Sins Out of School

by Jeanne M. Dams

  “Amanda,” I said softly.

  Her eyes opened. They looked at me without apparent interest.

  “Amanda, it’s Dorothy Martin. I’ve brought you your robe and a toothbrush.”

  She moistened her lips.

  A plastic cup of cracked ice sat nearby. I remembered that semiconscious patients could not be given water, for fear of choking, but could be fed small chunks of ice. “May I give her some?” I asked the nurse, who nodded.

  So I spooned a piece or two into her mouth. She seemed grateful, but turned her head away when I offered more.

  I tried once more for a response. “Amanda, do you know someone named Lydia?”

  “Of course.” Her voice was hoarse and very quiet, but perfectly clear, even sharp.

  I think I jumped. “Who is she?”

  This time Amanda just looked at me, her eyes dull. Then she closed them and curled into her pillow.

  I gave up and left her bedside.

  “That’s the clearest she’s been,” said the nurse approvingly. “For just that moment, she was quite all there. Well done.”

  It didn’t seem to me that I had done well at all, but if the nurse was pleased, I supposed I could accept that.

  We went next to the pediatrics ward, where I left Miriam’s things and talked to the nurse in charge.

  “You mustn’t worry too much,” she said. “She’s shown no signs of consciousness yet, but her vital signs are steady. There’s no internal bleeding, and you must remember that as long as she’s unconscious, she’s in no pain. It’s the body’s own anesthesia, in a way. There’s every hope that she’ll come out of it soon.”

  “And her brain?”

  “Well, as to that, of course we won’t know until we can check her ability to communicate. We think she has sensation in her limbs, at least, and that’s good news.”

  “It’s amazing,” I said to Alan in an undertone, “what passes for good news in a hospital.”

  I got no response. His attention was elsewhere. He gestured with his head and I followed his glance.

  “He marches forth, a long Processional of one.” Somebody said that once in a poem. It perfectly described the arrival of Anthony Blake in the pediatrics ward. Carrying a large Paddington Bear, he made an entrance, as if for an adoring audience, a crowd of reporters, a studio full of television cameras.

  The nurses responded accordingly, almost curtsying. “Oh, Mr. Blake,” said the one who had been talking to me, “this kind woman—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name—brought Miriam’s things to her.”

  The processional turned my way and favored me with a five-hundred-watt smile. “Are you a friend of my poor Amanda, then?” he asked in a voice that would have graced any Rolls-Royce commercial.

  Alan, who can be very smooth himself when he wants to be, smiled gently and said, “My wife knows your daughter, yes. We live in Sherebury. My name is Alan Nesbitt, sir, and of course I know yours.” He held out his hand.

  Blake shook it gravely, and then raised his eyebrows. “Nesbitt, Nesbitt. Surely I know you?”

  “I don’t believe we’ve met, but I was commandant at Bramshill, briefly, a couple of years ago. You might have heard the name then.”

  “Yes, of course. And do I remember that your lovely wife is American?”

  I smiled stiffly. “American born, yes. I’ve lived in England for some time, now.”

  “And have you had the opportunity to visit a debate in the House of Commons?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’ve tried once or twice, but the line—”

  “Ah, we can’t have that.” He thrust the teddy bear into the hands of the nurse and reached into his pocket for a small notebook and a fountain pen. “Here you are.” He scribbled something on a leaf of the notebook, tore it out with a flourish, folded it, and handed it to me. “This will admit you any time you like, without having to stand in the queue. And thank you for your kindness to my granddaughter.” He smiled graciously. I almost expected a regal wave as he turned to retrieve his bear.

  “That bear is ridiculous,” I said to Alan as we walked away. “Much too big, and Miriam’s too old for such a present anyway. And why is he paying such attention to his family now, after ignoring them for so long?”

  Alan shrugged. “Political expediency. He can no longer ignore them, now that his connection to them is known. Especially not when they’re in hospital. So he makes the most of the opportunity. I’m surprised he didn’t bring along a cameraman.”

