Death in the Devil's Acre Read online

  “I would indeed, Mr. Mullen, thank you. And if your duties permit, perhaps a little of your time?”

  “Certainly, sir.” Mullen pulled the bell rope and, when the footman answered, requested that a pot of tea be brought, with two cups. He would not have presumed to take refreshment with a gentleman caller, and a tradesman would have been sent through the green baize door to the kitchen. But he considered Pitt to be roughly his social equal, which Pitt realized was something of a compliment. A butler was in many senses the real master of a household, and might rule a staff of a dozen or more lesser servants. He might also have greater intelligence than the owner, and certainly inspire more awe from his fellows.

  “Have you been with Dr. Pinchin long, Mr. Mullen?” Pitt began conversationally.

  “Eleven years, Mr. Pitt,” Mullen replied. “Before that I was with Lord and Lady Fullerton, in Tavistock Square.”

  Pitt was curious about why he had left an apparently superior employment, but was unsure how to ask him without giving offense. Such a question, as well as being against his regard for the man, would be professionally foolish at this point.

  Mullen supplied the answer of his own accord. Perhaps he wished to clear himself from suspicion of incompetence. “They took the habit of going to Devon every winter.” A shadow of distaste crossed his face. “I did not care for the travel, and I have no wish to remain idle in an empty town house with a caretaking staff for several months of each year.”

  “Indeed,” Pitt agreed with some sympathy. An estate in the home counties would be an entirely different thing, with hunt balls, shooting parties, and guests for Christmas, no doubt. But a retreat to the silence of Devon would be a form of exile. “And I should imagine Dr. Pinchin was not an uninteresting employer?” he said, trying to probe a little deeper.

  Mullen smiled politely. He was far too honorable to repeat the vast and intimate knowledge he had acquired of the Pinchin household. Butlers who betrayed that trust were, in his opinion, contemptible and a disgrace to their entire profession.

  He misunderstood deliberately, and both of them knew it. “Yes, sir, although not a great deal of his practice was conducted from this house. He has offices in Highgate. But we have had some distinguished gentlemen here to dine, from time to time.”

  “Oh?”

  Mullen repeated the names of several surgeons and physicians of eminence. Pitt made a mental note of their names, to call upon later for whatever they might add to his picture of Hubert Pinchin, although he knew from past experience that all professionals seem to defend their colleagues, even to the point of ridiculousness. However, there was always the hope of stumbling upon some personal or professional jealousy that might loosen a tongue.

  He learned from Mullen a little more about Pinchin’s habits, particularly that he quite frequently returned home very late in the evening. It was not unknown that he should be out all night. No explanation was offered other than the discreet supposition that illness does not confine itself to convenient hours.

  A few moments later, the lady’s maid knocked on the door. Her mistress was ready to speak to Mr. Pitt, if he would care to come to the breakfast room.

  Valeria Pinchin was a woman of Wagnerian stature, broad-bosomed, blue-eyed, with a sweep of fading hair above her wide forehead. She was dressed in unrelieved black, as became a new widow in the deepest mourning, not only for the untimely death of her husband but the appalling notoriety of its nature. Her face was pale, and set in grim and defensive determination. She looked at Pitt warily.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” he began with suitable reverence for the occasion and some genuine pity. “May I offer my sympathy in your bereavement?”

  “Thank you,” she replied, with a very slight sniff and a lift of her powerful chin. “You may sit down, Mr.—er, Pitt.”

  He took the chair opposite her across the table. She sipped at tea without offering him any. After all, he was an extremely distasteful necessity, part of the trappings of the sordid disaster that had overtaken her—like the ratcatcher, or the drainman. There was no need to treat him as a social equal.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he began again, “but I am obliged to ask you a number of questions.”

  “I can be of no help to you whatsoever.” She stared at him, bridling at even the suggestion. “You cannot imagine I know anything of such an unspeakable—” She stopped, unable to find a word extreme enough.

  “Of course not.” She was not a woman Pitt found it easy to like. He had to force to his mind some of the other shocked people he had spoken with, their various ways of protecting their wounds.

