The Property of Lies

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘How did she know that, Catherine?’ Reardon asked.

  She shook her head.

  He sighed. ‘Then I’ll tell you. She knew because she was there when you were born, fourteen years ago, and that knowledge could still make trouble. Sadly, however unfair, a shameful pregnancy and its concealment can follow a woman for the rest of her life. It can spell ruin if that woman has subsequently made a good marriage – or become successful in her own right. It’s a motive for blackmail, serious blackmail in this case. But who would have taken Isabelle Blanchard’s word alone for what she knew? She needed someone to back her up. She seriously miscalculated, however, if she had hoped to bribe your aunt, which was what she was trying to do.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because although there were other people who had been there when you were born, her mother and her stepsister, she knew they would never have agreed to help her in what she was trying to do. Her plans were not going as she wanted, and I think she told you the truth about your birth because she knew you’d hate your birth mother and hoped it would make you try to persuade your aunt against her. But it was Isabelle Blanchard you hated, for telling you that, wasn’t it, Catherine?’

  Still she kept silent.

  It had come to the point where he couldn’t put it off any longer, a duty that had to be accepted. This time, in circumstances he could never have envisaged, he had to brace himself for it. ‘What she’d told you was enough cause for you to push her from that door.’

  Miss Hillyard came to life, making an odd, strangled sort of sound. Gilmour raised his eyes from his notes, and his look cautioned her to silence.

  Catherine, however, was quite unfazed. ‘It didn’t matter what I thought, not really, but she couldn’t be allowed to ruin the school, could she? What would Evie and I have done then?’

  He had questioned many murderers, but he had never been so flummoxed. Someone so young, a suspect in such a terrible crime, was outside his experience. But he realized he had ceased to think of her as a schoolgirl, even while he was struggling with what he knew was still to come. Catherine herself was not, however. She was almost smiling, as if what he’d said was quite reasonable, and she was prepared to give an equally reasonable explanation. And Edith Hillyard? She had known the truth, too, he thought. Instinctively, perhaps, or perhaps she had just suspected and been unwilling to believe it would ever come to this. She, too, was rigidly silent now, imprisoned in her own thoughts. Then she said, white to the lips, ‘It must have been an accident. Catherine?’

  ‘No, Miss Hillyard,’ Reardon said, ‘it was planned. Very cleverly planned, wasn’t it, Catherine?’

  She returned his gaze steadily, even smiling very slightly. ‘Well, it seemed impossible at first, but nothing is, is it? I didn’t mean to kill her, just to scare her – but the idea grew.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  She was still sitting upright on her chair, ankles crossed, her hands folded together in her lap. ‘Well, you see,’ she said conversationally, ‘she left Maxstead quite suddenly and I thought it was all finished. Until she sent Evie a letter. She hadn’t given up at all. Evie said to ignore it, but I couldn’t do that, because I knew that wouldn’t stop her. So I answered it myself, telling her I’d found out what it was she wanted from Evie, and we had to talk.’

  ‘And she agreed?’

  ‘Oh yes, I knew she would. I’d worked it all out. It had to be here, at Maxstead, of course, I couldn’t get away from here to meet her anywhere else, could I? I knew she could get here by taxi, and she wouldn’t keep it waiting – too expensive. She would have meant to do what she’d always done before – walk along to the village and ring from the callbox there, either for another taxi or for that man, Mr Deegan, to take her home.’

  ‘Mr Deegan?’

  ‘She used to meet him in the east wing. She thought nobody knew, but we did. She didn’t even suspect anything when I suggested the room where they used to meet. It was quite near that door that came to light when that last bit was knocked down. Avis had said what a hoot it would be if someone opened it and stepped out, not knowing, like one of those silly tricks she played. I went to have a look. It was boarded up, but the nails were quite easy to remove, as it happened.’

  ‘And replace, afterwards?’

  ‘Well, not really. I had to use a brick to hammer them in and they wouldn’t go back properly. But it didn’t matter. I knew when she was found, they’d soon work out what had happened.’ She stopped and smiled into their stunned silence, then frowned. ‘So long afterwards, how did you know it was me?’

  ‘For one thing, the brooch, Catherine,’ Reardon said at last. ‘It was a complete giveaway.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s not important.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is. She was wearing it when she was found. You did give it to her.’

  ‘No, I would never have done that! I was wearing it that night, for luck, but when I tried to move that canvas to cover her – you wouldn’t believe how awfully heavy it was – it caught the brooch and pulled it off. The clasp wasn’t very strong, anyway, and it fell, right on to her face.’ For a moment, she looked outraged. ‘I loved it, Evie had given it to me. I couldn’t leave it there – but I could never wear it after that, could I? It wasn’t very expensive, she would have despised it, so I pinned it on her dress. She was mad on cats, so it seemed right.’

  All this was quite outside the normal conventions he and everyone else understood. It was against nature, but it wasn’t over yet. ‘That wasn’t all though, Catherine, was it? What about Josie? Did she know something that made you shut her up in that room?’

