by Sara Rosett
Gwen was rarely so passionate about anything. “That’s quite a strong reaction.”
She jerked toward me, her hands fisted. “He refuses to admit that this new evidence of the missing photographs points to someone besides Peter. He doesn’t even seem to have taken the photos into account.”
I put a hand on her arm. “I’m sure if he could remove Peter from his suspect list, he would, if only for you.”
“Well, he doesn’t act like that at all,” Gwen said, but a blush had crept into her cheeks. She shifted on the cushion. “What more does he need? Peter never came across Mr. Payne when the war was on. Peter wasn’t even here when we opened the hospital. He was at school.”
“It’s a shame there are no records from nineteen fourteen.”
“What do you mean?”
“When Aunt Carolyn gave the tour, Mr. Payne mentioned that he had been here in nineteen fourteen. If you had records from the time Parkview served as a hospital, we’d know exactly when Mr. Payne was here. Then if Peter was away during that time . . .”
“It would force Inspector Longly to move away from Peter as a suspect.”
I didn’t think it would be so clear-cut as that, but before I could point that out, Gwen said, “But of course there are records.”
“Weren’t all the records moved to London when they moved the hospital?”
Gwen all but bounced on the cushion in her excitement. “No, I don’t believe so. I remember there was some discussion about transferring the paperwork, but I don’t think it ever happened. It was all boxed up and put away.”
“Put away where?”
Gwen smiled. “Where one puts everything that has to be stored away—in the attic.”
Chapter Twenty
“I should have brought my gloves.” I closed a box and moved to the next one. “It’s freezing up here.”
“Only a few more to go,” Gwen said, her head down as she bent over a crate filled with papers.
The attic at Parkview was a huge space crammed with boxes, trunks, rolled rugs, and discarded furniture, but Gwen had strode across the bare, dusty floorboards with confidence to an area just beyond a decrepit pram and pulled a chain attached to a dangling light bulb. With a single-minded focus, she’d already made good progress on the little area she’d selected for us to search, which was bounded by a steamer trunk on one side and a table in the Jacobean style on the other. The stack of boxes she’d already looked through was as high as her shoulder.
“What about the twenty or thirty boxes under the window?”
“We don’t need to check those. They’re mostly from the nursery.”
I turned my back on the attic and its seemingly endless storage capacity and put another box on a rickety straight-backed chair that was missing its cane seat. “We should have informed Inspector Longly that the records might be in the attic. His men should be conducting the search.”
Gwen stopped pawing through the crate and looked at me over her shoulder. “When have you ever been one to worry about breaking rules?”
“I don’t break rules. I bend them occasionally, especially when the rules are ridiculous.” I opened the box.
“And it would be ridiculous to wait for Inspector Longly’s people to go through all this,” Gwen said. “We’re expediting things. We can find the relevant files and—what is it?”
“Hospital records.” The box I’d opened contained folders with men’s names on the tabs along with dates. “From nineteen fifteen, it looks like.”
Gwen came over and opened the next box. “Here we go, nineteen fourteen.” Her fingers rippled across the tabs. “They’re alphabetical. It should be—” Her voice pulsed with excitement. “Right. Payne, Vincent.” She splayed the folder open and skimmed through the pages. “He arrived October thirtieth, nineteen fourteen with multiple injuries, including a broken leg. He was put in an empty bed in the mahogany room.”
“Yes, that’s the room he remembered.”
“Peter wouldn’t have been here then. He’d have already gone back to school after his mid-term break.” Gwen turned the pages. “This lists Mr. Payne’s medication and has the doctors’ notes. Looks like it was old Dr. Grimshaw who saw him the most. There was some doubt about his leg and whether or not he’d recover. They thought they might have to amputate at one point, but his wound healed. He left . . . let’s see, December eighth. So that leaves Peter completely out of it. He wouldn’t have returned for Christmas holiday before then.”
“Well, that’s good news.” I pulled the first file out of the box and scanned the dates.
“What are you doing?” Gwen had taken a step toward the door. “Don’t you want to come downstairs with me and show this to Inspector Longly?”
