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were, an' why."
A tiny smile flickered over Tellman's mouth. It might have been admiration, or only amusement.
Gracie found herself blushing, something she never did as a rule, and it annoyed her, because it gave away her emotions. She had no wish at all for Samuel Tellman to get ideas that she had feelings for him.
"I'm very good at asking pert'int questions!" she said hotly. "I worked for Mr. Pitt for years and years. Longer 'n you 'ave!"
He took in his breath sharply and half smiled, then let it out again without saying whatever it was he thought. "So they are certain that Garrick wouldn't have let him go? Could he have got tired of catering to Garrick's temper and gone by himself?"
"Without tellin' Tilda, or anyone else?" she said incredulously. " 'Course not! Yer give notice, yer don' walk out." She saw the flicker of contempt in his face, reminding her again of how he viewed the whole concept of living and working in service. "Don' start that again," she warned. "We got someone in danger an' it's real, an' could be serious. We got no time ter be arguin' about the rights an' wrongs o' the way folk live." She looked at him very levelly, feeling a shiver of both excitement and familiarity as she saw the intensity with which he stared back at her. She was aware of the heat in her cheeks, and her eyes wavered. "We gotta do summink ter 'elp." She said "we" very carefully. "I can't do much without yer, Samuel. Please don' make me 'ave ter try." She had placed their relationship in the balance, and was amazed that she had taken such a risk, because it mattered far more than she had realized until this instant. "Summink's 'appened ter 'im," she added very quietly. "Mebbe Mr. Stephen's as mad as they say, an' 'as done 'im in, an' they've 'id it. But it's a crime, an' no one else is gonna 'elp, 'cos they dunno."
The waitress brought his meal and a fresh pot of tea, and Tellman thanked her. He already knew what his decision was; it was in his eyes, in the line of his mouth and the stillness of his hands. He made only a momentary gesture of resistance by hesitating, as if he were still weighing it up. It was a matter of pride to pretend, but they both knew his decision was made.
"I'll take a look," he said at last. "There's been no crime reported, so I'll have to be careful. I'll tell you what I find."
"Thank yer, Samuel," she said with perfectly genuine humility.
Perhaps he recognized that, because he suddenly smiled, and she saw an extraordinary tenderness in it. She would never have said so to anyone else, but at that moment his face held something that she would have called beauty.
PITT LEFT THE PURSUIT of Edwin Lovat's life and the trail of pain he had created behind his various love affairs. He had followed every name, and found nothing but unhappiness and helpless anger.
A wild thought came to him as he tried looking at the case from an entirely different angle. Sometimes it was profitable to abandon even the most obvious assumptions and consider the story as if they were untrue. Lovat had been shot in a garden in the middle of the night. There seemed to be no sense in Ayesha Zakhari's having taken her gun and gone outside to see who it was lurking in the bushes. She had a perfectly capable manservant and a telephone in her home to call for assistance.
He had assumed that she had known it was Lovat, but there seemed no sane reason to have killed him. If she did not wish to see him she had merely to remain inside. If she did not know who it was, the answer was the same.
But what if she had supposed it was someone else? What if she had not recognized Lovat until after he was dead? The garden was dark. They were not in a path of light thrown from the house, even if all the lamps had been lit in the downstairs rooms, which in itself was unlikely at three in the morning.
Who might she have mistaken him for? Was it possible that a perfectly rational answer to the murder lay in the fact she had believed him to be someone else?
He began by going back to Eden Lodge. It looked curiously empty in the sharp autumn morning, the