by Anne Perry
Daniel felt himself blush. She was making fun of him, quite gently, but unmistakably. He deserved it. “You are right. I do have something on which I need your opinion. I haven’t brought it because I can’t take it out of the office. I…need you to come. We have to give it back to the prosecution tomorrow.”
Her eyes widened. “Do you have it legally? Or would I rather not know that?”
“Yes! It’s perfectly legal. It’s just that Kitteridge swore he would not take it anywhere else. It’s…only paper.”
“What do you need to know about it? I must bring the appropriate instruments with me.”
“Documents. We need to know if they’re forged or genuine.”
“And presumably you need to give them all back? And in the state you received them?”
“Yes. Is that a problem?”
She looked at him a little more closely. “Are you sure that you have them legally?”
“Yes! I wouldn’t ask you to be involved if it weren’t legal!”
“Stuff and nonsense! Of course you would, if you believed it was to bring about justice. Is that your cab I see waiting at the curb?” she said, looking over his shoulder.
“Yes.”
“Then you had better come in and help me carry my good microscope. And don’t drop it! Don’t tell me about the case yet. I want to make an unbiased judgment.”
He followed her in and pushed the door closed behind him. He knew the taxi driver would wait, since he had not paid him yet.
Miriam walked ahead of him, stiff-backed, straight-shouldered. He had forgotten how slender she was, the certainty with which she moved.
The huge cellar at first looked vast and full of shadows, but his eyes became accustomed to the lack of light quickly and he recognized the outlines of cupboards, tables, sinks where there was running water and drains, others where there were burners and retorts. Shelves were filled with glass jars full of chemicals.
“Daniel!”
He brought his attention back to the moment. She was holding out a large case for him to take.
“Be careful of it,” she warned. “Please take it to the cab and look after it. I shall follow in a moment.”
“Do you want me to come back and—”
“No! Don’t leave that alone. It’s about the most expensive thing I own.” Her eyes flared with pride and disbelief that he should even think such a thing.
Perhaps it was meant to warn him, even make him nervous. It had the opposite effect. He remembered with a surge of pleasure the elation of discovering patterns, making sense out of chaos, human passions flaming up out of inanimate objects.
As if she could read his thoughts, she suddenly blushed. Or perhaps it was because her own memories were just as sharp.
He turned and carried the box out the door, which she held open for him. He brought it up to the cab and set it down gently on the seat. “The lady will be coming in a moment,” he told the driver.
“Yes, sir,” the man answered patiently. Little surprised him in human behavior.
* * *
—
THEY ARRIVED BACK at the chambers a little after six, and by half-past Kitteridge was watching with interest as Daniel passed Miriam sheet after sheet of paper: letters, pages of ledgers and pages loose from account books, notes kept on meetings, and reminders to do this or that.
Each page she examined under her microscope, looking carefully at the signature for a few seconds. Then she made brief comment and passed it to Daniel to put in one pile or another. Two piles? No, three.
Daniel was aching to ask what she saw but held his tongue with difficulty. He knew she would tell him nothing until she was finished. His mouth was dry and he felt hollow with hunger. But the pile to be done was growing shallow, as the other three piles grew larger.
Behind him, Kitteridge fidgeted restlessly.
Finally, Miriam was finished. She looked very carefully at the last one and put it on the nearest pile. She turned to face them. “These are genuine. The middle pile is questionable, but not provably forgeries. This pile here is forged.”
“You’re sure?” Kitteridge interrupted her eagerly. “This would stand up in court? There’s something anyone else could see? I—” He stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry. We need to have something.”
“To do what?” she asked. “Prove your client guilty? Or someone else guilty?”
Kitteridge let out a sigh. “I’m not sure. To have anything to say, to cling on to as truth. And no, a forgery would mean he’s innocent.”
“You mean he had the right to some of the money, but not all of it?” She caught the meaning of it right away. “They’re all from the British Embassy in Washington.” Her face tightened. She directed the question to Daniel. “Is this the Philip Sidney case? My father mentioned it. It’s not much money for such an issue.”
Daniel knew what she meant. Perhaps she had gone to the heart of it. “I don’t think that’s really what it’s about,” Daniel said quietly. “It’s a smaller case to carry a bigger one, a lot darker.”
“What are you trying to do? Open up the darker one behind? Or protect him from it?” She searched his face and remained puzzled.
He should have known she would see it clearly and press him to answer. “I’m not sure.” He could not lie to her. He would never get away with it anyhow, nor did he really want to. He would lose something, he felt, though he was not sure what. “I want to know what the truth is. I thought I was sure when I started. The case behind this is despicable. This one, I’m not sure. And it matters rather a lot. Because if the accusation is false, who’s really doing it? And of course—why?”
“Well, some of these signatures are forged, but I think most of them are genuine.”
“How do you know?” Kitteridge asked.
“I’ll show you under the microscope, so you can be prepared to ask the right questions.” She frowned. “Although I’m not sure how it will help you. Except…”
“What?” Daniel asked immediately.
