difficult thing Rathbone had ever swallowed. It tasted sour, and he was aware that it was he himself who had poisoned it.
"Thank you," he said aloud. He wanted to add something, but it was all contrived, insulting.
"You are welcome, Sir Oliver," Cribb replied calmly. He appeared to see nothing odd in Rathbone's manner, in fact to be totally unaware of his appalling discomfort. "I have given the matter a great deal of thought, and I am afraid I can think of no solution for it."
"I was wrong to have asked," Rathbone replied, and that at least he was absolutely certain about. "I must seek some other solution." He finished the tea. "Please do not trouble Mr. Ballinger with it until I can think of some way to ease his mind at the same time as I tell him of it. If I am fortunate, it may turn out to be an error anyway."
"Let us hope so, sir," Cribb agreed. "In the meantime, as you say, it would be better not to distress Mr. Ballinger unnecessarily."
Rathbone thanked him again, and Cribb walked with him to the front door. Rathbone went down the steps into the street heavy-footed, imprisoned within himself and weighed down with a moral dilemma from which there was now no escape.
He went straight to his own office and spent the next four hours comparing notes of cases he knew, court dates, and trials past and pending against the names he had copied down from Ballinger's diary. He pursued every one to its conclusion, finding out who the people were, of what they were accused, by whom they were defended, and what had been the verdict.
Most of the cases were trivial and easy enough to dismiss as regular business. In fact, many were to do with family estates, wills, and quarrels over property. Some were trials or settlements out of court for cases of financial incompetence or malfeasance. Those that had gone to trial and were concluded he could also discount. Their course was clear, and now in the public domain, simple cases of moral decline ending in tragedy, common enough.
In the end he was left with only three who could be Phillips's benefactor, or victim! Sir Arnold Baldwin, Mr. Malcolm Cassidy and Lord Justice Sullivan. It was that last name that caused him to freeze and his hands to clench the paper. But that was ridiculous. Lord Justice Sullivan had to have a solicitor, like any other man. He would have property, in all likelihood a house in London and a home in the country. Property always involved deeds, money, and possible disputes. And of course there were wills and inheritances and other matters of ownership and litigation.
His immediate task was to learn more about each of the men on the list, and if necessary to actually meet them. Although exactly how he would determine which of them it was, he realized he had no idea. What did a man look like who was driven by such an appetite? Was he frightened, plagued with guilt, compulsive like one who gambles or drinks to excess? Or did he look like anyone else, and that darker part of his nature emerged only when he permitted it, secretly, on the river at night?
This was forced upon him even more plainly upon meeting both Cassidy and Baldwin, the first at a luncheon, the latter at one of the gentlemen's clubs of which he was a member. He observed nothing about either of them that made him wary; indeed, it was only his own suspicions that caused him any preoccupation whatever.
Meeting Sullivan proved more difficult, and he felt a crowding sense of inevitability, as if in his mind he had already determined the man's guilt. Since he was the judge who had actually heard the case, the situation was hideously tangled, by that fact alone.
In order to meet the judge, Rathbone had to connive to obtain an invitation to a reception to which he had not originally been invited, a most unseemly act. And it was not easy to ask Margaret if she would come; to her it was even harder to offer any explanation that was not clearly an evasion.
"I'm sorry, my dear," he said, busying himself with sorting his cuff links so he did not have to meet her eyes. "I realize it is unfair to expect you to give up your evening at such little notice, but the opportunity only came today, or I should have told you in better