‘Forgive me, Alec, but was there no sign, no sign at all, that something like that was up?’
‘What do you mean? What kind of sign?’
‘Well, wasn’t she – I mean, didn’t she – Because I’ve been thinking, if it had been me, in Cara’s predicament, I know I would have.’ I hoped he would work out what I meant. No such luck. He blinked at me and waited.
‘Remember when I asked you a very impertinent question to which the answer was no? Well, might I ask why not? I mean, whose decision was it?’ I was being terrifically modern, and I wondered if Alec knew, or if he believed that in my youth, so recent and yet so distant, I had turned this question over calmly as though deciding between a walk or a drive on a Sunday morning.
‘I don’t know that it ever came up,’ said Alec. ‘Why?’
‘And she didn’t try to bring it up? Sometime after the New Year. I mean, as soon as she found out that she was definitely going to have a baby, so long as the father wasn’t a Chinaman or anything… and then I daresay you’d have been none the wiser.’
‘I daresay not,’ said Alec, drily.
‘And nobody else would have cared,’ I said. ‘Look at Daisy, for heaven’s sake. Rupert weighed almost nine pounds, hardly six months after her wedding and no one even remembers it now. Although her mother was incandescent with fury at the time.’
‘And Silas has never guessed?’ said Alec.
‘I didn’t mean that!’ I said. ‘Rupert is Silas in miniature. Goodness, no. Much more likely that there are many more Silases in miniature popping out where they shouldn’t be. Thankfully Daisy is too scatty to notice or care.’
‘I had heard as much,’ said Alec, and the little awkwardness had passed.
‘It’s a good question, though,’ he said. ‘Cara doesn’t seem to have entertained any of the obvious solutions, does she? Such as postponing the wedding, or even seducing me, if she got really desperate, as you suggest.’
‘But we do think she wanted to get an abortion and that’s why she tried to sell the diamonds,’ I said, refusing to react to such outrageous compliment-fishing.
‘Even though one would think it’s a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a walnut in terms of price and even though she would only think of it if she hadn’t in fact stolen them.’ This was another point which occurred and reoccurred.
‘But if it wasn’t Cara who stole them…’ would be next.
‘And we’re back to where we began,’ someone would conclude. Then we would both groan and start somewhere else.
‘Let’s try the fire.’
‘All right. Lena planned the fire, but was it to destroy Cara’s body? Or merely to hide her disappearance?’
‘Oh no. Lena planned to kill her,’ Alec would say stoutly. He was sure of this. ‘For some reason.’
‘That we don’t know,’ I would remind him.
‘And she did kill her,’ he went on. ‘But we don’t really know how, do we? Except that it could be mistaken for… something else.’ He gulped.
‘Let’s not think about that, darling. It’s too horrid. Lena planned to kill her and Lena killed her.’
‘For some reason,’ he would say.
‘That we don’t know,’ I would remind him.
‘What do we know?’ he would ask with the regularity of a metronome. And then I would recount what we knew and we would talk for another hour and the next day at the same time Alec would ask again what we knew and I would answer him again in so nearly the same words that if the intervening day with its meals and tennis and walks had been missed out no one would have been able to tell.
The day that we finally got somewhere, the day at least that the cracks began to show, the day before the really momentous days began, looked like all the rest to start with.
‘What do we know, then?’ Alec said, already querulous.
‘Lena changed her mind about how to cover up the crime.’
‘For some reason.’
I screamed. ‘Alec, please stop saying “for some reason”.’
‘Steady on,’ said Alec.
‘It’s not just irritating,’ I insisted. ‘I think it’s actually stopping us from getting anywhere. We keep assuming that there’s a reason for everything and it’s just that we don’t know what it is. But if we didn’t do that, if we very strictly held to the rule that if a thing appears to have no explanation then it can’t have happened -’
‘The exact opposite of Sherlock Holmes, then?’ said Alec, and I could not stop myself from shooting a guilty look at my desk.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re saying we should eliminate the implausible on the grounds that its implausibility makes it impossible too?’
‘I think we could try it out,’ I said, hoping that I did not sound too defensive. I had obviously given up on Conan Doyle before the useful bits. ‘We haven’t been getting anywhere anyway.’
‘All right,’ said Alec, sitting up, and speaking with great deliberation. ‘Why did Lena change her mind about using the fire to destroy Cara’s body? She had made very elaborate plans and something must have made her abandon them.’
We sat in perfect silence listening to the clock ticking until I felt a blush begin.
‘What I wouldn’t give for a madman,’ I said. ‘A mad murderous tramp with an axe.’
‘If Conan Doyle had dragged on madmen when he got stuck he would never have found a publisher,’ said Alec. ‘It has to hang together.’
‘Does it?’ I said. ‘I believe that things have to make sense, but must they hang -?’ I stopped.
‘Well, a mad axe-man who just happened to have killed Cara when she was about to be killed by someone else anyway is a little too -’
I shushed him furiously and thought hard, biting my lip, until my cigarette burned down to the end and, suddenly scorching my fingertips, brought me back with a start.
‘I nearly had something there,’ I said. ‘I think so anyway. Not a mad murderous tramp, but… Listen to this, Alec. We need to explain why Lena changed her mind and did something as risky and ad hoc – the maid and Dr Milne – instead of something she’d planned – the fire. We’ve been thinking that she must have lost her nerve, that she must have begun to doubt the body would be destroyed. Must have started worrying that there would be enough left to tell that Cara didn’t die in the fire. But don’t you see? We are missing something very obvious. The only reason to kill Cara the way she did, so that it looked the way it looked… I’m sorry, Alec, I know, but we must, darling.’
Every time I got close to talking about the precise moment and manner of Cara’s death, the same thing happened. That curious tawny freckle that covered his face like a crochet-work shawl meant that he could not turn white exactly, but his lips seemed to disappear and the shadows under his eyes became suddenly prominent as the colour drained from around them. I tried to harden my heart to this, at least not to look at it while I spoke.
‘Listen. We keep shying away from it, but we must force ourselves. It’s too awful to think about, so we’re trying to make sense of it all in some way that means we don’t have to. And that’s never going to work. My nanny used to tell me that “Monsters faced are mice.” So let’s face it. The only reason I can think of to kill Cara in that particular way is this: if the body did not burn and was discovered, the story of the abortion was to be a second line of defence. Cara was supposed to have tried to abort a child and, when she failed, was supposed to have set the fire and killed herself. Do you see? You must see.’
Alec was blinking repeatedly as though to steady himself while a new idea took hold.
‘And in that case,’ I went on, ‘it makes no sense whatsoever, whatsoever, whatsoever, that Lena would dream up the kitchen maid idea, does it? Not only is she taking a huge risk with Dr Milne, who she cannot possibly have known in advance would be so disgustingly co-operative, but more importantly, she is actually removing a central piece of her original plan. The way it actually happened, if the cottage had not burned completely, it would have come out that there was no one there at all. And then all the talk would be, where was Cara? And the newspapers would be full of the story that a young woman had disappeared and Dr Milne might get to wondering and…’