At Some Disputed Barricade_ A Novel - Anne Perry [58]
“You…you are assuming…” Wheatcroft began.
“That it was not your idea? Yes, I am,” Matthew agreed. “Your record up to this suggests you are a man of honor.”
“I did not approach that boy,” Wheatcroft said in a whisper. “I…I may have been foolish, but that’s all! It is…inadvisable. Perhaps I deserve to lose my government position for such stupidity. That I can accept. But I have committed no crime!”
“No,” Matthew agreed. “But blackmail is very definitely a crime, and you are accusing Corracher of that. If he is found guilty then he will not only lose his position, he will go to prison.”
Wheatcroft looked so wretched, it was hard to believe he was not physically ill. “What has that to do with Intelligence? What is it you think I know? For God’s sake, don’t you think I’ve done enough to him? I don’t believe he’s a traitor. I’ve nothing more to say about it.”
“I don’t believe so, either,” Matthew responded. “I don’t know who it is behind the charge, but I believe you can help me find out.”
Wheatcroft did not look up. “If I knew of any treason, I’d have reported it! I haven’t sunk so low as that.”
Matthew felt brutal, but there was no alternative. Neither affection nor pity were excuses to add to injustice. “What made you think of accusing him of blackmail?”
“I…” He stopped.
“Didn’t,” Matthew finished for him. “Someone else suggested it to you?”
“It wasn’t that…simple!” Wheatcroft’s face was ashen and glistening with sweat. “Corracher came to see me a couple of days after…after the…event. We quarreled over something else, stupid. They were putting a man called Jamieson to take over my work temporarily. Eunice, my wife, seemed to…she…assumed the quarrel was about the incident. She leaped to conclusions. I…I allowed her to. It…” He gave up helplessly. His eyes beseeched Matthew to understand without forcing him to put it into words.
Matthew felt both disgust and pity. Wheatcroft was trapped. It was his cowardice in allowing himself to be used in turn to trap Corracher that Matthew despised.
“Withdraw the charge,” Matthew told him. “I doubt you can restore his career. People don’t forget. But you can save yourself some honor out of it.”
“I can’t!” Wheatcroft protested. “It would be as good as saying that I was guilty! And before God, I wasn’t!”
“And it is unjust to be punished for something you didn’t do?” Matthew had asked.
“Yes! And my family ruined!”
“I imagine Tom Corracher feels the same way.”
Wheatcroft stared at him as if he stood on the edge of an abyss.
Matthew opened his mouth to apologize, then said nothing. He could not withdraw his words. They were true. There was some agony within Wheatcroft that he could not share—a guilt, a fear for himself or for others—but Matthew could not let him escape it at the price it would cost.
Did Wheatcroft know who had manipulated his wife? Probably not. Certainly he would not tell Matthew. He remembered her icy face, the fear in her and the immediacy to attack. She would tell him nothing, maybe even warn the Peacemaker, knowingly or not.
He left the Wheatcroft house with a feeling of oppression and went back to his office.
He worked late to learn all he could about Eunice Wheatcroft, searching for a connection to anyone who might be the Peacemaker, dreading the link that would tie them, however tenuously, to Shearing. But if it was there, whatever it cost him, he could not look away.
By the time he left he was tired. His neck and shoulders ached with tension and his mouth was dry. He walked outside in the dark to get a bus home. He alighted two or three streets away and took a shortcut through an alley to save himself a hundred yards.
He heard the noise behind him. It was no more than a loose pebble kicked, but he swung around, losing his balance a little. A figure fell hard against him and metal clanged on the brick.
Some deep memory of those last minutes on the Cormorant awoke in him the feel of Hannassey’s relentless strength as they struggled at the railing with