Southampton Row

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

Isadora sat at the breakfast table across from the Bishop and watched him toy with his food, pushing bacon, eggs, sausage and kidney around his plate. He did not look well, but then he so often complained of some minor ailment, and she knew that if she asked him he would tell her. She would be required, in ordinary civility, to listen and to offer some condolence. Kindness dictated she do more than that, and she could not bring herself to feel such a thing. So she ate her own breakfast of toast and marmalade, and avoided his eyes.

The butler brought in the morning newspaper and the Bishop motioned him to lay it on the table at his end, where he could reach it in a moment or two when he was ready.

“Take my plate away,” he directed.

“Yes, my lord. Is there something else you would prefer?” the butler asked solicitously, doing as he was bidden. “I am sure Cook would oblige.”

“No, thank you,” the Bishop declined. “I’m not hungry. Just pour the tea, would you.”

“Yes, my lord.” Again he did as he was bidden, and then discreetly withdrew.

“Are you feeling unwell?” Isadora asked before checking herself. It was so much habit with her that it required a conscious effort not to do so.

“The news is depressing,” he answered, but without picking up the paper. “The Liberals will win and Gladstone will form a government again, but it won’t last. But then nothing does.”

She must make the effort. She had promised him, and she sensed the fear in him across the table as if it were an odor in the air. “Governments don’t last, but neither should they,” she said gently. “The good things do. You’ve preached that all your life. You know it’s true. And the things that are destroyed, but in righteousness, God can rebuild. Isn’t that what the resurrection is all about?”

“That is the idea, the hope,” he replied, but his voice was flat, and he did not look up at her.

“Is it not the truth?” She thought that by provoking him into arguing it, the sound of his own words would strengthen him. He would realize that he did believe it.

“Really . . . I have no idea,” he answered instead. “It is a habit of thought. I repeat it over and over every Sunday because it is my job. I can’t afford to stop. But I don’t know that I believe it any more than the members of my congregation who come because it is the thing to be seen to do. Kneel in your pew every Sunday, repeat all the prayers, sing all the hymns and look as if you are listening to the sermon, and you will seem to be a good man. Your mind can be anywhere . . . on your neighbor’s wife, or his goods, or relishing his sins, and who will know?”

“God will know,” she said, startled by the anger in her voice. “And quite apart from that, you will know yourself.”

“There are millions of us, Isadora! Do you suppose God has nothing better to do than listen to our witterings? ‘I want this’ and ‘Give me that,’ ‘Bless so and so, which will release me of the necessity of doing anything about him.’ Those are the sort of orders I give my servants, which is why we have them in the first place, so we don’t have to do everything ourselves.” His face twisted with disgust. “That isn’t worship, it’s a ritual performed for ourselves, and to impress each other. What kind of a God wants that, or has any use for it at all?” There was contempt in his eyes, and anger, as if he had been let down unfairly and was just realizing the fullness of it.

“Who decided that it was what God wanted?” she asked.

He was startled. “It is what the church has done for the best part of two thousand years!” he retorted. “In fact, always!”

“I thought it was only meant to be the instrument of our growth,” she replied to him. “Not an end in itself.”

His brow creased with irritation. “Sometimes you talk the most arrant nonsense, Isadora. I am a bishop, ordained of God. Don’t try to tell me what the church is for. You make yourself ridiculous.”

“If you are ordained of God, then you should not doubt Him,” she snapped. “But if you are ordained of man, then perhaps you should be looking for what God wishes instead. It may not be the same at all.”

His face froze. He sat motionless for a moment, then leaned over and picked up the newspaper, holding it high enough to hide behind.

“Francis Wray committed suicide,” he said after a few moments. “It seems that damned policeman Pitt was hounding him over the murder of the spirit medium, imagining he knew something about it. Stupid man!”

She was horrified. She remembered Pitt; he had been one of Cornwallis’s men, one he was particularly fond of. Her first thought was for how it would hurt Cornwallis, for the injustice if it were not true, and for the disillusion, if by some terrible chance it were.

“Why on earth would he think that?” she said aloud.

“Heaven knows.” He sounded final, as if that closed the matter.

“Well, what do they say?” she demanded. “You’ve got it in front of you.”

He was irritated. “That was yesterday’s paper. There’s very little about it today.”

“What did they say?” she insisted. “What are they blaming Pitt for? Why would he think Francis Wray, of all people, would know anything about a spirit medium?”

