I could only whistle.
‘How soon can you get here?’ I said, sensing that we could spend the remainder of the morning on the telephone before we had done turning this over between us. ‘I’ve already warned Hugh that you’re on your way. I’m afraid he thinks you’re coming for solace and there’s worse – my boys are home and there will be a fair bit of letting them win at tennis and mending kites to be got through.’
‘You’ve already said I’m on my way?’
‘Yes, darling. Because Cousin Gregory who knows something is not alone. We know something too. Or I do anyway and I can’t go on pretending I don’t. Look, I don’t want to talk about it on the telephone, but unless I face it and do something about it, I am never going to sleep a peaceful night through again. Only -’ a sudden thought had struck me – ‘Mr Duffy didn’t say anything about wanting you to let sleeping dogs lie, did he? I mean, it’s not a condition of the inheritance that you don’t make any trouble? Because if it is…’
‘You think I might let Lena off with murder to get my hands on it?’ said Alec. His voice was cold and it was that I first responded to, flushing at his offence, at my insult. Then I realized what he had said, and the silence between us lengthened.
‘So,’ I said, at last.
‘Just so,’ said Alec.
Having arranged for his arrival two days later, we rang off. I walked around the room for a while picking up and setting down ornaments and disarranging the flowers. Clemence, Mr Duffy, Lena, Alec, the fire, the abortion, the photographs, and countless other flitting ghosts of ideas too vague even to be named whisked around my head, only obliquely visible, disappearing if I looked straight on. I despaired of ever being able to organize it all and view the whole thing at once. If I could only lay out each fact in order in front of me. For things are connected and life does make sense – I had decided that as early as the Croys visit and it had served me well until now. But this was like trying to play soldiers with kittens, goldfish even, seven disappearing for every two I managed to set in place and hold there.
Despairing of a head-start then, although it galled me to admit that I must wait for Alec, I thought I could at least make some practical preparations. Slipping into Hugh’s business room I helped myself to a quantity of the large sheets of paper he uses to sketch out his interminable improvements. From the day nursery I took an India rubber and some pencils, and I looked forward to standing in front of my fire sharpening them with a pocket knife; this is one of my few manual skills, learned in childhood from a rather dashing drawing master and something which I felt would give me a welcome air of competence in front of Alec. Passing out of the nursery again, I stopped at the bookcase and, feeling rather silly, extracted the illustrated volume of Sherlock Holmes stories.
For the rest of that day I sat curled in my chair devouring it, hoping for guidance, but as tea approached I concluded that the working methods of a genius are of no use to lesser beings. Besides, real life is rather less neat than Mr Conan Doyle would have us imagine, or perhaps I should say rather more neat, people (as a rule) not dropping the ends of unusual cigars and abandoning scraps of their garments on convenient thorns as they pass. Really, when one thinks about it, story-book villains must be hardly decent and must suffer terribly from draughts, considering how much of their clothing they leave behind them. I closed the volume and hid it in my desk.
Chapter Fifteen
Alec was a terrific hit with the boys. In fact, his commandeering of their admiration prodded Hugh into enormous efforts of his own, even to the extent of getting Drysdale to fix up an old two-wheeled carriage and teaching the boys to drive along in it behind a quiet pony; I quite saw that they would be returning to school in September utterly spoiled.
Each day, after tea, which I and Alec and hence unbelievably Hugh – Hugh! – took with the children, it was understood that Alec and I should be left alone until it was time to change.
I cannot say what Alec was feeling, but on the first afternoon I felt as bashful as a child at a recital when it came to sitting opposite him and telling. Apart from anything else, there was so little of substance to tell. I cleared my throat.
‘I think Lena killed Cara,’ I said. ‘I’m convinced of it, although I cannot explain why. Why I’m convinced, I mean. Or why she did it for that matter. Or how. Or how on earth Dr Milne managed to make the mistake he did.’
‘I agree,’ said Alec. ‘We need to work out what happened and then we need to find some evidence. And then, whether we like it or not, we must go to the police.’
I leapt on this.
‘Couldn’t we go now?’ I asked. ‘I should love so much simply to hand it all over.’ Alec was already shaking his head.
‘What on earth would you say happened? How would you even begin? What proof do we have?’
‘There’s Mary’s evidence,’ I said. ‘There never was a servant at the cottage.’
‘That shows that Cara died, Dandy, not that Lena killed her.’
‘And there’s the diamonds,’ I said.
‘What about them?’
‘I have no idea.’ He was right: we needed proof. And unless we worked out what had happened we shouldn’t even know what to look for proof of. I saw that.
‘All right, then,’ said Alec.
‘Quite,’ I replied.
By the end of a few days, we had reams of notes and permanent headaches and with each discussion it seemed we were losing sight of anything sensible, miring ourselves in endless speculation which produced nothing except fatigue.
A typical conversation might begin with me saying: ‘There’s just too much of everything.’
‘Run through it again,’ Alec would say, sitting back in his chair with his eyes shut. He said this on average every half-hour until I began to feel like a secretary.
‘And none of it makes sense,’ I would conclude at last. ‘No one is behaving in a way that makes any sense at all. Take Mr Duffy. If he knows Lena killed her daughter, why is he content with divorce? Or rather if he is angry and disgusted enough to divorce her, why is he not angry and disgusted enough to go to the police? And how did he find out? And if he thinks Clemence knows, why is he giving her the Canadian property? But if he doesn’t think Clemence knows why is he sending her off to Canada? And why also is he concerned to make sure that you don’t marry her?’
‘Or Lena,’ Alec might say, running his hands through his hair for the hundredth time. ‘Why did she make such elaborate plans to burn the house down if she had no intention of using the fire to destroy the body? Why did she take such a risk in asking Dr Milne to hush up the maid? Why did she think she could blackmail Silas and why does she now appear to have given up? What does she know about the disappearance of the diamonds?’
‘Come to that, where are the diamonds, and who stole them and why and who knew about it?’
Then a silence.
‘Might Cara have stolen them to raise money for an abortion?’ This tended to recur.
‘That would be far too much money. And anyway, in November? Impossible.’
‘When do you suppose it did happen?’ This from Alec, very gruff.
‘Not before November, darling. She’d have been immense by the time of the Croys visit.’
‘When then?’ he said, staring hard at his feet.
I tried to remember Cara in her slim tube of a dress walking beside the river. Silk jersey it had been, the most clinging and least forgiving of any stuff dresses could be made of. I had not worn it for years.
‘Oh, well after the New Year, anyway,’ I said. Within a few months of the coming wedding then. But since we were talking about it, and he was squirming with embarrassment anyway, I finally resolved to ask something I’d been ducking.