After the Armistice Ball

Chapter Nineteen

‘And what was the candlestick doing on the stairs?’ asked Inspector MacAlpine, yet again. Even the constable in the corner, taking laborious notes of my answers, looked up with an exasperated sigh and flicked back in his pad to read what I had said last time.

‘I put it down because my ankle made it difficult to climb the stairs without holding on,’ I said.

‘And you picked it up because…?’

‘We didn’t know who was there or what to expect. For all we knew there was a gang of thugs around every corner.’

‘And you were there because…?’

‘We were concerned about Mrs Esslemont. When we found out she had agreed to meet Mrs Duffy in a deserted house we thought undue pressure might be brought to bear. As it was. I told you, when we arrived Mrs Esslemont was tied to a chair.’

‘And you broke your ankle…?’

‘I cracked a small bone in it getting into the car. I slipped on the gravel. But I didn’t even notice until I was halfway up the stairs.’

‘Didn’t notice a broken ankle,’ said the inspector blandly but quite firmly.

‘Chipped,’ I said, just as firmly. ‘A very small bone.’ It was too exasperating the way he kept worrying over the one thing that was absolutely true while missing the great gaping holes, but I could hardly point that out.

‘And what happened next, Mrs Gilver?’

The constable sighed yet more audibly, loud enough for his superior officer to throw him a glance from the corner of his eye. Hugh, stolid and dumbstruck beside me, followed the glance and blinked at the sight of the uniform as he had every time he had looked at every uniform in the last week. He was there ostensibly to be my supporter and protector but he looked so poleaxed that, if anything, I tried not to speak too bluntly for fear of upsetting him.

‘We found Mrs Esslemont in the ballroom and untied her and Mrs Duffy ran away, tripped on the candlestick and fell down the stairs.’ The servants’ passage, its doorway well concealed in the panelling, had not been found in the police examination of the scene and so the scattered contents of the tray had escaped the need for explanation.

One thing should be made quite plain: Alec and I had not cooked anything up on that first journey in search of a doctor and a telephone. It just so happened that in answering the questions put to us, in separate rooms, by a startled sergeant in Alec’s case and a bewildered constable in mine, we did not chance to mention Cara. I was horribly aware even then, of course, that while my interrogator might think he was being so rigorous as to be forced to offer two apologies for every one question, I knew that he was merely nibbling around edges of what would choke him if he were to take a proper bite.

I think it was the fact of Daisy that allowed us, in conscience, just to answer each question as it came and resist pouring out the whole story. We did not see Daisy before her first interview, in her hospital bed in a private room with what she reported to be a very dashing Chief Superintendent (Daisy always does land on her feet), and she might easily have reported word-for-word everything that passed between Lena and me. At that point I should have resigned myself to telling all to Inspector MacAlpine and should have excused myself for not having done so before by pointing out truthfully that I had answered every question asked. That was the other point which helped Alec and me repress any guilt: we managed interview after interview, day after day, not to lie. The Silas, Daisy and the diamonds end of the affair held together so well on its own, you see, that nothing alerted the policemen to something’s being hidden and Daisy, although quite without any natural reticence, presumably still had an eye on Silas’s flotation and wanted to side-step as much scandal as she could. I expect that is how it was, although we have never spoken of it.

And so, the records show, no crime was committed. At least not by anyone in a position to be brought to book for it. Lena’s death was found to have been an accident, as indeed it was. As for her attempt at extortion, even had Silas and Daisy been minded to drag it all out, the general assumption that she had planned it all alone meant that her death put an end to any thoughts of redress. And as Lena herself had pointed out, since one cannot steal what is already one’s possession, the theft of the Duffy diamonds turned out not to be a theft at all, but only one of many instances that year of an old family attempting to shed some of its assets in unsettled times.

If somewhere in a police station in Edinburgh an officer scratched his head and wondered whether the name of the poor lady who fell down the stairs in a country house in Perthshire was not the same name that had been shouted down the telephone to him by some madman gibbering about a murder in Drummond Place, then we can be sure that he did no more than scratch his head before he put it out of his mind.

Hugh remained as perplexed as ever about how I had got myself mixed up in it all. Yet more evidence of my silliness, I expect he thought, if he thought. Silas had to be told everything, of course, and when my cheque came it bore his signature. Furthermore, Daisy, who answered the telephone when I rang to protest about the shameful enormity of the sum, said that was Silas’s doing too and if I felt like talking to a brick wall she would call him to the telephone, but really darling, there was no point, as he was determined to reward me for saving her life and if one looked at it that way, wasn’t it rather insultingly stingy.

‘You sound cross,’ I said, wondering whether I shouldn’t repay something after all, if it was causing trouble between them.

