by Alex Pavesi
‘But now you’re not so sure?’
‘When you put away childish fancies, it doesn’t quite hang together, does it? He hadn’t confessed, he’d only shown me one of the missing diamonds. It’s much more likely that he found the body by himself – before we found it together – and that the ring had been on the floor, by the bed.’
‘Or somebody could have given it to him. But you never asked him about this?’
Lily looked sad. ‘I would have asked him for more details, once the initial shock had passed. But nothing could have prepared me for how quickly we lost each other. It can’t have been more than a couple of weeks later. Matthew inherited the house and didn’t want William living there. He’d always hated him, on account of who his father was.’
‘That’s right, he went to live with the gardener?’
‘With Raymond, who had always felt sorry for William. They got on well, and Raymond and his wife had no children of their own. So it seemed a fortuitous arrangement. But the three of them moved away almost immediately. Raymond didn’t want to work at The Grange after what had taken place, and he’d heard of another job. So they left. That all happened in a matter of weeks and I haven’t seen my cousin since. William wanted nothing to do with any of us after that, after we rejected him.’
‘Then that’s the only lead we have?’ The doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘One suspect, who was probably too young to have killed her anyway.’
‘There is more,’ said Lily, lining her mouth with another sip of whiskey. She was quite used to it now, and wondered if she should ask for a cigar. ‘First there was Dorothea’s funeral, just over a year later. That was followed closely by Violet’s wedding.’
‘To Ben Crake?’
‘That’s right, to Ben Crake, who had been hanging around the house on the day of my grandmother’s murder. He didn’t go away after Agnes’s death. I think Violet felt freed by the tragedy and started to talk to him quite openly. They were soon engaged.’
‘Your uncle must have been delighted?’
‘Oh, Matthew didn’t like it at all. But he didn’t make too much fuss. He’d been kind in letting Violet and me go on living at The Grange, even if he was beastly to William. But we still felt like a burden, and I’m sure he was relieved to get rid of her. Violet herself was desperate to escape. The marriage was inevitable.’
‘How romantic,’ said Dr Lamb.
‘Anyway, none of us really suspected Ben of being a murderer. The notion seemed ridiculous; he knew almost nothing about our family. He certainly wouldn’t have known about any diamonds. It was only Uncle Matthew that insisted we treat him as a suspect.’
‘But at some point you began to agree with him?’
The small family – Lauren, Matthew and Lily – sat around the kitchen table, eating a late lunch. There was a knock at the door. It was Violet.
‘Uncle Matthew, Lauren, Lily.’ She stepped into the kitchen. ‘How are you all?’ She sat down. ‘I just had to show you the ring that Ben has bought for me.’ They’d been married for six months by this point. ‘He’s been saving up. You’ll understand why when you see it.’
She held her hand out over the crowded table, showing a large diamond set in a simple silver band. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’
Lauren and Matthew looked at each other.
‘Yes, it’s very beautiful,’ said Lauren.
‘Very,’ said Matthew.
Lily said nothing, though she noted how similar it looked to the ring William had shown her eighteen months before. Could Ben have been involved in her grandmother’s death? Was that really possible?
If only Dorothea was still with us, she thought.
‘But you’ve made far more progress with this case than Dorothea ever did,’ said Dr Lamb.
‘Have I? Ben, William, the rest of them. These are all strands that can’t be reconciled.’
‘But you have real suspects; she only had suspicion.’
Lily felt that there was something missing from her understanding. ‘Even you may have heard about what happened next. It was quite sensational.’
Dr Lamb nodded. ‘The incident with the gardener, Raymond?’
On the evening of Lily’s fifteenth birthday – Lauren had bought her a dress and was watching her parade around the lounge in it – Matthew came home from work in a frightful state. ‘I got the gossip from the stationmaster. You won’t believe it.’ Forgetting all about Lily’s special day, he poured himself a sherry and sat down. ‘It’s the strangest thing.’ His hair was dishevelled where he’d combed his fingers through it repeatedly; his fingernails glistened with grease. ‘It’s Raymond,’ he said.
