At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [52]
An engine accelerated and tires squealed again.
Struggling to catch his breath, he started to clamber to his feet, feeling more than a little ridiculous. Anger boiled up inside him.
Someone offered him a hand and pulled him up. It was an elderly gentleman with a white mustache and military bearing.
“That was a close shave, sir,” he said with a shake of his head. “Damn fool driver! Must have been drunk as a newt. Are you all right? You look a trifle shaken.”
Matthew was damp from the pavement and there were smears of mud on his elbows and knees. His left foot was wet where he had stepped in the gutter, but other than the wrench to his shoulder and a few bruises, he was unhurt.
“Yes, sir, thank you. I didn’t see him coming at all.” He felt extremely foolish.
“You wouldn’t, sir,” the other man said crisply. “Come round the corner driving like a Jehu! Straight for the pavement. If it weren’t ridiculous, I’d say he was aiming straight for you. I’d thank your stars, sir, and go home and have a hot bath, if there is such a thing available to you, and a large whisky.”
“Thank you,” Matthew said sincerely. “I think that’s exactly what I will do.”
But when he was back in his flat, sitting in the armchair with a single lamp shedding a soft light over the familiar room, and a glass of whisky in his hand, he was still cold, and his mind was racing. Was it possible that the incident in the street was not an accident?
Surely not? It was just somebody drunk, or even distracted perhaps with bad news. There was certainly enough of it about. Matthew was angry because he had been frightened, for a moment, and made to look vulnerable and ridiculous.
He telephoned Aidan Thyer and made an appointment to see him the next day. There was no point in wasting time going all the way to Cambridge, and then finding that Thyer was too busy to see anyone, or even not there at all. But telephoning did mean he was warned. If he was the Peacemaker, then he might already know what Matthew was doing, and the reason he was coming.
If it proved to be Thyer it would hurt Joseph. He had liked the man and trusted him. It would be a double betrayal because of Sebastian Allard’s death as well, and the manner of it, as well as the murder of John and Alys Reavley.
Matthew went over in his mind yet again the course he had followed in seeking the Peacemaker. It had to be someone with connections to the Royal Families of both Britain and Germany. Although since the king and the kaiser were first cousins, with Queen Victoria as a common grandmother, a connection with one might well open doors to connections with the other. He had also to be a man of extraordinary intelligence, boundless ambition, an understanding of world politics, and an idealism he could follow with ruthless dedication regardless of all cost.
Because John Reavley had found a copy of the treaty that proposed this monstrous alliance, and been murdered in the attempt to expose it, the Peacemaker had to be someone who knew him sufficiently well to predict his actions, even his daily routine.
But Matthew and Joseph had considered Aidan Thyer, Master of St. Giles; Dermot Sandwell, senior government minister and confidant of royalty; and Ivor Chetwin, Secret Intelligence agent and longtime friend of John Reavley, until an ethical difference over the morality involved in spying had divided them. Matthew had once dreaded that it might be Shanley Corcoran, brilliant scientist and lifetime friend of John Reavley. He had not even dared suggest that to Joseph. It would have wounded him desperately. But then Corcoran’s betrayal last summer had wounded him even more deeply. And he was dead now, hanged for treason.
Matthew sipped the whisky again, and did not taste it. He barely felt its fire slip down his throat. He himself had been sure it was Patrick Hannassey who had been the Peacemaker, and