Half Moon Street (27 page)

But none of these, good as they were, were worth the price of Lily Monderell’s teapot, let alone the watercolor.

“Yes, I see,” he said aloud. “Now how about the others, the expensive ones? Do you bring them to me, or do I have to look for them myself ?”

Unsworth hesitated, clearly torn as to how much he could still hope to get away with.

Pitt turned to Tellman. “Sergeant, go and see if you can find—”

“All right!” Unsworth said loudly, his face dark, his voice edged with anger. “I’ll show ’em to yer meself ! Yer an ’ard man! Wot’s the ’arm in a few pictures? Nobody’s ’urt. Nobody’s in it as doesn’t wanter be. It ain’t real!”

“The pictures, Mr. Unsworth,” Pitt said grimly. He would not argue realities of the mind with him.

Ungraciously Unsworth produced the pictures, slamming them down on the table in front of Pitt, then stood back, his arms folded.

These were different. Innocence was gone completely. Pitt heard Tellman’s intake of breath between his teeth and did not need to turn sideways to know the expression on his face, the revulsion, the hurt inside. Some of them still possessed an art, albeit a twisted one. In the first four the women were leering, their bodies in attitudes of half ecstasy already, but vulgar, totally physical. There was no suggestion of tenderness, only appetite.

He flipped through them quickly. He would rather not have looked at all. Each one of these women had not so long ago been a child, searching for love, not lust. They may have been used rather than cared for, they may have been lonely or frightened or bored, but they had still been outside the adult world of selfish, physical use of one person by another merely to relieve a hunger.

Except, of course, for those who long knew abuse from the very people who were supposed to protect them. And looking at some of these sad, worldly eyes, that might have described a few of them. There was already a self-disgust in some that was harsher than any of the physical degradations.

Others were worse again, mimicking pain inflicted for pleasure, with the implication that it held some kind of secret joy reached only by breaching all the barriers. Some were obscene, some blasphemous. Many women were dressed in mockery of those in holy orders, nuns with skirts torn open, hurled to the ground, or over the banisters of stairs, as if rape was on a level with martyrdom and a kind of religious ecstasy was achieved by submission to violence.

Pitt felt a sickness churn in his stomach. The moment he looked he wished he had not seen them. How did one erase from the mind such images? He would not want it to, but the next time he saw a nun this would return to him, and he would be unable to meet her eyes in case she saw what was in his mind. Something was already soiled for him.

And there were others equally ugly, some involving men also, and children. Satanic rituals were suggested with emblems of death, sacrifice. In two or three the shadow of a goat’s head, goblets of blood and wine, light shining on the blade of a knife.

Tellman gave a little grunt. It was a short sound, barely audible, but Pitt heard the distress in it as if it had been a scream. He wished there was a way he could excuse them both, but there was not.

Among the pictures he recognized one beautiful face, not a young one, not lovely with the untouched flower of youth, but older, the beauty that of the clean sweep of throat and cheek, the perfect balance of bone delicate yet strong, the halo of fair hair. It was Cecily Antrim, dressed as a nun, her head back, her arms tied by the wrists to a wheel, her body bent over it. A man knelt in front of her, his face reflecting ecstasy. It was a curious picture, half pornographic, half blasphemous, as if the two, in the figure of the priest, came together. It was a powerful and profoundly disturbing image, far less easy to forget than those which were simply erotic. This raised questions in the mind as to the nature of religious practice and the honesty or dishonesty of what purported to be service of God.

Pitt looked at a few more, another dozen or so. He was almost at the bottom of the pile when he saw it. He knew from the stifled gasp beside him that Tellman had seen it at the same instant.

It was Cecily Antrim again, in a green velvet gown, lying on her back in a punt, surrounded by drifting flowers. Her knees were half drawn up. Her wrists and ankles were very obviously manacled to the boat. It was the parody of Ophelia again, making it seem as if the imprisonment of the chains was what excited her, and the beginning of ecstasy was sharp and real in her face.

“That’s disgusting!” Tellman said with a half sob. “How could any woman like that sort of thing?” He was glaring at Pitt. “What kind of idea does that give a man, eh?” He jabbed his thin finger at the shiny card. “A man looking for that is going to . . . to think . . . God knows! What’s he going to do, tell me that?”

