Fran knew she’d been right, the moment she saw them, standing together in the doorway, when Mark had fetched Jasie in from the garden where he was playing with the other children at Madame Bayard’s. Perhaps she’d always known, subconsciously. Mark and his son. Her heart had turned over.
And now Mark is announcing proudly, in a way that leaves no room for doubt, that yes, he is Jasie’s father. ‘It suited Bibi to let everyone think it was Armstrong, including Armstrong himself, but that’s a load of old cobblers. You’ve only to look at Jasie to know.’
The same lock of dark hair falling over the brow, the same turn of the head. Not enough to call it a startling resemblance, but enough, when you know. It explains a lot, but not everything. Chiefly why it was only then, when Bibi had turned up with Jasie, two years ago, that Mark had suddenly started avoiding the subject of children of their own.
‘I suppose she was putting pressure on you?’
Mark laughs shortly. ‘I don’t easily succumb to that sort of thing. But it was a bloody impossible situation … For one thing, knowing how you felt about having children … I couldn’t stand the idea of you looking at him, thinking, he’s Mark’s son — she has his child, but what about me? But children of our own, knowing that …’ She swallows and bends her head. A strand of hair comes loose and strokes her cheek. Distressed at the pain he’s causing her, he lifts it gently and pushes it back behind her ear, then takes both her hands. ‘I thought, if we moved away, it might be different, but I had to find a good reason for asking you to do that. And then, there was Jasie himself …’
The restaurant is noisy round them, but they’re in a quiet corner of their own. ‘I know how much I’ve hurt you - it’s crucified me, come to that, but … no, absolutely no excuses. I thought, I can take care of this, but I couldn’t. Didn’t want to believe it at first, even told myself it wasn’t certain he was mine. The dates were right — but he could have been Chip’s. In the end I asked her outright and she said of course I was his father, did I think she slept with every man she came across? She was really upset that I could think that.’
That was so like Bibi. The Bibi Fran’s learned to know only since she died.
‘She said if I needed convincing,’ Mark goes on, ‘just to ask Chip. They’d never actually slept together, then or since. Believe that, I thought, and you’ll believe anything! But when I got to know her better, it didn’t seem so crazy.’ Fran remembers Jonathan saying pretty much the same thing. ‘The situation was impossible. There he was, poor sod, hoping against hope, and there was I, wanting more than anything to acknowledge Jasie as mine. I hated him bringing up my child, supporting him, deciding on his life …’
‘Don’t you think it’s possible that Chip might have known? He’s quite capable of putting two and two together.’
‘Sure it occurred to me. In fact I think that’s probably what he has done.’
They fall silent while the waiter collects their plates and Mark orders coffee.
‘Why ever did she marry Armstrong? When there was Chip?’ (And what about you? she thinks, but doesn’t say.)
‘She wanted to keep the hotel at all costs — and Armstrong was there, wild about her, the obvious solution. Only she bit off more than she could chew when she picked on him.’
She frees a hand to sip the last of her wine. She takes a deep breath. ‘Mark, I’ve seen the letters Armstrong wrote. I’m sorry, I broke into your desk and found them in the bottom drawer.’
‘You did what?’ His grasp tightens around the other hand he still holds and he stares at her. That’s done it. Will he ever trust her again?
But what she sees in his face isn’t condemnation, only that he knows exactly what’s been going through her mind - the suspicions, the fear, the terror — and she sees no blame on her for that. ‘She gave them to me, Fran,’ he says quietly. ‘She knew, of course, that I was going to Belgium for a while, and she rang me on Thursday morning and asked me to take Jasie along, too. It was school holidays, she reminded me, and finding something to occupy him was a pain. Knowing how protective of him she was, I couldn’t take that on board — I’m afraid I was a bit short with her and I told her it was out of the question — and then it all came out. She’d been getting these threatening letters from her ex, and she’d just had another which had really frightened her. I thought she was overreacting, but within half an hour she’d hobbled down to The Watersplash with them, apart from the one she’d received that morning — that one had really got to her, and she’d immediately destroyed it. “Read them,” she said, “and then see whether you believe me.” Well, you’ve read them yourself, you must know what I felt. Yes, Fran, I did advise her to go to the police, but there was no way she’d do that — look what had happened last time, she said. I hadn’t much time before I had to leave, so in the end I agreed to do what she wanted and let Jasie come with me, on the understanding that when I got back she must go to the police.’