“It’s not terribly well done. When we sign our name, it’s not the same every time. Close, but hardly ever exactly the same.”
“They aren’t all the same,” Daniel argued.
“No. Whoever it was, he was clever enough for that. But several are. Or there may be two or three that are identical. And then another two or three. But if you are making it exactly the same as one you copied, you move slowly to be sure to follow the lines. When you write your own signature, you move swiftly, with certainty; you touch the pen to the paper differently. Here, I’ll show you.”
She turned and put one of the letters under the microscope, then adjusted the paper so that the lens was directly above the actual signature. “Look,” she told him.
Daniel leaned close to the eyepiece and focused it. He saw the ink on the paper in something he hardly recognized. The lines were thick and, in places, almost as if they had scales, tiny little spikes, all pointing the same way. It was extraordinarily clear where the pen had lifted off the paper, and where it had touched down again. He stared at it for several seconds.
Miriam stood close behind him and moved the paper away, then replaced it with another. It was completely different. The line was smoother, the place where the pen lifted off the paper was clean, as if it had landed with a light pressure, and taken off again easily. It would be impossible to confuse one with the other.
He turned away from it to look at her. “Are those the forgeries, with all the little spatters?”
“Yes, you can’t help it, however careful you are, if you write slowly. The best forgeries may not be as close to the originals as a really good copy, but they are done swiftly, with assurance, so they look natural. Whoever did these was very careful, but not clever enough to do away with the signs you can see with a microscope.”
“Would you be willing to sw
ear to that in court?” Kitteridge asked.
“Of course,” Miriam replied. “But you’d need a lot more than that to prove anything.” She turned to Daniel. “What are you trying to prove anyway? That he did embezzle, or that he didn’t?”
“We’re for the defense,” he answered. “That he didn’t.”
She looked at him very candidly. “And what about the other crime you said was worse? Are you trying to bring that up? Or make sure it doesn’t arise, even tangentially in character reference? Or as explanation as to why he left Washington so hastily? Because if you want to protect him altogether, you should have him plead guilty to the embezzlement, pay the money back, and get the embassy to withdraw the charges. Case closed. Nobody would have any cause to raise the other issue, whatever it is, never mind give evidence of it in court.”
Suddenly Daniel’s mind was whirling. He thought of her as a forensic doctor, a pathologist who read evidence as another person might read a book. He had forgotten she was a lawyer’s daughter. Of course, if they really wanted to protect Sidney, they would at least point out that option to him. Whether he took it or not was his choice. Whether they proved that some of the letters of authorization of payment were forgeries or not had nothing to do with using the trial to revisit the question of the attack on Rebecca and make it hideously public.
What would Sidney choose, if he really were innocent of the embezzlement? And of the assault?
Or innocent of the embezzlement, but guilty of the assault?
Miriam must have seen these thoughts written in his face. Daniel felt totally transparent and, for a moment, terribly young.
“Damn!” Kitteridge swore. “What a thundering mess! Thank you very much, Miss fford Croft. You have clarified half of it for us and made the other half much worse.”
“I haven’t changed what it is, Mr. Kitteridge,” she replied. “Just shone a bit of light on it. If you have any other evidence, I would be happy to look at it for you.”
“Not yet, and probably not ever,” he said ruefully. “Before we tidy this up, and preferably so that we haven’t done the prosecution’s work for them, would you like to have supper? I’ve got some pretty decent pork pies. And cider.”
“Thank you very much. I would,” she accepted. She looked at Daniel and gave a half smile. “It doesn’t help, does it?”
He forced himself to smile back. “Not yet.”
CHAPTER
Eleven
THE CASE AGAINST Philip Sidney opened in a minor court several miles from the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, and thus also from Lincoln’s Inn, where most of the lawyers’ chambers were situated, including those of fford Croft and Gibson.
Daniel went by underground train. Later, if things got more urgent, he might hire a taxi.
The train was crowded and noisy as it rattled from station to station under the city. He did not want to read papers relevant to the trial in public, so he sat in silence and considered what he could do. There were very few possible arguments. He knew them by heart and did not feel sanguine about any of them. The only good thing was that the prosecution had produced a far longer list of witnesses than he had expected, which indicated a very thorough case, but which also allowed him far more time to work for some break in Sidney’s favor.
Having been given the list at somewhat short notice, he had spent the intervening time learning as much as he could about the witnesses.
“All character witnesses,” Kitteridge had remarked sourly when Daniel showed him the list. “As we supposed. They’re not going to ship half the Washington embassy over here. Still, you might be able to make something of it. Better find out what you can regarding this lot. Got to have something to argue about—with luck, trip them up over. Get to it, Pitt!” And he had handed the list back to Daniel.
That had been three days ago. Four, if you counted Sunday, when nobody’s office was open. Kitteridge had not yet heard back from the Washington police about Morley Cross’s whereabouts. Was the man afraid of being questioned?
