Brunswick Gardens (40 page)

“No.” He sat down on the dressing chair without waiting for
her to invite him. “It makes excellent sense. Please tell me what happened as exactly as you can remember.”

“Where shall I begin?”

“Wherever you wish.”

She considered for several moments, then drew a deep breath. “I am not sure what time it was.” She cleared her throat with difficulty. “I had just changed for dinner. Braithwaite had left me and gone downstairs. It was the hour the servants eat. They dine before us, but I expect you know that? Yes, of course you do.” She blinked. “I’m sorry. I am rambling. I am finding it very difficult to think properly.” Her hands were opening and closing on the bedclothes. “I decided to go and see how Ramsay was, see if perhaps I could talk to him. He had been very … alone. He seldom came out of his room. I thought perhaps I could persuade him to take dinner with us, at least.” Her eyes searched Pitt’s face. “If you ask me why, I am not sure now. It seemed quite natural then, quite a good idea.” She started to cough, and Braithwaite handed her the glass again. “Thank you,” she murmured, taking a sip from it.

Pitt waited.

She cleared her throat again and resumed with a tiny smile of thanks. “I knocked on the study door, and when he answered I went in. He was sitting at his desk with a lot of papers spread out. I enquired how his work was proceeding. It seemed a harmless sort of thing to say … and quite natural.” She looked at him, her eyes pleading for acceptance.

“Quite natural,” he agreed.

“I—I walked over to the desk and picked up one of the papers.” Her voice had dropped and become very hoarse. “It was a love letter, Superintendent. Very … passionate and very … very graphic. I have never read anything like it in my life. I didn’t know people … women … used such language, or even thought in such terms.” She gave a high, nervous little laugh. She was clearly embarrassed. “I confess, I was shocked. I suppose it showed in my face. It must have.”

“It was a letter from a woman to a man?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. The … content of it made that quite plain. As I said, Mr. Pitt, it was very … explicit.”

“I see.”

She looked down, then up again quickly, staring at him. “It was in Unity Bellwood’s hand. I know it well enough. There is much of her writing in the house. It was what she was employed for.”

“I see,” he said again. “Go on.”

“Then I saw other letters, in my husband’s hand. They were love letters also, but much more … restrained. More spiritual, if you like … much …” She gave a jerky, painful little laugh. “Much more in his style … roundabout, meaning the same sort of thing but never really coming to the point. Ramsay always preferred to be … metaphorical, to conceal the physical and emotional behind something paraphrased as spiritual. But stripped of its euphemisms, it was much the same.”

Pitt should not have been surprised. Ramsay’s death should have prepared him for something like this. A suppressed passion, a need long smothered and denied, when it does break out, is wild, beyond control, perhaps inevitably destructive not only of the pattern of safe and productive life but of previous morality and convention, even of the curbs of taste. And yet he was surprised. He had seen nothing in Ramsay but a middle-aged churchman crowded by spiritual doubt, old before his time because he saw nothing ahead but a desert of the soul. How wrong he had been.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly.

She smiled at him. “Thank you. You are very kind, Superintendent; far kinder than your duty necessitates.” She shivered a little, drawing her shoulders in, hunching herself amid the piled pillows. “Ramsay must have seen my expression. I did not conceal my feelings … my amazement … and my … my revulsion. Perhaps if I had …” She lowered her eyes and for a moment seemed unable to continue.

Braithwaite stood beside her helplessly, raising and lowering the glass in her hands, not knowing what to do. Her face vividly reflected her anguish.

Vita regained her control with an effort. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I can’t remember what I said to him. Perhaps it was not tactful, or prudent. We had a fearful quarrel. He seemed to lose all … sanity! His whole bearing altered until he was like a madman.” Her hands gripped at the embroidered linen of the sheet. “He threw himself at me, saying I had no right to violate his privacy by looking at his personal letters.” Her voice dropped even lower. “He called me all sorts of … frightful things: a thief, a philistine, an intruder. He said I had spoiled his life, dried up his passion and his inspiration, that I was a … a leech, a drain on his spirit, unworthy of him.” She stopped abruptly. It was a moment or two before she could continue. “He was almost incoherent with rage. He seemed to have lost all control of himself. He threw himself at me, with his hands out, and caught me by the neck.” She put her fingers up towards her throat but did not touch it. It was red where his hands had been and was already beginning to darken into bruising.

