Twenty-One Days

by Anne Perry

  Graves stared at him with acute dislike. His desperation robbed him of dignity, stripped naked his fears and exposed the inner man far more than if he stood without the decency of being clothed. The humiliation burned in his eyes.

  Daniel needed him to cooperate. ‘It’s your neck they’ll stretch, not mine,’ he said ruthlessly. ‘Do you want me to stay . . . or go?’

  ‘I did not kill her,’ Graves said between his teeth.

  ‘Well, someone did. I need to know a lot more about her. You can’t protect her now, either her reputation or her life. I’m looking for the truth. I don’t ask out of prurient curiosity, and I’m not going to tell anyone else, if it proves of no value in finding who killed her. Believe it or not, I don’t find other people’s affairs particularly interesting, and I’m good at keeping secrets. For one thing, I’m your lawyer, so I have to keep them, unless by following them up I can prove your innocence.’

  Graves let out his breath in a sigh. It signified agreement, but the language of his body, slumped in a chair, made it seem like surrender.

  Daniel felt a twinge of guilt. But this was no time to be gentle at the expense of truth.

  Graves looked lost, as if he had no idea where to begin.

  ‘You said she was eccentric,’ Daniel prompted. ‘In what ways? Did she do something that might have offended people?’

  ‘Lots of things,’ Graves said tartly. ‘She was always offending people. But you don’t kill a woman and burn her face so she’s hardly recognisable because you don’t like the way she dresses! Or because she keeps company you think beneath her, or because she walks in the room as if she owns it, or talks to the wrong people. For God’s sake, man, we are not savages. Someone . . . hated her.’ His face looked pinched, and frightened at his own words. He was angry, and he was weary of concealing it.

  Daniel kept his patience with difficulty. Time was short, and he had little enough knowledge to work with. He began again. ‘I’m trying to get an idea of what she was like,’ he spoke slowly. ‘At the moment, I have nowhere to begin. Someone did this to her. Do you think it was a chance robber who took nothing, but lingered long enough to disfigure her before escaping?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Of—’ Then Graves stopped. It was as if a shadow had suddenly passed over his face. His shoulders slumped in submission. ‘I’ll tell you what I can. She was a woman of strong opinions, and aroused strong opinions in others.’

  ‘What about, that might have caused a quarrel?’ Daniel asked. This was more hopeful.

  ‘Politics,’ Graves answered. ‘She wanted to reform all sorts of things. But I don’t know if anyone took her seriously. And of course she wanted women to have the vote, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘So do quite a few people.’ Daniel thought of his own mother, but did not say so. ‘Did she offend anyone in particular?’

  Graves made a gesture of distaste. ‘She offended so many I lost count. She was highly in fashion sometimes, and wore her clothes well, better than Lady Midhurst, and the parson’s wife, and the doctor’s wife. But that happens in all communities where women have nothing useful to do with their time. Can you imagine killing another man because he has a better tailor, or can tie a cravat more elegantly?’

  ‘I can imagine it being an outward sign of a much deeper rivalry,’ Daniel replied. ‘Or to show who is the leader of that community: whose word counts the most, not to mention who draws the most admiration from men, maybe one in particular.’

  Graves looked at him with grudging agreement. ‘It all seems so desperately trivial, but I suppose it’s not. It depends upon the size of your world, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Was Mrs Graves’ world so small? Who were her friends? Perhaps I should speak to them; they would know more of how she spent her time. If there was one who was jealous, even if for a futile reason, and there was a man involved? Money? A rivalry over something?’

  Graves looked helpless.

  Daniel leaned forward. ‘It’s happened! Think, man. Your life depends upon it!’

  ‘I – I took no interest in local affairs,’ Graves said helplessly. ‘I’m a very busy man. It may not fall within your professional orbit, but I’m a biographer of some note. I write with great detail about men of the highest importance. I am noted for accuracy, even in the smallest details. I – I have no time to involve myself with the affairs of nobodies.’

  ‘A biographer?’ Daniel ignored the insult and affected an interest he did not feel. ‘Then you must have learned to understand human nature, at its best and worst. You must know what makes a man give in to his weaknesses, or rise to his strengths.’

  ‘Of course.’ Graves looked as if at last Daniel had said something of worth. ‘It is a high art, but also a most exact one. You have to understand people, to know what to seek that tells you their deepest secrets.’ Some of the tension had gone from his face. It was as if he had moved his position in relation to the light.

  ‘Good! Then speak as if you were doing a biography about Ebony! Describe her for me: her looks, her mannerisms. Tell me, what did she read, what did she care about? What causes did she fight for, and who did she fight against? Who did she admire? Who did she criticise? Who did she quarrel with, and what about? Somebody killed her. If it wasn’t you, who was it? A biographer might be able to make a good guess!’

  Graves was silent for so long that Daniel was about to speak again, and perhaps frighten him into some reaction, when at last he replied.

  ‘She was a very attractive woman,’ Graves said thoughtfully. ‘She was interesting and alert. If I were writing about her in a story, I would say people were drawn to her because she was so alive. She felt more than most people do. She was never tedious, but she could be extremely irritating. She tried my temper sorely, on occasion. But I never grew bored with her.’

  Daniel watched Graves’ face as he spoke. It was not affection he saw, virtually no tenderness, but there was a certain admiration. Ebony had earned his respect, albeit unwillingly given. He did not interrupt.

  ‘She loved music, colour, sensation, life itself. She loved flowers, open skies, electric storms, the flight of birds, the utter silence of a starlit night. And things made her laugh that I might have found ridiculous.’

