He shook his head. “Yes it does. Victor loved that job of his. In a way it was all he had.” He looked conflicted, emotions twisting his features. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to imply that you are not important to him, but I think from what he said that you do not see each other so often.”
Now she was angry. She felt it well up inside her, knotting her stomach, making her hands shake, her voice thick as if she were a little drunk. “No. We don’t. But you’ve known Victor for years. Was he ever a fool?”
“No, never. Many things good and bad, but never a fool,” he admitted.
“Did he ever act against his own interest, hotheadedly, all feelings and no thought?” She could not imagine it, not the man she knew. Had he once had that kind of runaway passion? Was his supreme control a mask?
McDaid laughed abruptly, without joy. “No. He never forgot his cause. Hell or heaven could dance naked past him and he would not be diverted. Why?”
“Because if he really thought Cormac O’Neil was responsible for ruining him in London, for setting up what looked like embezzlement and seeing that he was blamed, the last thing he would want was Cormac dead,” she answered. “He would want Cormac’s full confession, the proof, the names of those who aided—”
“I see,” he interrupted. “I see. You’re right. Victor would never put revenge ahead of getting his job and his honor back.”
“So someone else killed Cormac and made it look like Victor,” she concluded. “That would be their revenge, wouldn’t it.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes,” he agreed, his eyes bright, his hands loosely beside him.
“Will you help me find out who?” she asked.
He gestured to one of the big leather chairs in his gracious but very masculine sitting room. She imagined wealthy gentlemen’s clubs must be like this inside: worn and comfortable upholstery, lots of wood paneling, brass ornaments—except these were silver, and uniquely Celtic.
She sat down obediently.
He sat opposite her, leaning forward a little. “Have you any idea who already?”
Her mind raced. How should she answer, how much of the truth? Could he help at all if she lied to him?
“I have lots of ideas, but they don’t add up,” she replied, hoping to conceal her knowledge of the facts. “I know who hated Victor, but I don’t know who hated Cormac.”
A moment of humor touched his face, and then vanished. It looked like self-mockery.
“I don’t expect you to know,” she said quietly. “Or you would have warned him. But perhaps with hindsight you might understand something now. Talulla is Sean and Kate’s daughter, brought up away from Dublin after her parents’ deaths.” She saw instantly in his eyes that he had known that.
“She is, poor child,” he agreed.
“You didn’t warn Victor of that, did you?” It sounded more like an accusation than she had intended it to.
McDaid looked down for a moment, then back up at her. “No. I thought she had suffered enough.”
“Another one of your innocent casualties,” she observed, remembering what he had said during their carriage ride in the dark. Something in that had disturbed her, a resignation she could not share. All casualties still upset her; but then her country was not at war, not occupied by another people.
“I don’t make judgments as to who is innocent and who guilty, Mrs. Pitt, just what is necessary, and that only when I have no choice.”
“Talulla was a child!”
“Children grow up.”
Did he know, or guess, whether Talulla had killed Cormac? She looked at him steadily and found herself a little afraid. The intelligence in him was overwhelming, rich with understanding of terrible irony. And it was not himself he was mocking: it was her, and her naïveté. She was quite certain of that now. He was a thought, a word ahead of her all the time. She had already said too much, and he knew perfectly well that she was sure Talulla had shot Cormac.
“Into what?” she said aloud. “Into a woman who would shoot her uncle’s head to pieces in order to be revenged on the man she thinks betrayed her mother?”
That surprised him, just for an instant. Then he covered it. “Of course she thinks that,” he replied. “She can hardly face thinking that Kate went with him willingly. In fact if he’d asked her, maybe she would have gone to England with him. Who knows?”
“Do you?” she said immediately.
“I?” His eyebrows rose. “I have no idea.”
“Is that why Sean killed her, really?”
“Again, I have no idea.”
She did not know whether to believe him or not. He had been charming to her, generous with his time and excellent company, but behind the smiling façade he was a complete stranger. She had no idea what was going on in his thoughts.
“More incidental damage,” she said aloud. “Kate, Sean, Talulla, now Cormac. Incidental to what, Mr. McDaid? Ireland’s freedom?”
“Could we have a better cause, Mrs. Pitt?” he said gently. “Surely Talulla can be understood for wanting that? Hasn’t she paid enough?”
But it didn’t make sense, not completely. Who had moved the money meant for Mulhare back into Narraway’s account? Was that done simply in order to lure him to Ireland for this revenge? Wouldn’t Talulla’s rage have been satisfied by killing Narraway herself? Why on earth make poor Cormac the sacrifice? If she wanted Narraway to suffer, she could have shot him somewhere uniquely painful, so he would be disabled, mutilated, die slowly. There were plenty of possibilities.
And why now? There had to be a reason.
McDaid was still watching her, waiting.
“Yes, I imagine she has paid enough,” she said, answering his question. “And Cormac? Hasn’t he too?”
“Ah yes … poor Cormac,” McDaid said softly. “He loved Kate, you know. That’s why he could never forgive Narraway. She cared for Cormac, but she would never have loved him … mostly I suppose because he was Sean’s brother. Cormac was the better man, I think. Maybe in the end, Kate thought so too.”
“That doesn’t answer why Talulla shot him,” Charlotte pointed out.
“Oh, you’re right. Of course it doesn’t …”
“Another victim of incidental damage?” she said with a touch of bitterness. “Whose freedom do you fight for at such a cost? Is that not a weight of grief to carry forever?”
His eyes flashed for a moment, then the anger was gone again. But it had been real.
“Cormac was guilty too,” he said grimly.
“Of what? Surviving?” she asked.
“Yes, but more than that. He didn’t do much to save Sean. He barely tried. If he’d told the truth, Sean might have been a hero, not a man who murdered his wife in a jealous rage.”
“Perhaps to Cormac he was a man who murdered his wife in a jealous rage,” she pointed out. “People react slowly sometimes when they are shattered with grief. Cormac might have been too shocked to do anything useful. What could it have been anyway? Didn’t Sean himself tell the truth as to why he killed Kate?”
“He barely said anything,” McDaid admitted, this time looking down at the floor, not at her.
“Stunned too,” she said. “But someone told Talulla that Cormac should have saved her father, and she believed them. Easier to think of your father as a hero betrayed than as a jealous man who killed his wife in a rage because she cuckolded him with his enemy, and an Englishman at that.”
McDaid looked at her with another momentary flare of anger. Then he masked it so completely she might almost have thought it was her imagination.
“It would seem so,” he agreed. “But how do we prove any of that?”
She felt the coldness sweep over her. “I don’t know. I’m trying to think.”
“Be careful, Mrs. Pitt,” he said gently. “I would not like you to be incidental damage as well.”