Seven Dials

by Anne Perry

  The knock came again, urgent and persistent.

  She picked up the rolling pin, then put it down and chose the carving knife instead. Keeping it hidden in the folds of her skirt, she tiptoed to the back door and opened it sharply.

  Tellman stood on the step with his hand raised to knock again. He looked cold and worried.

  “You should have asked who it was before you opened,” he said immediately.

  The criticism stung her. “You stop telling me wot ter do, Samuel Tellman!” she retorted. “You in’t got no right. This is my ’ouse, not yours.” She realized as soon as the words were out that her heart was pounding with suppressed fear, and she knew he was right. It would have been so simple to ask who it was, and she had not thought of it because she had been so preoccupied with thoughts about Martin Garvie, and people taken against their will and shut up in Bedlam, and the fact that they had not been able to solve the case of a man shot to death in a woman’s garden at night. What was he there for? No good, skulking in the bushes.

  Tellman came inside. He was pale and his face was drawn with lines of tension.

  “Somebody’s got to tell you what to do,” he said, closing the door hard. “You haven’t got the sense you were born with. What’s that?”

  She put the knife down on the kitchen table. “A carvin’ knife. Wot does it look like?” she snapped back.

  “It looks like something a burglar would take off you and hold to your throat,” he replied. “If you were lucky.”

  “Is that wot yer came ’ere ter tell me?” she demanded, swinging around to face him. “It in’t me ’as got no wits.”

  “Of course I didn’t come to tell you that!” He stood near the table, his whole body too tight to sit down. “But you’ve got to act with more sense.”

  If anyone else had said that, she would have brushed it aside, but from him it stung unaccountably. He was at once too far and too close. She hated that it mattered so much because it confused her, it stirred up feelings over which she had no control, and she was not used to that.

  “Don’t you tell me off like I belonged to yer,” she said, gulping back a surge of emotion, almost a loneliness, that threatened to swamp her.

  He looked startled for a moment, then he frowned very slightly. “Don’t you want to belong to anyone, Gracie?” he asked.

  She was stunned. It was the last thing she had expected him to say, and she had no answer for it. No, that was not true, she did have an answer, but she was not ready to admit it to him yet. She needed more time to accustom herself to the idea. She swallowed, opened her mouth to deny it, then like a wave breaking over her, she knew she could not. It would be a lie, but he might believe her and not ask again. He might even go away.

  “W-well …” she stammered. “Well … I … s’pose I do …” She had said it … aloud!

  He took a deep breath also. There was no indecision in him, only a fear that he would be rejected. “Then you’d better belong to me,” he answered. “Because there isn’t going to be anyone who wants you more than I do.”

  She stared at him. The moment had come. It was now or never. The warmth rose up inside her like sliding into delicious, hot, sweet water, almost like floating. She did not realize she was not saying anything.

  “Well, you’re stubborn and self-willed, and you’ve got the daftest ideas about people’s places I ever heard,” he went on in the crackling silence. “But heaven help me, there isn’t anybody else I really want … so if you’ll have me—” He stopped. “Are you waiting for me to say I love you? Maybe you haven’t got the wits you were born with, but you’re not so daft you don’t know that!”

  “Yes, I know it!” she said quickly. “An’ … an’ …” It was only fair that she answer him honestly, however difficult it was to say. “An’ I love you too, Samuel. But jus’ don’ take liberties! It don’ give you the right ter tell me wot I’m doin’ or wot I in’t.”

  His lantern face lit with a huge smile. “You’ll do as I tell you. But I want peace in my own house, so I reckon I won’t tell you anything you’d mind too much.”

  “Good!” She took a gulp of air. “Then we’ll be all right when … when it’s time.” She took another gulp. “Would you like a cup o’ tea? Yer look ’alf starved.” She was using the word in the old sense of being cold.

  “Yes,” he accepted, pulling out a chair and sitting down at last. “Yes, I would, please.” He knew better than to pursue an answer as to time now. She had accepted, that was enough.