Lily sat down next to Lauren. The name of their old gardener, whom none of them had seen since the month after the murder, put them both on edge. They knew that whatever Matthew said next would lead them back to Agnes’s killing.
‘He’s dead.’ Neither of them moved, not wanting to reveal themselves. ‘Killed, in London. It seems to have been a robbery. Apparently he was going around town trying to sell some diamonds. In the slums, trying to avoid anywhere legitimate. The bloody fool got himself robbed and killed. They stabbed him.’
Lily had a vision of Raymond struggling to breathe, his throat constricted, as he held a hand loosely over a hole in his stomach.
Matthew looked from her to her aunt. ‘Do you know what that means?’
They both knew exactly what it meant. Lauren put it into words. ‘Where did he get hold of these diamonds, unless he murdered your mother?’
‘Precisely,’ said Matthew. ‘I always thought he was suspicious.’
‘That was almost three years ago,’ said Lily. ‘I tried writing to William to check he was all right, but my letter never reached him. It was returned, unopened. Apparently Raymond’s widow had moved again and taken him with her.’
‘An unlucky child.’
Lily sighed. ‘The poor boy. He’d be fifteen now. And that brings us to the present day.’
‘Did you ever confront your sister?’
Lily, a little drunk now, narrowed her eyes at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I won’t suggest that she was involved in the murder, but she clearly lied about her movements that morning.’
Lily downed her drink. ‘You’re not such a bad detective yourself, doctor. Doctor, detective. The two words are quite similar, now that I say them out loud.’
‘Take it slowly.’ He took the glass from her hand.
‘Yes, it’s true. When I saw Violet on the morning of the murder she was in a terrible state, shaken and distracted. I’ve asked her about it since. She’d gone up to collect Agnes’s breakfast tray, after Lauren left, and Agnes had screamed at her and accused her of wanting her dead. Well, that wasn’t so unusual, but Violet was haunted by it. She never told the police.’
‘Then Violet was the last to see her alive?’
‘The last to admit to it.’
‘Of course.’ The doctor looked thoughtful.
‘I have one more question for you,’ said Lily, emboldened by the alcohol. ‘A memory, in fact, that I’d like to ask you about.’
The doctor nodded.
‘After I left William in the boat and before I settled down with my book, I walked around the garden several times. I was looking for somewhere to sit. At one point I put my head around a hedge and saw you and Lauren in each other’s arms, at the distant end of the lane. You were kissing her.’
The doctor spun his chair slightly towards the wall, as if to deflect the accusation. ‘That’s right, your aunt and me. Does that bother you?’
‘That depends on what the two of you did together.’
He sighed, and checked his watch: either in search of some excuse to end the conversation, or as an aid to recalling the past, she couldn’t be sure. ‘We lied to the police, obviously. We adjusted our accounts of the day to avoid mentioning that little encounter. But the truth is we’d been seeing each other for months by that point and we were together when the murder happened, at your un
cle’s old house in the village.’
‘How sordid,’ said Lily, dreamily.
The doctor grunted. He took a pen from his desk and leaned forward. ‘Perhaps you are too young to understand the impulse.’ She looked, with a sting of shame, at the whiskey glass in his hand. ‘Lately, I’ve come to think that the human reproductive system,’ he circled the air with his pen, pointing it vaguely at her womb, ‘is more an engine of destruction than of life.’
She drew her knees up into her stomach and perched her feet on the edge of her chair. ‘Then you have no regrets?’
‘What I have is an alibi, if you’re really concerned with solving the murder.’
She shrugged off this rebuke. ‘Well, can anyone confirm this alibi? If not, it’s not much good.’
‘Have you asked your aunt Lauren about it?’
Lily’s mouth straightened, her skin stretched a little tighter. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you knew. She died, last year.’ She thought back to Lauren’s body in its casket, the eyes bloodshot and the neck swollen. ‘It was a viral infection, a freak thing.’