“It really doesn’t matter,” he replied without lowering the paper. “And Pitt was quite wrong anyway. Wray had nothing to do with it, that has been proved.” And he refused to say anything further.

She poured a second cup of tea and drank it in silence.

Then she heard his suddenly indrawn breath and a gasp. The paper slid from his hands and fell in loose sheets in his lap and over his plate. His face was ashen.

“What is it?” she said with alarm, afraid he was having some kind of attack. “What’s happened? Have you pain? Reginald? Shall—“ She stopped. He was struggling to his feet.

“I . . . I have to go out,” he mumbled. He thrashed at the newspaper, sending the sheets slithering to the floor, rattling together.

“But you have the Reverend Williams coming in half an hour!” she protested. “He’s come all the way from Brighton!”

“Tell him to wait.” He flapped a hand at her.

“Where are you going?” She was on her feet also. “Reginald! Where are you going?”

“Not far,” he said from the doorway. “Tell him to wait!”

There was no use asking anymore. He was not going to tell her. It had to be something in the newspaper which had created such a panic of emotion in him. She bent and picked it up, starting her search on the second page, roughly where she guessed he had been reading.

She saw it almost immediately. It was an announcement by the police on the Maude Lamont case. There had been three clients at her house on Southampton Row for the last séance she had given. Two of them were named in her diary of engagements, the third had been represented by a little drawing, a pictograph or cartouche. It was like a small f hastily written, under a half circle. Or to Isadora’s eye, a bishop’s crozier under a roughly drawn hill—Underhill.

The police said that there was something in Maude Lamont’s papers which indicated that she had known who the third man was, and that he, like the other two, had been blackmailed by her. They were close to a breakthrough, and when they read her diaries again, with this new understanding, they would have the identity of Cartouche, and of her murderer.

The Bishop had gone to Southampton Row. She knew it as surely as if she had followed him there. He was the one who had gone to Maude Lamont’s séances, hoping to find some kind of proof that there was life after death, that his spirit would live on in a form he could recognize. It was not extinction that awaited him, but merely change. All the Christian teachings of his lifetime had built no sure faith in him. In his desperation he had turned to a spirit medium, with her table rappings, levitation, ectoplasm. Far worse than that, which held more horror, doubt and weakness, and which she could understand only too easily, he had known fear, loneliness soul-deep, even the hollow, consuming well of despair. But he had done it secretly, and even when Maude Lamont had been murdered, he had not come forward. He had allowed Francis Wray to be suspected of being the third person, and to have his reputation ruined, and now Pitt’s as well.

Her anger and her contempt for him burned in a pain that ran through her mind and body, consuming her. She sat down suddenly in his chair, the newspaper dropped onto the table, still open at the article. It had been proved that Francis Wray was not the third person, but too late to save his grief, or his sense that all his life’s meaning had been denied as far as those who had loved and cherished him could see. Too late, above all, to prevent him from committing the irretrievable act of taking his own life.

Could she ever forgive Reginald for his part in letting that happen, for his utter cowardice?

What was she going to do? Reginald was even now going to Southampton Row to see if he could find and destroy the evidence that implicated him. What loyalty did she owe him?

He was doing something she believed to be profoundly wrong. It was hypocritical and ugly, but it was largely his own destruction rather than anyone else’s. Worse, he had allowed Francis Wray to be blamed for long enough to destroy him, to be the last weight of misery on top of his grief, which had broken him, perhaps not only for this life but for the life to come. Although she could not accept that God would condemn forever any man, or woman, who had finally broken, perhaps only for one fatal instant, beneath something too great for them to bear.

It could not be undone. Wray was gone. The degree of sin in his death was beyond anyone to alter. If the church concealed it and gave him a decent burial that would redeem him to the world, but it altered none of the truth.

What was her deepest loyalty now? How far along the road of his cowardice did she have to go with her husband? Not all the way. You did not owe it to anyone to drown yourself along with him.

And yet she was perfectly sure that he would regard it as betrayal whenever she left him.

Did he know who had killed Maude Lamont? Was it even imaginable that he had done it himself? Surely not! No! He was shallow, self-important, condescending, totally absorbed in his own feelings and oblivious of the joy or the pain of anyone else. And he was a coward. But he would not have committed any of the open sins, the ones that even he could not deny because they were against the law of the land, and he would be forced to conceal them. Even he could not justify murdering Maude Lamont, no matter what she had blackmailed him for.

