Seven Dials - Anne Perry [148]
“Thank you,” he said with sudden depth of feeling. It was at least a resolution of the mystery, even if it did not solve the problem. And he had not realized until this moment how much it mattered to him that she was not guilty. It was almost like a physical weight removed from him.
“What are you going to do, Mr. Pitt?” Her voice was edged with fear.
“I am going to prove that you have been used, Miss Zakhari,” he replied, aware that his choice of words would remind her of that other time, years ago, when she had been used and betrayed before. “And that neither you nor Mr. Ryerson is guilty of murder. And I am going to try to do it without soaking Egypt in blood. I am afraid the second aim is going to take precedence over the first.”
She did not answer, but stood motionless as an ebony statue while he smiled very slightly in parting, and knocked on the door to summon the warder.
He debated for only moments whether to go alone or to find Narraway and tell him. If Tariq el Abd was the prime mover behind the plan to expose the massacre and set Egypt alight, then he would not meekly accept arrest from Pitt or anyone else. By going to Eden Lodge alone, Pitt might do no more than warn him, and possibly precipitate the very tragedy they dreaded.
He stopped a hansom in the Strand and gave Narraway’s office address. Please God, he was there.
“What is it?” Narraway said as soon as he saw Pitt’s face.
“The man behind Ayesha is the house servant Tariq el Abd,” he replied. He saw from Narraway’s expression that no more explanation was necessary.
Narraway breathed with a sigh of comprehension, and fury with himself because he had not seen it before. “Our own bloody blindness!” he swore, rising to his feet in a single movement. “A servant and a foreigner, so we don’t even see him. Damn! I should have been better than that.” He yanked a drawer open and pulled a gun out of it, then slammed the drawer shut again and strode ahead of Pitt. “I hope you had the wits to keep the cab,” he said critically.
“Of course I did!” Pitt retorted, striding after him out of the door and down the steps to the pavement, where the cab was standing, the horse fidgeting from one foot to the other, perhaps sensing the driver’s tension.
“Eden Lodge!” Narraway said tersely, climbing in ahead of Pitt and waving the man forward as Pitt was scrambling in behind him.
Neither of them spoke all the way through the crowded streets, around squares and under fading trees until the hansom stopped outside Eden Lodge.
“ ’Round the back!” Narraway ordered, moving swiftly ahead of Pitt.
But there was no one in Eden Lodge. The entire house was deserted. The stove in the kitchen was cold, the ashes in the fires gray, the food in the pantry already going stale.
Narraway swore just once, with white-hot fury, but there was nothing he or anybody else could do.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
NO TRACE WAS FOUND of Tariq el Abd by the police, or any of the men upon whom Narraway could call. Sunday was a wretched day, cold and windy, almost as if the weather itself fretted with the same sense of impending disaster as Pitt, cooped all day at home because he had nowhere to go and nothing to do that was of use. The trial would resume in the morning, and presumably Tariq el Abd would reappear and drag out the whole violent and dreadful truth of the massacre. It would be the beginning of the end of any kind of peace in Egypt, certainly of British rule and all that Suez meant for the empire.
He had told Charlotte what he knew. There was no point in keeping it from her because the only part that was dangerous she had known before he had.
They ate Sunday dinner together. It was the most formal meal of the week, and Daniel and Jemima found it both daunting and exciting, rather like being grown-up. They very much wanted it, it was part of life, but not necessarily today.
Afterwards Pitt sat by the fire, pretending he was reading, but actually he did not turn the pages of his book. Charlotte sat and stitched, but it was a straight