“I don’t know,” Pitt said quietly. “Maybe he’s going to think that’s the sort of thing women like. . . .”

“Exactly!” Tellman’s voice cracked. “It’s revolting. It’s got to be stopped! What would happen if some young lad came in here?”

“I don’t sell to young lads,” Unsworth cut in. “That sort of thing’s only for special customers, ones I know.”

Pitt swung around on him, his eyes blazing, his voice raw. “And of course you know exactly what they do with them, don’t you! You know that every one of them is safely locked up by some sane and responsible person who treats his own wife like a precious friend, a lady, the mother of his children?” His voice was getting louder and he could not help it. “No one ever feeds his own dreams with them and then acts them out? No one ever sells them on to curious and ignorant boys who don’t even know what a naked woman’s body looks like and is aching to find out?”

He remembered his own first awakenings of curiosity with surprising sharpness, and his ideas, his realizations of boundless, terrifying and wonderful possibilities.

“Well . . .” Unsworth spluttered. “Well, you can’t hold me responsible for . . . I’m not my brother’s keeper!”

“Just as well for him! The way you’re going about it he’s on that high road to that misery where he destroys everything he sees because he no longer believes in the possibility of worth. No, Mr. Unsworth, perhaps it is people like Sergeant Tellman and me who are his keeper, and we are now going to set about doing exactly that. You have a choice. You can either give us a list of your clients who buy these pictures—a complete list . . .”

Unsworth shook his head violently.

“Or,” Pitt continued, “I shall presume you have these here for your own pleasure, and since one of them is evidence in a murder, that you are protecting the person who committed it . . .”

Unsworth gasped and waved his hands in denial.

“Or that you committed it yourself,” Pitt finished. “Which is it to be?”

“I . . . eh . . . I . . .” Unsworth ground his teeth. “I’ll give you a list. But you’ll ruin me! You’ll put me in the workhouse!”

“I hope so,” Pitt said.

Unsworth shot him a venomous look, but he went and fetched a piece of paper and a pen and ink, and wrote a long list of names for Pitt, but no addresses.

Pitt read through the names and saw none he recognized. He would get a list of members of the camera club and compare them, but he held little hope that there would be any in common.

“Tell me something about each of these men,” he said grimly to Unsworth.

Unsworth shook his head. “They’re customers. They buy pictures. What do I know about them?”

“A great deal,” Pitt replied without shifting his gaze. “If you didn’t, you’d not risk selling pictures like these to them. And I want a list of the men who supply these pictures as well.” He watched Unsworth’s face. “And before you deny that too, one of these pictures prompted the murder of Cathcart. The murderer saw it, and laid Cathcart’s body in the exact image.” He was satisfied to see Unsworth pale considerably and a sweat break out on his brow. “Coincidence would be unbelievable,” he went on. “Especially since Cathcart took the photograph. I need to know who else saw it. Do you understand me, Mr. Unsworth? You are the key to a murder which I intend to solve. You can tell me now . . . or I can close down your business until you do. Which will it be?”

Unsworth looked at him with hatred, his eyes narrow and dark.

“You tell me which picture it is, I’ll tell yer ’oo brought it an’ ’oo I sold it to,” he said grudgingly.

Pitt indicated the photograph of Cecily Antrim in the punt.

“Oh. Well, like yer said yerself, Cathcart brought me that one.”

“Sole rights?” Pitt asked.

“Wot?” Unsworth hedged.

“Do you have sole rights to the picture?” Pitt snapped.

“Wake up an’ dream! O’ course I don’t!”

It was a lie. Pitt knew it from the fixed steadiness of his eyes.

“I see. And you wouldn’t know the names of the other dealers who have it because you wouldn’t have sold it to them?” Pitt agreed.

Unsworth shifted his weight again. “That’s right.”

“So tell me all you can about those people you did sell to.”

“That’d take all day!” Unsworth protested.

“Probably,” Pitt agreed. “But Sergeant Tellman and I have all day.”

“Maybe you bleedin’ ’ave—but I ’aven’t. I’ve got a livin’ ter make!”

“Then you had better start quickly, hadn’t you, and not waste your valuable time in arguing,” Pitt said reasonably.