‘As well I might,’ Daisy said. ‘Not only have I saved our flotation – through your genius, darling, of course – but I have almost been killed too and one would think Silas owed me some extravagant gift or at least that I should have my every heart’s desire for a while. As it turns out, however, it’s quite the reverse. I am to present him with yet another son in the spring. Don’t laugh, Dandy, it’s too bad. Relief and too much champagne, you see. Oh well, I suppose it might be a daughter.’ She sobered, with a sigh. ‘Speaking of daughters,’ she said but stopped, and so when the girl cut in to tell us our time was up there was silence on the line and we felt too foolish to ask for another three minutes.

No sooner had I hung up the earpiece before the telephone rang again and the same aggrieved voice – I should like to box that girl’s ears – told me I had another caller. It was Alec.

‘I’m in Edinburgh,’ he said. He had gone home to Dorset, I think to quiet his mother (understandably rattled by the news of yet another death in the family he had been to join). ‘But I’m just about to start for Dunelgar to meet Gregory. Can I pick you up on the way?’

‘Have you decided to tell him more?’ I asked. ‘Have you changed your mind?’

‘I’ve been summoned,’ said Alec. ‘And I can’t make up my mind, much less make it up and then change it. I’ll see what he has to say, but I need an ally.’

I had to agree, of course, but I felt very little enthusiasm for the visit because I had been trying my best to keep Gregory Duffy out of my thoughts. The daughter who had so clearly been his favourite was dead, his wife was dead, and as for his other daughter, the mystifyingly dispreferred Clemence – and it really did mystify me any time I considered it – his current treatment of her was a puzzle I could not begin to solve.

I had always been more taken with Cara myself and I expect the same was true of most people who knew them both. There had been something so fresh and sweet about her little monkey face that had to be found charming and Clemence’s beautiful mask and cold elegance could not compete. I should have thought, however, that a parent could love them both and love their difference more than any sameness. But Clemence was off to Canada after all. I had learned this from Mary, who had thrown up the area window and called to me as I descended the steps of the Drummond Place house after leaving a card of condolence on the day of Lena’s funeral.

‘I couldn’t think for the life of me what the noise was,’ she said, looking more than ever like Mrs Tiggywinkle as she leaned out over the sill above a frothing tub of washing. ‘I thought wee boys were whacking the railings.’ Sure enough, the best that could be said about the sound of the wooden clog strapped on to my plaster, the steel tip of my cane and my one proper shoe was that it was percussive. Grant was all for keeping me in the house for six weeks, such pain did it give her to see an outfit of hers wrecked by the white lump sticking out from the bottom of my skirt.

‘How are things?’ I called down to Mary, with a glance up and down the pavement to check that I was unobserved. (Drysdale, agog at the wheel of the motor car, would have to make of it what he would.)

‘An earthquake would be peace perfect peace compared to this place,’ she said. ‘Miss Clemence left from Leith two nights ago, gone to meet the liner at Gibraltar. She didn’t even stay for her mother’s funeral and if you know why, madam, don’t tell me. The less I know about any of this the better. I’m off at the start of the week. Down the other end of the street there, to a lawyer and his wife and three wee ones and another one coming, and I’ll be well shut of it.’ She looked over her shoulder as if at a sudden noise and then with a wiggle of her eyebrows she thumped the window down and was gone.

So Clemence was already started on her long journey and would miss her mother’s funeral. I doubted if even Mr Duffy would go and there was something dreadful, I thought, about a funeral with only the minister and the other officials, even for Lena. I only thought that for a moment, mind you, before I shook myself with disgust at my mawkishness. That kind of flabby sentiment – thinking that there is good in everyone – is responsible for a great deal of harm.

Why then, I wondered, after Alec’s telephone call, was I trembling at the thought of telling Mr Duffy the truth?

Had I seen him at any time in the weeks since Lena’s death, I should have had a convenient answer. No one with an ounce of compassion could have piled more pain on to the shrunken shoulders of the old man who opened the door to Alec and me later that day. I gasped at the sight of him, and instinctively went forward to take his cold, papery hands in my own. He squeezed them and gave a nod to Alec.

‘Osborne,’ he said, and I was relieved to hear some of his old self in the curt, barely polite, masculine greeting.

The shutters were open today, but otherwise the hall looked as it had the last time, with the rug still rolled and the furniture still sheeted. He led us to the back of the house, and I was glad not to have to climb the stairs with my cane, and even gladder not to have to pass the exact spot. We went through the baize door to the servants’ quarters and I suddenly knew where we were going. I did not follow them up the narrow stairs, but waited in the ground floor passageway resting my foot, listening to them walk along the stone flags above my head and then stop. They stood still for five minutes and more, perhaps talking although I could not hear their voices, and then they moved again, slowly, back to the head of the stairs and down to join me.

‘You look cold, my dear,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Come out and sit in the orangery and we shall have some whisky. I’m afraid I can’t rise to tea.’ He smiled, holding out his arm, and led us through another maze of passages then out into the light of a conservatory, empty of anything but a few tough-looking palms. It was dusty and neglected, but comfortable in the warmth of the afternoon sunlight.