  “Pompous phony!” I started to unfold the note he had handed me. “Handing out passes to Parliament as if they were—” I stopped, moved into a better light, and studied the note carefully.

  “What?”

  I pulled him along the corridor and around a corner. “Look at this.”

  He took it, looked at it and then at me.

  “Well?” I demanded.

  “I’m not a handwriting expert, Dorothy. But yes, it looks the same to me.”

  “Then would you please tell me why Amanda, who claims not to have seen her father for years, would have a note he wrote in the pocket of her bathrobe?”

  31

  FRANKLY, I haven’t the slightest idea. Shall we ask Gillian?”

  “I admit I’m pining to know, but it depends on how she’s feeling.”

  Gillian was feeling terrible. As a consequence she was also in a fractious mood. The pain medication they had given her when they first set her bones had worn off, and she hadn’t taken any more.

  “When I can’t bear it,” she said fiercely. “Not before. I know too many people who got started on drugs that way. Not little Gillian. I have my vices, but that’s not one of them, and it’s not going to be.”

  “You know, they do say that today’s pain pills very seldom cause addiction in cases when they’re really needed.”

  She just glared at me.

  I sighed. “Well, if you won’t, you won’t. I brought your things. What shall I do with them?”

  “I don’t care. Give them to the nurse.” She closed her eyes.

  “Gillian, do you know someone named Lydia?”

  Her eyes opened. “Why?”

  I improvised. I didn’t want to tell Gillian about the note, not just yet. “Because Amanda’s conscious, sort of, and she’s been rambling a bit about Lydia, whoever she is. Lydia, the tattooed lady, for all I know.”

  “The only Lydia I know is our mother. Though why Mandy would be talking about her, I don’t know.”

  “She probably won’t either, when she wakes up. People say all sorts of strange things, don’t they? I do hope you’ll take some of the pain pills soon, Gillian. You need some rest.”

  “I could get more rest if people didn’t keep coming in and asking pointless questions.”

  “I’m going, I’m going.” Gillian was wrong about the question being pointless, but she was right about the annoyance factor.

  Alan and I walked out of the hospital without speaking. We were thinking too hard. He hailed a taxi and said, “Home?”

  “Lunch first. I’m starving, and it must surely be lunchtime by now.”

  “Well past, in fact. Most of the restaurants we like will have stopped serving, but there’s always Victoria Station.”

  So we went to Victoria, collected the bags we had stowed earlier, bought a couple of not-too-bad sandwiches on pretty good French bread, and ate them standing up while we waited for our train. It wasn’t a restful meal, but it stayed the hunger pangs.

  Our train was late leaving the station, of course. In fact, we had to get out of one and take another, “owing,” said the raucous PA system, “to the nonarrival of the driver.”

  “That’s my favorite one yet,” I said to Alan as we trudged to another platform, luggage in hand. I collect excuses for the poor service of the railways. “Except maybe for the time in America when they asked for volunteers to get off a small airplane because it was overweight and had to rid itself of nine passengers.”

  We finally got under way,
in a carriage that was deserted except for a young couple who were, almost literally, wrapped up in each other. We sat well away from them and turned our attention to what had been occupying our minds for the last hour.

  “The note,” Alan said. “Or notes. You have both of them?”

  I fished them out of my purse. Side by side, they left no doubt that they had been written by the same person, probably with the same pen.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Indeed.” I put away the pass, with a mental note never to use it, and concentrated on the cryptic note.

  “‘Not tonight. Lydia’s home.’ Now what does that mean? Plainly he’s telling Amanda not to do something, probably meet him, because her mother’s at home. Or was she planning to visit her mother somewhere, and this was to say she—the mother—wasn’t going to be there. But in that case, wouldn’t it say ‘Not at’ wherever they were going to meet, instead of ‘not tonight’? And why would Amanda’s father, whom she hates, be making arrangements anyway? Why not just talk directly to her mother?”