But he might know who had, and why. The police must know the truth. She had no idea how to contact Pitt at Special Branch, and the new commander of Bow Street was a stranger to her. She needed to speak to someone she knew. This was going to be agonizing enough without trying to explain to a stranger. She would go to Cornwallis. He would begin halfway towards understanding.

Now that she had made up her mind she did not hesitate. It hardly mattered what she wore, simply that she composed her mind to speak sensibly and to tell only the truth she knew and allow him to make all deductions. She must not permit her anger or her contempt to show through, or the bitterness that welled up inside her. There must be no manipulation of emotions. She must tell him as one person to another, no more, and with no reminder, however subtle, of what either of them might feel.

Cornwallis was in his office but occupied with someone. She asked if she might wait, and nearly half an hour later she was taken up by a constable and found Cornwallis standing in the middle of his room waiting for her.

The constable closed the door behind her and she remained standing.

Cornwallis opened his mouth to say something, the conventional greeting, to give himself time to adjust to her presence. And then before he could speak, he saw the pain in her eyes.

He took half a step forward. “What is it?”

She stood where she was, keeping the distance between them. This must be done carefully, and without ever losing her self-control.

“This morning something occurred which makes me believe that I know who the third person was who visited Maude Lamont on the night of her death,” she began. “He was indicated only by the little drawing which looks rather like a small f with a semicircle over the top.” Now it was too late to retreat. She had committed herself. What would he think of her? That she was disloyal? He probably regarded that as the ultimate human sin. One does not betray one’s own, no matter what the circumstances. She stared at him, and could read nothing of what was in his face.

He looked at the chair as if to invite her to sit down, then changed his mind. “What was it that happened?” he asked.

“The police have issued a statement saying that they believe Maude Lamont knew the identity of that person,” she replied. “She was blackmailing him, and there are papers still in her house in Southampton Row, together with the information that Mr. Pitt gathered from the Reverend Francis Wray.” Her voice dropped at mention of Wray’s name, and for all her intentions not to allow it, her anger came through. “It will make his identity plain.”

“Yes,” he agreed, frowning. “Superintendent Wetron told the press.”

She took a deep breath. She wished she could control the lurching of her heart and the dizziness in her, the sheer physical reactions that were going to let her down. “When my husband read that at the breakfast table he went completely white,” she continued. “And then he rose and said that he was canceling his appointments this morning, and has left the house.” Put like that it sounded absurd, as if she wanted to believe it was Reginald. That was proof of nothing at all, except what was going on in her own mind. No wife who loved her husband would have leaped to such a conclusion. Cornwallis must see that—and despise her for it! Did he think she was trying to create some excuse to leave Reginald?

That was terrible! She must make him understand that she truly believed it, and that it had come to her only slowly, and reluctantly.

“He is ill!” she said jerkily.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. He looked terribly awkward, not knowing whether to offer any more sympathy, as if it were an irrelevance.

“He is afraid he is dying,” she hurried on. “I mean really very afraid. I suppose I should have realized years ago.” Now she was speaking too quickly, words falling over each other. “All the signs were there if I’d been looking, but it never occurred to me. He preached so vividly . . . sometimes . . . with such power . . .” That was true, at least it was how she remembered it. Her voice dropped. “But he has no belief in God. Now, when it really matters, he is not sure if there is anything beyond the grave. That is why he went to a spirit medium, to try to contact a dead person, any dead person, just to know they were there.”

He looked stunned. She could see it in his face, his unblinking eyes, the line of his lips. He had no idea what to say to her. Was it pity that silenced him, or disgust?

She felt both herself, and shame because Reginald was her husband. However far apart they were in thought or care, they were still tied together by the years they had been married. Perhaps she could have helped him if she had loved him enough? Perhaps the depth of the love she longed for had nothing to do with it; common humanity for a fellow being should have reached across the gulf and offered something!

It was too late now.

“Of course when she knew who he was, that gave her the means to blackmail him.” Her voice was now little more than a whisper. She felt the color hot in her cheeks. “‘Church of England Bishop goes to spirit medium to seek proof of life after death!’ He’d be a laughingstock. It would ruin him.” As she said it she realized just how much that was true. Would he have killed to prevent it? She had started out quite sure that that was impossible—but was it? If his reputation were gone, what had he left? How far had his illness, and the fear of death, unbalanced his mind? Fear can warp almost anything, only love was strong enough to overcome it . . . and did Reginald really love anything well enough for that?