  She went past him to the stove, overwhelmed with relief. This was as far as she could go now. “Was that wot yer came for?” she asked.

  “No. That’s been on my mind for … for a while. I came to tell Mr. Pitt that the police have a new witness in the Eden Lodge case, and it looks pretty bad.”

  She pulled the kettle onto the hob and turned around to look at him. “Wot kind of a witness?”

  “One that says he knows the Egyptian woman sent a message to Mr. Lovat, telling him to come to her,” he said grimly. “They’ll call him to the witness stand … bound to.”

  “Wot can we do?” she asked anxiously.

  “Nothing,” he answered. “But it’s better to know.”

  She did not argue, but she worried for Pitt, and even the sense of warmth inside her, the little tingle of victory that she had faced the moment of decision and accepted it, and all the vast changes it would mean one day, did not dispel her concern for Pitt, and the case they surely could not win now.

  PITT AND CHARLOTTE returned shortly after that. When Pitt had heard all that Tellman had to say, he thanked him for it, put his coat back on and went straight out again. He could not wait until tomorrow morning to inform Narraway. It was Friday night. They had two days’ grace before the trial resumed, but it was a very short time to rescue anything out of this. Pitt was not used to such complete failure, and it was a cold, hollow feeling with a bitter aftertaste he believed would remain.

  Of course he had had unsolved cases before, and others to which he was certain he knew the answer but could not prove it, but they had not been of this magnitude.

  Narraway looked up as the manservant closed the door, leaving Pitt standing in the middle of the room. He read his face immediately. “Well?” he demanded, leaning forward as if to stand up.

  “The police have a witness who says Ayesha sent Lovat a note asking him to go to her,” he said simply. There was no point trying to make it sound less dreadful than it was. He was aware of all that it meant before Narraway spoke.

  “So she deliberately lured him to the garden,” Narraway said bitterly. “Either he destroyed the note himself or she took it from him before the police got there. It was not a crime of the moment; she always intended to kill him.” His face creased in thought. “But did she intend to implicate Ryerson, or was that accidental?”

  “If she did”—Pitt sat down uninvited—“then she must have been extraordinarily sure of him. How did she know that he would get there before the police, and that he would help her dispose of the body? Did she have an alternative plan if he had raised the alarm instead?”

  Narraway’s mouth twisted in a hard grimace. “Presumably she was the one who called the police, or had her servant do it. If it was in revenge for the massacre, then he will have been party to it.”

  Narraway’s dark face was heavy with foreboding. He stared straight ahead at some horror he could see within his own vision. “I assume they are calling this witness on Monday?” he said without turning to Pitt.

  “I should think so,” Pitt replied. “It will prove intent.”

  “And then she will take the stand and tell the world exactly why,” Narraway went on in a low, hard voice. “And the newspapers will rush to repeat it, and within hours it will be all over the country, then all over the world.” His face looked bruised, almost as if he had been beaten. “Egypt will rise in revolt and make the Mahdi and the whole bloodbath of the Sudan look like a vicarage tea party. Even Gordon in Khartoum will
seem a civilized difference between peoples. And inevitably we shall lose Suez.” He clenched his fists, his shoulders tight. “God! What a hellish fiasco. We were damned from the start—weren’t we!” It was not a question, just an exclamation of despair.

  “I don’t understand it,” Pitt said slowly, feeling his way in a darkness of disjointed reason. “Why now? And if the purpose behind her coming to London, drawing in Ryerson, the whole business of trying to get the cotton manufacturing back into Egypt, the murder of Lovat, was in order to expose the massacre … then why all that trouble?” He stared at Narraway. “Why not simply make it known in Egypt? The facts are there. The bodies could be found and exhumed. With thirty-odd people shot to death, even after the burning, some of them will have bullet holes, chips in bone to show it wasn’t simply an accidental fire. Why all this murder and trial? Why risk her own life at all? If they know about the massacre, surely the murder of one of the soldiers responsible is trivial, almost an irrelevance, compared with exposing it? It’s ridiculously inefficient like this.”

