Farrier's Lane by Anne Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

patterns around the doors lending an individual touch. A carved chaise longue had a woven rug draped on it in reds and plums, and no one had changed the bowl of late chrysanthemums on the polished table.
    Juniper looked very tired this morning, and shocked, as if the realization of her husband’s death was beginning to come to her, with all the changes in her life that it would mean. In the harsher daylight her skin looked papery and the tiny natural blemishes more pronounced, but she was still a handsome woman with excellent features and very fine dark eyes. Today she was dressed in unrelieved black, but the excellence of the cut, the perfect drape of the fabricsacross the hips and the swath of the bustle made it a garment of fashion, and most becoming.
    “Good morning, Mrs. Stafford,” Pitt said formally. “I am truly sorry to disturb you again so soon, but there were questions I could not ask you last night.”
    “Of course,” she said quickly. “I understand, Mr. Pitt. You do not need to explain to me. I have been a judge’s wife long enough to appreciate the necessities of the law. Surely they have not done the …” She hesitated to use the word, it was so ugly.
    “No, not yet.” He saved her from having to say “autopsy.” “I hope for it this evening. But in the meantime I should like to confirm for myself what Mr. Stafford’s purpose was in going to see Mr. O’Neil and Mr. Fielding.” He pulled a rueful face. “I am in some confusion as to whether he did intend to reopen the Blaine/Godman case, or simply to find further evidence to convince Miss Macaulay of the futility of her crusade.”
    “You are in charge of the matter, after all?” she asked, still standing, one hand resting on the back of the tapestried chair.
    “I was given it this morning.”
    “I am glad. It would have been harder to face someone I did not know.”
    It was a delicate compliment and he accepted it as such, thanking her by expression rather than words.
    She walked over towards the fire and the mantel shelf, above which was a particularly fine Dutch oil painting of cows in an autumn field, the sky warm with golden light behind them. She looked at it for a moment or two before turning to face him.
    “What can I tell you, Mr. Pitt? He did not confide his intentions to me, but I assumed from what he did say that he had found some grounds on which to re-enquire into the case. If indeed he was … killed”—she swallowed, finding the word difficult—“then I have to assume it had some connection with that. It was a hideous case—bestial—blasphemous. There was terrible public outcry at the time.”She shivered and her lips tightened at the memory. “You must remember it. It was in all the newspapers, I am told.”
    “Who was Kingsley Blaine?” he asked. He could still recall the sense of horror he had felt when she had spoken of Farriers’ Lane, but very little else came back to him, no details, no people behind the names.
    “A fairly ordinary young man of good enough family,” she replied, standing close to the mantel and staring beyond Pitt towards the window. The curtains were drawn closed now because of the mourning of the house. “Money, of course, but not of the aristocracy. He and his friend, Devlin O’Neil, went to the theater that night. Some say they had a difference of opinion, but it proved later to be of no importance. It was only money, a small debt or something. Nothing very large.” She looked at the garnet ring on her finger and turned it slowly in the light.
    “But Mr. O’Neil was suspected for a while?” Pitt asked.
    “Only as a matter of course, I think,” she replied.
    “But Mr. Stafford went to see him yesterday?”
    “Yes. I don’t know why. Perhaps he thought he might know something. After all, he was there that evening.”
    “How did Aaron Godman come into the story?”
    She let her hands fall and stared towards the window again, as if she could see through the curtains to the