Twenty-One Days

by Anne Perry

  ‘You may be poking a stick into a hornets’ nest,’ Blackwell warned. ‘Why don’t you let me do it – sideways, like?’

  ‘Can you?’ Daniel asked, but he was really wondering if Blackwell already knew, or guessed, far more than Daniel did.

  ‘You can do most things, if you know the right people to ask.’ Blackwell smiled, pouring himself another cup of tea. ‘And, of course, the right questions.’

  Daniel thought of a lot of things to ask, and a lot of warnings and rules for Blackwell to keep, or at least not to break too badly, and ended up simply saying, ‘Thank you.’ He took a sip of his own tea, still very hot, and a bite of the bacon sandwich. It was so good he realised how hungry he was, and ate the rest of it before speaking again.

  Blackwell was following his own train of thought. ‘Wonder what axe the publisher has to grind. He won’t be so stupid as to think he could avoid causing a furore.’

  Mercy put down the piece of toast she was buttering. ‘There could be a lot of interesting things to find out about that,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘And a lot of reasons for doing it, or not doing it.’

  Daniel turned to look at her. The white stripe in her hair caught the light and shone dazzlingly, then she moved her head and it was shadowed again.

  ‘Apart from money, what?’ he asked. ‘A personal revenge? Pretty deep hatred to take revenge on the dead, isn’t it? Someone who was too scared to do it while they were alive?’

  ‘Your father’s head of Special Branch, right?’ Mercy said thoughtfully, moving her own slice of toast away from the open door of the oven fire.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘His intention would be protecting the reputation of his friends, not protecting his own. It’s a good distinction. Oldest trick in the book,’ she added.

  ‘He’d see through that,’ Daniel answered, but as he said it, he wondered if it were true. Friends, real friends who had fought battles beside you, after they were exhausted, but fought on to protect, stood by you. Even if the end was defeat, they did not leave you, they stayed with you. Friends knew your flaws, as you did theirs, but stood by you anyway. You laughed together, and mourned together, celebrated victories and grieved for losses. Pitt would never let them down. Perhaps if they were guilty you could not protect them from the carrion creatures who dared not attack them when they were alive. But still you would protect what you could. That’s what friendship is, not lies, sometimes not silence either.

  He had seen it in his father, as long as he could remember. His mother, too. She was even quicker to defend the vulnerable. It did not often occur to her to wonder if they deserved it. In fact, he could not remember her ever doing that. She had defended him when he was wrong, but punished him herself afterwards! He smiled at it now, but he had been scared stiff of her anger at the time.

  Strange thing, loyalty; defence of the vulnerable, whether right or wrong. Who to trust? Loyalty to what? Which were the ideals to follow? There were so very many! What were they worth, if mercy were not one of them?

  He sipped his tea again, and another bacon sandwich appeared on his plate. ‘Thank you,’ he said appreciatively, and began eating it immediately.

  ‘We must find out where Graves got his information, starting with those things that are true.’ Blackwell resumed.

  ‘There’s not much of it true!’ Daniel said too quickly.

  Mercy patted him on the arm. ‘Whatever is. It’s the only starting place that we know of. Get those things, and you may get the people. And find something we would like to have been true, and wasn’t, and that’s a point to fix the moving pieces!’

  Daniel began to see what she was meaning. ‘But if we do find out who was giving Graves the information, what good will that do us?’

  Mercy was absolutely direct. ‘What good do you want?’

  Daniel hesitated. What he wanted most was to prove beyond doubt that his father was not guilty of concealing a murder dishonourably, that he had a compelling reason, one that any decent person would understand. Graves had implied that this reason did not exist. There was nothing to expose, if there were such a reason. He knew perfectly well that Pitt would never have sanctioned the killing of Ebony Graves. That was not even a question. Nor would he have intentionally looked the other way while someone else did.

  And did not that amount to the question, in the end, of whether Narraway was guilty of any of the things he was accused of?

  Another thought occurred to him. If Narraway was guilty, had the person behind this known that at the time? Had they colluded in it?

  And did he, Daniel, want to prove Graves innocent, or not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Or did he really want to see him hanged, but with a clean conscience?

  Mercy was waiting, watching his face.

  Perhaps the last was really the truth, and he wanted to see him hanged.

  ‘I want lots of things,’ he said. ‘In order? I want to prove Graves killed his wife and we would be right to hang him. That if he didn’t, I want to know who did, and prove that. And I want to prove that my father didn’t—’ He stopped.

  He had said too much already. Was betrayal really as easy as that – a careless word because you could not carry the weight of a secret alone? The doubt in it was too much for you?

  ‘And you would like it in the next fifteen days,’ Mercy said in black humour.

  ‘Sixteen,’ Daniel corrected, his own smile twisted.

  ‘Fifteen,’ she repeated. ‘Eight o’clock in the morning, sixteen days from now, he’ll be hanged.’

  He did not bother to argue. He recounted briefly his visit to Graves’ house in Herne Hill with Miriam fford Croft and what they had observed at the murder scene.

  Mercy poured herself a cup of tea and sat beside him. ‘If what Graves said is true, then Ebony’s character is by the way and has nothing to do with her death. The purpose is to blame Graves and silence him.’

  Daniel nodded. ‘That is pretty brutal!’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed.

  He thought for a moment, forcing his mind to remain on the immediate problem. ‘Then why burn her face? That makes it very personal.’

  ‘All I could find about her, she was a woman who aroused deep feelings,’ Mercy said thoughtfully. ‘But more liked than disliked. She fought hard for what she believed in and she didn’t hold her tongue, when perhaps she ought to have. Enthusiast, you know? If you are enthusiastic, too, she’s wonderful. If not – she would be very irritating. Rather an . . . irresponsible sense of humour, as one woman put it.’ Suddenly her face filled with sorrow. As if the reality had suddenly reached her. ‘I think I would have liked her.’

