Dunkeld? You are mistaken. I have spent over half my life in Africa.” Now there was unmistakable emotion in his face.
It was clear in his eyes, his mouth, even the tightening of the muscles in his neck. “I love the country. It is the last great mystery left in the world, the one place too big for us to crush and occupy with our small-ness, trying to impress our image on its people and convince them it is the likeness of God.”
Narraway was stunned. The passion in Forbes had taken him totally by surprise.
“You don’t know Africa, Mr. Narraway,” Forbes said softly. “You have never felt the sun scorch your face and smelled the hot wind blowing across a thousand miles of grassland teeming with beasts like the sands of the seashore. You haven’t seen the sky flame with sunset behind the acacia trees, heard the lions roar in the night with the Southern Cross burning in the darkness above you, or put your ear to the ground as it trembles with the thunder of a million hoofs. Have you ever seen a giraffe’s eyelashes? Or a cheetah run? Felt the terror in your blood and in your bones when you know there’s a leopard stalking you?
Then you know how sweet life is, and how unbearably fragile.” Forbes shook his head fractionally, a denial so small Narraway almost missed it. “Here in England there’s a glass wall between you and the taste of reality. I don’t want to see the last true passion tamed by railways, and men with Bibles telling everyone to cover their bodies.” He spread his powerful, elegant hands. “Play your string quintets, by all means, Mr.
Narraway, but don’t silence the drums simply because you don’t understand them. The men who play violins have steel and gunpowder, and the men who play drums don’t.”
Narraway did not answer immediately. He studied Forbes’s intense face, the powerful nose and curious, thin- lipped mouth, which was yet so expressive.
In the end he waited so long it was Forbes who broke the silence.
“Is that what the Empire is for?” he asked. “To change everything into something we can buy and sell?”
Narraway was repulsed by the thought. It was worse than offensive, it was blasphemous. But he did not want Forbes to know that.
That he should be so moved was a revelation he could not afford to make. “Exploitation?” he said calmly.
“Isn’t it?” Forbes’s black eyebrows rose. He was watching Narraway intensely.
“And you are against it?” Narraway allowed no more than a shred of sarcasm in his voice.
Temper flared in Forbes’s face, then vanished. “A longer view,” he said softly. “What will Africa be a century from now? Dominion, friend, enemy, battleground?”
Again Narraway said nothing.
“We will not be alive then,” Forbes answered himself. “Is that all that matters, the basis of all judgment?”
Narraway did not answer. “But you think Dunkeld will build it anyway?” he said instead.
“Not easily, and not with my help, but yes, he will build it.” Again Forbes’s face was dark with emotion, but with such a conflicting mix-ture it was impossible to read.
Over dinner they spoke of other things. Forbes was an interesting and hospitable host, and Narraway did not arrive home until close to midnight.
In the morning Narraway was back at the Palace facing Pitt.
There was a tray with tea on the table and Pitt sat opposite him. He looked weary, trapped. More than that, there was a disillusion in him that Narraway had not seen before. Suddenly he realized how being here oppressed Pitt, who had witnessed violence and degradation often enough, but never before on this level. It was not that these murders were more brutal than others, it was that they were here in a place he had considered inviolate.
Perhaps it mattered also that the victims were women, the second one not wildly unlike Charlotte, at least in class and origin. Charlotte had something of the same warmth inside her, the same courage and quick tongue. She was just gentler, and perhaps immeasurably happier.
This was breaking Pitt’s ideals of his monarch, and threatening his feelings dangerously.
The ideals Narraway did not envy. He had lost his own illusions about people too long ago. Proximity had forced him into realism. It was hard to believe that Pitt had kept his naivete so long. He must simply have refused to see what he did not wish. Narraway felt both impatience and pity for that.
Then he thought of Charlotte’s face, her eyes, the curve of her mouth and her throat, and was drenched with loneliness. In that instant he would have traded all the knowledge and understanding he had in return for the innocence in Pitt that made Charlotte love him.
Was it innocence or hope?
And if the fact of these Palace murders crushed that, what was Pitt going to lose?
Pitt finished his tea and set his cup down, waiting for Narraway to speak. His eyes were dark-rimmed, his skin shadowed, and there were tiny cuts on his jaw where he had shaved clumsily. Did violent death still churn his stomach too, in spite of how well he hid it? Did he share Narraway’s sense of guilt for not preventing Minnie Sorokine’s death?
“Is Sorokine still locked in his room?” he asked.
“Yes. There was no alternative,” Pitt replied unhappily.
“Are you satisfied he killed her?” Narraway did not want to ask, but he needed the matter closed, and Pitt’s troubled face left him no choice. “Presumably she realized he had killed the first woman, and he could not afford to leave her alive because sooner or later she would betray him over it?”
Pitt spoke slowly. “That’s what it looks like.”
“Why aren’t you satisfied?” Narraway’s voice rose in spite of his effort to keep it level and under control. He was accustomed to anarchy, treason, and very considerable violence, but he had not met sexual aberration before. There was something uniquely repulsive about the intimacy of it, like the foul smell of some disease.
“There was no blood on him,” Pitt spoke carefully, as if picking his way through chaotic thoughts. “None at all, except the little from the scratches on his face. Nothing of the dark gore that came from her.”
Narraway’s stomach turned and he felt the chill of sweat on his skin. “He’d had all night to wash,” he pointed out.
Pitt shook his head. “There was shaving water in the jug and basin, but it was all clean. Nothing in it but soap. And what about his clothes?”
“He stripped to do it?” Narraway suggested. “There was no blood on anyone the first time either. It seems to be his pattern.”
Pitt frowned. “The first time he might have planned it, but the second was because she challenged him. He would hardly have told her to wait there while he stripped off, then came back and killed her!”
“Then what did he do?” Narraway demanded, frustration burning up inside him. Just as Pitt was still unfamiliar with the complexities of anarchy, so was he with the nature of murder.
“I don’t know,” Pitt replied. “He was distressed over her death, but he looked totally sane to me. He denied it.”
Narraway was startled. “Did you expect him to confess?”
Pitt pushed his hair out of his eyes with a clumsy hand. “It’s not just what he said, it’s the way in which he spoke. I don’t know what I think.” His brow furrowed. “There’s something wrong with it, something about all of it that I haven’t understood. I’ve racked my mind, but all I see is the break in reasoning, the place where something should be to tie it together. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.”
“Then for God’s sake, think!” Narraway said desperately. “Before it’s too late. We’ve got to make an arrest. This victim wasn’t a whore, she was Dunkeld’s daughter. We can’t afford to be wrong. If we are, and we have to admit it, it will be the end of Special Branch. We won’t ever have a case higher in the public eye than this, when it comes out. And it will.”
“I won’t condemn the wrong man to a life in the hell of a madhouse,” Pitt told him, stubbornness setting hard in his face. “Have you ever been in one of those places? I have. He’ll be gibbering mad in a year or two, even if he isn’t to begin with. It would be cleaner and more humane to hang him in the first place. I can still hear the screaming of Bedlam in my nightmares sometimes.”
Narraway leaned forward. “Pitt, we can’t afford any more dead women, whether we make or break the Cape-to-Cairo railway. One of those three men has murdered two women in four days. The Queen will be back here
