Highgate Rise by Anne Perry

Although Pitt could think of nothing that could aggravate a temperamental difference into murder.
    Burdin shrugged fractionally and turned his hand on its side.
    “Not more than usual?” Pitt guessed.
    Burdin smiled and there was a flicker of something like humor in his eyes, but again he shrugged. He did not know.
    “Anyone else call?”
    Palm up.
    “Local person?”
    Palm up and raised a little.
    “Very local? Mr. Lindsay?”
    Burdin’s face relaxed in a smile, the palm remained up.
    “Anyone else that you know of?”
    Palm down.
    He thought of asking if there was any mail that might be unusual or of interest, but what would such a thing be? How could anyone recognize it?
    “Did Dr. Shaw seem anxious or disturbed about anything that day?”
    The palm was down, but indecisive, hovering above the bed cover.
    Pitt took a guess, drawn from what he had observed of Shaw’s temperament. “Angry? Was he angry about something?”
    The palm came up quickly.
    “Thank you, Mr. Burdin. If you think of anything else, comments, a letter, unusual arrangements, please tell the hospital and write it down for me. I shall come immediately. I hope you recover quickly.”
    Burdin smiled and closed his eyes. Even that small effort had tired him.
    Pitt left, angry himself at so much physical pain, and helplessbecause he could do nothing for it, and he had learned little he felt of use. He imagined Shaw and Hatch probably quarreled fairly regularly, simply because their natures were utterly different. They would almost certainly perceive any issue with opposite views.
    The Shaws’ cook was in a far less serious state of health, and he left the hospital and took a hansom for the short ride down Highgate Hill and through Holloway to the Seven Sisters Road and the house of her relatives, which Murdo had given him. It was small, neat and shabby, exactly what he expected, and he was permitted in only with reluctance and after considerable argument.
    He found the cook sitting up in bed in the best bedroom, wrapped around more against the indecency of being visited by a strange man than to prevent any chill. She had been burned on one arm and had lost some of her hair, giving her a lopsided, plucked look which had it been less tragic would have been funny. As it was Pitt had difficulty in maintaining a perfectly sober expression.
    The niece, bustling with offense, remained obtrusively present every moment of the time.
    “Mrs. Babbage?” Pitt began. All cooks were given the courtesy title of “Mrs.” whether they were married or not.
    She looked at him with alarm and her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a shriek.
    “I mean you no harm, Mrs. Babbage—”
    “Who are you? What do you want? I don’t know you.” She craned upwards as if his mere presence threatened her with some physical danger.
    He sat down quickly on a small bedroom chair just behind him and tried to be disarming. She was obviously still in an extreme state of shock, emotional if not from her injuries which appeared to be relatively slight.
    “I am Inspector Pitt,” he said, introducing himself, avoiding the word
police.
He knew how respectable servants hated even an association with crime as tenuous as the presence of the police. “It is my duty to do what I can to discover how the fire started.”
    “Not in my kitchen!” she said so loudly it startled her niece, who drew her breath in in a loud gasp. “Don’t you go accusing me, or Doris! I know how to tend a stove. Never had so much as a coal fall out, I ’aven’t; never mind burnin’ down an ’ole ’ouse.”
    “We know that, Mrs. Babbage,” he said soothingly. “It did not begin in the kitchen.”
    She looked a trifle mollified, but still her eyes were wide and wary and she twisted a rag of a handkerchief around and around in her fingers till the flesh of them was red with the friction. She was afraid to believe him, suspecting a trap.
    “It was begun deliberately, in the curtains of four different