“I’m so sorry,” Cornwallis said with a break in his voice. “I . . . I wish I could . . .” He stopped, staring at her helplessly, not knowing what to do with his hands.

“Aren’t you going to . . . to do something?” she asked. “If he finds the evidence he’ll destroy it. That’s what he’s gone for.”

He shook his head. “There isn’t any,” he answered quietly. “We put it in the paper to try to make Cartouche show himself.”

“Oh . . .” She was stunned. Reginald had betrayed himself unnecessarily. He would be caught. The police would be waiting for him. But that was what she had come here for, it had to be. She could never have imagined Cornwallis would simply listen and not act, and yet now that it was going to happen, she realized the enormity of it. It would be the end of her husband’s career, a complete disgrace. He would not ever be able to retire behind excuses of ill health, because the police would be involved. He might even be charged with something—obstruction, or concealing evidence. She refused to think, even in the very back of her mind, of a charge of murder.

Suddenly, Cornwallis was standing in front of her, his hands holding her arms, steadying her as if she had swayed and were about to fall over.

“Please . . .” he said urgently. “Please . . . sit down. Let me send for tea . . . or something. Brandy?” He slid his arm around her and led her to the chair, still holding her as she sank down into it.

“The drawing,” she said, gulping a little. “It wasn’t an f, it was a bishop’s crozier, under a hill. It’s very clear when you think about it. I don’t want brandy, thank you. Tea would be quite all right.”

Pitt knew that if he went to Southampton Row alone he could not prove anything satisfactorily, either about the identity of Cartouche or about his involvement in the death of Maude Lamont. Tellman was in Devon, and Pitt did not trust anyone from Bow Street, even supposing Wetron would give him somebody, which was unlikely without an explanation. And of course he could not explain, not knowing Wetron’s own involvement in any of it.

Therefore he went straight to Narraway, and it was Narraway himself who came with Pitt to Southampton Row in the bright, early sunlight of the July morning. They traveled in mere silence, each absorbed in his own thoughts.

Pitt could not rid his mind of his memory of Francis Wray. He hardly dared allow himself to hope that an autopsy would somehow show that Wray had not taken his own life, even if only to Pitt. Whether they could ever prove it to the rest of the world was another matter.

He repeated in his mind all that he thought he had asked of the people in the village. Were the questions so open, so accusatory, that anyone would have supposed from them that Wray was suspected of being involved in Maude Lamont’s death? And if he went to see her with the intent of exposing her manifestations as fraud, then where was there any fault or hypocrisy in that?

And it was very easy to believe that in his outrage at the damage spirit mediums could do, he might well have used all his energy to expose them. Pitt thought back to the story of the young woman Penelope, who had lived in Teddington, and whom Wray must have known. She had lost her child and been tricked and misled by séances and manifestations, and when she had seen through them, in despair she had taken her own life.

He already knew that Maude Lamont had used mechanical tricks, at least some of the time—the table, for example—and he could not help feeling that the collected electric light bulbs were part of an illusion also. That number of them was certainly not for ordinary domestic use.

Was it conceivable she had some real power, of which she herself was only partly aware? More than one of her clients had said she seemed startled by some of the manifestations, as if she had not engineered them herself. And she had no helper. Lena Forrest denied all knowledge of her arts or how they were exercised.

Then another thought occurred to him, new and extraordinary, but the more he weighed it and measured it against all he knew, the more it seemed to make some kind of sense.

When they reached Southampton Row he climbed out of the hansom, with Narraway at his heels. Narraway paid the cabbie and they waited until he had driven away before they turned into the short alley of Cosmo Place.

Narraway looked at the door into the garden of Maude Lamont’s house.

“It’ll be locked,” Pitt observed.

“Probably.” Narraway squinted at it. “But I’m not climbing that damn wall and then finding I didn’t have to.” He put out his hand and tried the iron ring, turning it a quarter of a circle until it stopped. He grunted.

“I’ll give you a lift up,” Pitt offered.

Narraway shot him a malicious glance, but considering their relative heights, and Narraway’s slender build, it would have been absurd for him to have tried to lift Pitt. He regarded his trousers, his lips forming a thin line as he considered what the mossy stone would do to them, then turned to Pitt impatiently. “Get on with it, then! I would greatly prefer not to be caught doing this and trying to explain myself to the local constable on the beat.”