“He’s left. When we first came up here, I saw him and his sergeant leaving in the police motor.”
“Well, I’ll telephone the police station.”
“Let me look through the rest of these files now that we have a window of time. We can pull the files of everyone else who was here when Mr. Payne was a patient.”
“Oh, excellent idea,” Gwen said. “We’ll not only give him proof Peter wasn’t involved, but we’ll give him heaps of other suspects to investigate. In fact, let’s give him the name of everyone who was here—patients and staff. There shouldn’t be that many patient files. That was fairly early in the war, and Mother hadn’t expanded the hospital to include both wings. I’ll look for the roster of medical staff. I know mother had one.”
I worked my way through the folders, checking the dates. I stacked the ones that matched the dates of Mr. Payne’s stay on the Jacobean table. “I’ve found a few . . . Benjamin Henry Allan, Carl Cummins, Percival Winston Finton—” I paused over the name Winston. It couldn’t have been Miss Miller’s brother—he would have been too old to have fought in the war, but the name triggered another thought. “Didn’t Miss Miller say she volunteered here at Parkview in nineteen fourteen?”
“Yes, she said her brother broke his hip in nineteen fifteen, but she pitched in before that.” Gwen tilted her head and looked into the distance. “I don’t remember seeing Miss Miller here, but that doesn’t mean much. Mother would only let me visit the men in the afternoon at teatime. I don’t know all of the people who came and went. I’m sure there’s a record of volunteers as well. I’ll just have to find it.”
I nodded and went back to the files, murmuring their names as I added them to the stack. “Godfrey Rufus Lunn, Charles Robert Stanton, Rodger Scott, Thomas Talmage, and Wesley Godfrey Williams. I think that’s the lot. Nine patients in all, besides Mr. Payne. That shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“Olive, come look at this.” Gwen’s voice was sharp.
“What’s wrong?”
Gwen handed me a crinkled piece of paper. “It was in with the volunteer log. It’s a list of people Mother interviewed for positions in the hospital.” She tapped a name. “Isn’t that Sonia’s maiden name? I noticed it because the name Sonia caught my eye. Otherwise, I might have skimmed right over it . . .”
I angled the paper to the light to make sure I was reading the words correctly. “Sonia Bernard,” I read, then dropped my arms to my side. “Sonia lied. She said she’d never worked here.” I jerked the paper back up to the light and searched for a date. “November thirtieth, nineteen fourteen.”
Sonia had lied to me about being at Parkview. What else had she lied about? Even though Jasper and I had verified portions of the story she’d told, it was impossible to check every bit of it. “Oh, this is dreadful. If Sonia had something to do with Mr. Payne’s death—”
My heart ached for Father. If Sonia was responsible for Payne’s death, Father would be devastated. He’d been a widower for years and years before he married Sonia. To find out about the bigamy would be terrible, but to discover she was a murderess on top of that—? I shied away from thinking about it. It was too painful.
Gwen put her hand on my arm. “Olive, did you hear what I said? We shouldn’t delay. We have to
inform Inspector Longly.” She looked at her watch. “There’s enough time to do it before we have to dress for dinner.”
“Yes.” I dragged my gaze away from the folders. “Yes, I did. And you’re right. Inspector Longly needs to know.” No matter how ghastly the situation would be for Father, the police had to know. I handed the paper with the list of interviewees to her. “Will you do it?”
She gave my arm a squeeze. “Of course. I’ll use the telephone in Father’s study.” She turned away, then stopped, her gaze on the files. “Where should we put them?” Gwen asked. “Inspector Longly will want to see them, but I don’t want to cart them all down to the study either—that might lead to questions.”
I eyed the dusty pile. “We could leave them here. They’ve been undisturbed for years and years . . .”
“No, I don’t like that idea,” Gwen said. “Anyone could come up here and have a look. There’s no lock on the attic door, and it’s obvious where we’ve been looking.” Gwen nodded toward the trail of footprints we’d left in the dust on the floorboards.
“Let’s use one of the cupboards behind the wainscoting.” It was a storage place Sonia didn’t know about.
