Brunswick Gardens (42 page)

    Pitt returned to Brunswick Gardens to clear up the last details of Ramsay Parmenter’s death. He did not expect to achieve anything, it was merely necessary.

He was let in by Emsley, looking red-eyed and exhausted.

“There is no need to trouble Mrs. Parmenter,” Pitt said as he crossed the hall. “I don’t think I have any further questions to ask.”

“No sir,” Emsley said dutifully. He seemed to hesitate. If so dignified and unhappy a figure could be said to do so, he dithered.

“What is it?” Pitt asked gently.

“It is not my place to ask, sir,” Emsley said miserably, “but is it necessary to allow those in the newspapers to know all this, sir? I mean, I … I mean, could you just say Mr. Parmenter died
in an accident? He was …” He took a shaky breath and attempted to control himself. “He was such a quiet gentleman, Mr. Pitt, never a rough word to anyone all the time I knew him. And I’ve served in this house above twenty years. Kindest man, he was, sir. Always had time … and patience. The worst you could say of him was that he was a bit remote … like absentminded. Forgot things. But that’s hardly a sin. Most of us can be forgetful. Terrible worried, he was, lately.” Emsley swallowed and sniffed. “All that stuff about Darwin and monkeys and all that. Got him down terribly.” His face puckered. “I tried to tell him it was all nonsense, but it’s not my place to say things like that … not to the likes of the Master, him being a proper churchman.”

“I don’t think it matters who says it, if it is true,” Pitt answered. “And I will certainly not volunteer any unnecessary information to anyone. I cannot imagine that Mrs. Parmenter will. How is she this morning?”

“I haven’t seen her myself, sir, but Braithwaite says she’s very upset, naturally, and feeling the shock of it now. But she’s very brave. Did you need to see anybody, sir? I can tell Mr. Mallory you’re here, or Mr. Corde.”

“You could tell Mrs. Parmenter I’m here, as a courtesy,” Pitt answered. “But I don’t need to speak to anyone, thank you. I need to go back to the study.”

“Yes sir. It’s locked up. I suppose you have the key?”

“Yes, I have, thank you.”

“Right sir. Will you be wanting anything? A cup of tea, perhaps?”

“In an hour or so, thank you,” Pitt accepted, then excused himself and went up the black staircase, along the passage and unlocked the study door.

The room was exactly as he had left it. There were still dark bloodstains on the floor beside the desk. The paper knife was in the farther corner, where it had fallen. There had never been any
question of its not being the weapon, or of anyone else’s having touched it. It was evidence, but there was nothing to dispute.

He stood staring at it, trying to picture in his mind what had happened. Physically it was easy, but what had happened between Ramsay and Vita in the years leading up to it? Or more correctly, what had happened to him? How had his doubts so distorted his thinking, his feeling, that he had moved from being a loving husband dedicated to the care of other people’s souls to being a man whose own weaknesses so overwhelmed him he made love to a woman he despised, under his own roof, and when she blackmailed him with her pregnancy, killed her—and then tried to kill his wife?

Perhaps the answer was simply madness—as clear and as incomprehensible as that.

He went to the desk and started to look through the papers lying in piles. If Ramsay and Vita had quarreled over love letters, they must have been where she could easily see them. He had been in the room when she went in, so she had not searched for them; her eye had caught them by chance. And she would have had no opportunity to move them since then.

There was a paper on St. Paul. Half folded was the draft of a sermon on the Epistle of St. James titled “If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth liberally, and up-braideth not!” Under that were two short letters from missions abroad, one in Africa, one in China. He put them in a pile again and looked at the surface of the desk. There was a red leather-bound copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. A Stoic philosopher, albeit an emperor of Rome, was odd reading for a cleric of the Church of England, but not perhaps for what he had first believed Ramsay to be. Its dry, brave, rather comfortless wisdom would be exactly what would echo his own philosophy. It would be a companion voice. He looked beside it and saw half a dozen papers written in two quite different sets of handwriting. He picked up the first.

It was a neat, exact hand with open Greek
E’s.
Ramsay’s
writing. Pitt knew that from other papers on the desk. He began to read it.