  ‘Poor Josie, I’m sorry about that. No, of course she didn’t know anything, but she’d seen Mam’selle having words with me. We were actually talking about Aunt Evie. I was very cross and telling her she must leave Evie alone, but maybe Josie just thought I was being told off for something – we were both really angry, and I think she saw that. And afterwards, well, I knew you’d be questioning everyone and she would feel she had to tell, sooner or later, unless she was too frightened in some way. She still might, of course, but it doesn’t matter now. I don’t care what happens, now Evie’s dead.’

  The way she said it, it was as if a trickle of icy water was making its way down his spine. Especially since he knew it was very likely to be true. She seemed to be quite unafraid of what must follow from her admissions. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘the others, those silly Elites, had forced her to agree to clear all that rubbish they’d left behind that night, so I followed her.’

  ‘Followed her through the pantry window?’

  ‘There was no need. Josie needn’t have climbed through, either. If she’d thought it through, she would have seen there’s only one place the staff would keep the keys where they can be got at easily – in the little wall cupboard by the main door. I share a room with Selina Bright and Antonia Freeman. Antonia was in the sick bay with a cold that night, and as soon as Selina’s said her prayers and got into bed, she wouldn’t know if a herd of elephants was in the room, so it was easy for me to slip out, just as I had the first time.’

  ‘And Miss Keith?’

  She blinked as if she’d forgotten who Miss Keith was. ‘Oh, yes. Well, there’s a wild orchid grows down by the lake that I wanted for my botany project and I went to look for it after breakfast. She was standing there by the water’s edge, without her shoes. Aunt Evie seemed to have had some idea she was somehow mixed up with Mam’selle, that they were much friendlier than everyone thought, so … It was easy.’

  There was nothing anyone could say.

  ‘I had to do it, don’t you see, for Evie?’ she said after several minutes, as if that was more than justification, staring into the distance, beyond them all. Beyond remorse, or self-reproach. Was it possible she didn’t understand the enormity of what she had done? To say that it had been done for Eve’s sake didn’t go anywhere near enough to explain it. Her love for her aunt seemed genuine – yet, did she even know
what love was? Had the grief of knowing she had not been wanted by her own mother – that she’d been given away as an unwanted baby – destroyed it, or had she ever known it?

  Gilmour closed his notebook. He still didn’t look as though he believed what he’d heard. It was taking an effort of will for Reardon to remind himself sharply that she had cold-bloodedly planned and killed. He stood up, feeling bone weary. There were questions still to be answered, but for the present Catherine had to be cautioned and told she would have to come with them.

  ‘You can’t take her away!’ Edith Hillyard was grief-stricken. ‘She’s just a child!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Catherine repeated, with that bright, blank, unnerving look that made the hairs on Reardon’s arms stand on end, and asked if she might take some books with her. She really didn’t seem to care what was happening. Or perhaps it was just failure to comprehend what lay ahead. She was fourteen. They didn’t hang children, even if they were killers. But he’d already discovered that he could no longer think of her as a child, not in any sense.

  He did a surprising, and perhaps inadmissible, thing. It surprised him, most of all. He put his hand out and took hers, held it pressed between both his large ones. She let it stay there. She was a child after all, he thought, in need of comfort. Until it came to him that she was not allowing it to stay there because she was in need of sympathy. It was simply indifference.

  As Gilmore guided her out to the car, Edith Hillyard said, ‘I must tell you the whole truth, Inspector.’

  Reardon, who had, consciously or not, known the truth ever since his last talk with Phoebe Catherall, shook his head. ‘Not now.’

  But she ignored this and with some desperation, she said, ‘I was never meant to be a mother, you must understand. I had my career to make. I had nothing but what I earned. It was long before—’

  Long before she had inherited money. Perhaps she was right; she wasn’t meant to be a mother, if she still thought money would have made a difference.

  EPILOGUE

  A new term, the school coming to life again after the summer holidays. Taxis and cars arriving with girls and parents, and one of Folbury’s Countrywide buses pressed into service, disgorging a group of girls who have been met in London by Miss Golding and brought by train.

  Trunks, suitcases and bags litter the corridors as girls try to find their new rooms, screaming with delight as they greet friends they haven’t seen for eight whole weeks.

  Edith walks to the window and watches as Antonia Freeman drags her suitcase from the bus. A different Antonia, looking scarcely able to believe she’s back here, or what has happened. A letter clutched in her hand, she flies across to Josie Pemberton. They’ve been writing to each other during the holidays and have asked to share a room this year. Edith smiles. She knows about the situation with Antonia’s grandfather and his offer of money for her keep while she’s at art college – if she can get herself accepted, which Miss Keith had been sure will pose no problem whatever. Edith knows this because she has brokered it, and persuaded the girl’s mother to accept what she had hitherto insisted on seeing as charity, even from her own father.

  She turns from the window and tidies herself with a touch of powder, a discreet dab of fresh scent, readying herself to have a word with parents who have brought their children and would like to see her. There are always those who need reassurance. Yes, she’ll make sure Lilian wears her winter liberty bodices, that Margaret writes her Sunday letter home, that little Maureen can take her teddy bear to bed with her.

