That hurt her. Her body stiffened and some of the richness of color faded from her skin.
“Could he have killed Lovat?” he asked.
Her head moved fractionally, but it was an assent.
“How?” he asked.
“He… he poses as my servant…”
Of course! Tariq el Abd, silent, almost invisible. He could have taken her gun and shot Lovat, then called the police himself to make sure they came, and found Ryerson. He could easily have organized the whole thing, because she would naturally have given him any letter to deliver to Lovat. No one would question it; in fact, they would have questioned anybody else. It was perfect.
“Thank you,” he said with sudden depth of feeling. It was at least a resolution of the mystery, even if it did not solve the problem. And he had not realized until this moment how much it mattered to him that she was not guilty. It was almost like a physical weight removed from him.
“What are you going to do, Mr. Pitt?” Her voice was edged with fear.
“I am going to prove that you have been used, Miss Zakhari,” he replied, aware that his choice of words would remind her of that other time, years ago, when she had been used and betrayed before. “And that neither you nor Mr. Ryerson is guilty of murder. And I am going to try to do it without soaking Egypt in blood. I am afraid the second aim is going to take precedence over the first.”
She did not answer, but stood motionless as an ebony statue while he smiled very slightly in parting, and knocked on the door to summon the warder.
He debated for only moments whether to go alone or to find Narraway and tell him. If Tariq el Abd was the prime mover behind the plan to expose the massacre and set Egypt alight, then he would not meekly accept arrest from Pitt or anyone else. By going to Eden Lodge alone, Pitt might do no more than warn him, and possibly precipitate the very tragedy they dreaded.
He stopped a hansom in the Strand and gave Narraway’s office address. Please God, he was there.
“What is it?” Narraway said as soon as he saw Pitt’s face.
“The man behind Ayesha is the house servant Tariq el Abd,” he replied. He saw from Narraway’s expression that no more explanation was necessary.
Narraway breathed with a sigh of comprehension, and fury with himself because he had not seen it before. “Our own bloody blindness!” he swore, rising to his feet in a single movement. “A servant and a foreigner, so we don’t even see him. Damn! I should have been better than that.” He yanked a drawer open and pulled a gun out of it, then slammed the drawer shut again and strode ahead of Pitt. “I hope you had the wits to keep the cab,” he said critically.
“Of course I did!” Pitt retorted, striding after him out of the door and down the steps to the pavement, where the cab was standing, the horse fidgeting from one foot to the other, perhaps sensing the driver’s tension.
“Eden Lodge!” Narraway said tersely, climbing in ahead of Pitt and waving the man forward as Pitt was scrambling in behind him.
Neither of them spoke all the way through the crowded streets, around squares and under fading trees until the hansom stopped outside Eden Lodge.
“ ’Round the back!” Narraway ordered, moving swiftly ahead of Pitt.
But there was no one in Eden Lodge. The entire house was deserted. The stove in the kitchen was cold, the ashes in the fires gray, the food in the pantry already going stale.
Narraway swore just once, with white-hot fury, but there was nothing he or anybody else could do.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NO TRACE WAS FOUND of Tariq el Abd by the police, or any of the men upon whom Narraway could call. Sunday was a wretched day, cold and windy, almost as if the weather itself fretted with the same sense of impending disaster as Pitt, cooped all day at home because he had nowhere to go and nothing to do that was of use. The trial would resume in the morning, and presumably Tariq el Abd would reappear and drag out the whole violent and dreadful truth of the massacre. It would be the beginning of the end of any kind of peace in Egypt, certainly of British rule and all that Suez meant for the empire.
He had told Charlotte what he knew. There was no point in keeping it from her because the only part that was dangerous she had known before he had.
They ate Sunday dinner together. It was the most formal meal of the week, and Daniel and Jemima found it both daunting and exciting, rather like being grown-up. They very much wanted it, it was part of life, but not necessarily today.
Afterwards Pitt sat by the fire, pretending he was reading, but actually he did not turn the pages of his book. Charlotte sat and stitched, but it was a straight hem on the edge of a sheet, and required no attention at all. Gracie and the children had put on coats and gone for a walk.
“What will he do?” Charlotte asked when the silence had become more than she could bear. “Arrive as a witness for the defense and say that he killed Lovat in revenge for having lost all his family, or something of that sort? And then describe the massacre?”
He looked up at her. “Yes, I should think so,” he agreed. He could see the fear in her face, and ached to be able to comfort her with some assurance that it would not be so, even a hope of something they could do to fight against it, but there was nothing. The desire to protect was deep, and yet oddly there was a sweetness for him in being able to share his thoughts with her. She understood. The gratitude inside him was almost overwhelming that she was not a woman who had to be sheltered from truth, or even who wished to be. He did not know how any man bore the loneliness of that. One shielded a child, but a wife was a companion, one who walked beside you-in the easy paths and the hard.
“I suppose Mr. Narraway will warn the defense lawyer,” she said, her eyes wide in question. “Or… or is it the defense lawyer who will call him, do you suppose?” The ugliness of that thought was plain in her eyes. It was an alien thought in the comfort of this familiar room, with its slightly worn furniture, the cats asleep by the hearth, the firelight flickering on the walls.
But was she right? Had the lawyer who had been so ardent in defending Ryerson known this from the beginning? Pitt had no idea. The knowledge that it could be so was uniquely chilling. There was a brutality to the entire plan which had nothing of the mitigating passion of a more personal crime. If it was true, there was in it a depth of deliberate betrayal.
It was a little before three o’clock when the doorbell rang. Gracie was still out, so Pitt went to answer it. The moment he saw Narraway’s face he knew something extraordinary had happened.
“He’s dead,” Narraway said even before Pitt could ask him.
Pitt was momentarily confused. “Who’s dead?”
“Tariq el Abd!” Narraway said tartly, stepping in past Pitt and shaking himself. Although it was not raining at that moment, the wind was cold and a bank of heavy cloud was racing in from the east. He stared at Pitt, his eyes tense, filled with hard, biting fear. “The river police found his body hanging under London Bridge. It looks as if he did it himself.”
Pitt was stunned. In a few words Narraway had shattered the case. Was it the solution, or did it merely make things worse?
“Suicide?” Pitt asked with disbelief. “Why? He was winning. Tomorrow morning he would have achieved everything.”
“And the rope as his reward,” Narraway said.
“Lost his nerve?” Pitt asked with disbelief.
Narraway looked totally blank. “God knows.”
“But it makes no sense,” Pitt protested. “He had manipulated everything to the exact point where he could come into court as a surprise witness and tell the world about the massacre.”
Narraway frowned. “You spoke to Ayesha Zakhari yesterday. She knew that you now understood el Abd had killed Lovat-”
“Even if she told him that,” Pitt interrupted him, “he would hardly have gone off and taken his own life. She
