“He is certain you are not guilty,” she added.
Bitterness filled his face, and he turned away from her. “Not guilty,” he repeated the words softly. “Not guilty of what? I didn’t put my hands around her neck and break it, certainly. I was with a patient. I may have miscalculated the time, but not the essential facts.” His voice dropped still lower, filled with bitterness. “But am I ’not guilty’ of ignoring her, allowing her to fall further and further into gambling and debt and the kind of desperate boredom that took her to Allardyce’s studio, alone, where she could be killed?”
She wanted to deny it immediately. It was an absurd assumption of responsibility for someone else’s weaknesses, but she could hear in the strain of his voice that it was more real to him than the physical imprisonment of his own circumstances. Perhaps it was easier to consider that kind of guilt than the future and the accusations he would have to answer in court.
He straightened his shoulders, but he still did not turn to face her. His voice shook when he spoke again. “She was so full of life in Vienna. She made every other woman look gray in comparison. She would have stayed there, you know? It was I who was sick to the heart of it and wanted to come to England.”
Callandra said nothing. She sensed in him the need to talk; she was only the audience for something he was saying to himself, perhaps putting into words for the first time.
“She would have gone to Paris, Milan, Rome, anywhere that the struggle was still going on. But I brought her here and turned her into a housewife to spend her time ordering groceries and exchanging gossip about the daily trivia of lives she saw as perfectly safe and ordered, and with nothing on earth to fight for.”
“What absolute rubbish!” She exploded in real anger. “There is everything to fight for, and you know that, even if she did not. There is ignorance and pain to battle, disease, crime, selfishness, domestic and social violence, prejudice, authority, bigotry and injustice of every kind and color. And when you have conquered all of those, you can always try addressing poverty, madness, and perfectly ordinary dirt. Or, if those seem too large and indeterminate, what about common or garden loneliness and fear of death, hungry children with no one to tell them they are good . . . and lonely old people neglected by the rest of us—in a hurry and too busy to listen anymore. If she didn’t find that exciting enough, or glorious . . . that is not your fault!”
He turned slowly to face her. For a moment, surprise was sharper in his face than anything else. “Honest to the last,” he said. “You really are angry! Thank you at least for not patronizing me with false comfort. But I did ignore her. I knew her, and if I had thought more of her and less of myself I would not have tried to change her. Her gambling was beyond control, and I didn’t do anything about it. I argued with her, of course. I pleaded, I threatened, reasoned. But I didn’t look at the cause, because that would have meant I would have to change as well, and I was not prepared to.”
“It’s too late for that now, Kristian,” she replied. “We have only fifteen minutes left at the most before the constable comes back. Pendreigh will defend you in court. I don’t know whether he expects to be paid for it or not. He may do it simply out of belief, and because he would naturally prefer that you were shown to be not guilty, because it reflects less badly on his daughter if she were killed by someone outside the family. It raises less unfortunate speculation in the minds of others. And if he is in control of the defense, he can exercise some restraint over the exploration of her character by the counsel for the prosecution. At least he can do all that anyone could.”
“I can’t pay him,” Kristian said ruefully. “Surely he is as aware of that as I am?”
“I imagine so. But if the matter arises, I shall take care of it. . . .” She saw his embarrassment, but there was no time to be sensitive to it now. “I think money is the last thing that concerns him at the moment,” she said honestly. “He is simply a proud man trying with every skill he has to rescue what is left of his family—the truth of how his daughter died, assurance that the wrong man is not punished for it, and some remnant of her reputation preserved as the brave and vital woman she was.”
He blinked suddenly, and his marvelous eyes flooded with tears. He turned sharply away from her. “She was . . .” His voice choked.
Callandra felt awkward, lumpy and ordinary, and bitterly alone. But she could not afford the self-indulgence of her own hurt. There would be plenty of time for that later, perhaps years.
“Kristian—someone killed her.” She had not intended it to sound as brutal as it did, at least most of her had not. “The best defense would be to find out who it is.”
He kept his back to her. “Do you not think that if I knew I would have told you? Told everyone?”
“If you were aware that you knew, yes, of course,” she agreed. “But it was nothing to do with Sarah Mackeson, except that she was unfortunate enough to be there, and it was not Argo Allardyce. We have exhausted the likelihood of it being anyone who wanted to collect money she owed and make an example of her so others would be more in dread not to pay their debts.”
“Have you?”
“Yes. William assures me that gamblers will injure people to make them pay, or even murder those whose deaths would become known among other gamblers, but not to cause a major police investigation like this. It draws far too much attention to them. Gambling houses get closed down. Anywhere she had been is likely to face a lot of trouble. It would be stupid. They are not at all happy that she was killed. They have lost business because of it, and no doubt Runcorn will close the house when he is ready.”
“Good!”
“Not permanently.” She responded with the truth, and then wished she had not.
“Not permanently?” He looked back at her slowly.
“No. They’ll simply open up somewhere else, behind an apothecary’s shop, or a milliner’s, or whatever. It will cost them a little outlay, a little profit, that’s all.”
He was too weary to be angry. “Of course. It’s a hydra.”
“It has to have been someone else,” she repeated. “Someone personal.”
He did not answer.
There was silence in the cell, but it was as if she could hear a clock ticking away the seconds. “I am going to ask William to go to Vienna and find Max Niemann.”
He stared at her. “That’s absurd! Max would never have hurt her, let alone killed her! If you knew him you wouldn’t even entertain the thought for an instant.”
