Anne Perry - Seven Dials

“You know it for certain?” Pitt asked quietly.

“Yes. I suppose you want names?”

“No. I don’t want them,” Pitt replied. “I would far rather let the poor devils keep their pain secret, but I have to. If we don’t get the right person, then the wrong man… or woman, will be hanged.”

“I suppose so.” Jack listed off four names, and what he knew of where they might be found.

Pitt did not need to write them down. He wished he did not even need to hear them or make enquiries; he could understand their emotions too easily. Imagination was necessary to his job, but it was also a curse.

The dog came back, quivering with excitement and delight, dropping the stick at Pitt’s feet and dancing around waiting for him to throw it again. It did not often meet people so willing to play, and who obviously understood the game.

Pitt obliged and the animal went racing off again. He really would like to have a dog. He would tell Charlotte the cats would just have to accommodate it.

“You could ask Emily,” Jack said suddenly, looking at Pitt and biting his lip. He looked slightly abashed to be saying it. “She notices things about people…” He left it hanging. They were both aware of past cases where Charlotte and Emily had interfered, sometimes dangerously, but their acute discretion and understanding of nuances 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.