Highgate Rise Page 2

  His hands had been clenched, his body tight, now suddenly he remembered that Pitt was a policeman who probably possessed nothing—and then he also remembered why Pitt was here. His shoulders slumped again. “I am sorry. I should not so criticize a man bereaved. It is shameful.”

  “You went for a walk …” Pitt prompted.

  “Oh yes. My eyes were tired, and I wished to refresh myself, restore my inner well-being, my sense of proportion in things. I walked in my garden.” He smiled benignly at the memory. “It was a most agreeable evening, a good moon, only shreds of cloud across it and a light wind from the south. Do you know I heard a nightingale sing? Quite splendid. Could reduce one to tears. Lovely. Lovely. I went to bed with a great peace within me.” He blinked. “How dreadful. Not twenty yards away such wickedness, and a woman struggling for her life against impossible odds, and I quite oblivious.”

  Pitt looked at the imagination and the guilt in the man’s face.

  “It is possible, Mr. Pascoe, that even had you been awake all night, you would not have seen or heard anything until it was too late. Fire catches very quickly when it is set with intent; and Mrs. Shaw may have been killed in her sleep by the smoke without ever waking.”

  “Might she?” Pascoe’s eyes opened wide. “Indeed? I do hope so. Poor creature. She was a fine woman, you know. Far too good for Shaw. An insensitive man, without ideals of a higher sort. Not that he isn’t a good medical practitioner, and a gentleman,” he added hastily. “But without the finer perceptions. He thinks it witty and progressive to make mock of people’s values. Oh dear—one should not speak so ill of the bereaved, but truth will out. I profoundly regret that I cannot help you.”

  “May we question your resident servants, Mr. Pascoe?” Pitt asked only as a formality. He had every intention of questioning them whatever Pascoe said.

  “Of course. Of course. But please try not to alarm them. Reasonable cooks are so extremely hard to get, especially in a bachelor household like mine. If they are any good they want to give dinner parties and such things—and I have little occasion, just a few literary colleagues now and then.”

  Pitt rose and Murdo stood to attention. “Thank you.”

  But neither the cook nor the manservant had seen anything at all, and the scullery maid and housemaid were twelve and fourteen, respectively, and too horrified to do anything but twist their aprons in their hands and deny even being awake. And considering that their duties required them to be up at five in the morning, Pitt had no difficulty in believing them.

  Next they visited the house to the south. On this stretch of Highgate Rise the fields opposite fell away towards a path, which Murdo said was called Bromwich Walk, and led from the parsonage of St. Anne’s Church to the south, parallel with the Rise, and ended in Highgate itself.

  “Very accessible, sir,” Murdo finished gloomily. “At that time o’ the night a hundred people with pocketsful o’ matches could have crept down here and no one would have seen them.” He was beginning to think this whole exercise was a waste of time, and it showed in his frank face.

  Pitt smiled dryly. “Don’t you think they’d have bumped into each other, Constable?”

  Murdo failed to see the point. He had been sarcastic. Could this inspector from Bow Street really be so unintelligent? He looked more carefully at the rather homely face with its long nose, slightly chipped front tooth and untidy hair; then saw the light in the eyes, and the humor and strength in the mouth. He changed his mind.

  “In the dark,” Pitt elaborated. “There might have been enough moon for Mr. Pascoe to gaze at, but a cloudy night, and no house lights—curtains drawn and lamps out by midnight.”

  “Oh.” Murdo saw the purpose at last. “Whoever it was would have had to carry a lantern, and at that time of night even a match struck would show if anyone happened to be looking.”

  “Exactly.” Pitt shrugged. “Not that a light helps us much, unless anyone also saw which way it came from. Let us try Mr. Alfred Lutterworth and his household.”

  It was a magnificent establishment, no expense spared, the last one on this stretch of the road, and twice the size of the others. Pitt followed his custom of knocking at the front door. He refused to go to the tradesmen’s entrance as police and such other inferiors and undesirables were expected to. It was opened after a few moments by a very smart parlormaid in a gray stuff dress and crisp, lace-edged cap and apron. Her expression betrayed immediately that she knew Pitt should have been at the scullery door, even if he did not.

  “Trade at the back,” she said with a slight lift of her chin.

  “I have called to see Mr. Lutterworth, not the butler,” Pitt said tartly. “I imagine he receives his callers at the front?”

  “He don’t receive police at all.” She was just as quick.

  “He will today.” Pitt stepped in and she was obliged to move back or stand nose-to-chest with him. Murdo was both horrified and struck with admiration. “I am sure he will wish to help discover who murdered Mrs. Shaw last night.” Pitt removed his hat.

  The parlormaid went almost as white as her apron and Pitt was lucky she did not faint. Her waist was so tiny her stays must have been tight enough to choke a less determined spirit.

  “Oh Lor’!” She recovered herself with an effort. “I thought it were an accident.”

