papers out, no books, just his thoughts, and all the lights blazing.”
“It would seem there is something that concerns him profoundly,” he said with a chill of fear inside him. He had refused to consider that Byam might actually be guilty. Maybe he was wrong. Perhaps Byam calling him before he was even suspected was a double bluff. Perhaps the letter and the note that Weems was supposed to have kept were only his excuse to call Drummond, and there was something far more damaging yet to come.
He was torn with a dreadful mixture of emotions: dread of discovering irrefutably that it was Byam who had murdered Weems, and sickness inside at having to tell Eleanor-she would feel so betrayed. He was the person she had come to for help. Embarrassment: how could he explain all this to Pitt? He would leave him in a wretched position. And a sudden ease of a gripping weight inside him: if Byam was guilty, then Eleanor would be free.
That was a shameful thought, and the blood burned hot up his face, hot right up to his hair. Free for what? If Byam was hanged she would be a widow. That would not necessarily stop her loving him, and it certainly would not free her from terrible, overwhelming grief.
He did not even think of fear for himself, or his own involvement with the Inner Circle.
“Please-don’t let us stand here,” he said quietly. “Sit, and let us talk of it and learn if there is anything we can do that will resolve this problem.”
She accepted and sank into the chair gratefully. He sat opposite on one of the Chippendales, perched forward on the edge and still staring at her.
“I presume you have asked him what it is that troubles him?”
“Of course, but he will not tell me. He said he simply found it hard to sleep, and came downstairs because he did not wish to disturb me.”
“And is it not possible that that is the truth?”
Her smile was faint and a little twisted. “No. Sholto is not normally troubled by sleeplessness, and if he were he would have found a book from the library and taken it to bed with him, not paced up and down the study. And he looked ashen.” Her eyes met Drummond’s. “No one looks as he did merely because they cannot sleep. His face was haggard-as though he had seen the worst thing he feared.”
He spoke quickly; a question to reach for the last hope, not a dismissal of her fears.
“You are sure it was not the lamplight playing tricks on the features of a man overtired, and perhaps woken from an ill dream?”
“Yes-I am quite sure.” Her voice was very low; there was certainty in it, and pain. “Something terrible has happened, and I do not know what, except it seems inevitable to me that it must have to do with the death of the usurer. Surely if it were anything else he would have told me. He is not ill. We have no family matters, no relatives who might cause us distress.” Her eyes shadowed. “We never had children.” She was speaking more and more rapidly as the tension mounted in her. “My parents are dead and so are his. My brother is quite well, Sholto’s brother is in India but we have had no correspondence from him in the last two weeks. I did think to ask the butler if there had been any overseas letters that perhaps I had not seen, but he said there had not.”
“What about his work at the Treasury?” Drummond suggested it without belief, but he had to exhaust every possibility.
“I can think of nothing that would cause him the dread which I saw in him that night, and the constant fear I can feel at the edge of his mind even through the day.” She was sitting awkwardly on the edge of the chair, her fingers clenched together. “He is nervous, ill at ease. He cannot concentrate on the things which used to give him such pleasure: music, theater, books. He declined an invitation to dine with friends we have known and respected for years.”
“Could it be some friend in trouble?” He knew it was not even as he said it, but still the words spilled out, seeking any solution but the obvious.
“No.” She did not bother to elaborate her answer. It was as if she understood that they were simply making questions to put off the moment. “No,” she said again more softly, but still looking down. “I know him well enough. It is not the way in which he would behave for such a concern.” She bit her lip. “He is not a cold man. I do not mean that he is indifferent to the suffering or distress of friends, but that he is a man of decision. Such a happening would not affect him to such…” She lifted her shoulders very slightly. She was slenderer than he had realized, more fragile. “To such horror and inability to act. You did not see his face.”
“Then we must presume that something has happened that he knows of-and we do not,” he admitted finally. “Or at least he believes that it has. But he will not tell you what it is?” That was only half a question; she had already made the answer plain.
“No.”
“Are you sure you still want to know?”
She closed her eyes. “I’m frightened. I think I can guess what it may be-the least awful guess…”
“What?”
“That someone else has found the letter and the notes that Weems made of Sholto’s payments to him, and the reason. I suppose whoever killed him. Unless someone also was there after he was dead, and before the police found his body. And that person is now trying to blackmail Sholto himself.” She looked up at him suddenly, her eyes full of pain and fear.
He ached to be able to offer her some comfort, anything to take the cutting edge from her distress, or at the very least let her feel that she was not alone. Loneliness lent sharpness to all pains, as he knew only too well. But he knew of no practical comfort, nothing to ease the truth of what she said, and personal comfort would be so appallingly misplaced it would only add a fearful embarrassment to increase her misery, which was the last thing he wished.
“That at least would be proof that he was entirely innocent,” he said, clutching at a shred of hope. “If the worst happens and Pitt cannot find the murderer, then Lord Byam will have to tell what he knows, tell of the further blackmail, and expose the man.” He leaned a little forward. “After all,” he said earnestly, “the most he can do is make public the old matter of Laura Anstiss’s death, which would be most unpleasant, and there are some who may feel he was to blame, but may well also have great sympathy with him. And surely he is keeping the matter silent almost as much for Lord Anstiss’s sake as his own. It would be extremely distasteful for him also.”
“I think that troubles Sholto as much as any scandal attaching to himself,” she admitted. A curious look crossed her face, of confusion and distress, and then it was gone. “He admires Frederick so much. They have been friends since their youth, you know. There is something uniquely precious about an old friendship. One has shared so much, seen the passage of time, how it has marked and changed us, the hopes realized and the hopes dashed, the work to fulfill the dreams, and the dreams that are crumbled and kept secret.” She smiled. “One has laughed at the same things, and developed such an understanding because at times there is no need to speak. The knowledge is there simply because sharing has been so long a habit. One knows the best and the worst, and there is no need to explain.”
He felt a gulf between them with a pain so sharp it stopped him from laughing at himself for the idiocy of it. He was shut out. He had a past she knew nothing of: all his life, everything that had brought him to this day, the values, the loves and the griefs, Catriona’s death, his daughters, everything that mattered. To her he was simply a policeman.
And she had a life he could only imagine. All he knew was this desperate woman whose only concern was to help her husband.
“No,” he said abruptly, and heard his own words pour out while all the time his cooler brain was telling him to hold his tongue. “No-I think it is the quality of friendship which matters, not its length. One can have an acquaintance with people all one’s life, and never share a minute’s total understanding, or meet a stranger and feel with her some tremendous experience so deep you can never afterwards tell anyone else exactly how it was, and yet find, the moment your eyes meet, that she knows it as you do.”
She looked at him with surprise and then increasing wonder as the totally contradicting idea became clearer in her mind and she considered it. For seconds they stared at each other, the street outside forgotten, Weems and his murder, even Byam’s involvement with it. There was only the few square yards of the room in the amber sunlight through the big windows, the sofa and the chair they sat on, and the bright pattern on the carpet between them.
He saw her face as indelibly as if it were painted on his eyelids, the fine brow, the steady dark gray eyes with their shadowing lashes, the tiny lines woven by the years, the light on her hair, the softness of her lips.
“Perhaps you are right,” she said at last. “Maybe I have mistaken familiarity for understanding, and they are not