  Narraway stared at him, his eyes widening. “What, exactly, are you saying, Pitt? That she is being used by someone else? Expendable?”

  “I think so … yes,” Pitt agreed. “What use is it to anyone to involve Ryerson?”

  “Publicity,” Narraway said instantly. “The murder of one junior diplomat is neither here nor there. It’s Ryerson’s involvement that has journalists from every country in Europe writing about it. If the massacre comes out in the Old Bailey, you can be sure not only will all Britain know about it, and all Egypt, but most of the rest of the world as well. We wouldn’t have a chance in hell of keeping it quiet. Not only will all of the violence and horror of the event itself come out, but every stupid and ugly thing anyone has done since to conceal it.”

  “So she came believing she was trying to help the cotton industry, but whoever it was who sent her intended this all the time?” For Pitt it was now only half a question. At last it made sense of what he had learned of Ayesha in Alexandria. This was the woman he had discovered. And once again she had been betrayed, only this time it would cost her her life. There was only one question now. “What did they tell her to persuade her to kill Lovat?” he said aloud. “Or didn’t she?”

  Narraway stared at him, amazement, then comprehension, in his face. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “If she didn’t, then who did?”

  Pitt stood up. “I don’t know.” Anger seethed inside him for Ayesha, for Ryerson, who unquestionably had been used, for all the people who were going to be driven into the maelstrom that Egypt would become. The beauty and the warmth of Alexandria would be shattered, as would the lives of the men and women whose faces he had seen when he was there, without even knowing their names. And he hated not knowing, and having his emotions pushed and pulled, and then torn apart by pity for first one, and then another, and not knowing what to believe. “Give me the authority I need to go and see her.” That was a demand, not a request.

  “I can’t get it until the morning,” Narraway replied. “You’ll need it in writing,” he added as Pitt hesitated. “She’s not guilty yet, and she has rights. The Egyptian embassy will still protect her. I’ll have it for you by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Pitt accepted it because he had no choice.

  THE NEXT DAY, after a restless night in which the little sleep he got was filled with dreams of violence and almost unbearable tension, he was at Narraway’s house by noon. He was obliged to wait nearly two hours alone in the morning room until Narraway returned with a piece of paper in an envelope, and gave it to him without explanation.

  “Thank you.” Pitt took it, glanced at the few lines of writing on it and was impressed, although he had no intention of allowing Narraway to know that. “I’ll go straightaway.”

  “Do,” Narraway agreed. “Before they change their minds. And Pitt … be careful. The stakes could be as high as war. The people behind all this are not going to be squeamish about getting rid of one policeman more or less.”

  Pitt was jolted, in spite of himself. “I know that!” he said sharply, then turned and left, calling a good-bye over his shoulder so Narraway should not be aware how ugly and deep his thoughts had become. He had faced physical danger before. No one could patrol the back alleys of London as he had done without it. But this was a different venture, a conspiracy of a magnitude he had not tasted before. It was no one man’s ambition but a nation’s fate which could erupt in death and awful, senseless destruction.

  He took the first hansom that passed and told the driver to take him as rapidly as he could to Newgate. As soon as he was there he went straight to the warden in charge and showed him the paper Narraway had given him. The man read it right through twice, and then consulted with a superior. Finally, when Pitt was about to lose his temper, he conducted him to the cell where Ayesha Zakhari was held, and unlocked the door.

  Pitt stepped in and heard the steel clang behind him. The woman who turned to face him startled him so profoundly he was robbed of words. He had created a mental picture of her from his expectations, and from the Greek Alexandria he had seen. Perhaps old stories of the city had touched his imagination without his being aware of it. He had pictured someone olive-skinned with lustrous dark hair, rich and sultry, with a softly curving body, perhaps average height or less.