‘You say she rang on Thursday? But you left before me on Wednesday morning.’
‘I did, but on my way to London I had a call on my mobile postponing my meeting until the following day, so I came home and rearranged my schedule to leave for Brussels on Thursday evening. It was sheer chance that I hadn’t gone when I was supposed to.’
‘So that was it. I knew the oranges must have been you.’
He blinks. ‘Oranges? What oranges?’
She explains about seeing the fruit in the black bowl, her growing certainty that she hadn’t, herself, subliminally arranged them. He smiles wryly. ‘Right, I remember. Seeing the bowl empty, remembering the oranges in the fridge, putting them together … time I stopped having such predictable reflexes.’
‘It started me thinking — that and the owl.’ Barely repressing a shudder, she described the shock the image on the mirror had given her. ‘It was weird. Somebody must have left the front door open, and I knew I hadn’t. After a while I realized it could only have been you.’
‘The front door? Sorry, not me this time. Why should I change the habits of a lifetime and not use the back door?’
Why indeed? They both tend to use the more convenient back door, all the time.
‘In any case, on Wednesday evening, I shut myself up in the studio and got down to some work. I went straight to bed afterwards without going downstairs.’ And no doubt, following his usual custom when he worked, had turned the stereo full on, deaf to any sounds below. ‘Well, since I can’t believe in the supernatural, the owl must have got in by more normal means — an open door,’ he says.
That’s something to think hard about. Gooseflesh rises on her arms, the back of her neck.
‘There’s a key to the front door up at Membery, Fran, for emergencies. Anyone could have let themselves in — Chip, Alyssa, Jane — even Bibi herself.’
‘Why?’
‘All right then, maybe I should have taken more notice of those noises you’ve been hearing in the night.’
‘Don’t, that’s not funny.’
‘Fran, I’ve never been more serious. As soon as we get back, I mean to get to the bottom of that.’
She said slowly, ‘Anyway, surely — you couldn’t have missed seeing the imprint on the mirror when you came down next morning?’
‘Couldn’t I?’ he asks, smiling wryly.
She has to accede that he might. Mornings are never Mark’s best time, he surfaces slowly, not really awake until after the third cup of coffee — especially if, as he says, he was wakened suddenly by that panicky phone call from Bibi, asking him to take Jasie away. If he hadn’t done as she asked, would Jasie have been Armstrong’s second victim? Thinking about that, she almost forgives him the last few days — almost …
‘You might have saved us a lot of grief if you’d told us all this at the beginning.’
‘Bibi intended telling you that evening — but she never got the chance, did she?’
‘No.’ There was a silence. ‘But afterwards, when I told you she was dead? We were frantic
about him.’
‘Believe me, that really bugged me,’ he said steadily. ‘But it was a toss up between causing anxiety and keeping Jasie safe — which he wasn’t anywhere until that bastard was caught.’
She’s not sure she goes along with his reasoning — men, even the best of them, can be so obtuse. But they’ve crossed a barrier here tonight, so she just says, ‘Well, whatever, you’re going to have to face the music when we get back. Wasting police time and all that. Not to mention facing your mother.’
Crouch was taking a break from questioning Armstrong, back in his own office, with approximately the fifteenth cup of black coffee of the day in front of him, when Kate came in. Summing up the situation at a glance, she raised questioning eyebrows.
‘He’s admitted it — to sending the letters.’
‘At last!’
He shrugged. ‘It was only a matter of time, but he’s still sticking out that he’d nothing to do with killing Bibi, or taking Jasie.’