  “I am afraid not.” Pitt followed up his rather clumsy beginning as best he could. He should be past allowing his pride to be stung by a maid by now. “Did you happen to look out of your window around midnight and perhaps see a moving light, or hear anything unusual?”

  “No I didn’t—” She hesitated. “But Alice, the tweeny, was up, and she told me this morning she saw a ghost outside. But she’s a bit daft, like. I don’t know if she dreamt it.”

  “I’ll speak to Alice,” Pitt replied with a smile. “It may be important. Thank you.”

  Very slowly she smiled back. “If you’ll wait in the morning room, I’ll tell Mr. Lutterworth as you’re ’ere … sir.”

  The room they were shown to was unusually gracious, indicating not merely that the owner had money, but he also had far better taste than perhaps he knew. Pitt had time only to glance at the watercolors on the walls. They were certainly valuable, the sale of any one of them would have fed a family for a decade, but they were also genuinely beautiful, and entirely right in their setting, wooing the eye, not assaulting it.

  Alfred Lutterworth was in his late fifties with a fresh complexion, at the moment considerably flushed, and a rim of smooth white hair around a shining head. He was of good height and solidly built, with the assured stance of a self-made man. His face was strong featured. In a gentleman it might have been considered handsome, but there was something both belligerent and uncertain in it that betrayed his sense of not belonging, for all his wealth.

  “My maid tells me you’re ’ere about Mrs. Shaw bein’ murdered in that fire,” Lutterworth said with a strong Lancashire accent. “That right? Them girls reads penny dreadfuls in the cupboard under the stairs an’ ’as imaginations like the worst kind o’ novelists.”

  “Yes sir, I’m afraid it is true,” Pitt replied. He introduced himself and Murdo, and explained the reason for their questions.

  “Bad business,” Lutterworth said grimly. “She was a good woman. Too good for most o’ the likes o’ them ’round ’ere. ’Ceptin’ Maude Dalgetty. She’s another—no side to ’er, none at all. Civil to everyone.” He shook his head. “But I didn’t see a thing. Waited up till I ’eard Flora come ’ome, that were twenty afore midnight. Then I turned the light down and went to sleep sound, until the fire bells woke me. Could ’a marched an army past in the street before that an’ I’d not ’ave ’eard ’em.”

  “Flora is Miss Lutterworth?” Pitt asked, although he already knew from the Highgate police’s information.

  “That’s right, me daughter. She was out with some friends at a lecture and slide show down at St. Alban’s Road. That’s just south of ’ere, beyond the church.”
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  Murdo stiffened to attention.

  “Did she walk home, sir?” Pitt asked.

  “It’s only a few steps.” Lutterworth’s deep-set, rather good eyes regarded Pitt sharply, expecting criticism. “She’s a healthy lass.”

  “I would like to ask her if she saw anything.” Pitt kept his voice level. “Women can be very observant.”

  “You mean nosey,” Lutterworth agreed ruefully. “Aye. My late wife, God rest ’er, noticed an ’undred things about folk I never did. An’ she was right, nine times out o’ ten.” For a moment his memory was so clear it obliterated the police in his house or the smell of water on burnt brick and wood still acrid in the air, in spite of the closed windows. From the momentary softness in his eyes and the half smile on his lips they bore nothing but sweetness. Then he recalled the present. “Aye—if you want to.” He reached over to the mantel and pulled the knob of the bell set on the wall. It was porcelain, and painted with miniature flowers. An instant later the parlormaid appeared at the door.

  “Tell Miss Flora as I want ’er, Polly,” he ordered. “To speak to the police.”

  “Yes sir.” And she departed hastily, whisking her skirts around the door as she closed it again.

  “Uppity, that lass,” Lutterworth said under his breath. “Got opinions; but she’s ’andsome enough, and that’s what parlormaids ’as to be. And I suppose one can’t blame ’er.”

  Flora Lutterworth must have been impelled as much by curiosity as her servants, because she came obediently even though her high chin and refusal to meet her father’s eyes, coupled with a fire in her cheeks equal to his, suggested they had very recently had a heated difference of opinion about something, which was still unresolved.

  She was a fine-looking girl, tall and slender with wide eyes and a cloud of dark hair. She avoided traditional beauty by the angularity of her cheekbones and surprisingly crooked front teeth. It was a face of strong character, and Pitt was not in the least surprised she had quarreled with her father. He could imagine a hundred subjects on which she would have fierce opinions at odds with his—everything from which pages of the newspaper she should be permitted to read to the price of a hat, or the time she came home, and with whom.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Lutterworth,” he said courteously. “No doubt you are fully aware of the tragedy last night. May I ask you, did you see anyone on your way home from the lecture, either a stranger or someone you know?”

  “Someone I know?” The thought obviously startled her.

  “If you did, we should like to speak to them in case they saw or heard anything.” It was at least partly the truth. There was no point in making her feel as if she would automatically be accusing someone.

  “Ah.” Her face cleared. “I saw Dr. Shaw’s trap go past just as we were leaving the Howards’.”

