers and Louis XVI—it was the XVI, wasn’t it? It was such a marvelous idea of Jack’s, and full of all the things I imagined: farms with cheeses for sale, wonderful trees, little old villages with farmers’ wives arguing, all delightful and romantic. And I thought of the fleeing aristocrats in the Revolution—they must have passed this way to reach the packet boats to England!