He looked gutted. He was due for his second shave of the day and hadn’t noticed. She resisted the impulse, even though no one else was there, to give him a wifely, comforting hug. But Crouch wasn’t easy to comfort. And it was an unwritten law between them that home and office remained two separate worlds. He pushed his chair back and went to look out over the darkening town, his hands stuck in his pockets.
‘You believe he’s telling the truth about the rest, don’t you, Dave?’
‘Dammit, he can’t be!’ He slammed his fist against the window frame and swung round to face her. ‘Who else is responsible, if not him?’
She took a deep breath and counted to ten. She was about to be shot down in flames and didn’t want to think about it too much first. Then she said what she had to say, and waited.
‘Glass, Kate?’ In two words, he made her feel approximately the same size as Alice when she’d drunk the magic potion that enabled her to get down the rabbit hole. ‘You’re suggesting the murder weapon’s a piece of glass?’
She stuck to her guns. ‘That was my first reaction. How could a glass shard have been thrown into the stream without being broken? But you know, it didn’t need to have been thrown in with any force, just slipped in, and it didn’t have to break, either. Well, it didn’t break, did it? It just lay there, flat on the gravel at the side.’
‘And Forensics missed it when they were searching for the weapon? Hey, come on, that lot don’t miss a grain of sugar in a pile of sand!’
‘They missed this,’ she insisted stubbornly. ‘You could easily, you know. They were looking for a knife or something similar and I don’t suppose they actually sifted through every pebble in the stream. Glass is transparent, and I only happened to see it by a trick of the light. Try looking at a piece of glass under water and you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, Dave — the size and shape fit, they’ve looked at it and it seems to be the exact profile.’
He rubbed his chin, still highly sceptical but wanting to be convinced. ‘How the hell would you manage to push it in with enough force, without cutting yourself?’
‘Gary Brooker was picking out the shards of glass from the frame of a broken window — the same one this glass came from, is my guess. He was wearing really tough, heavy-duty gardening gloves.’
‘Brooker?’ He groaned. ‘Brooker? Oh, for God’s sake, Kate!’
‘No, I’m not saying he’s the one. She was still alive at half-past six, and he says he left Membery after delivering the note at about ten to. We’ve only his word for that, mind, but his gran would know what time he got home — and it’s unlikely the neighbours would miss the sound of his motorbike arriving, either.’
He was still gunning for Graham Armstrong, still hoping to be convinced he was lying. ‘I suppose it’s just possible that sad bastard could’ve been hanging around, noticed the glass and seized the opportunity to use it when he met her -’ He broke off, knowing he was grasping at straws, though she could see he hadn’t entirely thrown out the idea, knowing that scientific comparison of the glass shard with the wound would confirm whether she was right or wrong.
Kate was damn sure she was right, and there was more she had to say. She had at last pinned down that elusive idea she’d been chasing and, going back yet once more through her notes, there it all was, the possibility at any rate, a possibility so bizarre that she’d needed more time to work on it and let it mature in her own mind before amazing Crouch with her powers of deduction. She felt she’d come up with quite enough weird ideas for the moment, and her theory offered no explanation for the boy’s disappearance, but since they appeared to have come to the end of the line with Armstrong, it could do no harm. She said slowly, ‘Dave, I think you might have got it right. Right at first, when you were so adamant it was a family matter …’
He turned his gaze on her. Under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, she looked tired and anxious. She was wasted as a sergeant, bloody wasted on him, come to that, though she thought he didn’t appreciate that. He felt remorseful. He would do better. And this time he meant it.
He grinned at her. ‘Amaze me further.’
But before she could do so, the telephone rang. Since she was the nearer, she reached out a hand and answered it. A few minutes later, she replaced the receiver. ‘That was Fran Calvert. She’s in Belgium -’
‘Belgium?’
‘She’s with her husband — and they’ve got the boy there with them.’
There was a short, sharp silence. ‘So that’s one thing Armstrong didn’t do.’
‘I don’t think he killed Bibi Morgan, either. As we were saying … There are only two possibilities, really, aren’t there?’