Pitt grinned at the idea, but it was brief, and there was little pleasure in it. He bent and made a cradle of his hands and Narraway stepped gingerly onto it. Pitt straightened up and in seconds Narraway was on top of the wall, scrambling for a moment, until he found his balance and sat astride, then he leaned forward and offered Pitt his hand. It was an effort to haul himself up, but after a few very undignified wriggles he breasted the wall, and a moment later swung his legs over and down onto the earth at the far side, immediately followed by Narraway.

He brushed as much of the moss stain and dust off himself as he could, then stared around. It was the reverse of the view he had seen from the strip of grass in front of the French windows of the parlor. “Keep back.” He waved. “Another couple of yards and we can be seen from the house.”

“Then what, exactly, are we doing here?” Narraway retorted. “We can’t see the front door and we can’t see the parlor. And now we can’t even see the street!”

“If we keep to the bushes we can make our way to the back of the house, and once we’ve seen where Lena Forrest is, we’ll know if she goes to answer the door, and we can get inside through the back,” Pitt replied softly. He moved over to shelter behind the laurels as he spoke, motioning Narraway to follow him. “Since Cartouche always came through the side door anyway, I think that’s probably the way he’ll come now, if he’s still got the key.”

“Then we’d better make sure the bar is up,” Narraway observed, looking back over his shoulder at the door. “And it’s not!” He strode rapidly over to it and in a single movement lifted the bar up and laid it back off the rests that kept it closed. Then he drew back behind the shelter of the bushes beside Pitt.

Pitt’s mind was still half occupied with the idea which had come to him. He looked up at the branches of the silver birch trees above the laurels. There would probably be nothing to see, no mark now, but he could not help searching.

“What is it?” Narraway said crossly. “He’s hardly going to come down from the sky!”

“Can you see any notches up there, notches rubbed bare of moss or scraping on the bark?” Pitt said softly.

Narraway’s face was tense, interest flaring in his eyes. “Like a rope burn? Why?”

“An idea. It may be . . .”

“Of course it’s an idea!” Narraway snapped. “What?”

“To do with the night Maude Lamont was killed, and tricks, illusion that there might have been.”

“We’ll discuss it when we’re watching the woman. I don’t care how brilliant your theory is, it’ll do us no good if we miss Cartouche arriving . . . assuming he comes.”

Obediently, Pitt started to creep along the wall, as much as possible keeping concealed behind the various bushes and shrubs until they were fifteen yards away from the door in the wall, and only four yards from the scullery windows and the back door. They could see the shadowy figure of Lena Forrest moving about in the kitchen. Presumably she was getting herself breakfast and perhaps beginning whatever chores she had for the day. It must be a long, drawn-out, boring time for her with no mistress in the house to care for. They could not expect her to remain here much longer.

“Why were you looking for rope marks?” Narraway said insistently.

“Did you see any?” Pitt countered.

“Yes, very slight, a mark more like twine than rope. What was on it? Something to do with Cartouche?”

“No.”

They heard the sound at the same instant, the scraping of a key in the lock of the garden door. As one they shrank back behind the heavy leaves, and Pitt found himself holding his breath.

There was no sound until the key scraped again and then the slight clunk of the bar being dropped back. There were no footfalls across the grass.

They waited. Seconds ticked by. Was the visitor waiting also, or had he passed by soundlessly and might already be inside?

Narraway moved very carefully until he could see the side of the house. “He’s gone in through the French windows,” he said softly. “I can see him in the parlor.” He straightened up. “There’s no cover outside here. We’d better go around the back. If we run into the woman we’ll have to tell her.” And without waiting for Pitt to argue, he sprinted across the open space towards the scullery door and stopped just outside.

Pitt wondered for an instant if perhaps they should have left a constable at the front door, just in case Cartouche tried to escape that way. But then if he had seen anyone in the street he might not have risked coming in at all, and the whole exercise would have been useless.

Another alternative was for one of them to wait in the garden now, but then if Cartouche said anything, or Lena did, there needed to be more than one witness to it. He ran across the open lawn and joined Narraway at the scullery door.

Narraway looked cautiously in through the window. “There’s no one there,” he said, pushing the door. Inside was a small, tidy room with vegetable racks, rubbish bins, a sack of potatoes and several pots and pans, as well as the usual sink and low tub for laundry.

