Seven Dials

“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 Khartoum will seem a civilized difference between peoples. And inevitably we shall lose Suez.” He clenched his fists, his shoulders tight. “God! What a hellish fiasco. We were damned from the start-weren’t we!” It was not a question, just an exclamation of despair.

“I don’t understand it,” Pitt said slowly, feeling his way in a darkness of disjointed reason. “Why now? And if the purpose behind her coming to London, drawing in Ryerson, the whole business of trying to get the cotton manufacturing back into Egypt, the murder of Lovat, was in order to expose the massacre… then why all that trouble?” He stared at Narraway. “Why not simply make it known in Egypt? The facts are there. The bodies could be found and exhumed. With thirty-odd people shot to death, even after the burning, some of them will have bullet holes, chips in bone to show it wasn’t simply an accidental fire. Why all this murder and trial? Why risk her own life at all? If they know about the massacre, surely the murder of one of the soldiers responsible is trivial, almost an irrelevance, compared with exposing it? It’s ridiculously inefficient like this.”

Narraway stared at him, his eyes widening. “What, exactly, are you saying, Pitt? That she is being used by someone else? Expendable?”

“I think so… yes,” Pitt agreed. “What use is it to anyone to involve Ryerson?”

“Publicity,” Narraway said instantly. “The murder of one junior diplomat is neither here nor there. It’s Ryerson’s involvement that has journalists from every country in Europe writing about it. If the massacre comes out in the Old Bailey, you can be sure not only will all Britain know about it, and all Egypt, but most of the rest of the world as well. We wouldn’t have a chance in hell of keeping it quiet. Not only will all of the violence and horror of the event itself come out, but every stupid and ugly thing anyone has done since to conceal it.”

“So she came believing she was trying to help the cotton industry, but whoever it was who sent her intended this all the time?” For Pitt it was now only half a question. At last it made sense of what he had learned of Ayesha in Alexandria. This was the woman he had discovered. And once again she had been betrayed, only this time it would cost her her life. There was only one question now. “What did they tell her to persuade her to kill Lovat?” he said aloud. “Or didn’t she?”

Narraway stared at him, amazement, then comprehension, in his face. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “If she didn’t, then who did?”

Pitt stood up. “I don’t know.” Anger seethed inside him for Ayesha, for Ryerson, who unquestionably had been used, for all the people who were going to be driven into the maelstrom that Egypt would become. The beauty and the warmth of Alexandria would be shattered, as would the lives of the men and women whose faces he had seen when he was there, without even knowing their names. And he hated not knowing, and having his emotions pushed and pulled, and then torn apart by pity for first one, and then another, and not knowing what to believe. “Give me the authority I need to go and see her.” That was a demand, not a request.

“I can’t get it until the morning,” Narraway replied. “You’ll need it in writing,” he added as Pitt hesitated. “She’s not guilty yet, and she has rights. The Egyptian embassy will still protect her. I’ll have it for you by tomorrow afternoon.”

Pitt accepted it because he had no choice.

THE NEXT DAY, after a restless night in which the little sleep he got was filled with dreams of violence and almost unbearable tension, he was at Narraway’s house by noon. He was obliged to wait nearly two hours alone in the morning room until Narraway returned with a piece of paper in an envelope, and gave it to him without explanation.

“Thank you.” Pitt took it, glanced at the few lines of writing on it and was impressed, although he had no intention of allowing Narraway to know that. “I’ll go straightaway.”