“Good idea,” Gwen said. “I’ll take the first half of the alphabet and put them in my room, and you take the others. The whole stack would be too unwieldy for one of us to carry.” She gathered up the folders. “I’ll see you in the drawing room before dinner.”
I picked up the remaining files, tucked them in the box, and followed Gwen, my steps slower than hers as she raced away down the narrow and uncarpeted stairs. I saw two maids on my way to my room, but no guests. I deposited the files in the little cupboard behind the wainscoting in the Oriental room, dusted my hands, and went to look for Aunt Caroline. If I hurried, I could catch her before she went down to the drawing room.
When I stepped into the hallway, I nearly ran into Sonia. “Goodness, Olive, you’re coated in dust. What have you been doing?”
“Helping Gwen.” I almost hurried around her, but then I stopped. There was nothing to be lost if I asked her about what we’d found. She couldn’t do anything to me in the middle of the afternoon in the corridor of the guest rooms at Parkview. Maids were moving back and forth from room to room, preparing garments for guests and carrying hot water for those who preferred to use a hip bath instead of waiting for the bath in each hall, not to mention the guests who were also about, changing for dinner. The corridor might be deserted, but the wing wasn’t empty. A shout would bring people running.
I shifted so that I wasn’t blocking the light from the wall sconce. I wanted to see her face clearly. “Why did you lie, Sonia?” I asked, my insides twisting. In a distant part of my mind, I noted my physical reaction and almost couldn’t believe it. If someone had told me a few weeks ago I’d feel a mix of dread—and regret, I realized—as I confronted Sonia with her lie, I would’ve thought the person was barmy.
Sonia’s brows snapped down into a scowl. “What are you talking about?”
“You did come here to Parkview during the war, when Aunt Caroline interviewed you for a nursing job.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Sonia drew herself up a few more inches. “I never lied to you. Everything I told you has been the complete truth. You asked me if I’d ever worked here as a nurse. The answer is no. Lady Caroline did invite me here for an interview. A friend who worked here recommended me to Lady Caroline. I came for the interview because my friend said it was an excellent position, better than any she’d had in London. I was on the grounds of Parkview for all of a quarter hour. I traveled from London, met with Lady Caroline, then returned to London the next day.”
“But it was when Mr. Payne was here as a patient.”
For a moment Sonia looked as if she’d been walking along and missed a step on uneven pavement. “What?”
A door down the corridor opened, and Deena stepped out, dressed head to toe in silver. From her silver comb decorating her hair, to her dangling diamond earrings, to her silver-toned shoes that sparkled with every step, everything she wore shimmered and spoke of opulence. She gave us a nod as she passed. Something pinged in my mind as I watched her walk away, but Sonia’s fierce whisper drew my attention back to her.
“I’ll thank you not to make unfounded accusations. I had nothing to do with Simon—I mean, Mr. Payne’s death, and whether or not I was here at Parkview for a few moments in nineteen fourteen means nothing. Nothing.” She turned away, then spun back to face me. “And if you mention this to your father, you’ll regret it. I know you think nothing can come between you and him, but I can turn him against you. And if you pursue this, this—slander—against me, I’ll convince him you’re nothing but a grasping hussy out to cast me in a bad light.” Her words were like a physical blow, and I fell back a step. Her nostrils flared as she breathed in. I thought I saw a look of hurt in her eyes for a moment, then it was gone. “I thought I could trust you. Everyone speaks of how generous and loyal you are, but I don’t see any evidence of it—none at all.”
She jerked open her door and stepped back inside her room. I caught a glimpse of her face as she blew out a breath and transformed her expression into a serene mask. “No, nothing’s wrong, Cecil. I decided I do want to wear my shawl tonight . . .” The door clicked softly.
Her ability to abruptly cloak her emotions was disturbing, but part of a nurse’s job was to present a calm, confident manner. She must have had lots of practice hiding her true feelings.