But even though they spent several hours in the small upstairs room and the shop was closed for business all the time, they learned nothing that appeared to be of use in guiding them any further in Cathcart’s murder. They left as it was growing dusk and went out onto the gaslit pavements with a heavy feeling of oppression.

Tellman drew in a long breath, as though the foggy air—with its slight damp, the smell of horses, wet roads, soot and chimneys—was still cleaner than the air inside the closed shop.

“That’s poison,” he said quietly, his voice husky with misery and rage. “Why do we let people make things like that?” It was not a rhetorical question. He wanted and needed an answer. “What good are we doing if we can only arrest people after they do things wrong, if we can’t stop them?” He jerked his head back towards the shop. “We could arrest someone if they put poison in a sack of flour.”

“Because people don’t want to buy sacks of flour with poisons in them,” Pitt answered him. “They want to buy these things. That’s the difference.”

They walked in silence for a while, crossing the street amid rumbling drays and wagons, fast-moving carriages, light hansoms, all with lamps gleaming. The sound of hooves was sharp, the hiss of wheels, the smell of fog in the nostrils and an increasing chill as darkness closed in. Wreaths of mist shrouded the lamps, diffusing the light.

“Why do they do it?” Tellman demanded suddenly, striding out to keep up with Pitt, who, in his own anger, had unconsciously been going faster and faster. “I mean, why does a woman like Miss Antrim let anyone take pictures like that? She doesn’t need the money. She isn’t starving, desperate, can’t pay the rent. She must make hundreds as it is. Why?” He waved his arms in a wild gesture of incomprehension. “She’s quality! She knows better than that!”

Pitt heard the confusion in him, and more than that, the disappointment. He understood it sharply. He felt it also. What perversity led a beautiful and brilliant woman to such degradation?

“Was she blackmailed into it, do you supposed?” Tellman asked, swerving to avoid banging into a lamppost.

“Maybe.” He would have to ask. He half hoped that was the answer. The weight of disillusion inside him was heavier than he would have imagined. A dream had been broken, a brightness was gone.

“Must be,” Tellman said, trying to convince himself. “Only answer.”

For Caroline it was not quite the end of the matter with Samuel Ellison. She had liked him very much, not for his resemblance to Edward, or because he liked her or found her attractive, but for his enthusiasm and for the gentleness and the complexity with which he saw his own country. She did not wish to part from him with anger remembered.

She looked across the breakfast table. She and Joshua were alone. The old lady had remained in her room.

“May I write to Samuel and tell him that we have solved the mystery of the letters, and we apologize for the mischief caused? I cannot quite see how to do it without telling him the reasons, and I would prefer not to do that.”

“No,” he said clearly, but his eyes were soft, and he was smiling. “He still behaved a trifle improperly. He admires you, which shows excellent taste, but he was too forward about it. . . .”

“Oh . . .”

“I shall write to him,” he continued. “I shall tell him what happened, as much as I know. I cannot tell him the old lady’s reason because I don’t know it. And I shall apologize for her appalling behavior, and invite him out to dinner . . .”

She smiled, delight flooding through her.

“. . . at my club,” he finished, looking amused and a trifle smug. “Then I shall take him to the theatre, if he accepts, and introduce him to Oscar Wilde. I know him passably well, and he is a very agreeable fellow. I am not having him here. Mrs. Ellison may be a mischief-making woman, but Samuel is still too fond of my wife for my peace of mind.”

Caroline felt the color burn up her cheeks, but this time it was pleasure, sharp and delicious. “What an excellent idea,” she said, looking down at the toast on her plate. “I am sure he will enjoy that enormously. Please give him my best wishes.”

“Certainly,” he replied, reaching for the teapot. “I shall be happy to.”

After Joshua left, Caroline went upstairs and asked if Mrs. Ellison was well. She was told by Mabel that so far she had not arisen, and it seemed she had no desire to get up today. Mabel was concerned that perhaps the doctor should be called.

“Not yet,” Caroline replied firmly. “I daresay it is no more than a headache and will pass without treatment—except what you can give, of course.”

“Are you sure, ma’am?” Mabel asked anxiously.

“I think so. I shall go and see her.”