Tennant said, “I’ll see Doctor Lewis out.”
At the front door, he said, “Thank you for coming. By the time I arrived, Armstrong had assigned Allingham’s postmortem to Doctor Scott. But I thought the ladies could use your support.” He cleared his throat. “Tell me, did you look in on Louisa?”
“No. Doctor Scott treated Mrs. Allingham this morning. Mary said she was sleeping.”
“First, her father—Louisa was very dependent on him.” Tennant shook his head. “Now this.”
“You’re concerned for her, of course. I’m worried about Mary. She lost her only sibling. The supposed ‘strong ones’ are often overlooked.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right.” He looked up the staircase. “I must get back.”
He seemed hardly to have heard her. “Richard, don’t let Mary fall through the cracks.”
Julia watched him climb. Again, she thought about the power of the weak . . . and their attraction for the strong.
CHAPTER6
Mary closed the sitting room door behind Eastlake, thinking,Thank God.If she had to listen to another minute of his hand-wringing over Louisa . . .
She leaned her forehead against the doorframe.That’s unkind of me.But there was time enough to worry about her sister-in-law. Just then, all Mary could think about was Charles. She crossed the hall to the stairs, changed her mind, and left through the front door, making her way around the side of the house. She passed the yew tree. Its twisting beauty had always captivated her, and she’d sketched it more times than there were days in a year. That morning, she shivered as she passed it, thinking of the man who had lurked among the branches, watching.
Mary rummaged for her key at the studio door before finding she’d left it unlocked after the hurried summons to the house. Nothing and everything had changed. The coals still burned in the grate. Light streamed in from the south-facing windows. Her pencils were where she had left them, next to the sketches on her drawing table. All was the same, except thecake of Paris Green paint was gone. The police had taken it away.
Mary slid a folder from the shelf and opened a portfolio labeledCHARLES. Smiles and tears warred as she turned over sketch after sketch. Weeping won, tears brimming and streaking her cheeks. She came to the last picture, a watercolor sketch she’d done shortly before leaving for Paris. There he was, a white-suited Charles in a summer straw hat, arms crossed, leaning against a low-hanging branch, smiling in a garden she’d painted using Paris Green.
Mary threw the sketch on the coals. Instantly, she regretted it and tried to snatch it back, singeing her fingers. Mary watched the flames eat from the edges, blackening, curling, and finally consuming the image. Then she turned away with choking sobs.
* * *
Upstairs in Charles Allingham’s study, the locksmith sat back on his heels and grunted.
“Ha. Gotcha, you bugger.” He slid the bottom drawer open an inch and looked up. “There you go, gents. Bob’s your uncle.”
“Leave the drawer as it is,” Eastlake said. “The police will open it.”
“Right you are.” The locksmith collected his picks and wires and sprung to his feet with the ease of an acrobat.
“Record time, Bert,” Armstrong said.
He polished his nails on his sleeve. “You coppers are lucky I never went in for housebreaking.” The locksmith held up his fingers and wiggled them. “In and out, and nobody’s the wiser.” He picked up his tool bag. “Cheers, gents. Hope you find what you’re after.”
After the door closed, Tennant said, “All right, Paddy. Let’s see what’s in that bottom drawer.”
O’Malley eased it open. It contained a stack of oversized portfolios, each nearly as wide as the drawer, six in all. O’Malley handed them to Tennant, who laid them on the desk, untied their ribbons, and opened a collection of erotic paintings and sketches.
The pictures in the first folder looked vaguely familiar to Tennant, painted in the style of Renaissance masters.Pleasure Gardens, the second folder, depicted Asian women singly and in pairs, “entertaining” men in garden settings. Voyeurs watching lovers and women bathing filled the third. In the fourth folder, all the figures were males engaged in acts of sodomy. The fifth group was the darkest: scenes of captivity, flagellation, and sexual domination.
“The quality of the illustrations is striking,” Tennant said. “They’re a far cry from the usual thing we see. This is artful smut.”
Eastlake said, “Surely a gentleman’s . . . private art collection can remain just that. The Obscene Publications Act applies only to the distribution of salacious materials. This is England, sir, where a man’s personal pleasures are his affair.”
O’Malley handed Tennant the last folder. It contained images of women, alone or in pairs. Some of the girls seemed barely out of the schoolroom. In one picture, Margot Miller stretched out on a white sofa, one arm thrown over her head and a hand between her legs. A second girl reached for the paddle at her feet.
Halfway through the folder, Tennant stopped. “Paddy, look at these.” Tennant spread three pictures on the desk.
O’Malley bent over the first two. “Franny Riley. She was posing for artists, just like you guessed.”
“I never guessed this. Look at the last one.” Margot Miller was the subject, and the artist had painted a green wrap thrown carelessly across the bed.
