Thomas & Charlotte Pitt 29 - Death On Blackheath by Anne Perry Read Free Book Online

outhouse.’
    ‘Not quite.’ Whistler pursed his lips. ‘She was pretty clean, apart from a smear or two of mud and bits of gravel and sand caught up in her clothes. And that could be from where she was lying. Wherever she was kept for the time in between death and being put in the gravel pit, it was clean. And although she’s badly mutilated, when I looked more closely, that appears to have been done recently, after the flesh had begun to decay. I suppose that could be useful?’ He shrugged. ‘It more or less rules out anywhere outside.’
    ‘More than that.’ Pitt sat forward a little. ‘If you’re quite sure about that: no rats? Absolutely no rats?’
    Whistler took his point. There were rats almost everywhere, in cities or the country, in the sewers, in the streets and gutters, in people’s houses, even cellars, potting sheds, and outhouses of every kind. One did not see them so often, but any food left lying, certainly any dead and rotting body, they would have found.
    ‘Yes.’ Whistler nodded, his eyes meeting Pitt’s squarely for the first time. ‘You may safely conclude that wherever she was, it was cold and clean, and sufficiently well sealed that neither flies nor rats could get in. Of course there are no flies at this time of year, but there are always beetles of some sort. Narrows it down quite a lot.’
    ‘Any idea how she got there?’ Pitt pursued.
    ‘Impossible to tell. The body’s too badly damaged and too far deteriorated to find any marks of ropes, or whether she lay on slats, or boards, or anything else. You’ve got a nasty one …’
    Pitt looked at him coldly. ‘That also I had worked out for myself.’
    ‘I’ll let you know if I find out anything more,’ Whistler said with a faint smile.
    ‘Please do.’ Pitt rose to his feet. ‘For example, how old she was, any distinguishing marks that might help identify her, what state of health she was in, any healed injuries, old scars, birthmarks? Particularly, I would like to know what killed her.’
    Whistler nodded. ‘Believe me, Commander, I very much want you to find out who, and then exact everything from him the law allows, in some attempt at payment for it.’
    Pitt looked at him more closely, and for an instant saw, behind the defences of anger and a quiet belligerence, the sense of helplessness and pity for the agony of a stranger now beyond his help. Whistler was embarrassed by his own grief, and hid it behind a bitter professional detachment. Pitt wondered how often he had to do this sort of thing, and why he had chosen it instead of a practice with the living.
    ‘Thank you,’ Pitt said gravely. ‘If I learn anything that might be useful to you I’ll see that you are informed.’
    Outside again he walked quickly. The air was cold and had the sting of sleet in it, its odour was the sourness of soot and smoke, the smell of horse dung and swift-running gutters, impersonal, ordinary, but he breathed it in with relief.
    Questions were teeming in his mind. Who was she? Was it Kitty Ryder, or someone else who happened quite by chance to resemble her, at least superficially? How had she died? And where? Had she remained where she was killed, or been moved first somewhere safer, and then last night taken to the gravel pit? Why? What had necessitated that?
    If he knew where she had been, would that tell him also who she was? And therefore quite possibly who had killed her, how and why?
    As he came to the first major street corner he saw the newspapers for sale. The black headlines were already up – ‘Mutilated corpse found on Shooters Hill! Who is she? Police are keeping silent!’
    They were like hounds on the scent of blood. Inevitable, even necessary, but he flinched at it all the same.
    But then without Zebediah Smith’s dog they would not have found the poor woman before there was far less of her left – less chance of identifying her, less chance of finding out what happened to her and who was responsible.
    He hoped