  She was very tall, only three or four inches less than he, and slender, delicately boned. She wore a pale silk gown like those he had seen on women in Alexandria, but more graciously cut. But most extraordinary of all, her skin was almost black and her hair was no more than a dark, smooth covering for her perfectly shaped head. Her features were more than beautiful; they were so exquisite she seemed like a work of art, and yet the vitality in her made her obviously a living, breathing woman. She was not an Egyptian of the modern, sophisticated Mediterranean Islam; she was of ancient, Coptic Africa—not Cleopatra at all, but older than that, Nefertiti.

  “Who are you?” Her voice jolted him back to the present. It was low and a little husky, but with hardly any accent he could place, only a slightly more precise diction than an Englishwoman would have had, other than perhaps Great-aunt Vespasia.

  “I apologize,” he said without thinking. “My name is Thomas Pitt. I need to speak with you, Miss Zakhari, before the court resumes on Monday morning. Certain things have transpired of which you may not be aware.”

  “You may tell me whatever you wish,” she replied levelly. “I have nothing to tell you, beyond what I have already said. And since I cannot prove it, there is little purpose in my repeating it. You are wasting your time, Mr. Pitt, and you are wasting mine also. And I think perhaps I do not have very much of it left.” It was said without self-pity, and yet he could see in her face that underneath the effort of courage there was immeasurable pain.

  He remained standing because there was nowhere to sit, except the cot, and to reach that he would have had to walk past her, and then look up where she stood.

  “I went to Alexandria about three weeks ago,” he began, and saw the start of surprise in her, the stiffening of her body, but she did not speak. “I wanted to learn more about you,” he went on. “I admit that what I found surprised me.”

  The ghost of a smile crossed her face, and vanished. She had a gift of stillness which was more than a mere lack of movement; it was an inner control, a peace of the spirit.

  “I believe you came here to England to try to persuade Ryerson to influence the cotton industry, so more Egyptian cotton could be woven where it was grown, so that the factories could be started up again, as they were in the time of Mohammed Ali.”

  Again she was surprised. It was no more than a hesitation in her breathing; he felt it rather than saw it.

  “So your own people could prosper from their work,” he added. “It was naive. If you had understood how much money was vested in the trade, how many people’s power, I think you would have realized that no one man, even with Ryerson’s office, could have had any effect.”
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br />   She drew in her breath as though she was going to argue, then she let it out silently and turned half away from him. The light on her smooth face shone like polished silk. Her skin was blemishless, her cheekbones high, her nose long and straight, her eyes a little slanted upwards. It was a face of passion and immense dignity, but oddly, it was not without humor. The tiny lines, visible because he was close to her, spoke of laughter, not easy as of mere good humor, but of intelligence and irony as well.

  “I think that the man who sent you knew that you could not succeed,” he went on. He was not certain whether it was a shadow that moved, or if her body stiffened a trifle under the silk of her dress. “I believe his purpose was different,” he continued. “And that cotton was only the reason he gave you, because it is one you could serve with all your effort, whatever the cost to yourself.”

  “You are mistaken,” she replied, without looking at him. “If I was naive, then I have paid a high price for it, but I did not kill Lieutenant Lovat.”

  “But you are prepared to hang for it?” he said with surprise. “And not only yourself, but Mr. Ryerson as well.”

  She flinched as if he had struck her, but she did not make any sound, nor move her position.

  “Do you think perhaps because he is a minister in the government that they will let him off?” he asked.

  She turned to face him at last, her eyes wide and almost black.

  “Have you not realized yet that he has enemies?” he said more loudly than he wished to, but he could not afford gentleness. She might back away, evade the truth again. “And whoever sent you has far bigger aims than cotton, in Egypt or Manchester.”

  “That is not true.” She stated it as a fact. There was certainty in her eyes, then, even as he was watching, it wavered before she could master it.

  “If you did not kill Lovat, then who did?” he said far more quietly. He had not yet made up his mind whether to say anything of the massacre to her, or even to hint at it. He watched her, searching for anything in her expression, however fleeting, to betray the hatred that could lie behind a murder of revenge. So far he had seen nothing at all, not even a shadow.