So, he thought when she’d finished, they now knew who, and they knew how. What they didn’t know yet was why. But Crouch didn’t feel that was important just now. People who killed had their own agenda, their own motives, quite often inexplicable to other people. It would all come out in the end.
He smiled at Kate and said, as she’d known he would, ‘One up to you, darlin’. Now get me a line to Membery Place.’
It wasn’t gracious, but it was enough.
Chapter Eighteen
The small gold watch on the black strap was expensive, way out of his league. Try to flog that and they’d have him banged up to rights in no time. Gary had meant to give it to Charleen Smith, but it wasn’t her style, not flash enough. And smitten as he was at the moment, he knew she was dumb enough to try selling it if he did give it her. Keeping it here, on the other hand, was equally a nonstarter. His grandmother had eyes like lasers and a nose like a bloodhound that she poked into everything.
He couldn’t think now why he’d bothered nicking it, except that, unlike everything else his covetous eyes had lit on, the watch had been a doddle, lying on the floor by that leather chair thing that he’d tried out and found so comfortable he could’ve nodded off, only at that moment there’d been the sound of a door opening and a blast of music from upstairs. And the frigging house was supposed to be empty!
He’d leaped up like a scalded cat, pocketing a couple of CDs on his way out, just for luck, and then just as he was getting the hell out the same way as he’d come, there was a big soft thud and then a scuffling sort of sound. Something big and grey rushed past his ears. He’d nearly pissed himself. Christ, that was one weird house! Never mind it was stuffed to the gills with all the most up-to-date gear, as he and his mates had reckoned. And nearly all of it built-in, as he’d seen, too late.
So, what about the watch?
He didn’t hear the door open, but the next moment his grandmother was standing there. ‘What’s that you’ve got there then, our Gary?’
Today Membery is a different place. The relief of knowing that Jasie is safe has made everyone light-headed, the telephone lines between Brussels and Membery have been alive. Jonathan and Jilly are preparing to depart for Philadelphia, with Berlin in between, Chip is returning from London. Mark and Fran, with Jasie, will be here any time.
After all the exciteme
nts, Alyssa and Jane walk slowly under the trees towards the head of the waterfall, bypassing the bank of the stream where Bibi died, drawn there by an invisible thread of tension. The sky is a lurid shade of yellow. Purple thunderheads are forming in the distance but nobody is giving much credence to their promise of rain. The weather’s tried that trick once or twice too often in the last few days.
They reach the massed boulders above the fall and sit quietly for a while, the only sound the gurgle of the running stream and the splash as it hits the next rock below.
‘I need to talk to you, Jane.’
Jane bends down and works a tiny cushion of moss off its rock, looking like smooth, Lincoln green velvet, but in reality a dense mat of tiny, individual stems and leaves. It resists with all its might but it has met its match in Jane. Triumphantly, she pulls it free.
‘Look at me, Jane.’ Alyssa puts a hand on Jane’s brown forearm. The skin, like that on her own forearms, is dry and rough. Jane at last looks at her from under the brim of her fawn cotton sun-hat. ‘I think you might have guessed what I’m going to say. I’m going to marry Humphrey, Jane.’
An aeroplane moves across the sky, leaving a vapour trail, heading towards North America, its passengers settling down after take-off, awaiting their first gin and tonic and the pleasure of a British Airways meal. One of the village rowdies, maybe Gary, roars distantly past the garden gates on a motorbike. A column of gnats rises in the air in front of them. Jane rubs the moss between her fingers until it goes to nothing. ‘You can’t do that,’ she says.
‘I’ve already told him I will.’
‘You can’t,’ Jane repeats, suddenly shaking with anger. ‘I won’t let you!’
‘Now, Jane, it can’t come as any surprise to you. You know he’s been asking me for years.’
‘What’s going to happen to — all this?’ The wide sweep of Jane’s arm encompasses the acres surrounding Membery Place, the garden, and the house itself. The family.
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