  She flicks a comb through her hair and has a fleeting thought that perhaps she ought to have it cut off as so many women are doing, though she doesn’t linger on the idea. She likes to think she is not a vain woman by any means. There’s nothing else in her appearance to be especially proud of, except maybe that, her one asset, especially when she lets it down, at night, when it falls, still dark brown and glossy, to her waist.

  Like treacle toffee, he’d said, lifting off that hideous uniform hat and removing her hairpins gently so that it cascaded around her shoulders.

  She can’t think of that now. But the thought remains, without her consent.

  She has never been the sort of person who makes friends easily or quickly, but he was different, disarming, refusing to be held at arm’s length. She had found herself agreeing to meet him, whenever they could snatch an hour. Totally out of character for her, but they were all different, less inhibited out there in wartime, in that unreal world where life was uncertain from one hour to the next, amid that unspeakable chaos of mud, blood, mutilation and death. The Great War, they were calling it now. What was great about it, except the scale of that obscene, wanton destruction of human life?

  He had been an Oxford don before he was sent over to France, classified as a non-combatant since he refused to abandon his pacifist beliefs and fight, and was therefore thrown straight into the seventh circle of Hell, working as a stretcher-bearer, sent out into the front line under shellfire, unarmed, to bring in the casualties.

  The school drive ends just below Edith’s bedroom and one of the taxi drivers does a noisy three-point turn on the gravel, grinding his gears, setting her teeth on edge at the incompetence. Being taught how to drive an ambulance was how she and Eve had learnt to drive – properly. Eager to do their bit, never dreaming of the unspeakable awfulness they would have to face.

  She should go down, do her duty. But still she sits, looking at her face in the mirror, seeing another.

  He was young, a year or two younger than she was, only just installed as a don at Oxford University. He’d had a love of life, somewhat in the way of her father Jamie, but behind his laughing eyes, the joke on his lips, were the unimaginable horrors that he – that everyone – saw every day, that his quiet academic life could never have prepared him for.

  He once brought Edith roses – where he’d got them from, God knows. Roses of Picardy.

  Goldie senses something and comes to put her paws on Edith’s knees, gazing soulfully up at her. She picks the little dog up, nuzzling her warm fur, feeling her vibrant little body. Goldie licks her face affectionately, then settles back in her arms.

  Afterwards, after it was all over for her and she lay in the small house where Mathilde had tended her so well, assisted by Phoebe, and he was long dead – as by then he was bound to be, caught in crossfire as he and his companions struggled to bring yet another wounded or dying man from the trenches – she couldn’t believe any of it was real. Had it been love they had experienced, or only the tomorrow-we-die disease that gripped everyone out there? The madness that said nothing mattered because nothing was real in that manic world where men were ordered to maim and slaughter one another without knowing why they were doing it. In truth they had barely known each other. There hadn’t been time for love to develop gradually, as it should, but there was an undeniable attraction between them, which might, who knew now, have turned into the real thing. As it was, they had escaped when they could, where they could, and made love to the ceaseless battering of artillery fire and the nightmare of what they daily witnessed.

  Why had it been such a shock when it happened? She was no innocent young girl, after all; she was twenty-six and knew the possible consequences, yet innocent in the sense that what they had done had been a new experience for her. We were all under intolerable strain, she thinks, and he was a man with the look in his eye of one faced with his inevitable doom. What was then between them might never have come to anything. Except that it had. A child had been brought into the world. A child, Edith is still profoundly, deeply ashamed to admit, even to herself, especially now, that she did not want. Addie would have called that a sin and she would have been right.

  Catherine.

  They are taking care of her now, where she is. Edith has not seen her. She has written to her but Catherine has not replied. Edith has been told that she is happy, and is still having some form of schooling, which seems to be all she cares about. Happy? That seems inc
redible, but no more incredible than what she did. Edith closes her eyes. Catherine, that lovely child with those green-gold eyes.

  That other young girl had green eyes, too, but of a different kind. Mathilde’s daughter – Edith’s Nemesis, had she but known it. She watched us all, watched and stored up what she saw and then, years later, tried to use it.

  I was alone, Edith justifies herself. Unmarried, penniless, a woman with a child, with the career I had hoped to take up again after the war fast receding towards the horizon. Had it not been for Phoebe and her aunt – and, of course, dearest Eve – I would have had to go back to London, in disgrace with nowhere to go. I could not have gone home to my mother. I was right to let Eve take the child to someone who would give her a good home and love her as their own.

  How was I to know how drastically my circumstances would change? How soon I would have the chance of my own school, to make up for my mistake, hopefully, by steering generations of children through my hands? But I was right when I told Inspector Reardon that I was never meant to be a mother, in that sense.

  Before she goes downstairs, Edith leans from her open window and with her nail scissors cuts off a rose. Against all expectations, the ‘Zéphirine Drouhin’ she got Heaviside to plant there has already reached the first floor. She buries her nose in its frilled, carmine-pink perfection, breathes in its heavy scent and fastens it to her dress.

  It’s not right that I should show too much grief for Catherine. I cannot. I never really knew her.

  She goes downstairs to the front steps of her school, a smile on her face.