‘Of course I could have been the check, but all I thought about was my beloved girl. And Clemence turned out as cold as her mother before her. Not a bad girl – hard to like, you know, very proper, very concerned about right and wrong – but nothing really bad about her.’
He fell silent again and then roused himself with a brave smile that it hurt to see.
‘Nothing can bring her back,’ he said. ‘I realize that I am quite alone now, but still I want to know what happened. It’s clear that Lena was planning to kill poor Mrs Esslemont that day if you had not arrived in time. That in itself does not surprise me, but I don’t know why. I want to know why.’
Alec stared at me and then looked away out of the dusty window and across the gardens, and his message could not have been plainer. I cleared my throat.
‘We believe, I’m afraid, that Lena killed her daughter.’
‘Cara?’ said Mr Duffy.
‘Yes,’ I said. I should not be afraid to use her name, I told myself. I should not hide behind ‘her daughter’, ‘your wife’, ‘her sister’, but should speak plainly. ‘Lena used Cara to expose the theft of the diamonds and then planned to kill her to ensure her silence. I know it seems unbelievable -’
‘But it doesn’t, my dear,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Haven’t you been listening? Lena loved them more than almost anything else in the world and she was quite ruthless. So I am not at all surprised. Anyway, I knew, I suppose. At least, I never believed the fire was an accident. Oh, I did not want any more trouble than I could avoid, certainly did not want a murder trial. With my beloved girl gone, what was the point? All I could do was get rid of the pair of them as far as possible as soon as I could.’
‘Was Lena’s intention to go to Canada with Clemence, then?’ I said.
‘Yes, I expect so,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Not that I cared where she went. I couldn’t cast off Clemence into destitution – it wasn’t her fault who she was and what she was and, as I say, perhaps I should have tried harder not to let her turn into her mother’s child, but by then it was too late.’ He shook himself out of the reverie into which he was sinking. ‘I suppose Daisy Esslemont knew something, then? But how did she get involved?’
I told him and he listened with no more than a rueful shake of his head.
‘Quite ruthless, you see,’ he said. ‘Of course I knew what had happened when Lena started all the nonsense with the cleaning. The jeweller came to me and told me about the pastes and I said to him just to give the things back to Lena and say nothing. Then I quietly stopped paying the insurance premiums, in case she should get greedy. I am surprised at her going after the Esslemonts in particular, though. Why them?’
‘We’ve never been able to work that out,’ I said.
‘But I’m not surprised in any general sense,’ Mr Duffy went on. ‘She was a greedy, ruthless woman. But not really bad, I don’t think.’
I wondered how much whisky he had drunk before Alec and I arrived. Even if he did not know the truth yet, how could he say that a woman who had killed her own child in cold blood was not really bad? Perhaps the big gulps of whisky had affected me too, for I was not aware of deciding to speak, but simply found myself speaking.
‘She was bad, Gregory. Worse than you yet know. Cara did not die in the fire.’ His head jerked up and I saw a quick leap of hope in his eyes.
‘No! I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘she is certainly dead. But Lena killed her in anger, killed her brutally. It almost ruined everything. She was ruthless, you are right to call her so. But there was rage and evil in her too. It’s as though she was two quite different people. She laid all her plans and then just smashed through them as though they were nothing.’ I was speaking without a trace of kindness now. ‘Cara, your beloved girl, is buried in an unmarked grave not a mile from your house in Edinburgh, buried as a servant, given a death certificate full of lies by an idiot of a doctor who cares only about niceties. I’m sorry, Gregory, but Lena was not just greedy and ruthless, she was evil. She must have been, to do such a thing to her child.’
Gregory shook his head at me, smiling, and I thought once more that he must be drunk.
‘Lena would never have harmed her child, Dandy my dear. Lena kill her child? Why, her child was the only living thing in the world she ever loved.’ I stared at him, and felt Alec turn and stare too. Those deep down things were shifting again, bumping gently against each other, making low echoes I had to strain to hear.
‘Let me tell you,’ said Gregory. ‘I must start from a long way back, I’m afraid, but it’s the only way to explain.
‘We went to Ontario straight after our honeymoon and before we had docked I knew what a mistake I’d made. Of course, no one else knew a thing. As far as anyone was aware, we left in ’99, a happy young couple, and came back five years later a happy family with two little daughters. No. No. The truth was this. I went on a long trip up-country shortly after we got there and when I came back my wife tried to pass off her condition as happy news, but I was not such a fool as all that. I was only a big enough fool to throw myself immediately into the arms of someone else, and so before the year was out we did indeed have two little girls, one hers and one mine, born four months apart.
‘If the lady who was Cara’s mother had not died, I might have – I like to think I might have – dared to divorce Lena then. But on my own with a baby girl, all I could think was to make a deal. I should give a name to her brat if she would make a home for mine.
‘And so we went on. I wanted to make a family for the girls, but Lena would have none of it. Clemence was hers alone and it was only too plain that all she wanted from me was a share. Her share, she called it. Clemence’s share. Such arrogance. I gave up trying to tell her that she had no right to anything, that Clemence had no call on me, and then I grew stubborn. I stopped discussing it, but I determined that neither Lena nor Clemence would ever see a penny of my money nor an inch of my land. I was going to settle everything on Cara. Oh, I know this place and Culreoch must go through the male line, but they are nothing really, white elephants. Cara would have been a very wealthy woman.
‘Lena was incensed, of course. And I should not be surprised if the idea of killing Cara started as long ago as then. I think she had forgotten the details of our arrangement. At any rate, she was shocked that I did not intend to settle anything on Clemence and she blamed that for Clemence’s inability to attract a husband, but I always thought that had more to do with Clemence herself, poor thing. Lena wasn’t supposed to tell her that I was not her father – we agreed that neither of the girls would know – but I think she must have. Certainly she managed to stamp out any chance of affection between us. She spent her entire life bringing Clemence up and it’s a dangerous thing for a child – too much devotion, and a constant drip-drip of hints that she’d been wronged – it turned her out so prim, but with no real goodness underneath.
‘Towards the end of the war, Lena came to me and said that since Cara was to have everything else, was I really going to split up the diamonds and hand Cara a share of them too? Didn’t I see it made more sense for all of them to come to Lena and thence to Clemence in time? I laughed, and she didn’t understand why I was laughing. I asked her what on earth made her think that she and Clemence would have any of my diamonds? I can still remember her face. It was as though I had told her the sky was the ground and the ground was the sky. She loved them so much, you see, so much, that the idea that they were not hers was quite unthinkable.’