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They dropped Dr. Mullane off at a hotel he was familiar with, and Daniel felt free to discuss the case at last. “Five charges,” he said.
Miriam knew them exactly. The assault, the embezzlement, Morley Cross’s murder, and the two the court did not yet know of: the murder of May Trelawny and the treason that prompted it. That was what it was really about. All of it! One way or another.
“But why Sidney?” she asked. “Maybe that is where we should begin? Whether you know or not, you want to make the jury think about how it happened and that it has to be connected. You must not look as if you are searching; they must believe that you are just choosing the most dramatic way to show them.”
She looked sideways at him and he saw her smile. He was warmed by it, but he also wished she would keep her eyes on the road. He was too worried about the trial only hours away to have to be afraid of her driving, too. The road passed through a tunnel of trees, a shadowed pathway of light and darkness, then round a wide curve and into the sunlight again, the fields gold. He realized he actually wasn’t afraid at all. In fact, it was fun.
“You mean the thread needs to be visible,” he answered finally. “I’m pretty sure what the thread is: it’s Sidney. If he puts all he knows together, it’s enough to tie someone into May’s house, its importance as a deep-water naval base…for the Germans, if they bought the house. They could bring submarines in and hide them there, invisible from anywhere else if they came in deep and only surfaced after dark. May wouldn’t sell, so the only way forward was to kill her. Rebecca inherits and might well be persuaded to sell, especially if her advisers, principally her father, push for it.”
“Tobias Thorwood’s behind it?” Miriam asked, severe doubt in her voice. “Why? He can’t need the money. German sympathies? We’d have to know that beyond a doubt. You can’t simply assume it.”
“Blackmail?” He turned over ideas. “We’d have to know that, too.”
“His wife?” she suggested. “Lots of people have secrets no one would ever guess at, things in their past, very well covered now. Old love affairs, debts paid by someone else. All sorts of things. It might be more useful to think who blackmailed him than why.”
“Thorwood is part of it,” Daniel insisted. “He testified that he saw Sidney come out of Rebecca’s bedroom.”
“Because Bernadette told him that she did. Perhaps she is being pressured by someone?”
“Or has a German lover,” he said with a half smile.
“Are there any Germans in this at all, that you know of?”
“No. And the next step is the British Embassy in Washington. That’s where the embezzlement was forged. And where Morley Cross worked. It seems he’s the one who took the pendant to the pawnbroker, which he said he won as a gambling debt with a colleague. And we know Sidney is fond of card games. It ties pretty tightly into Sidney.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But Sidney didn’t kill May, though they’ll say he paid someone. You are going to have to be very careful, Daniel, that in trying to free Sidney from a charge of embezzlement, or even of assaulting Rebecca, you don’t end up getting him hanged for murder.”
“I know,” he said darkly, as if all the gentle apricot light had drained from the sky. “I do see that!”
* * *
—
DANIEL SPENT A miserable night. He knew he needed to sleep, but every time he even got close to it, new ideas surged into his mind, jerking him awake. He knew the witnesses he needed to call: a few who had already testified, plus Dr. Mullane and Mi
riam. It was the order in which to call them that troubled him. Usually, witnesses were not permitted in the courtroom until after they had testified, in case the other testimony given might affect what they were going to say. It had both advantages and disadvantages. The art was in how to use them! Several of the people he wanted had already been called by the prosecution anyway.
He must make the order work for him, build the story so there would be no time to create a lie that would defend them. They must trip themselves up, trip each other, weave the web so tightly that it caught the man behind the whole affair…and not Sidney or, even more, not Patrick. Daniel admitted at last…not Patrick.
It was a story changing shape all the time, but with a constant purpose: the secret use of the deep-water harbor in Alderney.
He lay awake staring at the ceiling. He must move a step at a time, making sure the jury believed and understood, and for that, he must understand it himself.
Should he go and see Jemima before it all started? What was there to say? Did it even matter? Yes. He knew with desperate certainty that it mattered that he paid her the courtesy of telling her himself. And Patrick, too.
Was he going to have to call him as a witness? Possibly. Not if he could help it.
He turned over and, within half an hour, fell asleep.
* * *
—
DANIEL CALLED BY Keppel Street at seven in the morning, partly because he wished to catch his father before he went into his office at Lisson Grove, the headquarters of Special Branch.
There was no one in the dining room, which surprised him.
“I think they’re all going to go to the court, Mr. Daniel,” the butler told him. “Would you like some breakfast, sir? It would be very simple to serve you with bacon and eggs within a few minutes.”
