Twenty-One Days (Daniel Pitt #1)(25)

‘Rather than his mother?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Ebony looked after him well enough. And we have very efficient household staff. There really was not anything I could do. I have tried.’

‘You’ve only told me what she looked like,’ Daniel said rather sharply. ‘But what was her life like? How did she spend her time, who did she like or dislike? When she went out, where did she go? With whom?’

Graves could shed no light at all on Ebony’s inner self. Daniel could have revealed far more about his mother, her curiosity, her quick temper at injustice, her humour, than Graves said about his wife. Graves seemed to recall no memories of shared experience; no flashes of insight appeared.

Daniel tried to think back on his own moments of closeness to someone, small truths that made him understand the greater ones. They mostly concerned his father. On one occasion Pitt had been helping Daniel with a school project. They were building a sort of machine with wheels and chains and cogs. Pitt kept doing it with one piece backwards. Finally, Daniel thought very hard and realised what was wrong. He did not want to tell his father his mistake, but they were getting nowhere. As tactfully as he could, he explained, giving the reasons why they needed to do it again the new way. It worked. And then he saw the amusement in his father’s face and had realised that he misplaced the piece on purpose in order to make Daniel not only do it, but understand the mechanism.

Maybe Graves never understood his wife. He saw her in lots of detail, but with little sense of her as a whole, as a woman who would stir passions of any sort, let alone ones that led to murder so violent and destructive. Could the man really be a good biographer with so little feel for the passions within the physical presence, the need and the heart behind the deeds?

‘Was she interested in your work?’ His work was the one subject Graves showed emotion about.

‘Ebony?’ Graves looked surprised. ‘Not in the slightest. She liked that I met famous and powerful people. I suppose it gave her some standing in the community. But she never wanted to read any of my books.’ His voice dropped from vitality to a lower note, which was laced with contempt. ‘She liked the fame, thought it the completed result, but she showed no interest at all in the active labour, and refinement of detail, the learning of the truth about people.’

Daniel heard the real bitterness in Graves’ voice, and saw it in the sudden anger in his eyes. What was he angry about? That she had lived in such a way that someone had killed her, and Graves was going to take the blame for it, die for it? Or had she driven him to the point where he had lost his temper and killed her himself?

‘Could her murder be to do with your work?’ he asked. He had to get something from this interview. They would not give him much longer, and he had little enough to work with. ‘Could she have been indiscreet?’

Graves suddenly stiffened. He raised his head slowly and stared at Daniel. ‘Damn her!’ he said between his teeth. ‘Yes! Yes, she could. I’m dealing with important people. Dangerous people. Some of them are dead, but their power stretches beyond the grave. Others can be affected.’ He drew in his breath, then spoke in a low, fierce voice, barely in control. ‘Damn her! Damn her! How could she be so stupid? I deal with private lives, but also with public ones. It goes as far as state secrets, even high treason.’ He looked up at Daniel. ‘I never told her anything confidential – of course I didn’t. But she could have heard a name, caught a thread of . . . some people I write about. I’m only just touching the edges myself – and it could threaten all kinds of people, the heads of government, even the Throne. Oh God! What an almighty fool!’

Daniel did not know whether to believe him or not. It was a perfect opening for believing that someone else was responsible for her death. With a careless word, had she been indiscreet? Had she led somebody to believe that she knew secrets about them that were dangerous . . . dangerous enough to kill for?

‘But they didn’t attack you?’ he said to Graves. ‘Why not? You are the one writing the book.’

Graves stared at him.

‘Well?’ Daniel pressed.

‘Perhaps it was a warning,’ Graves suggested. There was a rough edge to his voice that was almost certainly fear.

‘And you are supposed to read it, and know what it means?’ Daniel’s tone was heavy with disbelief. ‘Did you get any letters, or anything else to make you think that was what it was? No point in warning you if they don’t say what they want you to do, or not to do!’

‘No need to say, if they get me hanged!’ Graves said back at him. ‘I can’t come back and tell any secrets if I am dead!’

Daniel was torn between anger and pity. He looked at Graves sitting in a wooden chair, his hands manacled. The prison uniform made him look like every other man awaiting death, ticking the days away, then the hours, finally the minutes.

‘Anyone in particular whose secrets you were going to expose?’ he asked. He must get to something practical, something he could use.

‘Who knows where the threads of treason run?’ Graves answered. ‘And how do you imagine you are going to trace them? What are you? A newly graduated lawyer who’s tried half a dozen cases, and those as second chair? I was your first big case, and you lost it. What do you imagine you can do against the Establishment? You are absurd. I would laugh at you, if it weren’t my life at stake.’