Twenty-One Days (Daniel Pitt #1)(48)

‘I doubt he’s innocent,’ Miriam said with a dark tone in her voice. ‘And even if you discover where she wore those clothes, or if she wore them at all, it doesn’t prove he was not involved in her death. It just suggests that there is a better reason than a marital quarrel.’ She put the boots down. ‘I suggest you ask Mr Falthorne to lock this door. Not that I imagine there is anyone likely to come in. But we must take precautions. This is becoming more . . . complicated. There is little here for us to work with, but I will take a small piece of this carpet, which must have been roughly beneath her head, and see what I can find. I wish we had the body.’

‘What do you expect to find?’

‘Some tiny traces of alcohol . . . although it may well have burned away, if it was ever there,’ she answered. ‘But something was very hot. It burned a part of the carpet, and even the canvas beneath. And it burned human flesh.’ She looked at him with a wince of pain. ‘There is something terribly ugly here.’

That evening, before he and Miriam caught the train home, Daniel asked Falthorne to unlock Graves’ study door. He went to the desk, unlocked it and removed the copious notes and manuscript – in fact, all he could find of Graves’ book – and put it in his briefcase. He foresaw that he would need it to hand, convinced as he was that it had some bearing on the case. The question was what exactly that was.





Chapter Eleven


The morning after returning from Graves’ house to London, Daniel went again to see Graves in prison. He needed more information about the biography, particularly what Graves’ sources had been.

There were only seventeen more days before he would hang, if they did not find cause for the appeal.

Kitteridge had found nothing so far. All the evidence regarding the potential unpopularity of Graves’ proposed book may not have been known to Kitteridge, but it was definitely known to Graves himself.

Why had Graves not spoken of it before? That question had gnawed at Daniel since he had heard of it. It was Miriam, on the train journey back to London, who had suggested the answer. Graves had been indiscreet in his suggestions of corruption, blackmail, and sins of passion that might stretch to include suspicion of treason. No one knew how far it stretched, what damage it might do, or whose lives it would touch and stain.

Miriam had reminded Daniel that that was what had finally brought Robespierre down, and brought to an end the high terror in the French Revolution. Spread the fear widely enough, and no one was safe. Someone would silence you. Certainly no one could afford to let you speak. Someone they cared for, even if not they themselves, would be touched by it.

‘Graves has been too wide in his threats,’ she said with a bleak smile. ‘Anybody siding with him will make himself a hundred enemies.’

‘Graves will get very specific.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘We had better find something before then. Perhaps he will at last realise his danger?’

‘Then I shall tell him!’ Daniel promised.

He did not want to see Graves, but it was unavoidable. It was his duty, at the very least, to advise him regarding the facts of the case. There was no realistic chance that Kitteridge would discover cause for appeal, as Kitteridge had reminded him, although he was still looking. Graves’ last chance was to present a viable other suspect, along with any possible evidence of their guilt. It might be enough to get a stay of execution.

This he told Graves when he saw him.

‘They got me tried and convicted, what the hell is likely to make them keep me alive now?’ Graves demanded furiously. Today he looked haggard. His hair was unkempt, and was in need of washing and cutting. His skin was pallid, sagging a little around the jawline, and unsurprisingly he was not allowed a blade to shave himself.

Daniel kept his own temper with difficulty. ‘I’ll ask the questions. I’ve been to your house, interviewed your servants and looked in your desk. I’ve seen the notes for your book, too. It’s time for you to tell me what your information is, and where you got it! If anyone is involved with as much treason, blackmail and murder as you say, they’ll want to kill this book before it’s born.’

‘You expect me to tell you my sources, so you can destroy them?’ Graves snapped back. ‘I will go to my grave with my secrets.’ He glanced at Daniel. ‘Don’t think I don’t know who you are, Pitt! Clever, aren’t they, giving me Thomas Pitt’s son to keep me from telling the truth? You may think you’ve succeeded, but you haven’t.’ Suddenly there was life in his face, in his eyes.

‘Won’t do you any good if you’re dead,’ Daniel said. ‘I want to find a believable suspect of who could have killed your wife and framed you. Since that is what happened, according to you.’

‘Of course it is, you fool! Why would I kill her? She bored me with her endless causes, but she was doing no one any harm. If I had killed her, you wouldn’t have found her body there, in the bedroom, and at a time when I couldn’t prove myself elsewhere. Do you think I’m stupid?’

‘No,’ Daniel said honestly. ‘But I think you’ve got a hell of a temper, and you are certainly not above losing it with someone. You could have hit her, harder than you meant to, and found she was dead.’

‘They said she was burned,’ Graves retorted immediately. ‘Why in hell would I do that?’