Twenty-One Days (Daniel Pitt #1)(58)

‘And came prepared,’ Mercy added. ‘And I found no one who suggested her affairs were more than flirtations. From what I heard of Graves, I commend her restraint. I would’ve gone a lot further!’

‘You would have left him,’ Blackwell said.

‘If it had been he who had been killed, I would have understood it,’ Mercy replied ruefully. She looked across at Daniel. ‘I’m sorry, I know nothing of use.’ She looked momentarily crushed, and Daniel realised how very much she wanted to repay the debt she owed him for saving Blackwell.

He forced himself to smile at her, but it felt artificial. ‘There’ll be other times.’ He leaned back in the chair and looked again at Blackwell. ‘I wish I could believe Graves killed her. It would be so much easier. I could let him hang with an easy conscience. I would have done all I could.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But I don’t. I hear the pain in him now, I see the fear in his eyes, his anger, too. He’s desperate not only to save his life, but he sees this all as urgent and unanswerable. He believes it’s worth fighting, because it wasn’t fair.’

Mercy rolled her eyes. ‘You are too soft-hearted for your own good. Defending someone in the law doesn’t mean you have to believe they’re innocent!’

‘But you said yourself, you couldn’t find any enemy that hated her with that kind of intensity, that—’

‘Not among her acquaintances,’ Mercy interrupted him. ‘I can quite easily believe that her husband could have. If she mocked him, rejected him, made fun of him . . . any abilities he might have – he’s a proud man, by all accounts.’ She made a little grimace of disgust. ‘Yes? He could well have lashed out at her. You described him as arrogant, condescending . . .’

‘Yes, to me, after he had been convicted, and was very afraid,’ Daniel answered. ‘He would hate me because I’ve seen him defeated and, whether he likes it or not, he’s depended on me to save him. That would scald his pride like acid!’

‘And if he failed in the bedroom, and his wife laughed at him, do you not think that would burn his pride even more than acid?’ Mercy asked. ‘He would never forget it. And I dare say she would never let him, and he knew that. He would lash out, maybe kill her in one blow.’

‘But why the burning?’ Daniel persisted.

‘Take the smile off her face,’ Mercy answered with a shrug, as if the answer were self-evident.

‘All this may well be true, but it doesn’t answer your problem.’ Blackwell leaned forward a little. ‘You must find who gave Graves the information for his book. And more than anything, you have to save the reputations of people you love. Cover their weaknesses, if they had them, with the privacy we all need. But first of all, make sure that none of your father’s men did this.’ There was no lift of question in his voice. It was a statement of fact.

Daniel drew a breath to argue, and knew it instantly from Blackwell’s face that he understood and, more than that, he saw the gentleness in him. Perhaps he loved Mercy the same way, with the same absence of judgement or condemnation.

‘We’ve got just over two weeks,’ he said.

‘Then we’d better get on with it.’ Mercy poured more tea, as if she were free to start again. ‘What do you need to know?’

Daniel thought for a moment. ‘Where did Graves get his information and how reliable is it? Did anyone in Special Branch betray Narraway, or my father, and if so, who was it? I don’t think why matters now, and even whether or not it was deliberate, or just carelessness: trusting the wrong man, drunken misjudgement, a confidence to a lover. We need to find out just who, so no one else will be implicated.’

Blackwell was making notes in what looked to be a script of his own invention. ‘Would your father do that anyway?’ Blackwell asked.

‘Yes. But he doesn’t have access to Graves. I do.’ He winced as he said it. The thought of going back to Graves and trying to begin, or indeed ask him for information, was enough to chill him inside, in spite of the hot tea and the two bacon sandwiches.

Blackwell gave him a bleak, sympathetic smile, more a grimace, and poised his pencil for the next item.

‘That’ll do to start with. Kitteridge is continuing to search for anything useful in the law,’ Daniel said.

‘There won’t be anything in the law.’ Blackwell dismissed it. ‘Use him for something that matters, for heaven sake, he’s not a fool.’ He looked at Daniel, meeting his eyes. ‘Don’t need to tell him about your father. He’ll know anyway – the whole world will – if you fail! Bite the bullet!’

Daniel heard the faint contempt in Blackwell’s voice. He was about to fight back, then he realised he had nothing to fight with.

‘You’re standing in your own light,’ Blackwell said. ‘Get Kitteridge to help. fford Croft is in no position to complain. He got you into this. And you don’t need to tell him so. He’ll know.’

Daniel acquiesced silently.

‘And there’s one other thing,’ Blackwell added. ‘You need to find out how they burned her. Dropping a match on her might make a hole in her clothes, but not much more. Even if there was a fire in the grate, a hot coal would dig deep in the flesh, but it wouldn’t have burned her face. Did someone come prepared? Or know where to find the means? We need to dig her up and get an expert to tell us what was used. Can this woman of yours, fford Croft’s daughter, do that?’