  Mrs. Pinchin was slightly mollified, but still her eyes glittered at him and her black-beaded bosom rose and fell with indignation.

  “You can help me to learn a great deal more about your husband,” he said, trying again. “And therefore whoever might have believed him an enemy.” He wanted to be as courteous as possible, but ultimately the facts must be pursued to their logical end. Hubert Pinchin had been murdered. Someone had believed he had reason; a simple robber does not emasculate his victims.

  She started to say something, then changed her mind and took another sip of tea.

  Pitt waited.

  “My husband was ...” She was obviously finding it difficult to express her thoughts without betraying a part of her life that was far too private—and too painful—to be acknowledged, let alone paraded before this—policeman! “He was an eccentric man, Mr. Pitt,” she said. “He chose to practice medicine among some very peculiar people. I hesitate to say ‘unworthy.’” She sniffed. “I do not wish to be hard upon the unfortunate, but he could have had an outstanding career, you know. My father”—her chin jutted forward—“Dr. Albert Walker-Smith. No doubt you have heard of him?”

  Pitt had not, but he lied. “A very famous man, ma’am,” he agreed.

  Her face softened a little and Pitt feared for a moment that he would be called on to make some relevant comment. He had not the faintest idea who Albert Walker-Smith had been, except that obviously he was the man Mrs. Pinchin wished her husband could have lived up to.

  “You said Dr. Pinchin was eccentric, ma’am,” Pitt said. “Was that true in any way other than not pursuing his career to its best advantage?”

  She crumpled a napkin in her large hands. “I am not sure what you mean, Mr. Pitt. He had no unfortunate habits—if that is what you imply!” All the half-guessed-at aberrations of masculinity, practices her woman’s ignorance conjured from the darkness of imagination, hovered behind her words.

  Pitt looked at her hopelessly. She was so armored in dignity and so conscious of the formalities of grief that he knew he would accomplish nothing with these predictable questions. Her mind was running in channels as entrenched as those of an old river falling to a long-predestined sea.

  “Did he like Stilton cheese?” he asked instead.

  Her thin eyebrows rose and her voice was hard. “I beg your pardon?”

  He repeated the question.

  “Yes, he did, but I find that offensively trivial, Mr. Pitt. Some insane creature has attacked and murdered my husband in the most”—tears filled her eyes and she swallowed—“the most unspeakable manner, and you sit here in his house and ask if he cared for cheese!”

  “It is not irrelevant, ma’am,” Pitt replied with an effort at patience. She could not help herself: Social values and dignity were her only defense against such enormous fears. “There were crumbs of Stilton cheese on his clothes.”

  “Oh.” She apologized stiffly. “I beg your pardon. I suppose you know your trade. Yes, my husband was very fond of the table. He always ate well.”

  “Did I understand you earlier to say that he did a certain amount of charity work?”

  “He did a great deal of unprofitable work!” she replied with a sudden welling-up of resentment. “He wasted most of his time on people who were—yes—unworthy of him. If you are looking for rivals in his profession, Mr. Pitt, you are wasting your time. My hu
sband had great abilities, but he did not ever realize them as he should have.” Her voice held years of disappointment, of opportunities glimpsed and lost.

  “Nevertheless he was well respected, I believe.” Pitt was torn between his instinctive dislike of her and a sense of pity for her frustration. She had been tied to a man who had failed her and there had been no escape for her. Her dreams had been within his reach, and he had refused to pluck them.

  She sighed. “Oh, yes, in a certain fashion. He was very entertaining, you know. People liked him.” Her voice lifted a trifle in surprise; it was a fact that she did not understand, and perhaps did not consciously share. Her own disappointment was too deep to find his peccadilloes amusing. “And occasionally he would make a brilliant diagnosis. That was his specialty, you know—diagnosis.”