  Blackwell started to speak.

  Mercy held up her hand. ‘I know.’ She sniffed. ‘I know for you to burn someone’s face away because they irritate you, it was not easy to do. It requires a cold heart, an overbearing need, and something to make it burn. Flesh does not burn by itself. And why?’ She looked at Daniel. ‘I tried to find something she knew that was dangerous. Nothing. It makes no sense.’

  Daniel drew a deep breath. ‘Then you think she could have been killed just to cause Graves to be hanged?’

  Blackwell nodded slowly. ‘Mercy’s told me all she found out. No one had a reason to kill Ebony. Jealousy, yes, maybe.’ His face expressed what he thought of that. ‘Disagreed with her ideas, definitely. But I’m afraid none of the changes she wanted are likely to happen within the next ten years, anyway. And then, maybe, nothing will stop them. If she’d been slashed in a fight, I’d believe it. Another woman’s jealousy, maybe. But finding a way into her house, when her children were at home – nothing was heard, no noise, no lock picked, no window broken – and burning her face?’ He looked from one to the other of them.

  ‘I see,’ Daniel cut in. ‘You are right. If it were a personal thing, it would have cleared up suddenly, and would have been an attack, a fight, and all happening there and then. It would not be a break-in to her own house, after dark, and an attack in her bedroom by someone
who left no trace.’

  ‘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?’

  ‘We’ll never get permission to exhume the body!’ Daniel said in disbelief. Please God, Blackwell was not suggesting they do so anyhow. ‘Roman, we can’t go grave-robbing! Apart from anything else, the evidence wouldn’t stand up in court – that is, if we’re even out of prison ourselves and allowed to offer it!’

  Blackwell pressed his hand over his eyes. ‘Please, Daniel, couldn’t we have a little sense? We’ll get an exhumation order.’

  ‘They’ll never give one. The case is closed, as far as they’re concerned. They had their evidence. The police surgeon looked at the body – or someone did.’

  ‘Someone?’ Blackwell’s eyebrows shot up.

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there until the end of the trial. But they won’t give us an order.’

  ‘Would this Miriam of yours do it if we can get the body up, legally?’

  ‘It won’t happen . . .’

  Blackwell slammed his hand down on the table. ‘Would she?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘Fine. Then leave the exhumation order with me. I’ll get one.’

  ‘Not a forgery!’

  Blackwell looked indignant for a moment then he gave a bright smile. ‘No, not a forgery. It’s got to be a real one, so I’ll get a real one. Just go on with what you are doing. I’ll let you know when I have it.’

  ‘A real one,’ Daniel insisted. He knew Blackwell’s forgery skills.

  ‘Of course, a real one! There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’

  ‘Disgusting!’ Daniel’s imagination ran riot.

  ‘Not a real cat, you fool,’ Blackwell sighed. ‘When are you going to learn to speak English like an ordinary person?’

  Mercy put her hand on Blackwell’s arm. ‘Enough,’ she said gently. ‘The poor boy’s in a miserable situation. They’re after his father. Just get on with it and speak to whoever you have to.’ She turned to Daniel. ‘And you get yourself ready to go back to Graves. And mind how you watch yourself! When you’ve got a rat cornered, that’s when he’ll bite anybody, starting with you.’

  ‘I know,’ Daniel agreed. ‘Thank you for the bacon sandwiches.’

  Mercy smiled. ‘There are times when it’s the only thing that works.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Daniel left Blackwell’s house, and went straight to the chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. He spoke briefly with fford Croft. Apart from the courtesy of reporting in to him, he wanted to do it when he had something to say, rather than when he was sent for.

  fford Croft was sitting behind his desk reading papers. He looked up as Impney announced Daniel, hope in his face. It faded rapidly.

&nb
sp; ‘Good morning, sir.’ Daniel stood in front of him.

  fford Croft let the papers fall on the embossed leather surface of his desk. ‘Good morning. Is it, Mr Pitt? Have you anything else to report?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But I was wondering if Mr Kitteridge had discovered anything that would be usable. If not, I might ask his assistance.’

  ‘With what?’ fford Croft sat upright, shifting his considerable weight uncomfortably in the chair.

  ‘That depends upon what I discover in the next few days, sir. I’m hoping Miss fford Croft will assist me with an autopsy.’ Daniel replied.

  fford Croft looked startled. ‘Autopsy? On whom?’

  ‘With the law’s permission, of course, upon Mrs Graves—’

  ‘For God’s sake, boy! She’s already decently dead and buried, poor soul. If you’re hoping Kitteridge can get you permission to dig her up, after the police have already done a post-mortem, you’re doomed to total failure.’

  ‘No, I’m not going to ask him for that,’ Daniel replied, keeping his voice as level as he could. ‘But, sir, have you wondered why her face burned so deep?’

  ‘No – no, I haven’t. Can it possibly matter now? What have you found? Do you really have some hope Graves is not guilty after all?’ He put his head down and raked through his hair, making it even wilder than before. ‘God in heaven, boy! That’s the last thing you need! Was it something to do with Special Branch after all?’ He met Daniel’s eyes reluctantly, his own filled with pity. ‘Do I need to take you off this case? I haven’t anyone else free, or I would never have put you in court in the first place. You’re not fit for that yet, and you’re not fit to do this. But I’ve no one else. I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘No, you don’t need to take me off, sir,’ Daniel said quickly. ‘And I don’t know whether Graves is guilty or not. He could be innocent. And you owe him the best chance of proving that.’

  fford Croft’s eyes were round. ‘Oh! And that’s your job, is it? And blame your own father, or someone under his command? In the eyes of the public, it comes to the same thing. I’m not going to let you do that!’