of meaning had been key to the solution.
“Yes,” Pitt agreed, surprised that he had not thought of it for himself. “Yes, I’ll do that. Will she be at home?”
Jack smiled suddenly. “I’ve no idea!”
ACTUALLY, IT TOOK PITT two hours to catch up with Emily. Her butler told him that she had gone to a newly opened art exhibition, and after that she expected to return home only for the time it took her to change for the evening, and dinner at Lady Mansfield’s home in Belgravia. Tomorrow morning she would be riding in the park, and then visiting her dressmaker before taking an early luncheon and making the usual afternoon calls. The evening would be spent at the opera.
Pitt thanked the butler, asked for directions to the exhibition, and took himself there immediately.
The gallery was crowded with women in beautiful gowns, and a few men escorting them, flirting a little, and passing grave and wordy comments on the paintings.
Pitt looked at them only briefly, which he regretted. He thought them not only beautiful but of great interest. The style was impressionist in a manner he had not seen before, blurred and hazy, and yet creating a feeling of light which pleased him enormously.
But he was not here for interest. He must find Emily before she left, and that would require concentration, and even considerable physical effort merely to keep on excusing himself and pushing between groups of chattering people, women with skirts which brushed up against each other and blocked the way for several feet in every direction.
He received several angry and imperious glances and heard mutters of “Well, really!” on more than one occasion, but he could not afford the time to wait until they moved on and allowed him to pass of their own accord.
He found Emily in the third room, in idle conversation with a young woman in a cornflower-blue dress and an extravagant hat which he thought was most becoming. It lent her a drama which she did not otherwise possess.
He was wondering how to attract Emily’s attention without being rude when she noticed him, perhaps because he was conspicuously out of place in the rest of the crowd. Her face filled with consternation. She excused herself urgently from the woman in blue, and came straight over to Pitt.
“There is nothing wrong,” he assured her.
“I had not thought there was,” she said, without altering her expression in the slightest. “My fear was of being so bored I fell asleep and lost my balance. There is nothing whatever here to hold me up.”
“Don’t you like the pictures?” he asked.
“Thomas, don’t be so pedestrian. Nobody comes to look at the paintings, not really look. They only glance at them in order to make remarks they think are fearfully deep, and hope someone will repeat. Why have you come? They’re not stolen, are they?”
“No, they’re not.” He smiled in spite of himself. “Jack suggested that you might be able to help me.”
Her face quickened with interest. “Of course!” she said eagerly. “What can I do?”
“All I want is information, and perhaps your opinion.”
“About whom?” She linked her arm in his and turned towards one of the pictures as if she were studying it intently.
It was not really the situation in which to hold a hotly discreet conversation, but if he spoke softly it would probably be neither overheard nor remarked by anyone.
“About Lieutenant Edwin Lovat,” he replied, also staring at the picture.
She stiffened, although not a flicker crossed her face. “Are you dealing with that case?” Her voice was sharp with excitement. She did not mention Special Branch, she was far too aware of putting even a word out of place to say that aloud, but he knew the thoughts and possibilities racing through her imagination.
“Yes, I am,” he answered almost under his breath. “What do you know about him, Emily? Or what have you heard… and make plain the difference.”
She kept her eyes fixed on the painting. It was a scene of light shining through trees onto a patch of water. It had an extraordinarily restful beauty, as of solitude on a windless, summer day. One expected to see the shimmer of dragonfly wings.
“I know that he was a dangerously unhappy man,” she answered him. “He seemed to keep falling half in love, and then, the moment he had won someone’s commitment, to run away as if he were terrified of allowing anyone to know him. He caused a great deal of pain, and he never regretted it enough not to go and do it again straightaway. If it was not the Egyptian woman who murdered him, then you have plenty of other possibilities to look at.”
“Dangerously unhappy?” He repeated her phrase curiously.
“Well, you don’t behave like that unless something is corroding inside you, do you?” she challenged, still without more than glancing up at him. “If you are merely selfish, or greedy, you might marry for money, for title, or for beauty, but what he was doing gained him nothing except enemies. And he was apparently not so stupid as to be unaware of that. Nobody could be. He was quite as intelligent as most people, and yet he behaved in a way which any fool could see would bring him nothing but grief.”
He thought about it in silence for a while, turning it over in his mind. It was a concept he had not considered.
She waited.
“Do you believe he had thought as deeply as that?” he said at length.
“You didn’t ask me to be logical, Thomas, you asked me what I thought of Lieutenant Lovat.”
“You are quite right. Thank you. Can you give me the names of these people?”
“Naturally!” she said, raising her hand to indicate the light in the picture, as if she were remarking on it, then she reeled off half a dozen names, and he wrote them down, with at least a general idea of their addresses and a rough guide to their social pastimes. It was an ugly catalogue of hope and humiliation, embarrassment and hurt feelings, some lighter, others profound.
Pitt thanked her and left the gallery.
THAT EVENING and all the next day Pitt enquired discreetly into the whereabouts of the people whose names Emily had given him, but all of them could account for their whereabouts, or else the moral or emotional injury was too old, or too delicate, for revenge now to hurt Lovat any more than it would also hurt them. Every rational thought led Pitt back to Ryerson and Ayesha Zakhari.
The day after that he went to the records of Lovat’s time in the army in Egypt, just in case they shed any new light on his character or his relationships with other soldiers, or offered an avenue to pursue another Egyptian connection that could lead back to Ayesha Zakhari and make more sense of what had happened at Eden Lodge. He realized with something of a jolt how much he wanted to discover something that would justify what he could not avoid believing… that Ayesha had shot Lovat, and Ryerson was so inextricably involved with her that he had been prepared to help conceal the crime.
But the records yielded nothing. Lovat seemed to have been more than adequate at his profession. He had had a natural ease with people and knew how to conduct himself in society.
His military service had been without serious blemish, and he had been honorably discharged when his health was broken after a bout of fever while stationed in Alexandria. There was no suggestion of cowardice or shirking his duty in any way. He had been a good soldier and well liked.
Was it an honest summary, or one carefully censored of any facts that would prejudice a subsequent career? It would not be the first time Pitt had come across a tacit agreement to place loyalty before truth in the concept that the highest honor lay in protecting the reputation of the service.
He had no way of knowing from the printed word, and the clerks he saw knew nothing personally and were far too well trained to speculate. They looked at him blandly and gave away nothing.
It seemed to be in Lovat’s personal life that he had incurred enemies. According to those who had known him, he had been a pleasant-looking man, not traditionally handsome, but with a good physique, a fine head of hair, and a smile of great charm. He could dance well and found conversation easy. He liked music, and sang with enthusiasm, carrying a tune and remembering the words of all the sentimental ballads of the day.
