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Maybe Graves never understood his wife. He saw her in lots of detail, but with little sense of her as a whole, as a woman who would stir passions of any sort, let alone ones that led to murder so violent and destructive. Could the man really be a good biographer with so little feel for the passions within the physical presence, the need and the heart behind the deeds?
‘Was she interested in your work?’ His work was the one subject Graves showed emotion about.
‘Ebony?’ Graves looked surprised. ‘Not in the slightest. She liked that I met famous and powerful people. I suppose it gave her some standing in the community. But she never wanted to read any of my books.’ His voice dropped from vitality to a lower note, which was laced with contempt. ‘She liked the fame, thought it the completed result, but she showed no interest at all in the active labour, and refinement of detail, the learning of the truth about people.’
Daniel heard the real bitterness in Graves’ voice, and saw it in the sudden anger in his eyes. What was he angry about? That she had lived in such a way that someone had killed her, and Graves was going to take the blame for it, die for it? Or had she driven him to the point where he had lost his temper and killed her himself?
‘Could her murder be to do with your work?’ he asked. He had to get something from this interview. They would not give him much longer, and he had little enough to work with. ‘Could she have been indiscreet?’
Graves suddenly stiffened. He raised his head slowly and stared at Daniel. ‘Damn her!’ he said between his teeth. ‘Yes! Yes, she could. I’m dealing with important people. Dangerous people. Some of them are dead, but their power stretches beyond the grave. Others can be affected.’ He drew in his breath, then spoke in a low, fierce voice, barely in control. ‘Damn her! Damn her! How could she be so stupid? I deal with private lives, but also with public ones. It goes as far as state secrets, even high treason.’ He looked up at Daniel. ‘I never told her anything confidential – of course I didn’t. But she could have heard a name, caught a thread of . . . some people I write about. I’m only just touching the edges myself – and it could threaten all kinds of people, the heads of government, even the Throne. Oh God! What an almighty fool!’
Daniel did not know whether to believe him or not. It was a perfect opening for believing that someone else was responsible for her death. With a careless word, had she been indiscreet? Had she led somebody to believe that she knew secrets about them that were dangerous . . . dangerous enough to kill for?
‘But they didn’t attack you?’ he said to Graves. ‘Why not? You are the one writing the book.’
Graves stared at him.
‘Well?’ Daniel pressed.
‘Perhaps it was a warning,’ Graves suggested. There was a rough edge to his voice that was almost certainly fear.
‘And you are supposed to read it, and know what it means?’ Daniel’s tone was heavy with disbelief. ‘Did you get any letters, or anything else to make you think that was what it was? No point in warning you if they don’t say what they want you to do, or not to do!’
‘No need to say, if they get me hanged!’ Graves said back at him. ‘I can’t come back and tell any secrets if I am dead!’
Daniel was torn between anger and pity. He looked at Graves sitting in a wooden chair, his hands manacled. The prison uniform made him look like every other man awaiting death, ticking the days away, then the hours, finally the minutes.
‘Anyone in particular whose secrets you were going to expose?’ he asked. He must get to something practical, something he could use.
‘Who knows where the threads of treason run?’ Graves answered. ‘And how do you imagine you are going to trace them? What are you? A newly graduated lawyer who’s tried half a dozen cases, and those as second chair? I was your first big case, and you lost it. What do you imagine you can do against the Establishment? You are absurd. I would laugh at you, if it weren’t my life at stake.’
‘What did you imagine when you started doing biographies like this?’ Daniel lashed back at him. ‘That they were going to let you write whatever you like, and they’d do nothing about it? It must have crossed your mind, in among all the thoughts of how clever you were.’
‘The men I am writing about are dead! At least the most powerful ones are!’
‘But you said yourself their power stretches beyond the grave. Someone who cares is still alive. Are you going to tell me who I should start looking at?’
‘So you can destroy my writing? How do I know you aren’t paid by them?’
‘Because I wouldn’t be trying to clear your name, you fool! I’d let you hang,’ Daniel replied.
‘For all I know, that’s what you are doing.’ Graves rose to his feet, chains on his manacles clanking together.
Daniel thought for a moment before he answered, then he spoke deliberately. ‘You are quite right. You don’t know. But if these people really were guilty of treason, the Government would want to know. That might halt your death sentence long enough for us to find out more.’
Hope flared in Graves’ eyes, then died again as Daniel looked at him. In spite of himself, he felt a kind of pity.
‘I’ll find out what I can about whether Mrs Graves was speaking unwisely. And Mr Kitteridge is working on the legal side of it. If there was any flaw in the proceedings whatever, he’ll find it.’
‘Will you come back and tell me?’
‘If I have anything to tell. Or to ask.’
Graves did not reply. He turned away, so Daniel could not see his face. It was dismissal.
It was still only the middle of the day when Daniel went out of the grey shadow of the prison into the light on the pavement. He was going over in his mind what he would, or could, do. He was not sure how much he believed of anything that Graves had to say.
Perhaps the first thing was to find out if Graves was actually anything like the writer he claimed to be. He should exhaust his own resources first. Surely fford Croft would know. He was the man who had involved them in the case in the first place. But if fford Croft knew that Graves was a biographer who dealt in such dangerous subjects, would he not have told them that at the beginning? It was an obvious place to start looking.
