Page 37 of Triple Jeopardy (Daniel Pitt)

“No! Don’t leave that alone. It’s about the most expensive thing I own.” Her eyes flared with pride and disbelief that he should even think such a thing.

Perhaps it was meant to warn him, even make him nervous. It had the opposite effect. He remembered with a surge of pleasure the elation of discovering patterns, making sense out of chaos, human passions flaming up out of inanimate objects.

As if she could read his thoughts, she suddenly blushed. Or perhaps it was because her own memories were just as sharp.

He turned and carried the box out the door, which she held open for him. He brought it up to the cab and set it down gently on the seat. “The lady will be coming in a moment,” he told the driver.

“Yes, sir,” the man answered patiently. Little surprised him in human behavior.

* * *

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THEY ARRIVED BACK at the chambers a little after six, and by half-past Kitteridge was watching with interest as Daniel passed Miriam sheet after sheet of paper: letters, pages of ledgers and pages loose from account books, notes kept on meetings, and reminders to do this or that.

Each page she examined under her microscope, looking carefully at the signature for a few seconds. Then she made brief comment and passed it to Daniel to put in one pile or another. Two piles? No, three.

Daniel was aching to ask what she saw but held his tongue with difficulty. He knew she would tell him nothing until she was finished. His mouth was dry and he felt hollow with hunger. But the pile to be done was growing shallow, as the other three piles grew larger.

Behind him, Kitteridge fidgeted restlessly.

Finally, Miriam was finished. She looked very carefully at the last one and put it on the nearest pile. She turned to face them. “These are genuine. The middle pile is questionable, but not provably forgeries. This pile here is forged.”

“You’re sure?” Kitteridge interrupted her eagerly. “This would stand up in court? There’s something anyone else could see? I—” He stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry. We need to have something.”

“To do what?” she asked. “Prove your client guilty? Or someone else guilty?”

Kitteridge let out a sigh. “I’m not sure. To have anything to say, to cling on to as truth. And no, a forgery would mean he’s innocent.”

“You mean he had the right to some of the money, but not all of it?” She caught the meaning of it right away. “They’re all from the British Embassy in Washington.” Her face tightened. She directed the question to Daniel. “Is this the Philip Sidney case? My father mentioned it. It’s not much money for such an issue.”

Daniel knew what she meant. Perhaps she had gone to the heart of it. “I don’t think that’s really what it’s about,” Daniel said quietly. “It’s a smaller case to carry a bigger one, a lot darker.”

“What are you trying to do? Open up the darker one behind? Or protect him from it?” She searched his face and remained puzzled.

He should have known she would see it clearly and press him to answer. “I’m not sure.” He could not lie to her. He would never get away with it anyhow, nor did he really want to. He would lose something, he felt, though he was not sure what. “I want to know what the truth is. I thought I was sure when I started. The case behind this is despicable. This one, I’m not sure. And it matters rather a lot. Because if the accusation is false, who’s really doing it? And of course—why?”

“Well, some of these signatures are forged, but I think most of them are genuine.”

“How do you know?” Kitteridge asked.

“I’ll show you under the microscope, so you can be prepared to ask the right questions.” She frowned. “Although I’m not sure how it will help you. Except…”

“What?” Daniel asked immediately.

“It’s not terribly well done. When we sign our name, it’s not the same every time. Close, but hardly ever exactly the same.”

“They aren’t all the same,” Daniel argued.

“No. Whoever it was, he was clever enough for that. But several are. Or there may be two or three that are identical. And then another two or three. But if you are making it exactly the same as one you copied, you move slowly to be sure to follow the lines. When you write your own signature, you move swiftly, with certainty; you touch the pen to the paper differently. Here, I’ll show you.”

She turned and put one of the letters under the microscope, then adjusted the paper so that the lens was directly above the actual signature. “Look,” she told him.

Daniel leaned close to the eyepiece and focused it. He saw the ink on the paper in something he hardly recognized. The lines were thick and, in places, almost as if they had scales, tiny little spikes, all pointing the same way. It was extraordinarily clear where the pen had lifted off the paper, and where it had touched down again. He stared at it for several seconds.

Miriam stood close behind him and moved the paper away, then replaced it with another. It was completely different. The line was smoother, the place where the pen lifted off the paper was clean, as if it had landed with a light pressure, and taken off again easily. It would be impossible to confuse one with the other.

He turned away from it to look at her. “Are those the forgeries, with all the little spatters?”

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