He smiled. “You are no better at lying to me now than you were at seven.”
“I don’t want you taking charge and doing it all your way. I want to satisfy myself in my own fashion. I can’t do anything about the past, I can’t bring back the dead, but I think Arthur was-changed by what happened in Carroll Square, and perhaps he’ll rest a little easier at the bottom of the sea if I finish what he never could.”
“All right. That’s fair enough.” He signaled to the waiter, and we left the subject of Lily Mercer until we reached the street. As we walked to where Simon had left the motorcar, my father said, “We’ll say nothing of this to your mother. Is that agreed?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“And if you should find yourself in over your head in this business, you’ll remember to call in the cavalry, won’t you?”
“I promise.” He handed me into the motorcar, and as he walked around to the driver’s side, I thought, This is my chance. I could tell him about Peregrine, and let him see to finishing what I’d inadvertently begun in Owlhurst.
But I couldn’t. It wasn’t clever to deal with a murderer, let alone a man who has spent years in an asylum. It wasn’t clever to hide an armed man with a history of murder in his background. It wasn’t at all clever to think I could do what I’d set out to do, alone and in the dark.
Yet if I sounded the alarm now, Peregrine would be returned to the asylum to live out his life there. And the truth would be locked away with him.
If Arthur had had any part in what had happened to Lily Mercer, I wanted to know.
He was only eleven, the little voice in my head reminded me.
Who was I to say that a child of eleven could or couldn’t kill. I didn’t even know if a child that age really understood the significance of killing.
I remember one summer morning in India when the box wallah came to tell the cook that his favorite grandson was dead. The boy had been bitten by a cobra that had been called out of its hole in the roots of a tree near the river by the boy’s own cousin with a flute he had made for himself from a reed. It was called an accident, a tragic accident, but other children told me later what the adults hadn’t known, that the cousin had been eaten up by jealousy and wanted the boy out of the way. They were both nine.
I had told my ayah, my Indian nanny, what I’d learned, but she said to me, “It was the boy’s time to die, don’t you see? If it hadn’t been, the cobra would never have come, no matter how much the cousin had played his flute.”
Her fatalism had frightened me far more than the death of the boy. It claimed that the universe I knew wasn’t run by a benevolent God, as I’d been taught, but by Chance, a system where one’s turn was dictated by forces over which one had no control.
My father was saying, “You must get this altruistic nature from your mother, not me.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “That indicates a choice in the matter,” I told him. “This wasn’t so much choice as it was thrust in my face when I wasn’t looking.”
The Colonel dropped me at my flat.
As I watched him drive away, I wished I’d had the forethought to ask him to stay in London, within reach, and not return to Somerset just yet.
Then I turned and hurried into the flat, where Peregrine and Diana were comfortably discussing a visit she’d made to Rochester shortly before the war. But his eyes as I came through the door flicked to my face on the instant, searching for any sign of betrayal.
Diana went out that night to dine with friends, and I made dinner for Peregrine and myself.
“What did you tell your father?”
“That I was in London to discover what had become of Lily Mercer’s family.”
He started up, sensing betrayal.
“Sit down. I can’t track them alone. Nor can you. The best chance we have is to use my father’s connections. You don’t know the Army, Peregrine-the regular Army. It’s as tightly knit a group as the Knights Templar-or the Masons or the Catholic Church. If there’s a way to find them, my father will.” I had left out Simon Brandon. Don’t muddy the waters too far, my girl.
Besides, no military plan should be without a line of retreat.
But Peregrine was nothing if not astute.
“Who was the man with your father? The one waiting with the car?”
I would have sworn, if I’d been my father’s son instead of my father’s daughter. As it was, I was sorely tempted.
The windows of Elayne’s room looked down on the street. I had forgot.
“His batman. My father retired as a Colonel. Simon had risen to sergeant major. But they served together when my father was a lowly lieutenant, and the bond has lasted all these years. Simon drives my father, he always has.”
“But he didn’t drive you back here, did he?”
The temptation to swear was overwhelming now.
“He had other business to attend to. He left us while we were still in the restaurant.”
Peregrine wasn’t convinced, though he said nothing more. But I could feel him watching me for the rest of the evening, speculation in his eyes.
Diana left the next day, and I was grateful not to have to consider her in my dealings with Peregrine. She gave him a good-bye kiss on his cheek, though, a dancing dervish in her eyes, and blew me one, then was gone, back to France, leaving silence behind her. I saw that Peregrine was staring at the door with an unreadable expression on his face.
At teatime, Mrs. Hennessey brought up a folded note. “From your father, dear,” she said.
I thanked her and read it quickly.
Lucy Mercer’s family had emigrated to New Zealand soon after she was killed. Their passage had been paid for them by the Graham solicitors.
They had traded their daughter’s death for a better life for themselves.
I turned to Peregrine as he came up from Elayne’s room. “Not the best of news,” I said, and gave him the message.
He read it and swore.
“A dead end,” he said, finally.
“But it’s odd, isn’t it? That they should take the money offered them, and leave England on the heels of their daughter’s murder.”
“Desperate people. She wasn’t coming back, and something good-for them, at any rate-had come of it.”
“I expect so.” But I couldn’t rid myself of doubts. Still, I had no children, and I couldn’t judge whether a grieving mother might well take the chance to better the lives of her remaining children while she could, even at the hands of the murderer’s family, or whether she had been willing to sacrifice one for the good of the others, making the best of what life had brought her.
Had that been the bribe? Had the family accepted a new life in lieu of demanding that Peregrine be sent to prison? The police of course had decided Peregrine’s fate, but without the Mercers demanding an eye for an eye, they might have been more easily persuaded to be lenient with a disturbed boy.
“I’m going back to Carroll Square,” I said on my way to my room to fetch my coat and hat. “I’ll see if anyone there still remembers Lily.”
He was at the door before me, his own coat over his arm as I came out of my room.
“No, Peregrine-”
“Yes. They aren’t going to know me, for God’s sake. Why shouldn’t I accompany you?”
Reluctantly I let him come with me. We found a cab and arrived at Number 17 as a few early flakes of snow began to fall.
An elderly maid answered our knock, and I asked her if there was anyone still employed in this house who remembered a maid here some fourteen years ago, by the name of Lily Mercer.
She stared at me for a moment, and said, “You must ask Mrs. Talbot, Miss.”
And so it was that we were admitted to the presence of Mrs. Talbot, a formidably fat woman in her later years, swathed in shawls and seated like a toad in the largest chair in a very fashionable drawing room. Her trim feet rested on a stool.
She had an eye for Peregrine and asked him where he’d been wounded.