  Alan thought about it and looked at the note again. “It isn’t signed. Now, to a policeman, that’s significant. It means that the person who wrote it was well-known to the person who received it.”

  “I sign notes I leave for you, phone messages and that sort of thing. Just with a D., but I sign them.”

  “Yes, and that’s the second thing this note tells me. The writer wanted to make sure no one else would know who wrote it.”

  “Hmm. Pretty stupid, really, when he has such a distinctive handwriting.”

  “No one ever said Anthony Blake was clever about anything except politics.”

  “True. But I still can’t make any sense of this. Amanda’s always told us she hasn’t seen her father in years. I don’t remember if she said, actually, or just implied that she’d had no contact at all. Wait, though. John might have seen Blake that day in London, when he went in to see Vanessa. Maybe Blake gave the note to John. Only why would he? And why be so convoluted about it, when all Blake had to do was pick up the phone and call Amanda?”

  “You know,” Alan said thoughtfully, “you might be going at this from the wrong angle altogether. If I bring into play my long experience of dealing with some rather sordid situations, I get a different idea. Suppose you look at this note and make one minor change. A translation, if you will. Lydia is Anthony Blake’s wife. So suppose we make the note read, ‘Not tonight. My wife’s home.’ What does that sound like to you?”

  “Good grief! Of course, why didn’t I see it? It’s the cancellation of some clandestine meeting—rendezvous—assignation—whatever you want to call it. Obvious, once you look at it in the right way.”

  “Thank you, Watson,” said Alan dryly.

  “Now, dear. I didn’t mean you weren’t brilliant. You get full honors for that. However, the question remains: How did Amanda get hold of this? I absolutely refuse to believe that she was involved in something illicit with her own father, and I refuse to allow you to suppose it, either. I don’t care how sordid your past is.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be that sort of relationship, you know. It could be political, or even a spot of blackmail. But I agree it’s unlikely, given what we know of both parties.”

  “All right, then, let’s think about what we do know of all the relationships involved. Know, not surmise. I think it’s fair to say we know, from more than one source, that Amanda hated her father. Still does, probably.”

  “Right.”

  “We know that John was on somewhat more cordial terms with his father-in-law. Cordial enough that he was going to try to see him that day in London.”

  “Right.”

  “So suppose he did see him. Suppose Blake gave him the note—for some reason—”

  “No, let’s wait a bit for suppositions and go straight on with what we know. We know that John did see Vanessa Thompson, who is a confidential aide to the Honorable Mr. Blake.”

  “You use the term ceremonially, I take it. I wonder what the lovely Vanessa makes of him? I wonder—wait a minute.” I held up my hand, thinking furiously, and Alan obediently waited.

  “Vanessa is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” I went on slowly. “Counting movie stars and Princess Diana and Nefertiti—any competition you can imagine. She is, as you say, a close associate of Mr. Blake.”

  “Are you suggesting—?”

  “You know perfectly well what I’m suggesting. And let me tell you something you don’t know. It didn’t seem important at the time I noticed it, but Vanessa carries a very beautiful, very expensive handbag. She keeps her appointment book, and other scraps of paper, in a side pocket of the bag. It’s a tight fit, and the day I saw her—heavens, was it only yesterday?—she pulled out the appointment book and some other papers fell out and scattered all over the floor. I helped her pick them up.

  “Now. I’m back to the realm of supposition here, but see if it makes sense. Suppose Blake, who we agreed is not wildly intelligent, wrote that note to Vanessa. Vanessa is intelligent, and would have destroyed it the moment she received it, if she could. But suppose Blake slipped it to her in some place where she could not dispose of it immediately? She would have put it in her purse. And if there had been no time, before she met John, to deal with it, or if for some reason she had forgotten, it could easily still have been in her purse. Suppose she did just what she did with me, pulled out her date book and some other papers with it. John would have helped her pick them up, as I did. Suppose he saw that one and read it?”

  “You’re doing an awful lot of supposing. But go on.”

