Betrayal at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [23]
‘Where did you get them?’ he asked.
Stoker looked at him with a very slight smile. ‘Better you don’t know, sir.’
Narraway smiled back. ‘Then I can’t tell,’ he agreed wryly.
Stoker nodded. ‘That too, sir,’
There was something about Stoker calling him ‘sir’ that was stupidly pleasing, as if he were still who he had been this morning. Did he value the respect so much? How pathetic!
He swallowed hard and drew in his breath. ‘Leave them with me. Go home, where everyone expects you to be. Come back for them when it’s safe.’
‘Sorry, sir, but they have to be back by dawn,’ Stoker replied. ‘In fact, the sooner the better.’
‘It will take me all night to read these and make my own notes,’ Narraway argued, but he knew as he said it that Stoker was right. To have them absent from Lisson Grove even for one day was too dangerous. Then they could never be returned. Anyone with two wits to rub together would look to Narraway for them, and then to whoever had brought them to him. He had no right to jeopardise Stoker’s life with such stupidity. It was poor thanks for his loyalty, if that was what it was. Perhaps it wasn’t – he might have his own entirely different reasons – but Narraway clung to the thought that it was loyalty. He needed it to be that, and a belief in the truth.
‘I’ll have them read before dawn,’ he promised. ‘Three o’clock. You can return then and I’ll give them to you. You can be at the Grove before light, and away again. Or you can go and sleep in my spare room, if you prefer. It would be wiser. No chance then of being caught in the street.’
Stoker did not move.
‘I’ll stay here, sir. I’m pretty good at not being seen, but no risk at all is better. Wouldn’t do if I couldn’t get back.’
Narraway nodded. So Stoker understood the risk he was taking. Perhaps it was as well. Never underestimate the enemy. He himself was only just beginning to taste the power of this one.
‘Up the stairs, across the landing to the left,’ he said aloud. ‘Help yourself to anything you need.’
Stoker thanked him and left, closing the door softly.
Narraway turned up the gas a little more brightly, then sat down in the big armchair by the fireplace and began to read.
The first few pages were about the Mulhare case: the fact that a large sum of money had been promised Mulhare if he co-operated. It was paid not as reward so much as a means for him to leave Ireland and go, not as might be expected, to America, but to Southern France, a less likely place for his enemies to seek him.
Mulhare had not received the money, according to Austwick. Instead he had remained in Ireland, and been killed. Narraway still did not know exactly what had gone wrong. He had paid the money out. At least he had completed all the paperwork to have it paid, and had checked that it had gone. Then, it now seemed, inexplicably, it had reappeared. Someone had evidently intervened so that the end result had been the exact opposite from what Narraway had instructed, and Mulhare had been murdered in the very way he’d feared.
The papers also referred to a twenty-year-old case that he would like to have forgotten. It was at a time when the passion and the violence were even higher than usual.
Charles Stewart Parnell had just been elected to Parliament. He was a man of fire and eloquence, a highly active member in the council of the Irish Home Rule League, and everything in his life was dedicated to that cause. There was a sudden resurgence of hope that Ireland might at last throw off the yoke of domination and govern itself again. The horrors of the great potato famine could be put behind them. Freedom beckoned.
Of course, 1875 was before Narraway had become head of Special Branch. He was simply an agent in the field at that time, in his mid-thirties; wiry, strong, quick-thinking and with a considerable charm. With his black hair and almost black eyes, his dry wit, he could easily have passed for an Irishman himself.