Anne Perry: Seven Dials

“I see. What did you do?” Pitt kept his voice neutral.

“I asked her to show me, and followed her to where he was lying on the ground, half under the laurel bushes. I had thought perhaps he was not actually dead. I hoped she had found him knocked senseless, and perhaps leaped to a hasty conclusion. However, when I knelt down to look at him, it was quite apparent that she was correct. He had been shot at fairly close range, through the chest, and was unquestionably dead.”

“Did you see the gun?”

Ryerson’s eyes did not waver, but it obviously cost him an effort.

“Yes. It was lying on the ground beside him. It was Ayesha’s gun. I knew it immediately, because I had seen it before. I knew she owned it, for protection.”

“Against whom?”

“I don’t know. I had asked her, but she would not tell me.”

“Could it have been this Lieutenant Lovat?” Pitt suggested. “Had he threatened her?”

Ryerson’s face was tight, his eyes miserable. He hesitated before answering. “I believe not,” he said at last.

“Did you ask her what had happened?”

“Of course! She said she did not know. She had heard the shot, and realized it was very close by. She had been in her upstairs sitting room, waiting for me, awake and fully dressed. She went downstairs to see what had happened, if anyone were hurt, and found Lovat lying on the ground and the gun beside him.”

It was a strange story, and one Pitt found almost impossible to believe, and yet as he looked at Ryerson, he was sure that either he himself believed it or he was the most superb actor Pitt had ever seen. He was clear, calm and without any histrionics. There was a candor to him that, if it was art, then it was also genius. It confused Pitt, and he felt wrong-footed, off balance because of it.

“So you saw the dead man,” he said. “And you knew from Miss Zakhari who he was. Did she have any idea what he was doing there or who had shot him?”

“No,” Ryerson answered immediately. “She assumed he had come to see her, but that much was obvious. There could be no other reason for his being there at that hour. I asked her if she knew what had happened, and she said she did not.” There was finality in his voice, and belief that defied sense.

“She had not invited him there, or given him reason to believe he would be welcome?” Pitt pressed, uncertain what tone to adopt. It annoyed him to be deferential, the situation was absurd, and yet his instinct was to believe him, even to feel some sympathy.

Ryerson’s lips tightened. “She would hardly invite him at the same time she was expecting me, Mr. Pitt. She is a woman of high intelligence.”

There was no time to afford niceties. “Women have been known to contrive that lovers should be made jealous, Mr. Ryerson,” Pitt responded, and saw Ryerson wince. “It is a very old strategy, and can work well,” he continued. “She would naturally deny it to you.”

“Possibly,” Ryerson said dryly, but there was no anger in his voice, rather a kind of patience. “But if you knew her you would not bother with such a suggestion. It is absurd, not only because of her character, but were she to have done such a thing, why in heaven’s name would she then shoot him?”

Pitt had to agree that there was no sense in it, even allowing for temper, passion, or accident. If Ayesha Zakhari was convincing enough to have planned such a thing in advance, then she was far too clever to have behaved so idiotically afterwards.

“Could Lovat in some way have threatened her?” he asked aloud.

“She did not let him in, Mr. Pitt,” Ryerson answered. “I don’t know if there is any way of proving it, but he was never in the house.”

“But she was outside,” Pitt remarked. “In the garden she would have had little defense.”

“You are suggesting she took her gun with her.” Ryerson’s lips were touched briefly with the tiniest smile. “That would seem to be excellent defense. And if she shot him because he threatened her, or even attacked her, then that is self-defense and not murder.” Then the light vanished from his eyes. “But that is not what happened. She went outside only after she heard the shot, and she found him already dead.”

“How do you know that?” Pitt said simply.

Ryerson sighed and his face pinched so minutely not a single feature altered, simply the vitality died inside him. “I don’t know it,” he said quietly. “That is what she told me, and I know her infinitely better than you do, Mr. Pitt.” The words were invested with sadness and an intensity of emotion so raw Pitt was embarrassed by it. He felt intrusive, and yet he had no choice but to be there. “There is an inner kind of honesty in her like a clear light,” Ryerson went on. “She would not stoop to deceive, for her own sake, for the violence it would do to her nature, not for the sake of anyone else.”

Pitt stared at him. Ryerson was worried; there was even a flicker of real fear, tightly controlled, at the back of his eyes, but it was not for himself. Pitt had never seen the Egyptian woman. He had imagined someone beautiful, lush, a woman to satisfy a jaded appetite, to flatter and yield, to tease but only for her own ends. She would be the ultimate mistress for a man with both money and power, but who would marry only to suit his political or dynastic ambitions, and seek the answer to his physical needs elsewhere. Such a man would not look for love or honor; he would not even think of it. And he would expect to pay for his pleasures.

Now it occurred to Pitt with startling force that perhaps he was wrong. Was it conceivable that Ryerson loved his mistress, not merely desired her? It was a new thought, and it altered his entire perception. It made Ryerson a better man, but also perhaps a more dangerous one. Pitt’s charge from Narraway, and therefore from the prime minister, was to protect Ryerson from involvement in the case. If Ryerson was behaving from love, and not self-interest, then he would be far more difficult to predict, and impossible to control. A whole ocean of danger opened up in front of Pitt’s imagination.

“Yes…” he said quietly. It was not an agreement, he was merely acknowledging that he understood. “Miss Zakhari told you that she had heard the shots… Did she say how many?”

“A single shot,” Ryerson corrected him.

Pitt nodded. “You went to see, and found Lovat dead on the ground near the laurel bushes. What then?”

“I asked her if she had any idea what had happened,” Ryerson replied. “She told me she had no idea at all, but that Lovat had sent her letters, pressing her to rekindle an old love affair, and she had refused, fairly bluntly. He was not willing to accept that, which was presumably why he had come.”

“At three in the morning?” Pitt said with disbelief. He did not add reasons for the absurdity of that.

For the first time Ryerson showed some trace of anger. “I have no idea, Mr. Pitt! I agree it is ludicrous-but he was unarguably there! And since he is dead, and no one we know spoke to him, I cannot think of any way to learn what he hoped to achieve.”

Pitt had a sudden awareness of the power of the man, the inner intellectual strength and the will which had taken him to the peak of his profession and kept him there for nearly two decades. His vulnerability with regard to Ayesha Zakhari, and the fact that he was involved, in whatever way, with a murder and therefore in personal danger, had made him temporarily forget it. When Pitt spoke again it was with a new respect, even though it was unintentional. “What did you do then, sir?”

Ryerson colored. “I said that we must move the body. That was when I knew that it was her gun.”

“It was your idea to move Mr. Lovat’s body?”