‘Are you saying he killed her?’
‘Somebody did.’
‘Why didn’t any of you come forward with this?’
‘We were afraid.’
‘Of what?’
‘Griaule.’
‘That’s ludicrous.’
‘Is it, now? You’re the man who got Lemos off, you must understand what Griaule’s capable of.’
‘But what you’re saying, it throws a different light on things. Perhaps Lemos and Mirielle plotted this whole affair to get revenge, perhaps . . .’
‘Even if they did,’ said the man, ‘it was still Griaule’s idea.’
Following this interview, Korrogly checked the tides on the night of Patricia Lemos’ death and discovered that they had been sweeping out from the temple bluff toward Ayler Point, that had her body entered the water in the early morning, she might well – as had been the case – have washed ashore on Ayler Point. That, however, was the extent of his enlightenment. Despite exploring every avenue, he could come up with no evidence to implicate Lemos or his daughter in a plot against Zemaille. The matter continued to prey on him, to cause him bad dreams and sleepless nights; having been used, he had an overwhelming compulsion to understand the nature of that usage, to put into perspective all that happened, so that he could know the character of his fate. He did not know whether he wanted more to believe that he had been manipulated by Griaule or by Lemos and his daughter. Some nights he thought he would prefer to cling to the notion of free will, to think that he had been the victim of human wiles, not those of some creature as inexplicable as God; other nights he hoped that he had won the case fairly and freed an innocent man. The only thing he was certain of was that he wanted clarity.
Finally, having no other course of action open, he went to the source, to Lemos’ mansion on Ayler Point, and asked to see the gemcutter. A maid advised him that the master was not in, but that if he would wait, she would find out if the mistress was at home. After a brief absence she returned and ushered him onto a sunny verandah that overlooked the sea and provided a breathtaking view of the Almintra quarter. The strong sunlight applied a crust of diamantine glitter to the surface of the water, spreading it wider whenever the wind riffled the tops of the wavelets, and the gabled houses on the shore looked charming, quaint, their squalor hidden by distance. Mirielle, clad in a beige silk robe, was reclining on a lounge; on a small table close to her hand lay a long pipe and a number of dark pellets that Korrogly suspected to be opium. There was a clouded look to her eyes, and though she was still lovely, the marks of dissipation had eroded the fine edge of her good looks; a black curl was plastered to her sweaty cheek, and there was an unhealthy shine to her skin.
‘It’s wonderful to see you,’ she said lazily, indicating that he should take a chair beside her.
‘Is it?’ he said, feeling the rise of old longings, old bitternesses. God, he thought, I still love her, despite everything; she could commit any excess, any vileness, and I would love her.
‘Of course.’ She let out a fey laugh. ‘I doubt you’ll believe me, but I was quite fond of you.’
‘Fond!’ He made the word into an epithet.
‘I told you I couldn’t love you.’
‘You told me you’d try.’
She shrugged; her hand twitched toward the pipe. ‘Things didn’t work out.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ He gestured at the luxurious surround. ‘Things have worked out quite well for you.’
‘And for you,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard you’ve become a great success. All the ladies want you for their . . .’ A giggle. ‘Their solicitor.’
A large wave broke on the shore beneath the verandah, spreading a lace of foam halfway up the beach; the sound appeared to make Mirielle sleepy; her lids fluttered down, and she gave a long sigh that caused her robe to slip partway off one pale, poppling breast.
‘I tried to be honest with you,’ she said. ‘And I was. As honest as I knew how to be.’
‘Then why didn’t you tell me about your mother and Zemaille?’
Her eyes blinked open. ‘What?’
‘You heard me.’ She sat up, pulling her robe closed, and regarded him with a mixture of confusion and displeasure.
‘Why have you come here?’
‘For answers. I need answers.’
‘Answers!’ She laughed again. ‘You’re more a fool than I thought.’
Stung by that, he said, ‘Maybe I’m a fool, but I’m no whore.’
‘A lawyer who thinks he’s not a whore! Will wonders never cease!’
‘Tell me,’ he demanded. ‘Nothing can happen to you now, your father can’t be tried again. It was you, wasn’t it? This was all a scheme, a plot to kill Zemaille and avenge your mother. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but . . .’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Mirielle,’ he said. ‘I need to know. I won’t hurt you, I promise. I could never hurt you. It almost killed me to have to do what I did to you in court.’
She met his eyes for a long moment. ‘It was easy,’ she said at last. ‘You were easy. That’s why we picked you . . . because you were so lonely, so naive. We just kept you spinning. With love, with fear, with misdirection. And finally with drugs. Before I – or rather Janice – took you to the temple, I slipped a drug into your drink. It made you highly suggestible.’
‘That’s what made me hallucinate?’
She looked perplexed.
‘The hidey hole behind the bed. The snakes, the . . .’
‘No, that was Mardo’s illusion. It was real enough. The drug only made you believe what I wanted you to – that we were in danger, being pursued. All that.’
‘What about the scale?’
‘The scale?’
‘Yes, the image of the dead wizard in the scale above Zemaille’s bed. Archiochus, I guess it was.’
Her brow wrinkled. ‘You were so frightened, you must have been seeing things.’
She got to her feet, swayed, righted herself by catching hold of the verandah railing. He thought he saw a softening in her face, the trace of a longing equal to his own, and he also thought he saw her madness, her instability. She would have had to be insane to do what she had, to be in love and not in love at the same time, to inhabit those roles fully, to lie and deceive with such compulsive thoroughness.
‘If we’d presented our evidence in a straightforward way,’ she said, ‘Daddy still might have been convicted. We needed to orchestrate the trial, to manipulate the jury. So we chose you to be the conductor. And you were wonderful! You believed everything we handed you.’ She turned, let her robe drop to expose her perfect back and said in a northern accent, ‘I’ve no great love for dragons.’
It was Janice’s voice.
He gazed at her, uncomprehending. ‘But she fell,’ he said. ‘I saw it.’
‘A net,’ she said. ‘Rigged just below the bluff.’ This she said in a fluting voice, the voice of the old woman, Kirin.
‘My God!’ he said.
‘A little make-up can do miracles,’ she said. ‘And I’ve always been good at doing voices. We planned for years and years.’
‘I still don’t understand. There were so many variables. How could you control them all? The nine witnesses, for example. How could you know they would run?’
She gave him a pitying look.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right. There were no witnesses, were there?’
‘Only Mardo and I. And of course Daddy didn’t throw the stone. We couldn’t take a chance on him missing. We overpowered Mardo, and then he smashed in his skull with it. Then I took drugs to make it look as if I’d been laid out on the altar. The cult had already disbanded, you see. They were all afraid of the great work. It was already in process of breaking up when I joined. That was the heart of the plan. Isolating Mardo. I spent hours encouraging him in the great work; I knew the others would abandon him if they thought he actually might complete it. They were more afraid of Griaule than of him.’