  “How do you know it was his?”

  “No one else around here has one like that.” She had no trace of Lancashire in her voice. Apparently her father had paid for elocution lessons so she should sound the lady he wished her, and even in his temper, now that her attention was engaged elsewhere, his eyes rested on her with warmth. “Anyway,” she continued, “I could see his face quite clearly in the carriage lamps.”

  “Anyone else?” Pitt asked.

  “You mean coming this way? Well, Mr. Lindsay came a few moments after us—I was walking with Mr. Arroway and the Misses Barking. They went on up to the Grove in Highgate itself. Mr. and Mrs. Dalgetty were just ahead of us. I don’t recall anyone else. I’m sorry.”

  He pressed her for further descriptions of the evening and the names of everyone attending, but learned nothing that he felt would be of use. The occasion had ended a little too early for the fire setter, and in all probability he, or she, would have waited until such a function was well over before venturing out. They must have supposed themselves to have several hours at least.

  He thanked her, asked permission to speak to the tweeny and the rest of the staff, and accordingly he and Murdo were shown to the housekeeper’s sitting room, where he heard the twelve-year-old between maid’s story of seeing a ghost with burning yellow eyes flitting between the bushes in next-door’s garden. She did not know what time it was. The middle of the night. She had heard the clock in the hall strike ever so many times, and there was no one else about at all, all the gas lamps on the landing below were dimmed right down and she daren’t call anyone, terrified as she was. She had crept back to bed and put the covers over her head, and that was all she knew, she swore it.

  Pitt thanked her gently—she was only a few years older than his own daughter, Jemima—and told her she had been a great help. She blushed and bobbed a curtsey, losing her balance a little, then retreated in some confusion. It was the first time in her life that an adult had listened to her seriously.

  “Do you reckon that was our murderer, Inspector?” Murdo asked as they came out onto the footpath again. “That girl’s ghost?”

  “A moving light in Shaw’s garden? Probably. We’ll have to follow up all the people Flora Lutterworth saw as she left the lecture. One of them may have seen somebody.”

  “Very observant young lady, very sensible, I thought,” Murdo said, then colored pink. “I mean she recounted it all very clearly. No, er, no melodrama.”

  “None at all,” Pitt agreed with the shadow of a smile. “A young woman of spirit, I think. She may well have had more to say if her father were not present. I imagine they do not see eye to eye on everything.”

  Murdo opened his mouth to reply, then found himself in confusion as to what he wanted to say, and swallowed hard without saying anything.

  Pitt’s smile widened and he increased his rather gangling pace up the pavement towards the house of Amos Lindsay, where the widower Dr. Shaw was taking refuge, being not only bereaved but now also homeless.

  The house was far smaller than the Lutterworths’, and as soon as they were inside they could not help being aware it was also of highly eccentric character. The owner was apparently at one time an explorer and anthropologist. Carvings of varied nature and origin decked the walls, crowded together on shelves and tables, and even stood in huddles on the floor. From Pitt’s very restricted knowledge he took them to be either African or central Asian. He saw nothing Egyptian, Oriental or from the Americas, nothing that had the subtle but familiar smoothness of the classicism that was the heritage of western European culture. There was something alien in it, a barbaric rawness at odds with the very conventional Victorian middle-class interior architecture.

  They were conducted in by a manservant with an accent Pitt could not place and a skin no darker than many Englishmen’s, but of an unusual smoothness, and hair that might have been drawn on his head with India ink. His manners were impeccable.

  Amos Lindsay himself was eminently English in appearance, short, stocky and white-haired, and yet totally unlike Pascoe. Where Pascoe was essentially an idealist harking back to an age of medieval chivalry in Europe, Lindsay was a man of insatiable and indiscriminate curiosity—and irreverence for establishment, as his furnishings showed. But his mind was voyaging outward to the mysteries of savagery and the unknown. His skin was deep furrowed both by the dominant nature of his features and by the severity of tropical sun. His eyes were small and shrewd, those of a realist, not a dreamer. His whole aspect acknowledged humor and the absurdities of life.

  Now he was very grave and met Pitt and Murdo in his study, having no use for a morning room.

  “Good evening,” he said civilly. “Dr. Shaw is in the withdrawing room. I hope you will not ask him a lot of idiotic questions that anyone else could answer.”

  “No sir,” Pitt assured him. “Perhaps towards that end you might answer a few for us before we meet Dr. Shaw?”

  “Of course. Although I cannot imagine what you think there is to learn from us. But since you are here, you must suppose, in spite of the unlikelihood of it, that it was in some way criminal.” He looked acutely at Pitt. “I went to bed at nine; I rise
early. I neither saw nor heard anything, nor did my domestic staff. I have already asked them because quite naturally they were alarmed and distressed by the noise of the fire. I have no idea what manner of person might do such a thing with intent, nor any sane reason why. But then the mind of man is capable of almost any contortion or delusion whatever.”