Kerr turned up again the next morning. Hannah seemed pleased to see him and regarded Joseph’s exasperation with patience. “He needs you,” she said simply. “The poor man is out of his depth. I’m going to the shops to get more wool, and then to the VAD center for supplies to sew ditty bags. I’ll be back at lunchtime.”
Kerr was in the sitting room as before, standing in the middle of the floor and looking just as white-faced as he had the previous day. Joseph’s heart sank. “What is it now?” he said somewhat less than graciously. He was afraid Kerr was going to ask him to conduct the funeral, a duty that should fall to the incumbent of St. Giles.
“I have a moral dilemma,” Kerr replied. “I have never been in this position before!”
“Life is full of positions we have never been in before,” Joseph pointed out a little tartly. Kerr’s failure was tempting him more than he wished. He could feel the yielding in himself.
Kerr was nervously clenching and unclenching his hands. He would not be put off. “This policeman seems to think it was someone in the village who killed poor Blaine,” he said abruptly. “He’s like a ferret with his teeth in your leg—he won’t let go until he has nabbed someone.”
Joseph smiled bleakly. “I think your acquaintance with ferrets must be better than mine.”
“He is going to hound us all until he knows everything about everybody. It will do untold harm.”
“Murders do,” Joseph assured him bitterly. He remembered acutely what murder had done to St. John’s and the students there. “I’m sorry. It’s a wretched thing, but there is no dilemma because there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“But I know people’s secrets!” Kerr protested, his voice rising. “It is part of my calling. You know that! What am I supposed to tell this awful man?”
“It’s perfectly simple,” Joseph replied. “You tell him nothing.”
“And if what I know allows a murderer to go free? Or worse than that, an innocent man to be hanged?” Kerr’s face twisted in misery. “It isn’t as simple as you are saying. This crime may be linked with the war. Perhaps poor Blaine was killed because of his work at the Establishment, and whoever is guilty is a German spy. Have you considered that? Doesn’t that alter my duty? I may not be in the army, but I am as loyal to my country as you are.”
Joseph saw the wretchedness in the man’s face, the confusion and the longing to be accepted.
“Of course you are. And it is a dilemma. If you observe anything for yourself that has bearing on the crime, or could have, then you should tell Inspector Perth. But if it is only something that you have been told by someone else, then you do not know if it is true or not. You can’t judge. Let Perth find it out for himself, or not.”
Disbelief filled Kerr’s face. “You make it sound so simple.” It was almost an accusation, as if Joseph were still attempting to evade the issue.
Joseph looked away. “Judgment is anything but simple.” Judgment was
“Just do your best,” he said to Kerr. “Perth will probably find out eventually anyway. Don’t betray anybody’s trust in you.”
“Thank you,” Kerr said with a rush of overriding gratitude, his face suddenly pink. “I knew you would advise me.” He hesitated a moment as if to repeat himself, then straightened his shoulders and went to the door.
Joseph was exhausted and his arm ached appallingly. It seemed as if a hideous pattern was starting all over again.
CHAPTER
SIX
Matthew was in his office as usual on the morning Blaine’sbody was found. He was reading a letter and he finally put it down with a sense of relief. He was always pleased to hear from Judith because he worried about her, not only because of the very obvious danger of being injured, or even killed, but the threats of ordinary illness made far worse by the long hours and the wet and filthy conditions.
But in her letter she accepted that every avenue of inquiry had been followed to its end, and they knew no more about the Peacemaker than they had before. He could still be almost anyone, except Ivor Chetwin or Dermot Sandwell. Even Aidan Thyer, Master of St. John’s, might be the Peacemaker. Most painful to Matthew, and perhaps most frightening, was the chance it was Calder Shearing himself. That thought touched Matthew now and then like the cold fingers of nightmare. His father had hated Secret Intelligence and all its works. Was Shearing’s involvement what his father had meant when he had warned Matthew to trust no one because the corruption reached right to the very top?
He had had no difficulty in deciding not to tell Judith anything of his thoughts on Patrick Hannassey yet. There was too much yet to test. Where had Hannassey been at the time of John and Alys Reavley’s deaths? And was it imaginable that John Reavley had known him? Could he possibly have had private access to the king and the kaiser?
He still had these questions in his mind when Desborough entered and announced that Shearing wanted him immediately. “Something bad,” he added with a frown. “By the look on his face, pretty bloody. Thought I’d warn you.”
“Thanks,” Matthew said drily, rising to his feet. He put Judith’s letter in his pocket and went along the corridor to Shearing’s office. His mind raced over the most probable disasters in the Atlantic, or worse still, in America itself. Either one of their own agents had been caught, or there had been another major incident on the Mexican-American border.
“There’s been a murder in St. Giles,” Shearing said bluntly as Matthew entered his office. “Theo Blaine. He was Corcoran’s best man, in fact he was brilliant, key to the whole project.”
Matthew was stunned. It was the last thing he had been expecting. “Do we show our interest by investigating it, or leave it to the Cambridge police?”
Shearing looked exhausted. He had the dazed, rather stiff air of someone newly bereaved, but Matthew knew it was not the young scientist personally whose loss bruised him so deeply, but the wound it dealt to the project that was possibly crucial to their survival in the war. He harbored the thought that perhaps this was another brilliant act of the Peacemaker’s. A blow like this, with such surgical precision, emulated the pattern of his parents’ deaths —swift, murderous, but in its own way hideously strategic.
“Reavley!” Shearing’s voice broke his moment’s inattention.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I can go to St. Giles without drawing any particular notice, if you want me to. I can stay at home, visit with my brother. He’s still far from recovered. But if it was a German agent who killed him, that won’t fool anyone.”
“We’ve no idea yet who it was,” Shearing replied. “He was only found this morning.”
“Where? By whom?” Matthew asked. It was still hard to grasp as reality. It was someone he had never met, but his death could affect the entire country, millions of lives, perhaps the course of history. It was too vast to have meaning yet.
“By his wife,” Shearing answered. He moved to stand with his back to the window, the late morning light shadowed from his face for a moment. “By the potting shed at the bottom of the garden. He was probably there all night.”
“She didn’t miss him?” Matthew was startled. Perhaps this was nothing to do with Germany, but was simply a domestic tragedy.
Shearing must have read the thought in his expression. The ghost of a smile touched his eyes and vanished instantly. “Don’t cling to that, Reavley. It means nothing.” He walked slowly over to his desk, but without sitting down in the leather-padded, round-backed chair, as if it would in some way imprison him. “His throat was torn out with the prongs of a garden fork.”
Matthew winced.
Shearing saw it. “It could still have been a woman’s crime,” he pointed out. “That doesn’t mean it had nothing to do with Germany. It could be any of a dozen things, and whatever it was, it is still the loss of the best scientific brain in the country. That matters more than any one man’s life.”
There was nothing to argue. “What do you want me to do, sir?”
