Seven Dials Page 0,41

overheard nor remarked by anyone.

"About Lieutenant Edwin Lovat," he replied, also staring at the picture.

She stiffened, although not a flicker crossed her face. "Are you dealing with that case?" Her voice was sharp with excitement. She did not mention Special Branch, she was far too aware of putting even a word out of place to say that aloud, but he knew the thoughts and possibilities racing through her imagination.

"Yes, I am," he answered almost under his breath. "What do you know about him, Emily? Or what have you heard... and make plain the difference."

She kept her eyes fixed on the painting. It was a scene of light shining through trees onto a patch of water. It had an extraordinarily restful beauty, as of solitude on a windless, summer day. One expected to see the shimmer of dragonfly wings.

"I know that he was a dangerously unhappy man," she answered him. "He seemed to keep falling half in love, and then, the moment he had won someone's commitment, to run away as if he were terrified of allowing anyone to know him. He caused a great deal of pain, and he never regretted it enough not to go and do it again straightaway. If it was not the Egyptian woman who murdered him, then you have plenty of other possibilities to look at."

"Dangerously unhappy?" He repeated her phrase curiously.

"Well, you don't behave like that unless something is corroding inside you, do you?" she challenged, still without more than glancing up at him. "If you are merely selfish, or greedy, you might marry for money, for title, or for beauty, but what he was doing gained him nothing except enemies. And he was apparently not so stupid as to be unaware of that. Nobody could be. He was quite as intelligent as most people, and yet he behaved in a way which any fool could see would bring him nothing but grief."

He thought about it in silence for a while, turning it over in his mind. It was a concept he had not considered.

She waited.

"Do you believe he had thought as deeply as that?" he said at length.

"You didn't ask me to be logical, Thomas, you asked me what I thought of Lieutenant Lovat."

"You are quite right. Thank you. Can you give me the names of these people?"

"Naturally!" she said, raising her hand to indicate the light in the picture, as if she were remarking on it, then she reeled off half a dozen names, and he wrote them down, with at least a general idea of their addresses and a rough guide to their social pastimes. It was an ugly catalogue of hope and humiliation, embarrassment and hurt feelings, some lighter, others profound.

Pitt thanked her and left the gallery.

THAT EVENING and all the next day Pitt enquired discreetly into the whereabouts of the people whose names Emily had given him, but all of them could account for their whereabouts, or else the moral or emotional injury was too old, or too delicate, for revenge now to hurt Lovat any more than it would also hurt them. Every rational thought led Pitt back to Ryerson and Ayesha Zakhari.

The day after that he went to the records of Lovat's time in the army in Egypt, just in case they shed any new light on his character or his relationships with other soldiers, or offered an avenue to pursue another Egyptian connection that could lead back to Ayesha Zakhari and make more sense of what had happened at Eden Lodge. He realized with something of a jolt how much he wanted to discover something that would justify what he could not avoid believing... that Ayesha had shot Lovat, and Ryerson was so inextricably involved with her that he had been prepared to help conceal the crime.

But the records yielded nothing. Lovat seemed to have been more than adequate at his profession. He had had a natural ease with people and knew how to conduct himself in society.

His military service had been without serious blemish, and he had been honorably discharged when his health was broken after a bout of fever while stationed in Alexandria. There was no suggestion of cowardice or shirking his duty in any way. He had been a good soldier and well liked.

Was it an honest summary, or one carefully censored of any facts that would prejudice a subsequent career? It would not be the first time Pitt had come across a tacit agreement to place loyalty before truth in the concept