  Pitt reverted to the obvious. “Can you think of anything at all, ma’am, that might help us—anyone who might have borne a grudge? An old patient, perhaps—someone who could not accept the death of a relative and blamed the doctor? Was there anything unusual in Dr. Pinchin’s behavior lately, or any new acquaintance who was out of the ordinary?”

  “My husband did not bring his less reputable friends to this house, Mr. Pitt.” Her mouth tightened. “There were certain persons he entertained elsewhere, as I am sure you will understand. And I noticed nothing odd in his behavior—it was just as usual.” A look of unhappiness crossed her face, a mixture of disapproval of the dead man’s habits and a sudden loneliness that he was gone. With all his failings and irritating ways, she had still grown used to him; he had been there for thirty years of her life. Now there was nothing,

  For a moment Pitt felt unclouded pity for her, but he knew the gulf between them was too wide to bridge. His understanding would not ease her pain at all; on the contrary, to her it would be presumptuous.

  He stood up. “Thank you, ma’am, for your help. I hope I shall not have to disturb you again. I am sure Mr. Mullen can see to everything else I need to know.”

  “Good day, Mr. Pitt.” She regarded him bleakly until he had reached the door. She then lifted the pot and poured herself another cup of tea, dabbing her napkin first to her mouth, then up to catch the tears running down her cheeks.

  Pitt went out and closed the door with a faint click.

  Mullen was waiting for him in the hallway. “Is there anything else, sir?”

  Pitt sighed. “Yes, please. I would like you to show me the household accounts, and your cellar. I presume you have approved all the staff before they were hired, and checked their references?”

  Mullen stiffened and his expression became chilly. “Most certainly I have. May I ask what you expect to find, Mr. Pitt? They are entirely in order, I assure you. And the staff are all above question in honesty and morals or they would not remain here! And as for any one of them being out at night, that is impossible.”

  Pitt was sorry to have offended him. Actually, he had no suspicions of any of the servants. What he was looking for was evidence of Pinchin’s standard of living, to judge his expenditures. Normally a man of his class would not go to the Acre, even for cheap entertainment. Was he a good deal less well-off than he appeared, or more well-off than his medical practice would account for? Was he spending money in brothels or gambling houses? Or was he earning it? He would not be the first outwardly respectable man to have a source of income in slum property.

  “It is merely routine, Mr. Mullen,” he said with a smile. “Just as you check references, even though you believe them.”

  Mullen relaxed a little. He respected professional thoroughness. “Quite so, Mr. Pitt. I am familiar with police procedure. If you will come this way ...”

  After his visit to the Pinchin household, Pitt spent the afternoon checking the Highgate medical practice and talking with shocked and extremely reticent colleagues. By the time he got home, at five past seven, he was tired, cold, and only a little wiser. If Pinchin owned property in the Devil’s Acre, he had hidden all record of it—or any other business transactions outside those of his Highgate practice. His standard of living, however, did suggest he was enjoying an income rather larger than his medical abilities would account for. Inherited money? Savings? Gifts? Even a little juggling of the books? Or perhaps blackmail of patients with indiscretions that required medical help: social diseases, an unwanted child—the possibilities were legion.

  Gracie met Pitt at the door and took his coat through to the scullery to dry out. “’Orrible wet night, sir,” she said, shaking the big coat like a blanket and nearly overbalancing with it. She scurried ahead of him, muttering to herself about the hours he was obliged to keep in all weathers. Not once did she meet his eyes. She was sorry for him, for some reason, and her rigid little back was full of disapproval.

  It did not take him long to put two and two together when Charlotte was also sweetly attentive, and full of conversation. “Have you been out?” he asked Charlotte.

  “Only for a short while,” she said quite casually. “I was home before it began to rain. It was really not unpleasant.”

  “And no doubt you came back in the carriage,” he added.

  She looked up quickly, a faint color in her cheeks. “Carriage?”

  “Didn’t you go to see Emily?”

  There was reluctant admiration in her face. “How did you know?”