They went up the step into the kitchen, and still there was no one in sight. Lena must have heard the intruder and gone through to the parlor. On tiptoe, Pitt and Narraway crept along the passage and stopped just short of the doorway. It was ajar. They could hear the voices inside. The first was male, rich and melodious, only slightly sharpened by emotion. His diction was still perfect.

“I know that there are other papers, Miss Forrest. Don’t try to mislead me.”

Then Lena’s voice in reply, surprised and a trifle edgy. “The police already took everything that has to do with her appointments. There’s nothing here now but household bills and accounts outstanding, and that’s just the ones that have come in through the last week. The lawyers have all the old ones. It’s part of her estate.”

Now there was fear in his voice, and anger. “If you imagine you can continue where Miss Lamont was obliged to desist, and that you can blackmail me, Miss Forrest, you are most deeply mistaken. I will not permit it. I will do not another thing by coercion, do you hear me? Not one more word, written or spoken.”

There was a moment of silence. Narraway was standing in front of Pitt, blocking his view through the crack between the door and the jamb. His eye was about level with the top of the hinge.

“She was blackmailing you!” Lena said with consuming disgust. “You were so afraid of what she knew about you that you’d rather remove her papers for good or ill than have people know about you.”

“I no longer care, Miss Forrest!” There was a wild note in him now, as if he would overbalance out of control any moment.

Pitt stiffened. Was she in possible danger? Had Cartouche murdered Maude Lamont over this blackmail, and if Lena pressed him too far, would he kill again, once he knew where the papers were? And of course she could not tell him because they did not exist.

“Then why are you here?” Lena asked. “You’ve come for something!”

“Only her notes that would tell who I am,” he replied. “She’s dead. She can’t say anything further now, and it’s my word against yours.” There was an element of confidence creeping in. “There’s no question which of us they would believe, so don’t be foolish enough to try blackmail of your own. Just give me the papers and I’ll not trouble you again.”

“You aren’t troubling me now,” she pointed out. “And I never blackmailed anyone in my life.”

“A sophistry!” he sneered. “You were helping her. I don’t know if there’s a legal difference, but morally there isn’t.”

There was real anger in her voice; it shook with something close to fury. “I believed her! I worked in this house for five years before I had any idea she was a fraud! I thought she was honest.” She choked on a sob and caught her breath painfully. Her voice sank so low Pitt leaned forward to hear her. “It was only after someone else made her blackmail certain people that I found her out in tricks . . . with the magnesium powder on the wires of the light bulbs . . . and that table. She never used them before . . . that I know of.”

Another moment’s silence. This time it was he who was urgent, choked with feeling. “Wasn’t it all . . . tricks?” It was a cry of the heart, desperate.

She must have heard it. She hesitated.

Pitt could hear Narraway’s breath and felt the tension in him when they stood almost touching each other.

“There are real powers,” Lena said very softly. “I discovered that myself.”

Silence again, as if he could not bear to put it to the test.

“How?” he said at last. “How would you know? You said she used tricks! You discovered it. Don’t lie to me! I saw it in your face. It shattered you!” That was almost an accusation, as if somehow it were her fault. “Why? Why do you care?”

Her voice was almost unrecognizable, except that it could be no one else. “Because my sister had a baby out of wedlock. He died. Because he was illegitimate they wouldn’t baptize him. . . .” She was gasping for breath, choking on her pain. “So they wouldn’t bury him in hallowed ground. She went to a spirit medium . . . to know what happened to him after . . . after death. That medium was a fake as well. It was more than she could bear. She killed herself.”

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “The child, at least, was innocent. It would have done no harm to . . .” He tailed off, knowing it was all too late, and a lie anyway. The church’s rules on illegitimacy and suicide were beyond his power to break, but there was pity in his voice, and contempt for those who built rules without compassion. He obviously saw no kind of God in it.

Narraway turned and stared at Pitt.

Pitt nodded.

There was a rustle inside the room.

Narraway swiveled back.

“You weren’t here the night she was killed,” the man said. “I saw you go myself.”

She snorted. “You saw the lantern and the coat!” she retorted. “You think I learned nothing the weeks I worked here after I knew she was a fraud? I watched. I listened. It’s not very hard with ropes.”

“I heard you replace the lantern outside the front door when you got ’round to the street!” He made it an accusation.

“A few stones dropped on the ground,” she said with scorn. “I let another lantern down on a string. I went out afterwards . . . to see a friend who has no clock. The police checked. I knew they would.”