He continued down to the end of the page and turned it over. It was all in the same vein, about loneliness and separation, about unity of thought and heart, symbolized by unity of person.

The second was in the same hand, and while dealing with a different subject, it was of the same nature. Again loneliness was a continuous thread running through it, the desire to be together again, to remove all difficulties and barriers that kept them apart. The underlying emotion was obviously deeply felt, but it was couched in metaphor, a trifle pedantic, drawing back from the ultimate of verbal commitment. Pitt could hear Ramsay Parmenter’s careful, slightly dry voice all the way through it.

The third was in a different hand, rapid, exuberant, full of confidence. Here the meaning was undisguised. It began instantly and passionately.

There were three more in the same dashing hand. Little wonder Vita Parmenter had been amazed and had challenged her husband to explain them. What could he possibly say?

Pitt set them down again in the place where they had been. He felt confused, overtaken by his own sense of not being equal to the task given him. He had failed to understand Ramsay while he was alive, and thus to prevent his death. And he could not dismiss the fact that Ramsay could have succeeded in hurting Vita. Then Pitt would have been responsible for that, too. Now he understood even less. He had read the love letters, and anyone could see how they would precipitate a quarrel. It was inevitable the moment Vita saw them … or for that matter if anyone else in the family had, or even Dominic. But why had Ramsay left them out on the desk where they must be seen? Why did he have both his and hers? Presumably he must have retrieved them from her belongings after her death. With any sense at all he would have destroyed them.

Did he still love her, or was he so obsessed with her, that he could not, in spite of the risk they represented? Had he abandoned hope of escape for the result of his act? Was he only waiting for the inevitable?

And yet looking at the unbridled passion in the letters, Pitt
could see neither Ramsay nor Unity in them. The wording was characteristic of what he had seen of him and heard of her. But the emotion was not. He still could not imagine them in love with each other at all, let alone so wildly.

Which showed the depth to which he had failed in this case.

He sighed and started to look through the drawers of the desk. There were the usual personal accounts and trivial letters regarding Ramsay’s profession. He read them all as a matter of duty. They were even drier than he had expected, the same pedantic phrases repeated in each one. Perhaps they were meant sincerely, but there was a stiffness about them which made it difficult to believe.

In the next drawer down there were more letters. They were from various people, colleagues, parishioners, friends. He glanced at them. Most of them were several years old, apparently kept because they were of emotional value. Among them he found one from Dominic. It was an invasion of privacy to read it, yet he found he had done so even while the thought was in his mind.

Pitt refolded it with an overwhelming sadness. For a moment he was at one with Dominic in a way he had never imagined possible. He could understand his hurt now, the lost opportunity that could not be retrieved. The reproach would never leave.

And the letter must have been precious to Ramsay, because he had kept it among the few other tokens of friendship over the years. Some had dates as far back as his university days.

There were none from Vita. Perhaps they had not written to each other, or if they had, then he had kept them somewhere else, possibly in his bedroom. It hardly mattered.

He looked at the drawer below. There were only more letters to do with his profession. Several of them concerned the book he was currently working on. Pitt leafed through them rapidly. They were all brief and exceedingly dry. Then he came upon one in Unity’s hand. He recognized it instantly. It was dated from the end of 1890, just over three months before. It was her application for the position she had occupied.

He folded that also and put it in with the love letters. It was one thing more which confused him. She had written as a stranger, and yet that was only six or eight weeks before she had become pregnant, at the outside. It was a short time for such passion to explode.

There was one more thing. Ramsay had kept a notebook, a brown leather-bound volume about an inch thick. Glancing through it, Pitt saw that it did not seem to be a diary so much as a journal of occasional thoughts. He looked at one page, then another, and found it too difficult to understand. Some of it seemed to be in Latin, some in almost a shorthand of Ramsay’s own devising. He would take it with him and study it and the letter later, when he had time.

There was nothing more to be done here. He should speak to Vita, and perhaps Dominic, and then check finally with Tellman and attend to the formalities. The cases of Unity Bellwood and Ramsay Parmenter were closed—not satisfactorily, but still closed, for all that.

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