  “Grade’s back.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Grade’s back. It is rigid with disapproval. Since I have only just come home, it cannot be anything I have done. It must be you. I imagine it was a visit to Emily to recount to her everything you know about the murders in the Devil’s Acre—especially since one of them concerns the footman of a previous acquaintance. Now tell me, am I mistaken?”

  “I—”

  He waited.

  “Of course we discussed it!” Her eyes were bright, the blood warm in her cheeks. “But that is all—I swear! Anyway, what more could we do? We can hardly go to such a place. But we did wonder what on earth Dr. Pinchin was doing there. There are much better places for picking up loose women, if that is what he wanted, you know?”

  “Yes, I do know, thank you.”

  Her eyes met his in a flash, then slid away into a professed candor again. “Have you thought that perhaps he put up the money for Max, Thomas? You know, some unlikely-seeming people go into partnership with—”

  “Yes, thank you,” he replied with a smile bubbling up inside him. “I thought of that, too.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed.

  He took her hand and pulled her toward him. “Charlotte,” he said gently.

  “What?”

  “Mind your own business!”

  3

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Pitt pursued the investigation in the next most obvious course. He took his oldest coat and a rather battered hat that normally not even he would have worn and set out in a drizzling rain for the Devil’s Acre, to find Max’s establishments—or at least one of them.

  It was an area like many of the older slums of London, a curious mixture of societies that lived quite literally on top of each other. In the highest, handsomest houses with frontages on lighted thoroughfares lived successful merchants and men of private means. Below them, in smaller houses on lesser streets, were lodging-rooms for clerks and tradesmen. Beneath even these, squat and grimy, were the sagging tenements and cellars of the very poor, sometimes packed so full of humanity that two or three families shared one room. The stench of refuse and bodily waste was choking. Rats teemed everywhere, so that an untended baby might well be eaten alive. And more children died of starvation or disease than ever reached an age of six or seven years, when they might profitably join one of the schools for pickpockets and apprentice thieves.

  Among this warren of alleys and passageways were the sweatshops, the rooms where broken-down lawyers or clerks drafted false affidavits, account books, and receipts, where forgers practiced their art, and where receivers of stolen goods made bargains. And of course there were the
gin mills, doss houses and brothels, and the police snouts.

  Over it all loomed the shadow of the great towers of Westminster Abbey, coronation cathedral of kings, the tomb of Edward the Confessor before Norman William ever sailed from France to defeat the Saxon king and take England for himself. And beyond the Abbey was Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster, the Mother of Parliaments since the days of Simon de Montfort six hundred years ago.

  There was no point in Pitt’s hoping to receive answers to questions posed in this teeming rats’ nest. The police were the natural enemy, and the swarming population knew an outsider as a dog knows one, by senses far subtler than mere sight. In the past he had made a few arrests here, but had also let a few slip by. He had friends—or, if not friends, at least those who knew what could be to their advantage.

  Pitt followed gray alleys past youths idle and sullen, watching him with mean eyes. He hunched his shoulders, aping the furtive gait of the long-abused, but he did not look behind him. They would smell fear and be on him like a hunting pack. He walked as if he knew where he was going, as if the narrow passages—sometimes only wide enough to allow two men to pass each other sidewise—were as familiar to him as his home.

  Beams creaked, wood rotted and settled. A dozen rats scattered as he approached, their feet scrabbling on the wet stones. Old men lay in doorways, perhaps in drunken stupor, or maybe they were dead.

  It took Pitt half an hour before he found the man he was looking for, in a dilapidated attic where he did his work. Squeaker Harris, so named for his sharp, high-pitched voice. He was a little man with narrow eyes and a pointed nose—not unlike a rat himself, Pitt thought. All he lacked was the long, hairless tail. He was a scrivener, a forger of letters of recommendation, of papers of attorney.

  “Wotcher want wiv me?” he demanded truculently. “I ain’t done nuffin’, not as yer can prove!”

  “Not trying to, Squeaker,” Pitt replied. “Although I dare say I could if I put my mind to it.”

  “Nah!” Squeaker dismissed the possibility, but there was anxiety in his quick little face. “Nah—never!”