  So, he had noticed such things. She had been real to him, at least at times.

  ‘She sounds like a woman who had both friends and enemies,’ Daniel observed.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. I didn’t know them.’

  Daniel kept his temper with difficulty.

  Graves seemed to show some appreciation of his wife, but more like the appreciation of an artist for a subject to paint than of a man for the woman he had married, and who had borne his two children. Daniel wondered what question he could ask that would bring out the humanity in him.

  ‘Is your daughter like her mother?’

  ‘Who, Sarah? No, nothing like her at all. Sarah looks like my mother. Fair-haired. Blue-eyes. Arthur is more like Ebony, or he would have been, were he . . . were he well.’

  Daniel tried to catch the emotion in Graves’ voice, or his face, or even the tension in his body, but he saw nothing. He could have been speaking of a stranger, not his son.

  ‘Has he always been ill?’ he asked.

  ‘No . . . he was perfectly normal until he caught an illness when he was about ten years old. Now he will always be . . . dependent.’ He still hid all feeling. ‘His doctor is hopeful, if he gets constant treatment. But if you are looking to Arthur for any explanation of his mother’s murder, you will not find one. He never leaves his room. Sarah is very good with him. She’s very patient. Dedicated much of her life to him.’ For a moment, there was something in his voice, perhaps admiration, but it disappeared before Daniel could be certain.

  ‘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 loo
ked 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.’

  ‘What did you imagine when you started doing biographies like this?’ Daniel lashed back at him. ‘That they were going to let you write whatever you like, and they’d do nothing about it? It must have crossed your mind, in among all the thoughts of how clever you were.’

  ‘The men I am writing about are dead! At least the most powerful ones are!’

  ‘But you said yourself their power stretches beyond the grave. Someone who cares is still alive. Are you going to tell me who I should start looking at?’

  ‘So you can destroy my writing? How do I know you aren’t paid by them?’

  ‘Because I wouldn’t be trying to clear your name, you fool! I’d let you hang,’ Daniel replied.

  ‘For all I know, that’s what you are doing.’ Graves rose to his feet, chains on his manacles clanking together.

  Daniel thought for a moment before he answered, then he spoke deliberately. ‘You are quite right. You don’t know. But if these people really were guilty of treason, the Government would want to know. That might halt your death sentence long enough for us to find out more.’

  Hope flared in Graves’ eyes, then died again as Daniel looked at him. In spite of himself, he felt a kind of pity.

  ‘I’ll find out what I can about whether Mrs Graves was speaking unwisely. And Mr Kitteridge is working on the legal side of it. If there was any flaw in the proceedings whatever, he’ll find it.’

  ‘Will you come back and tell me?’

  ‘If I have anything to tell. Or to ask.’

  Graves did not reply. He turned away, so Daniel could not see his face. It was dismissal.

  It was still only the middle of the day when Daniel went out of the grey shadow of the prison into the light on the pavement. He was going over in his mind what he would, or could, do. He was not sure how much he believed of anything that Graves had to say.

  Perhaps the first thing was to find out if Graves was actually anything like the writer he claimed to be. He should exhaust his own resources first. Surely fford Croft would know. He was the man who had involved them in the case in the first place. But if fford Croft knew that Graves was a biographer who dealt in such dangerous subjects, would he not have told them that at the beginning? It was an obvious place to start looking.

  To what purpose? Graves had nothing to gain in sending Daniel on a fool’s errand. But perhaps he had nothing to lose, either. Would he rather have Daniel think he was a threat to some traitor than guilty of a sordid domestic murder over jealousy, humiliation, or greed? That was believable, too. Perhaps Ebony had mocked him, and his pride had led him to such hatred that he had killed her, and he had to destroy the beautiful face that had made a fool of him?

  It sounded more likely than his writing an exposé of some famous figure whom he had previously suspected of . . . what? An unknown treason?

  He passed a fairly large bookshop and decided to go in and enquire about Gra
ves’ work.

  ‘Yes, sir, may I help you?’ the elderly gentleman at the counter asked him.

  ‘Thank you. I have had a certain author recommended to me, and I wondered whether you carried any of his work, and would advise me where to begin.’

  ‘If you will tell me the name of the author, sir . . .?’

  ‘Yes. Russell Graves. I believe he is a biographer of some note.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ The man’s face assumed an expression of piety. ‘I dare say you have not heard. I’m afraid he has met with . . . a catastrophe.’

  ‘Yes. I had heard. But he will perhaps appeal. And it does not alter his work. I am told he gets very much to grips with his subjects.’

  ‘His research is exhaustive. Personally, sir, I prefer to leave my heroes their privacy. We are all weak at times, and I dare say there is no one who could stand the closest scrutiny. But I believe his biography of the Duke of Wellington was less scathing than some, and told us a few incidents that are little known, particularly of his political career, long after the Peninsula War or Waterloo. I can see if have a copy, if you like. We have sold one or two of his works lately, but I may have one left.’

  Daniel had no money to spend on rare and expensive books he was not going to read, certainly not in the next nineteen days. ‘No thank you,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’d like something more contemporary. If I change my mind, I shall return.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the man nodded, understanding exactly what Daniel meant.

  Daniel checked in with fford Croft, and told him of his progress, or lack of it, but that he had a line of enquiry to follow. Apparently, Kitteridge had not yet discovered anything worthy of comment. That was no surprise. There probably was not anything to find – it was simply obligatory to try.