“Go on,” Pitt said gently.

She lowered her hands slowly, watching his face. “I couldn’t argue with him, I couldn’t speak. I tried to fight him off, but of course he was far stronger than I.” She was breathing very hard, gulping. He could see her breast rise and fall. “We struggled back and forth. I don’t remember exactly now. His grip was getting tighter all the time. I could hardly breathe. I was afraid he meant to kill me. I … I saw the paper knife on the desk. I reached for it and struck at him. I meant to stab his arm, so the pain of it would make him let go of me and I could escape.” She shook her head, her eyes wide. “I couldn’t cry out. I couldn’t make a sound!” She stopped again.

“Of course,” Pitt agreed.

“I … I struck at his arm, at his shoulder, where I wouldn’t miss. If I struck lower down I was afraid I would only catch
sleeve.” She took a very deep breath and let it out silently. “I drove it with all my strength, before I fainted from lack of air. He must have moved.” She looked paper white. “I caught his neck.” Her voice was so low it was barely a whisper, as if the strangling hands were still choking her. “It was terrible. It was the worst moment of my life. He fell back … staring at me as if he couldn’t believe it. For an instant he was himself again, the old Ramsay, sane and wise and full of tenderness. There was … blood … everywhere.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know what I did then. I was so filled with horror … I—I think I went to kneel where he fell. I don’t know. It was all a blur of horror, of grief.… Time stood still.” She swallowed, her throat tightening. It must have hurt. “Then I went downstairs to get help.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Parmenter,” he acknowledged gravely. While she had been speaking he had been watching her face, her hands, and looking discreetly at the deep bloodstains on her dress. Everything he saw was consistent with her account of what had happened and with what he had seen in the study. There was no cause to doubt the tragedy as she had told it to him. “I am sure you would now like to bathe and change your clothes, and perhaps take the sedative the doctor left for you. I shall not need to disturb you further tonight.”

“Yes. Yes, I should.” She gave a little shiver and pulled the sheet higher up over her, but she did not say anything else.

Pitt left her and went back to the study. He must speak to the doctor, to both her daughters, and either he or Tellman should speak to the servants. Somebody might have heard something. Not that it would help if they had; it was simply a matter of being thorough.

    It was nearly midnight when he arrived at Cornwallis’s rooms and the manservant let him in. The man had already retired and had been awakened by the doorbell. He had a dressing
robe on over hastily donned trousers, and his hair stood on end at the back where his comb had not reached it.

“Yes sir?” he said a little stiffly.

Pitt apologized. “I imagine Mr. Cornwallis has gone to bed, but I am afraid I need to see him urgently. I’m sorry.”

“Yes sir, he has. May I deliver a message, sir?”

“You may,” Pitt agreed. “Tell him Superintendent Pitt is downstairs and needs to give him news which will not wait until morning.”

The man winced, but he did not argue. As he passed the telephone instrument hanging on the wall, he glanced meaningfully at it but forbore from recommending its use. He left Pitt in the sitting room, a comfortable, highly masculine place filled with padded leather chairs, books, mementos such as a giant conch shell from the Indies, its curved heart glowing with color, a polished brass miniature cannon, a wooden cleat from a ship’s rigging, two or three pieces of ambergris and a porcelain dish full of musket balls. There were several paintings of the sea. The books were of a wide variety, novels and poetry as well as biography, science and history. Pitt smiled when he saw Jane Austen’s
Emma,
Eliot’s
Silas Marner
and the three books of Dante’s
Divine Comedy.

Cornwallis came in less than ten minutes later fully dressed and carrying two glasses of brandy and soda.

“What is it?” he asked, pushing the door closed behind him and passing Pitt one of the glasses. “Something terrible, to judge by your face and to bring you here at this time of night.”

“I am afraid Parmenter lost his head completely and attacked his wife. She fought him off, but she killed him in the struggle.”

Cornwallis looked astounded.

“Yes, I know,” Pitt agreed. “It sounds absurd, but he tried to strangle her, and when she could feel herself suffocating, she grasped the paper knife from the desk and attempted to stab his arm. She said he moved, in order to keep the grip on her throat,
and she drove with all her strength at his shoulder and caught his neck.” He sipped the brandy and soda.

