come after him for vengeance?”
“Guilt,” Sandeman replied without hesitation. “In his nightmares he relived it. It was the men and women we murdered who came after him.”
Narraway stared back at him, unblinking. “And you, do the dead pursue you as well?”
“No,” Sandeman replied, meeting his eyes, hollow and haunted by pain, but unflinching. “I let them catch me. I admitted my guilt. I can’t ever undo what I did, but I shall spend whatever is left of my life trying to give back something. And if whoever killed Lovat comes after me, they will find me here. If they kill me, then so be it. If you want to arrest me, I shan’t resist you. I think I am of more use here than at the end of a rope, but I shan’t argue the case.”
Charlotte could feel the ache in her chest tighten so hard it almost stopped her breathing.
“God is your judge, not I,” Narraway said simply. “But if I need you again, you would be wise to be here.”
“I shall be,” Sandeman answered.
“And repeat this to no one else,” Narraway added, his voice suddenly harsher than before, a note of threat in it. “I make a very bad enemy, Mr. Sandeman. And if you whisper even a word of this story to any man alive, I shall find you, and the end of the noose would seem very attractive to you in comparison with what I will do.”
Sandeman’s eyes widened. “Good God! Do you think it is something I repeat willingly?”
“I’ve known men who tell their crimes over and over, seeking absolution for them,” Narraway replied. “If you repeat this, it may cost a thousand times as many lives as you have already taken. If you feel tempted to seek some kind of release by confession, remember that.”
A look of irony as deep cutting as a knife to the heart covered Sandeman’s face. “I believe you,” he said. “I imagine that is why you do not arrest me.”
An answering flash softened in Narraway, but only for a moment. “Oh… and mercy also,” he responded. “Or perhaps it is justice? What could anyone else do to you that will equal the honesty with which you punish yourself?” He turned and walked very slowly back across the hallway towards the outside door, and Pitt took Charlotte by the arm. She tugged away from him long enough to look at Sandeman, to smile at him and know that he had seen her and understood, then she allowed herself to be led outside as well.
None of them spoke until they reached Seven Dials itself, and turned along Little Earl Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue.
It was Charlotte who broke the silence. “Surely the murder of Lovat has to be connected with this?” she said, looking at one then the other of them.
Narraway’s face was blank. “For it to be otherwise would be a coincidence to beggar belief,” he answered. “But that does not take away our difficulty. In fact, it adds a dimension so appalling it would be better to allow Ryerson to hang than to-” He stopped because Pitt had grasped hold of him and swung him around so sharply Charlotte almost collided with them both.
Narraway took Pitt’s hand off his arm with a strength that amazed Pitt and made him wince.
“The alternative,” Narraway said between his teeth, “is to allow the truth to be brought out-and see the whole of Egypt go up in revolt. After the Orabi rising, the bombardment of Alexandria, then Khartoum and the Mahdi, the place is like tinder. One spark and it could all ignite. We would lose the Suez Canal, and with it not only trade in Egypt but in the whole eastern half of the empire. Everything would have to go ’round the tip of Africa, not only tea, spice, timber and silk imports, but all our exports as well. Everything would cost half as much again. Not to mention the military and colonial traffic.”
Charlotte saw the tight fear in his face, and she turned to Pitt. It was there in him also as the enormity of it hit him, as if he had seen it before but clung to the hope that it was not real, just his own personal nightmare.
“Four drunken British soldiers massacring thirty-five peaceful Muslims in their own shrine,” Narraway said, barely above a whisper. Only by watching his lips could they be certain of the words. “Can you think what that will do in Egypt, Sudan, even India, if it’s known?”
“You mean Ayesha killed Lovat in revenge for her own people?” Pitt said slowly. His face betrayed how deeply the thought wounded him.