I walked slowly down the hall. Could it simply be a coincidence that Sonia was at Parkview when Payne was a patient? Was Sonia being completely honest? She certainly had the strength and determination to do away with Payne, but if Payne’s death was linked to something that happened in nineteen fourteen and Sonia was only here at Parkview for a quarter of an hour then, how would she even know Payne was here as well? Unless Aunt Caroline took Sonia on a tour of the hospital and introduced her to some of the patients.
My steps quickened as I went directly to Aunt Caroline’s room and tapped on her door. She was seated at her dressing table in her wrapper, her head tilted to one side as she put on an earring. “Hello, Olive.” Her gaze met mine in the mirror. “Is something wrong? Is it Peter?” she asked, half rising from the chair.
“No, it’s nothing like that.” I waved her back down and took a seat on the blanket trunk at the foot of the bed. When we were little, Gwen and I would sit on the trunk and watch her dress before parties, giggling and dreaming of dressing up so elegantly.
I pulled my mind away from the memories. “When you were running the hospital here at Parkview, do you remember interviewing Sonia for a nursing position?”
“Yes, of course. She made a marvelous impression. I thought she’d do an excellent job.” Aunt Caroline tipped her head in the opposite direction and attached the other earring. “Why?”
I scrambled for an explanation. “I didn’t realize you’d recommended her when Father was ill. I was curious about the whole situation.”
Aunt Caroline picked up a comb and smoothed her hair. “You and your curiosity. It’s rather insatiable,” she said, but her tone was indulgent.
“But you didn’t hire her.”
“No, the position I thought I’d need to fill didn’t become vacant. The nurse decided to stay on, so I didn’t need to hire anyone at that time.”
“Did you take Sonia on a tour of Parkview when she was here?”
Aunt Caroline dabbed scent on her wrist. “Of course not. There wasn’t time for anything of that sort. It was simply a quarter hour of conversation. We chatted a bit. I went over her references, and then she departed. I was always on the lookout for a good nurse, and she was highly recommended. I never gave tours to the nurses I interviewed. That would happen when they arrived for work.”
“I see.”
Aunt Caroline replaced the glass bottle on her dressing table. “You’d better run along and get ready. You look quite dusty.”
“Yes, I am rather
a mess.”
I stopped by Gwen’s room to tell her that Sonia was not as good a candidate for a suspect as we thought, but Gwen wasn’t in her room. Perhaps it had taken longer than she thought to get through to the inspector and she was still on the telephone. I didn’t have time to go down and find her, then return upstairs and change for dinner. I’d have to draw her aside tonight and speak to her before dinner. I hoped Longly had been out and she’d had to leave him a message. If he made his way back to Parkview, I’d have to catch him before he interrupted dinner and tell him we’d been mistaken about Sonia.
I raced back to my room, rang for Hannah, and requested she draw me a bath. I was too filthy to just change into my evening gown. I was lost in my own thoughts, not paying much attention to Hannah’s chatter as I looked through my jewelry box, until she said something about the color of hair accessories. I put down the string of jet beads and turned. “What was that?”
She’d hooked the hanger with my dress on the Chinese screen and was straightening the sash on the dropped waistline, but she halted her movements at my sharp tone. “I’m sorry, miss. I was just yammering on. I’ll be quiet.”
“No, what did you say about hair accessories?”
“Just that Miss Lacey has such beautiful things. Imagine having accessories like feathers, jewelry, shoes, and gloves to match every outfit. She has every color in the rainbow in her wardrobe.”
“Yes, Deena does have the finest of everything in matching shades.”
Hannah went through and turned on the taps in the bath, and I stared at my reflection in the glass without seeing it, my brain cells firing away.
When she turned off the water, I said, “I’ll ring for you when I’m done with the bath. I want a good long soak tonight.”
“Very good, miss,” Hannah said and left me.
Normally, I’d soak in the deep luxurious warm water, but tonight I didn’t have time for that. I slipped in and out of the water as quickly as possible and didn’t ring for Hannah again. Instead, I left the water standing in the tub, went to the lacquered screen, and took down my evening gown. I slipped the dress over my head. It only had a few buttons on the side, which I could fasten without help. I put on my plain shoes and picked up my gloves.