  “We both know what John would do with information like that, don’t we? He would immediately see what it was about. Unlike us, he would recognize the handwriting, he would know who Lydia was, he would know who the note was written to. He could put the pieces together. And he would rejoice that he had uncovered a sinner almost in the act of sinning, and, incidentally, that he had an even tighter hold on Blake than before.”

  32

  ALAN considered this, and finally nodded. “It’s all very iffy, but it’s plausible. Do you have an explanation for how the note ended up in Amanda’s possession?”

  “We can ask her when she’s more herself, but I suspect it was in John’s pocket the night he was killed, and she found it that morning when she cleaned him up so tidily. And put it away in her pocket and forgot about it. The police might well not have thought to search the pocket of her bathrobe.”

  Alan groaned. “I wonder if she will ever be able to grasp the difficulties she created by that act of housewifely imbecility. But if you’re saying Doyle was killed by Blake, surely he would have looked for the note.”

  “Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps something woke Miriam, and he heard her stir upstairs. I think he would have been afraid to look further, would have left in a hurry. After all, with John dead and unable to talk about the circumstances in which he found the note, it wasn’t nearly as damning. We can find out if Miriam woke that night at all, if she—when she feels better.”

  “Yes. Meanwhile, the whole thing is terribly nebulous, and both Blake and Vanessa Thompson will deny that any such thing ever happened, that they are any more than colleagues, that she ever dropped a note. How, by the way, do you imagine—and I use the word advisedly—that Blake found out Doyle had the note? Assuming that any of this scenario is based on reality.”

  “All right, I admit I’m making an awful lot of bricks with very little straw, but all we have to go on at this point is snippets. The police do that, too, and don’t try to tell me they don’t. They build up a hypothesis and then go about finding the proof.”

  “If you say so. So how did Blake find out? Did our righteous friend Doyle try a spot of blackmail?”

  “Not of the usual sort, I think. He was a vicious man, but not a thief. He enjoyed pulling wings off flies, always with the excuse that the fly had sinned and was in need of correction, and of course rendered unable to sin anymore. The metaphor�
��s getting out of hand, they always do, but goodness, Blake is such a large, gaudy fly! I can imagine Doyle’s delight at the thought of dewinging him. I think he would have waited a day or two to think things over, and then would have called Blake and told him about the note, delivering a long sermon while he was at it.”

  “And you speculate that Blake, unwilling to allow anyone to jeopardize his career with such dangerous information, would have told Doyle he was quite mistaken and that he, Blake, would come to Sherebury and explain. Is that the denouement of your hypothesis?”

  “Of course. He would have come, met Doyle somewhere, and given him a large dose of Lanoxin in beer or coffee or whatever Doyle would drink. I think I remember reading in some book somewhere that it has almost no taste, even in a heavy concentration. Then he would have taken him home when he began to feel ill. Taken him home and watched him die, and then stabbed him to make it look, dear heaven, as if Amanda—Blake’s daughter Amanda—was the killer.”

  “How would Blake have known about the Lanoxin?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. Wait, yes, I do. Suppose Doyle carried the tablets with him, and Vanessa had seen him take one?”

  “Thin, but I’ll allow it for now. However, and I hate to do this, my dear, but there is one unanswerable flaw in your reasoning.”

  “There is not! A hole here and there, maybe, but logically—”

  “You have forgotten that Blake has, most unfortunately, the perfect alibi.”

  I just stared at him.

  “On the evening that you suppose Blake was meeting with Doyle, feeding him Lanoxin, waiting for him to become ill, and all the rest of it, he was in fact sitting in Parliament and giving a little speech outside, watched by television cameras, Big Ben, and dear only knows how many viewers across the country, including, I’ll remind you, me.”

  I sat back, defeated. It had all hung together so well. All I’d needed, I’d thought, was to check a few details with Amanda, maybe tomorrow if she was fully conscious by then, and then we could go to Derek with the whole story and he could set the machinery in motion, talk to people, gather evidence, build a case.