“You spoke to Sebastian the day before he killed my parents,” he said aloud.
Thyer was jolted at last. It showed only in the flicker of his eyes. “How did you know that?” he asked quietly.
“You took no trouble to conceal it,” Matthew replied. “Was it meant to be secret?”
Thyer relaxed deliberately, the faintest touch of humor at the corners of his mouth. “No. Not at all.” His face was almost without expression. “I called to remind him of his promise to give me a few quotes for a dinner with some friends. He could be forgetful. They were Greek scholars who could appreciate his translations of heroic verse.”
It was another world, a year ago, and a different lifetime. “And had he forgotten?” Matthew asked. Heroic verse! And the next day he had murdered John and Alys Reavley.
“No,” Thyer replied. “He had prepared for it and was quite willing. As it happened, I canceled the dinner. It no longer seemed appropriate. Joseph would have been one of the guests, and in the circumstances none of us felt like proceeding.” Thyer bit his lip and leaned forward very slightly. “I am quite aware of what you are seeking, Matthew. I find it almost impossible to believe that Sebastian was planning murder then,” he said earnestly. “He sounded exactly like the young man we all knew: intense, charming, exasperating, brilliant, at times sublimely funny. And of course fickle.”
Matthew was surprised. “Fickle?”
Thyer’s face softened unexpectedly with a deep sadness. “He was very handsome. He had all life before him. He had a keen appetite for its pleasures, and he wanted to taste them all. I was unaware of his fiancee until she came here after his death, but I knew perfectly well of his dalliance with the girl in the pub along by the millpond, and others as well. He was fairly discreet about seeing her, but Cambridge is not such a big place, and he was easy to recognize also.”
“I didn’t know about others.” Matthew was surprised, and disconcerted. “Who were they?”
“I have no idea,” Thyer confessed. “I imagine he did not wish any of his—girls—to know about the rest.”
“But you knew!” Matthew pointed out.
Thyer smiled very slightly. “A great deal is told to me that does not become general knowledge. As long as his behavior is within certain bounds, a student’s love affairs are not my concern. I may not approve, but I do not interfere.”
It still left a faintly disturbing taste. Sebastian had taken some trouble to deceive at least three women. It could not have been easy, it required planning, evasion, sometimes lies. Deeper than that, it required a degree of lying to himself. To his fiancee he had proposed marriage, or at the least, allowed it to be understood. To Flora in the pub along the river he had offered a deep and possibly intimate friendship, and now it seemed he had given time and at least a degree of affection also to other women. He had committed something of himself to each of them, and yet all of them would have supposed themselves to be unique.
Was that kind of emotional deceit in a man the beginning of the duplicity that could betray his friends and eventually his country as well? Where does omission of the truth begin to be a lie?
The telephone rang on the wall beside Thyer. “Excuse me,” he said, picking it up. Unconsciously he straightened a little as he listened, nodding his head and smiling. “Yes, of course,” he said quietly. “I know your beliefs in the matter, but I think a compromise is necessary.” He waited a few moments while the person on the other end spoke. He nodded again, giving occasional murmurs of agreement. He had not spoken the other person’s name, and yet a certain respect in his manner made Matthew suppose that it was someone of considerable importance, and his mind was sharp to the power of a man in Thyer’s position. What more perfect place for the Peacemaker? He would know men in government, the army, the royal household, the diplomatic service, he would know their dreams and their weaknesses, and above all, they would trust him.
He was still talking, giving gentle advice, the subtlest of pressure.
What had he really said in his conversation to Sebastian on that last afternoon before the murder? It need not have been anything more than an arrangement to meet. The knowledge of the document, the need for such horrific violence could not have been delivered that way, it had to have been face-to-face. He could hardly imagine the emotion there must have been, Sebastian’s horror, recoiling from the savagery of it, the irredeemable commitment to a single act that was the violation of all he professed to believe. And the Peacemaker would have argued the greater good, the self-sacrifice to save humanity, the urgency to prevent the chaos of war—no time to delay, prevaricate. He might even have called him a coward, a dreamer with no passion or courage.
It had to have been face-to-face. Thyer had seen him that afternoon, or early evening. It was grotesque to sit here in the drawing room making polite conversation, playing games around each other, as if it were chess, not lives. There was a dreamlike insanity, the madder because it was real.
Thyer hung up the phone. He was standing near the instrument where it hung on the wall. Outside the morning sunlight was silent on the roses. In the far distance someone laughed.
“I don’t suppose you saw him?” Matthew said aloud, his voice sounding unnatural in his ears. “Sebastian, I mean.”
“No. I just spoke to him on the telephone,” Thyer answered. “There was no need to say anything else.” A very slight shadow touched his face. “Whatever prompted him to commit such a crime the following day, I believe it must have happened after that, but I have no idea what it was. I think you may have to resign yourself to the fact that you may never discover. I truly am sorry.”
Was he a supreme actor? Or only what he seemed—a quiet, scholarly man, now watching half his students sent to the battlefields of Europe to waste their dreams and their learning in blood?
“What time was it you spoke to him?” Matthew asked.
“Almost quarter past three, I think,” Thyer answered. “But I was with Dr. Etheridge from the philosophy department at the time. I daresay he would remember, if you think it matters?”
“Thank you,” Matthew said with a strange mixture of honesty and confusion. He took his leave still uncertain if he had learned anything, or nothing. It would seem to be so easy to check all Thyer had told him, and yet if it were true, what had he learned? Who had spoken to Sebastian—where? How had he been contacted and given his orders to commit the crime that had destroyed his victims, and also himself, when there had been no other call, no letter and no message?
He left the master’s lodgings and, after considerable inquiry, found Dr. Etheridge, who confirmed exactly what Thyer had said. Without difficulty Matthew also confirmed Thyer’s whereabouts for the rest of the evening until after midnight. He had gone from dinner in the hall to a long conversation in the senior common room and finally back to his lodgings. He had never been alone.
Did that prove anything? According to Mary Allard, Sebastian had gone out, and been troubled when he returned. To see whom? All Matthew knew now was that it had not been Aidan Thyer.
He drove back to London knowing only that the master of St. John’s was in a position of extraordinary power to do exactly what the Peacemaker planned, and that Sebastian had been seeing a third woman, perhaps a fourth, in a deceit that startled him. It was like a fog—choking, blinding, and impossible to grip.
CHAPTER
THREE
General Owen Cullingford stood in the center of the room he had turned into his corps headquarters in the small chateau a couple of miles from Poperinge, to the west of Ypres. The military situation was desperate. He was losing an average of twenty men every day, killed or wounded. In places there was only one man to each stretch of the trench and they were worked to exhaustion simply to keep sentry duty and give the alarm if there was a German attack. In the worst raids whole platoons of fifty men were wiped out in one night, leaving vast gaps in manning the line.
Ammunition was so short it had to be rationed. Every shot had to find a target; sometimes there was no second chance. Ironically, if a brigade did well, there was the difficulty of getting sufficient food up over the crowded and shell-cratered roads to reach them, and if they were decimated, the food was surplus, and wasted. Clean, drinkable water was even more difficult to find.
The other major challenge was evacuating the wounded. Those who could, simply had to walk. Kitchener had promised a million new men, but they were raised by voluntary recruitment, and were still too few, and too raw to fill the yawning gap.