The doctor paled. ‘I didn’t know.’
He became thoughtful and silent. For all his shock at the image of Lauren’s body convulsing on the cold floor, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of triumph. She was one of his sins and he’d outlived her. Maybe, in fact, he would outlive them all.
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ he said. ‘God knows your family has been through enough.’
She wondered if there was meant to be something diminishing in that remark and looked down at the floor.
‘Well,’ she said, as a final formality, ‘is there anything else you can tell me about that day?’
He got to his feet. ‘In fact, there is.’ He filled his glass again. ‘After you leave this room it might occur to you to wonder how Lauren and I knew such a rendezvous would be safe, at Matthew’s own house, on a day when he wasn’t working. It’s because he was going to the train station to meet Dorothea, or so he said. That’s a twenty-five-minute walk in each direction. But he never did meet her, did he? She arrived by herself. Which makes you wonder, where did he really go?’
Leaving Dr Lamb suspended between his office and his deathbed, let us take a step back.
Here it is my duty, as the author of this story, to assure the reader that they have now been presented with enough evidence to solve this mystery for themselves. The more ambitious of my readership may wish to pause for a moment and attempt to do so.
And now it was five years later.
Dr Lamb had a view of the twilight in two rectangles. He was looking out of the window, through his glasses. He’d written her name and nothing else. ‘Dearest Lily.’
Then sadness had consumed him. His sins seemed impossible to justify now that he’d reached the end of his life and seen how little difference they’d made to it; for the same reason, they were impossible to regret.
‘Five years ago you came to me with questions about your grandmother’s murder. I did not tell you everything I knew at that time, for reasons that will become clear. In fact, I did the opposite, and my last hint to you was a piece of misdirection; your uncle did walk to the station, but he’d got the train times wrong. Perhaps you suspected this and were too polite to say so? You were an impressive young woman and I hope the intervening years have served you well. Dorothea would have been proud.’
He sighed deeply; he was delaying the moment of confession and he knew it. ‘At that meeting you got me to confess to one of my sins, my affair with your aunt Lauren. But not to the other, to the part I played in Agnes’s murder. It all began with Ben Crake.’
‘Excuse me.’ The doctor was walking past the war memorial one late summer’s day, when the young man called out to him.
‘Hello, Ben. How are you?’
Ben got to his feet. ‘Have you just come from The Grange, doctor? Do you mind if I walk with you?’
‘Yes, I have; and no, I don’t mind. Come along. Do you want to know about Violet?’
‘Not today,’ said Ben. ‘Today, I want to ask you about diamonds.’
‘It was the first I’d heard of them,’ wrote Dr Lamb. ‘But Ben was insistent. Agnes had asked his father to help her sell them, when she’d briefly considered it; he knew a lot about that kind of thing, being in the antiques business. When she’d pulled out of the sale she’d sworn him to secrecy. But of course he’d told his son all about it. Ben knew I was in her bedroom often and asked me if I’d seen them. I had not, but I asked Lauren about it. She told me the story, that when Agnes’s husband was alive and their future was bright, he’d bought her a diamond every year for their anniversary. Before the war. But she thought the old woman had sold them years ago.’
The light was growing dim. He squinted at the page.
‘I told her that Ben had assured me otherwise and together we concocted a plan. This was after Agnes’s fortuitously timed illness and I was spending a lot of time at the house; I promised to find some way to sedate her on one of my visits, then Lauren would go in and search her room. We didn’t intend to take all of the diamonds, just enough to split handsomely between the three of us – giving Ben his cut too – but Lauren was unable to find them. She spent an hour searching; they were nowhere. We didn’t know that Agnes had woken up still feeling the effects of the sedative and had grown suspicious, so a few days later we planned our second attempt. This time I would come with her and help with the search.’
Ben scanned the nooks and partitions of the garden with his binoculars, finally spotting the two of them, Lauren and Dr Lamb, through a gap in the trees.
‘They ought to be more careful,’ he said to himself.
