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Pitt drew it out of his pocket and passed it to him.

Drummond took it and read it slowly, his brows drawing down, his face darkening as he came to the end. He looked up, puzzled and oddly disappointed.

“Somehow this is not how I imagined Laura Anstiss.” He smiled very briefly. “Which is foolish. It hardly matters, but I…” He seemed unable to find the words, or else was embarrassed by his emotion and its irrelevance.

“Nor I,” Pitt agreed. “It’s a forceful letter, and perhaps even a little indelicate.”

“That’s it,” Drummond agreed quickly. “And it seems Byam was a good deal less than honest with us. From this it sounds as if they were indisputably lovers, which he said they were not. I’m not surprised he still feels guilt over her.”

Pitt looked at Drummond’s face, the letter lying on the desk between them. He knew Drummond was faintly repelled by it, as he had been himself, and had not wished to say so.

“I think Weems may have decided to try his hand with Anstiss as well,” Pitt said. “After all, it had worked successfully for him with Byam. For two years he had had a nice little addition to his income.”

Drummond regarded him steadily without interruption.

“But this time he found a very different mettle of man,” Pitt went on. “Anstiss lost his temper and struck him with his stick. If we go to Anstiss’s house and find his cane, I think there may well be blood or hair on it.”

Drummond pursed his lips but there was agreement in his eyes.

“And then when Weems was temporarily unconscious,” Pitt continued, “he saw the opportunity—probably Weems had already let him know he was blackmailing Byam—so he loaded the blunderbuss and killed Weems. Then he took the papers incriminating Byam, and Weems’s half of the letter, perhaps not even realizing there was another half. He left the second list incriminating the errant members of the Inner Circle, of which he is a master, in order to discipline them. I daresay he knew their secrets through the Inner Circle as well. With this situation he would take over the blackmail of Byam himself, and force him to change his Treasury decisions and allow Anstiss to step in with his venture capital. The profit would be enormous.”

Drummond sat without speaking for several moments, then at last he looked up. There was no conviction in his eyes.

“It seems to me you are trying too hard, Pitt. There are too many motives for Anstiss, and all of them too small to move an intelligent and self-controlled man to murder, especially one who already has power, wealth and position. I can easily believe he would take advantage of Weems’s death and Byam’s vulnerability to extend the blackmail and force Byam to change his political decisions on African loans. But I can’t see him committing cold-blooded murder to bring it about. And honestly, even with proof that he profited, I don’t think we would convince any jury of it. In fact I don’t think we’d even get the public prosecutor to bring the charge.”

Pitt refused to give up.

“Perhaps Anstiss had not seen the letter until Weems showed it to him,” he suggested. “And we don’t know what was in his half, but if it was in the same vein as the half we have, he may have struck out in rage then, and his prime motive might have been to have revenge on Byam. Especially if Byam told him what he told you—that he was never Laura Anstiss’s lover, that it was simply a sudden infatuation she had for him, and he broke it off when he realized how serious she was. If Anstiss had accepted that all these years and forgiven him in that belief, to see proof in Laura’s own hand, if he was also deeply in love with her …”

He stopped. It was not necessary to fill in the rest. Infatuation was one offense; to be cuckolded in one’s own house quite another.

Drummond’s face tightened.

“That I can believe. If he had always accepted Byam’s innocence, and his wife’s virtue, if not her love, then it would come as a very violent shock to him, enough to make him lose all control, at least for long enough to strike out at Weems’s smiling