The train arrived at the nearest station to the court. Daniel walked the three blocks through the hot, dusty street to the courthouse and went in. The halls were already buzzing with people. Someone had seen to it that word got around, Daniel thought grimly. This case was going to be about a lot of different things, least among them the possible embezzlement of one hundred pounds from a British embassy thousands of miles away.
Philip Sidney looked cornered when he was brought in and led to the dock. He glanced anxiously at Daniel, almost as if he were awaiting execution: brave and desperate, but determined to show it as little as possible. Was he a superb actor, or was there something essentially brave in him, something like the hero whose name he bore?
Daniel could not ally that with Rebecca Thorwood’s account of the assault, essentially the act of a cowardly man. And yet Tobias Thorwood had sworn to it. They had done a certain amount of digging into Tobias’s character and found only a decent and honorable man, with a deep love of his wife and his only living child. No one had caught him in any dishonesty, verbal or financial.
The judge was a clean-shaven, middle-aged man of unremarkable features, but the more Daniel looked at him, the more he saw a scholar within the robes, rather than a man here to exercise power or further his career with a controversial decision. Or perhaps Daniel was just being hopeful. Heaven knew, there was little enough to cling to.
The jury was sworn, twelve ordinary citizens, all of good standing, all men, of course. Women were not considered serious and emotionally stable enough to make an important judgment that might affect the rest of a person’s life. They might too easily become frightened or confused. Daniel had grown up with a mother and sister who had dispelled any such idea very quickly. In his earliest years, he had known the Pitts’ maid, Gracie, all five-foot-nothing of her, and she was the most down-to-earth judge of character he had ever met. And Great-grandmother Mariah was not impressed by anyone at all, probably not even the old Queen!
And he could remember very clearly Great-aunt Vespasia. Kings, never mind high court judges, had admired her for her courage as well as beauty.
But you dealt with what was, not what you would like to have had, and Daniel was here trying to defend a man he was deeply afraid might be guilty, if not of the lesser crime, then of the greater.
His Honor Judge Ullswater brought the court to order and Mr. James Hillyer opened for the prosecution. “Your Honor, gentlemen of the jury,” he began easily. He was a man of about forty, unremarkable except for his most beautiful hair and the deep lines in his face that suggested a considerable sense of humor. “I am going to show you a man accused of a trivial, and so far as we are aware, completely unnecessary crime. It is a series of comparatively petty thefts. A few pounds here and, days later, another few pounds there. A steady bleeding away, if you like, of his employer’s funds, amounting altogether to one hundred pounds. And this concerns you deeply, because the employer concerned is His Majesty’s Government, your government. Specifically, the British Embassy in Washington, the capital of the United States of America. The disgrace and embarrassment to this country is vast, compared with the amount stolen. Of course, he could pay back the money within a little while. It is not a serious loss to the government. It would be ridiculous to portray it as such.”
He smiled ruefully and gave a tiny shrug of his shoulders. It was an elegant gesture. “But it is a devastating loss to our honor, our national pride. I even considered whether to plead with my superiors not to prosecute the case and draw attention to it. Let it die in ignominy. But others know of it. Are we a people who hide our sins away from others, and so let them breed, and let others see that we are willing victims, afraid of the truth, favoring a lie? A fit subject for mockery. As it is said, you can pull the lion’s tail with impunity, in fact he has no teeth!”
There was a stir of anger in the gallery, a nerv
ous giggle toward the back. Daniel saw several jurors stiffen in their seats. One even shook his head sharply.
“I perceive you see this as I do,” Hillyer said softly. “Justice is not partial, and is not in fear of any man, or people, or nation. I will show you the accused as a well-bred young man, carrying a name that used to be honored in the noble tales of our history. But a man who also carries with him a sense of entitlement, to do as he pleases without answering to the law, as lesser men do.”
What on earth was Daniel going to say that could undo that picture drawn in the jury’s mind? He wished that Kitteridge were doing this, not him. It was his turn at last, and he stood up reluctantly. He cleared his throat and began.
“Good morning, Your Honor, gentlemen.” He smiled very slightly, only a patch of light crossing his face. “My learned friend may succeed in showing some of these things, but you will see for yourself, and judge for yourself. It is your duty, and I trust your nature, not to prejudge a man because of the way he speaks, or dresses, or what name his mother chooses to give him.”
He felt ridiculous. Was anybody listening to him? He cleared his throat again. “I could bring you any number of witnesses to tell you Philip Sidney is an honorable man, that he is not extravagant, nor does he live beyond his means. They can show you no proof that he has debts, because there are none. But there are papers, financial documents, showing the transfer of a few pounds in payments for expenses, some of them highly questionable. Some of them we will prove to you are forgeries.”
Now the jurors were all upright, their faces alert. In the gallery there was rustling and shifting of feet.
Daniel continued, “You will find it fascinating how that can be demonstrated with a microscope. That, at least, shows that there was someone else involved, with dishonorable intent.”
Though Daniel had spoken for only a few moments, when he sat down, his heart was beating hard in his chest, almost choking his breath.