“And you killed her . . . after we’d gone? Leaving us to take the blame!” Now he was angry again, and frightened.

She heard it. “No one’s been blamed yet.”

“I will be, when they find those papers!” He sounded shrill, the pity gone.

“Well, I don’t know where they are!” she retorted. “Why . . . why don’t we ask Miss Lamont?”

“What?”

“Ask her!” she repeated. “Don’t you want to know if there’s life after death, or if this is the end? Isn’t that why you came here in the first place? If anyone should be able to come back to tell us, it’s her!”

“Oh yes?” His tone was razor-edged with sarcasm, and yet he could not keep the thin thread of hope out of it. “And how are we going to do that?”

“I told you!” Now she was sharp, too. “I have powers.”

“You mean you learned some of her tricks!” The voice was filled with contempt.

“Yes, of course I did!” she said witheringly. “I already told you that. But I’ve been looking ever since Nell died. I’m not easily taken in. There was some truth as well, before the blackmailing started. Spirits can be called up, if the circumstances are right. Draw the curtains. I’ll show you.”

There was silence.

Narraway turned and looked at Pitt, questioning in his eyes.

Pitt had no idea what Lena was going to do, or if they should allow it to go ahead.

Narraway pursed his lips.

They heard the very slight sound of fabric against fabric, then footsteps. Pitt grasped Narraway by the shoulders and half dragged him backwards, and they were in the drawing room opposite, still with the door open, only just in time to avoid being seen by Lena as she came out of the parlor and disappeared towards the kitchen.

She was gone for several minutes. There was no sound from Cartouche, in the parlor.

Lena returned and went into the room again, closing the door.

Pitt and Narraway resumed their listening position, but could make out only the occasional word.

“Maude!” That was Lena’s voice.

Then nothing.

“Maude! Miss Lamont!” That was Cartouche, unmistakable, even though his voice was higher pitched with urgency.

Narraway swung around to look at Pitt, his eyes wide.

“Miss Lamont!” It was Cartouche again, but this time with excitement, almost awe. “You know me! You wrote my name down! Where are the papers?”

There was a long moan, impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman. In fact, it could even have been an animal, so strange and stifled in the throat was it.

“Where are you? Where are you?” he begged. “What is it like? Can you see? Can you hear? Tell me!”

There was a loud bang, and a shriek, and an even louder crash as if something made of glass had broken.

Narraway put his hand on the door just as an explosion shook the whole house, and there was a roaring like a sheet of flame and the smell of burning was thick in the air.

Pitt threw himself at Narraway and dragged him away from the door handle, Narraway kicking and struggling against him.

“They’re in there!” he shouted furiously. “The stupid woman has set fire to something. They’ll suffocate! Let go of me, damn it! Pitt! Do you want them to burn?”

“Gas!” Pitt yelled back at him, just as the whole side of the house erupted, hurling them backwards to land sprawled on the floor a couple of yards from the front door, which now hung crazily on its hinges, gaping open. Pitt scrambled to his feet.

The parlor door had gone altogether, and the room was full of flame and smoke. A gust from the hall blew across it and it cleared for a moment. Bishop Underhill lay on his back with his head towards the doorway, a look of amazement on his face. Lena Forrest was slumped in the chair at the end of the table, blood on her head and shoulders.

Then the fire took renewed hold as the flames roared upwards, consuming the curtains and the woodwork.

Narraway was on his feet now, too, his face ashen under the dust and smoke.

“We can’t do anything for them,” Pitt said shakily.

“The whole house could go up any moment.” Narraway coughed and choked. “Come on out! Pitt! Run!” And he yanked him around by the arm and plunged for the front door.

They went careering out over the step and fell into the street side by side just as the third explosion rent the air and a gout of flame shot out through the windows with glass flying everywhere.

“Did you know?” Narraway demanded, on his hands and knees. “Did you know it was Lena who killed Maude Lamont?”

“I did by this morning,” Pitt replied, rolling over to sit. His knees were scraped, his hands scarred and he was scorched and filthy. “When I realized it was her sister who died in Teddington. Nell is short for Penelope.” He bared his teeth savagely. “Voisey missed that one!”

There were several people in the street now, running, shouting. In a little while the fire engines would be here.

“Yes,” Narraway agreed, his smoke-grimed face splitting into a white-toothed grin. “He did—didn’t he!”