Midnight at Marble Arch - By Anne Perry Page 0,102

form of a complaint or not, then an innocent man may hang,” Knox said peremptorily.

Townley swung around and glared at him. “Not because of anything I have said, sir!”

“Because of what you know, and have not said,” Knox retorted. “Silence can lead to damnation as much as speech, and still cost a man his life.”

“Or a woman her reputation!” Townley snapped back. “I look after my own, sir, as does any decent man.”

“Have you a son also, Mr. Townley?” Pitt said suddenly.

Townley stared at him with disbelief. “And what is that to you, sir? None of this … this supposed affair has anything to do with him.”

“I have a son and a daughter also,” Pitt told him. “They are children still, but my daughter is fast turning into a woman. It seems to me that she grows more and more like her mother with every few months that pass.”

Townley tried to interrupt him, but Pitt overrode him.

“Because of an incident involving someone she knew, my daughter has asked me, and her mother, very urgent and awkward questions about rape. She wishes to know what it is, and why people are so terribly upset about it. We have tried to answer her both delicately and honestly, bearing in mind that she is only fourteen.”

“I wish you well, sir,” Townley said, succeeding in interrupting this time. His face was gray-white and he seemed to have trouble forming his words coherently. “But that is of no concern to me.”

“And I look at my son,” Pitt went on, disregarding the interruption. “He is nearly twelve, and has no idea what we are talking about. How do I explain it all to him, so that his behavior toward women is never coarse or, worse still, violent? But perhaps more terrible than that, how do I protect him from being accused of something he did not do? What father, what mother, would see their son at the end of the hangman’s rope, jeered at by the crowd, insulted, and abused, for a hideous crime of which he was innocent, but could not prove himself so?”

Townley was trembling where he stood, his fists clenching and unclenching. “Then you will understand, sir, why I make no complaint. You have answered your own question.” He took a shaky step closer to the hallway and his escape.

“Mr. Townley!” Pitt said as if it were a command.

“You have my answer,” Townley said between his teeth.

“I am not asking that you lay a complaint,” Pitt said, quietly now. “Only that, man to man, you tell me the truth. You can deny it afterward. I will not ask you to sign anything, or to swear anything. I need to know, because the daughter of a foreign ambassador was also a victim recently. That is why Special Branch has become involved.”

Townley hesitated. “I will not testify!” he said, his voice a little shrill.

“I’m not sure that I would if it were my daughter,” Pitt admitted. “I’d do what I thought was best for her.”

“I will not allow you to speak to her,” Townley warned. “Even if I was so inclined, her mother would not. Seeing the doctor … was bad enough.”

Pitt drew in his breath to say he understood, but realized he had no idea. Instead he simply asked what she’d told them had happened.

Townley closed his eyes and said in a flat hesitant voice, “Alice is nearly seventeen. She was at a ball in the house of a friend. I will not tell you her family’s name. There were naturally young gentlemen present also. She enjoys dancing and is particularly skilled. She was flattered when a young man in his early twenties asked her to dance, imagining he thought her older, more sophisticated, which she has a great desire to be. To … to get to the point …” He gulped. “He spoke pleasantly to her, inviting her to see one of the galleries in the house where there were some remarkable paintings. Alice likes … art. She suspected nothing and went with him.”

Pitt felt himself clenching inside.

“He took her first to one gallery with some art as lovely as he had said it would be,” Townley continued. “Then promised more works, even better, but said they were in another part of the house … a private part where they should not trespass, but he said they would touch nothing, merely look at the paintings.”

Pitt almost said it for him, to break the unbearable tension, and to save the man from having to