He intercepted them at the top of the lane, after circling widely around the gardener, busy collecting leaves at the other side of the house, and Violet’s younger sister who was reading under a tree – he’d already seen Matthew leaving the house for the station – and stepped out to interrupt them. ‘I’m coming with you.’
Lauren looked at him suspiciously. ‘Why, don’t you trust us?’
‘We want to maximize our chances of finding them, don’t we?’
The doctor shook his head. ‘But if you’re seen, how will we explain your presence?’
‘It shouldn’t come to that,’ said Lauren. ‘Violet is asleep in the lounge. If we use the other staircase, she won’t hear us.’
‘Fine.’ The doctor parted his hands, then turned to Lauren. ‘Did you give her the sedative?’
Lauren nodded. ‘It’s in her milk.’
‘Then let’s make sure we find them this time.’
‘I’ve been watching her,’ said Ben, lifting his binoculars, ‘but I haven’t seen where she keeps them.’
‘You won’t find them.’ A small voice trickled out of the trees. ‘She doesn’t take them out in the daytime.’ There was a rustling of leaves and a shape climbed out from one of the nearby elderberries. It was William, his hands black with crushed fruit. ‘I know where they are. They’re very well hidden.’
‘Where are they?’ asked Ben.
Lauren knelt down in front of the child. ‘William, how do you know where they’re hidden?’
‘She was out of the room once. I crawled under her bed. I was going to surprise her, but when she came back in she slammed the door so I was too scared. I stayed there all night. She takes them out at night.’
The doctor struggled to suppress a smile. ‘Then won’t you tell us where they are?’
The boy shook his head. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said, with an air of importance.
Lauren looked up at Dr Lamb, then glanced briefly at Ben. She turned back to the child. ‘William, can you keep a secret?’
Dr Lamb massaged his hand; he’d covered two pages already. The light was failing and he wanted to get it all down before dark. He picked up the pen again.
‘Well, there you have it. The four of us went up to her bedroom together, sneaking past you and Raymond and Violet without too much difficulty. Will
iam showed us the loose piece of wood in the window frame, and behind it just the edge of a canvas pouch emerging. It came out like a worm pulled from an apple, with a little resistance. Then we emptied it onto a table. There were more than we had imagined, and they were dazzling. It felt fantastic. And young William was the most excited of all of us.’
‘You!’
They turned around. Agnes was sitting up in bed. Where her head had left the pillow there was a dark, wet stain. She had felt too weak to make it to the window after breakfast, so she’d poured the glass of milk very carefully into her own pillow, to give Lauren the impression she’d drunk it. Then she’d lain back and covered it with her hair.
‘I knew somebody was up to no good. But all four of you!’
Ben stepped forward without hesitating. He took some spare blankets from a chest of drawers beside the bed and threw them over the old woman. Briefly, she looked like a ghost. Then he nudged them all towards her. ‘Come on, there’s no going back now.’
She had seen too much and they knew what they had to do. There were no objections, even from William, who seemed to think it was all a game. They threw every piece of bedding they could find over her and then climbed on top. The four of them, all equally committed to her murder. She was barely able to struggle beneath their combined weight, but they could still feel movement and they sat there holding onto each other until it had stopped. Then they stayed in place for another few minutes, to be sure. But not one of them was willing to lift the blankets and look at her dead body.
‘We changed the pillow, of course. Nobody noticed that the mattress was slightly damp. And we sealed up the hiding place. But we left everything else as it was. At worst, you can call me an unwilling accomplice.’
He sighed, wondering if that was accurate. Even now it was a struggle to speak honestly.
‘Lauren and I sold our shares through Ben’s father, who asked no questions. But William had already moved away by that point. We’d given him a share, of course, and hoped that it would keep him quiet. And it did, for a few years. But he must have told Raymond all about the diamonds at some point, and the fool evidently took them to London and advertised them too widely and wound up getting stabbed in an alleyway.’ Dr Lamb smiled. ‘It’s not much, but that’s the only thing resembling justice that I can offer you.’