Charlotte wished she could think of anything at all to comfort him, but there was nothing. Who could blame Ayesha for it? The law would do nothing to answer the massacre, but it would hang her, without doubt… and probably Ryerson with her. But perhaps she did not care about that. “Has Ryerson anything to do with it?” she said aloud. “Or is he just unfortunate? He fell in love with the wrong woman at the wrong time…”
She was startled at the pain that for a moment was naked in Narraway’s face, acute and so obviously personal. Then he masked it, as if aware that she had seen. “Probably,” he agreed, starting to walk again.
They turned the corner and crossed the street into Shaftesbury Avenue. Charlotte had no idea where they were going, and she had a strong belief that neither Pitt nor Narraway did either. The dread that filled their minds drowned out everything else, as it did with her. She was aware of the noise of traffic passing, but it was all a blur of meaningless movement. Alexandria was another world which she had seen only in paintings and through Pitt’s descriptions he had shared with her. But it was linked with everything here as really as if it lay across some immediate border. It would be British soldiers who would be sent to fight and die there if there was an armed revolt, just as there had been in the Sudan. She could remember the newspaper accounts of that well enough. She had known and liked a woman whose only son had been killed at Khartoum.
And if Suez fell, the repercussions of it would touch every life in Britain.
But it was still wrong to sacrifice an innocent man to the rope. If he was innocent? Aunt Vespasia wanted to believe he was, but that did not make it so. Even she could be mistaken. People did things that seemed unimaginable to others when they were in love.
Narraway stopped on the footpath, facing Pitt. “Garrick is safe enough for the foreseeable future, whatever that is. I’m less happy about Sandeman, but I think if he understands the dangers he will keep silent. If he wanted to be a martyr to soothe his own conscience, he would have done it before now. Staying in Seven Dials matters to him. It is his way of answering for his soul. I believe he will die before he will sacrifice that. And Yeats and Lovat are dead.”
“Is it Ayesha?” Pitt said almost hesitantly. “For vengeance?”
“Probably,” Narraway replied. “And God help me, I can’t blame her… except for drawing Ryerson in. And perhaps she couldn’t help that. It was chance that brought him there that night, exactly as she was disposing of the body. She couldn’t have been sure he would help rather than calling the police-as, if he had an ounce of self- preservation, he would have.”
“Why did she wait for fifteen years?” Charlotte interrupted. “If some of my family had been killed like that, I wouldn’t.”
Narraway looked at her with curiosity turning to interest. “Neither would I,” he said with feeling. “Something must have made it impossible before-a lack of knowledge? Of help? Power? Assistance from someone, their belief, money?” He looked from one to the other of them for an answer. “What would make you wait, Mrs. Pitt?”
She thought only for a moment. A brewer’s dray with six gray horses rumbled past, their huge feet heavy on the cobbles, manes tossing, brasses bright. “Not knowing about it,” she said first. “Either not knowing it happened, or that my family was involved, or not knowing who did it or where to find them. Some situation that I couldn’t leave-”
“What situation?” Narraway interrupted.
“Illness,” she said. “Someone I had to nurse, a child or a parent? Or someone I had to protect, who might be hurt if I acted? Somebody implicated, maybe? A hostage to fortune of some kind.”
He nodded slowly, and turned to Pitt, his eyebrows raised.
“Only not knowing,” Pitt replied, and as he said it something tingled in his memory. “I knew of the fire, but the people I spoke to believed it was an accident, at least that is what they said. How did Ayesha learn that it wasn’t?”
Narraway’s face set hard. “That’s a very good question, Pitt, and one to which I would like the answer, but unfortunately I have no idea where to begin looking. There is a great deal about this I would like to know. For example, is Ayesha Zakhari the prime mover, or is she acting with or for someone else? Who else knows about the massacre, and why did they not expose it in Egypt? Why wait, and why in London?” His voice dropped a little and became tight and hard with emotion he barely kept in control. “And above all, is personal revenge all they want, or is this just the beginning?”
Neither Pitt nor Charlotte answered him. The question was too big, the answer too terrible.
