Free Betrayal at Lisson Grove by Anne Perry

of his revenge.
    Could something have prevented him in the meantime? A debilitating illness? Not twenty years long. Time in prison? Surely Narraway would have heard of anything serious enough for a term so long. And even from prison there was communication.
    Perhaps this case had nothing to do with the past. Or could it be that Cormac really understood that Narraway was only fighting for his own country, his own beliefs, as they all were, and this vengeance was not personal so much as against England? Perhaps this was the time when Special Branch would be most vulnerable if Narraway were taken from it and his work discredited? The present stakes for Cormac might be incidental, only an exquisite touch that added to the flavour. Perhaps it had to do with the socialist revolution planned by the European anarchist reformers who would sweep away the old order, with its corruption and inequality, the only way they believed would work, with violence.
    He closed the papers and put them back in the envelope Stoker had brought, then sat quietly in the dark and thought about it.
    The old memories returned easily to his mind. He was walking again with Kate in the autumn stillness, fallen leaves, red and yellow, frozen and crunching under their feet. She had no gloves and he had lent her his. He could feel his hands ache with the cold at the memory. She had laughed at him for it, smiling, eyes bright, all the while making bitter jokes about warming the hands of Ireland with English wool.
    When they had returned to the tavern Sean and Cormac had been there, and they had drunk rye whiskey by the fire. He could recall the smell of the peat, and Kate saying it was a good thing he didn’t want vodka because potatoes were too scarce to waste on making it. He had not replied. Even thirty years on, the ruin of the famine still scarred the land. Nothing he could say would heal it, or excuse it.
    There were other memories as well, all sharp with emotion, torn loyalties, and regret. Wasn’t it Wellington who had said that there was nothing worse than a battle won – except a battle lost? Or something like that.
    Was the record accurate, as far as he had told anyone? Sanitised, of course, robbed of its passion and its humanity, but the elements that mattered to Special Branch were correct and sufficient.
    Then something occurred to him, maybe an anomaly. He stood up, turned the gaslight higher again, and took the papers back out of the envelope. He reread them from beginning to end, including the marginal notes from Buckleigh, his superior then. He had not studied them the first time he read it because he knew exactly what they said, and had no desire to be reminded. His own lies had been believed too easily, even if they were largely lies of omission. But then the operation had been on Buckleigh’s orders, so he had to accept it. Morally he was also to blame.
    Narraway found what he feared. Something had been added. It was only a word or two, and to anyone who did not know Buckleigh’s turn of phrase, his pedantic grammar, it would be undetectable. The hand looked exactly the same. But the new words added altered the meaning, only slightly, but enough to cast doubt on Buckleigh’s acceptance of Narraway’s account. Once it was only the addition of a question mark that had not been there originally, another time it was a few words that were not grammatically exact, a phrase ending with a preposition; Buckleigh would have included it into the main sentence.
    Who had done that, and when? The why was not obscure to him at all: it was to raise the question of his role in this again, to cause the old ghosts to be awakened. Perhaps this was the deciding factor that had forced Croxdale to remove him from office. Doubts were enough, if they were sufficiently serious. One did not wait for proof that might never come.
    He read through the papers one more time, just to be certain, then replaced them in the envelope and went upstairs to waken Stoker so he