Seven Dials - Anne Perry [144]
His lantern face lit with a huge smile. “You’ll do as I tell you. But I want peace in my own house, so I reckon I won’t tell you anything you’d mind too much.”
“Good!” She took a gulp of air. “Then we’ll be all right when . . . when it’s time.” She took another gulp. “Would you like a cup o’ tea? Yer look ’alf starved.” She was using the word in the old sense of being cold.
“Yes,” he accepted, pulling out a chair and sitting down at last. “Yes, I would, please.” He knew better than to pursue an answer as to time now. She had accepted, that was enough.
She went past him to the stove, overwhelmed with relief. This was as far as she could go now. “Was that wot yer came for?” she asked.
“No. That’s been on my mind for . . . for a while. I came to tell Mr. Pitt that the police have a new witness in the Eden Lodge case, and it looks pretty bad.”
She pulled the kettle onto the hob and turned around to look at him. “Wot kind of a witness?”
“One that says he knows the Egyptian woman sent a message to Mr. Lovat, telling him to come to her,” he said grimly. “They’ll call him to the witness stand . . . bound to.”
“Wot can we do?” she asked anxiously.
“Nothing,” he answered. “But it’s better to know.”
She did not argue, but she worried for Pitt, and even the sense of warmth inside her, the little tingle of victory that she had faced the moment of decision and accepted it, and all the vast changes it would mean one day, did not dispel her concern for Pitt, and the case they surely could not win now.
PITT AND CHARLOTTE returned shortly after that. When Pitt had heard all that Tellman had to say, he thanked him for it, put his coat back on and went straight out again. He could not wait until tomorrow morning to inform Narraway. It was Friday night. They had two days’ grace before the trial resumed, but it was a very short time to rescue anything out of this. Pitt was not used to such complete failure, and it was a cold, hollow feeling with a bitter aftertaste he believed would remain.
Of course he had had unsolved cases before, and others to which he was certain he knew the answer but could not prove it, but they had not been of this magnitude.
Narraway looked up as the manservant closed the door, leaving Pitt standing in the middle of the room. He read his face immediately. “Well?” he demanded, leaning forward as if to stand up.
“The police have a witness who says Ayesha sent Lovat a note asking him to go to her,” he said simply. There was no point trying to make it sound less dreadful than it was. He was aware of all that it meant before Narraway spoke.
“So she deliberately lured him to the garden,” Narraway said bitterly. “Either he destroyed the note himself or she took it from him before the police got there. It was not a crime of the moment; she always intended to kill him.” His face creased in thought. “But did she intend to implicate Ryerson, or was that accidental?”
“If she did”—Pitt sat down uninvited—“then she must have been extraordinarily sure of him. How did she know that he would get there before the police, and that he would help her dispose of the body? Did she have an alternative plan if he had raised the alarm instead?”
Narraway’s mouth twisted in a hard grimace. “Presumably she was the one who called the police, or had her servant do it. If it was in revenge for the massacre, then he will have been party to it.”
Narraway’s dark face was heavy with foreboding. He stared straight ahead at some horror he could see within his own vision. “I assume they are calling this witness on Monday?” he said without turning to Pitt.
“I should think so,” Pitt replied. “It will prove intent.”
“And then she will take the stand and tell the world exactly why,” Narraway went on in a low, hard voice. “And the newspapers will rush to repeat it, and within hours it will be all over the country, then all over the world.” His face looked bruised, almost as if he had been beaten. “Egypt will rise in revolt and make the Mahdi and the whole bloodbath of the Sudan look like a vicarage tea party. Even Gordon in