Cornwallis looked wretched, his face creased with unhappiness, his body stiff as if braced against a blow. He stood still for several moments. Pitt wondered if he was thinking of the bishop and his reaction, and how he would now be able to have the whole matter kept private and dealt with exactly as he had wanted.

“Damn!” Cornwallis said at last. “I had no idea he was so … his sanity was so fragile. Had you?”

“No,” Pitt confessed. “Neither did his doctor. He had been called for Mrs. Parmenter, and I asked him. He looked at the body, too, of course, but there was nothing he could do, and nothing of any help to say.”

“Sit down!” Cornwallis waved at the chairs and Pitt accepted gratefully. He had had no idea he was so tired.

“I suppose there is no doubt that is what happened?” Cornwallis went on, looking at Pitt curiously. “It wasn’t a suicide the wife was trying to disguise?”

“Suicide?” Pitt was puzzled. “No.”

“Well, she might,” Cornwallis argued. “After all, we haven’t proved he killed the Bellwood woman, not beyond doubt. But suicide is a crime in the eyes of the church.”

“Well, trying to murder your wife isn’t well regarded, either,” Pitt pointed out.

Cornwallis’s face was tight in spite of the flash of humor in his eyes. “But he didn’t succeed in that. He may have intended the crime, but you cannot punish him for it … not when he is dead anyway.”

“You cannot punish a person for suicide, either,” Pitt said dryly.

“Yes, you can,” Cornwallis contradicted. “You can bury them in unhallowed ground. And the family suffers.”

“Well, this was not suicide.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes. The knife must have been in her hand, not his.”

“Left side of the throat or right?” Cornwallis asked.

“Left … her right hand. They were facing each other, the way she described it.”

“So it could have been in his hand?”

“I don’t think so, not at that angle.”

Cornwallis pursed his lips. He pushed his fists deep into his pockets and stared at Pitt unhappily. “Are you satisfied that he killed Unity Bellwood?”

Pitt was about to answer, then realized that if he were honest, he was still troubled by an incompleteness to it. “I can’t think of any better answer, but I feel there is something important I’ve missed,” he admitted. “I suppose we’ll never know. Perhaps the letters will explain.”

“What letters?” Cornwallis demanded.

“That’s what provoked this quarrel, a collection of love letters between Unity and Parmenter, very graphic on Unity’s part, according to Mrs. Parmenter. When he realized she had seen them he completely lost control of himself.”

“Love letters?” Cornwallis was confused. “Why would they write letters to each other? They were in the same house. They worked together every day. Are you saying they knew each other before he employed her?”

It did seem in need of explanation. It should have occurred to him before, but he was too surprised at the nature of the letters to have considered it.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask Mrs. Parmenter if the letters were dated … or for that matter why they were all together. One would expect her to have his, and he to have hers.”

“So he was the father of her child,” Cornwallis concluded, his voice dropping with a low, harsh note of disappointment. Perhaps in a young man he would have found it easier to understand and forgive, though age was no protection against the passion, the need, the vulnerability or the confusion of falling in love, or of the storms of physical hunger, even if when they subside
they leave a wreckage of injury and shame. Was Cornwallis so detached from life ashore, with both men and women, that he did not know that?

“It would seem so,” Pitt conceded. “We shall never know beyond question, since they are both dead now.”

“What a mess,” Cornwallis said more quietly. His face was pinched with sadness, as if he could suddenly see all the futility of it spread out plainly in front of him. “It was all so … unnecessary. What was it for? A few hours’ indulgence of … what?” He shrugged. “Not love. They despised each other. They agreed on nothing. And look what it has cost!” He glanced up, searching Pitt’s face. “What happens to a man that he so loses his balance as to throw away a lifetime’s work and trust … for something he must know is going to last only a few weeks and in the end be worth nothing? Why? Was he mad, in some way a doctor would recognize? Or was the whole of his life until then alie?”

“I don’t know,” Pitt said honestly. “I don’t understand it any more than you do. It doesn’t seem like the man I saw and spoke to. It is as if there were some division in his mind, as if he were two men inside.”