Shoulder the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

it will bring any kind of justice if you do? You won't be able to prove anything. You will look ridiculous, and whoever you accuse will walk away. You'll be fortunate if he doesn't ruin you for slander."
    "You underestimate me, Mrs. Allan. I didn't have anything so straightforward in mind."
    She stared at him. It was not hope in her eyes, making them so alive, but it was a flicker of something better than the dead anger before. "There was a telephone call, from Aidan Thyer, and then half an hour after that, Sebastian went out."
    Aidan Thyer. He was Master of St. John's College in Cambridge, a position of extraordinary, almost unique, influence. Many young men's dreams and ambitions had been moulded by whoever had been Master of their college in their first formative years as adults, away from home, beginning to taste the wild new freedoms of intellectual adventure. Matthew could remember his own Master, the brilliance of his mind, the dreams he had started, worlds he had opened for his students. Who better to teach Sebastian to be an idealist who would kill for peace?
    If it were Thyer, it would hit Joseph profoundly. But pain had nothing to do with truth.
    "Nothing between?" he asked Mary Allan. "No one to the door, even at the back? No deliveries, no tradesmen?"
    "No," she answered.
    Was she being careful, or trying to avoid an answer that would hurt so deeply? But the contact had to be someone John Reavley had known, and presumably trusted. It had to be someone close enough and with the intellectual and moral power to have influenced Sebastian to kill two people he had known for years,
    the parents of the man who had tutored and helped him even before he went up to university and even more afterwards.
    "Did he say anything about where he was going?"
    "No. Do you think it was to see Aidan Thyer?" Her voice was crowded with disbelief. After Sebastian's death she had stayed in Thyer's house! He had witnessed her grief, and appeared to do all he could to help.
    "I don't know," Matthew replied truthfully. "There are lots of possible explanations. But it is at least somewhere to begin. Someone told Sebastian what to do, and where my father would be."
    "Why could it not have been at any time?" she asked, frowning slightly. "Why only in the afternoon of the day before? Why did he do it? Your brother was Sebastian's closest friend."
    "I know. It had nothing to do with Joseph. It was political." That was as close to the truth as he would come.
    "That's absurd!" she retorted. "Your father used to be a Member of Parliament, I know, but he didn't stand for any convictions Sebastian was against. He didn't stand for anything out of the ordinary. There were scores of men like him, maybe even hundreds." It was possibly not intended to be rude, but her tone was dismissive and she made no effort to hide it.
    Matthew pictured his father's mild, ascetic face with its incisive intelligence, and the honesty that was so clear it was sometimes almost childlike. Yes, there were many men who believed as he had, but he himself had been unique! No one could fill the emptiness his death had created. Suddenly it was almost impossible for Matthew not to snap back at Mary's callous remark. It required all his self-control to answer civilly.
    "And had any of those hundreds been the ones to learn the information he had, and had the courage to act on it," he said carefully, 'then they would have been the ones killed." He deliberately avoided using the word 'murdered'.
    Her face pulled tight and she turned away. "What information?"
    "Political. I can't tell you more than that."
    "Then go and talk to Aidan Thyer," she told him. "There's nothing I can do to help you." And without waiting for him to say anything more, or to wish him goodbye, she turned and walked back towards the door inside, a stiff-backed figure, every other passion consumed in grief, oddly dignified, and yet completely without grace.
    Matthew remained outside, and went back to the car along