‘What made you go along that passage, sir?’ said Alec, once he had fussed me into a comfortable chair and lifted my legs on to another. Mr Duffy handed me a beautiful old glass one-third full of whisky and sat down with his own, gesturing Alec to go and fetch one from the decanter.

‘I was searching the house,’ he said, ‘looking for the diamonds.’ Alec looked around, startled.

‘And did you find them?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Duffy, taking an appreciative though dainty sip, an old man kind of sip, from his tumbler. ‘I knew she wouldn’t have sold them. She loved them, you know. Really loved them. The Duffy diamonds. I think they were the only reason she married me.’

I took a gulp from my glass. I abhor whisky, and can usually only choke it down with a great deal of very cold water. In fact, I think it’s best to do what the Americans do – ice, lemon and soda – but Hugh will not hear of it. I shuddered as it spread through me, the liquid setting me on fire all the way to my stomach and the fumes rising up and coming out of my nose. I can well believe cars can go for miles on the stuff if the petrol runs out.

From the table beside him, Mr Duffy lifted a small stout chest and passed it to me. It was plain mahogany with silver hasps and a silver crest worn with polishing in the middle of the lid. He waved at me to open it. Inside, bedded snugly in velvet nests, were more cases, lizard skin this time I thought, six lizard skin cases from a huge bulbous one in the middle, to a tiny one like a bread bun, almost too small to support the elaborate hinges. I noticed the scuff marks and the snags in the soft silver of the locks. One by one, I opened the lids.

The stone in the centre of the necklace caught the sunlight and made me blink. People called it pear-shaped; ‘a pear-shaped blue-white diamond’ was how it was always described in the society pages when it was worn at Court, but I thought it looked like a quail’s egg. It was blue-white, even against the faded pinkish silk of its case, and the light skipping off it was as cold and as sharp as icicles. Two more of the same stones in the earrings, three in the headdress, then the small ones in rings and bracelets, all looking like little nubs and chips and crystals of ice. They were mesmerizing, quite breath-taking the way they seemed to hum and shimmer with light. But hard on that thought a voice in my head said: two lives lost. Pink cheeks, brown eyes, red blood, all lost while these blue-white stones glittered on and on.

‘She loved them so much,’ said Mr Duffy. I closed the cases and shut the lid of the chest. ‘I should have been warned right then. No one who can feel real love for something as useless as a diamond could possibly be a wife. Or a mother. You only have to look at Clemence to see that a mother with that kind of flaw is a dangerous thing. She passes it on in the blood and then she teaches the child that there is nothing wrong with it and so any check that there might have been is missing.’ He swirled his glass around and stared down into it.

‘Of course I could have been the check, but all I thought about was my beloved girl. And Clemence turned out as cold as her mother before her. Not a bad girl – hard to like, you know, very proper, very concerned about right and wrong – but nothing really bad about her.’

He fell silent again and then roused himself with a brave smile that it hurt to see.

‘Nothing can bring her back,’ he said. ‘I realize that I am quite alone now, but still I want to know what happened. It’s clear that Lena was planning to kill poor Mrs Esslemont that day if you had not arrived in time. That in itself does not surprise me, but I don’t know why. I want to know why.’

Alec stared at me and then looked away out of the dusty window and across the gardens, and his message could not have been plainer. I cleared my throat.

‘We believe, I’m afraid, that Lena killed her daughter.’

‘Cara?’ said Mr Duffy.

‘Yes,’ I said. I should not be afraid to use her name, I told myself. I should not hide behind ‘her daughter’, ‘your wife’, ‘her sister’, but should speak plainly. ‘Lena used Cara to expose the theft of the diamonds and then planned to kill her to ensure her silence. I know it seems unbelievable -’

‘But it doesn’t, my dear,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Haven’t you been listening? Lena loved them more than almost anything else in the world and she was quite ruthless. So I am not at all surprised. Anyway, I knew, I suppose. At least, I never believed the fire was an accident. Oh, I did not want any more trouble than I could avoid, certainly did not want a murder trial. With my beloved girl gone, what was the point? All I could do was get rid of the pair of them as far as possible as soon as I could.’

‘Was Lena’s intention to go to Canada with Clemence, then?’ I said.

‘Yes, I expect so,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Not that I cared where she went. I couldn’t cast off Clemence into destitution – it wasn’t her fault who she was and what she was and, as I say, perhaps I should have tried harder not to let her turn into her mother’s child, but by then it was too late.’ He shook himself out of the reverie into which he was sinking. ‘I suppose Daisy Esslemont knew something, then? But how did she get involved?’

I told him and he listened with no more than a rueful shake of his head.

‘Quite ruthless, you see,’ he said. ‘Of course I knew what had happened when Lena started all the nonsense with the cleaning. The jeweller came to me and told me about the pastes and I said to him just to give the things back to Lena and say nothing. Then I quietly stopped paying the insurance premiums, in case she should get greedy. I am surprised at her going after the Esslemonts in particular, though. Why them?’

‘We’ve never been able to work that out,’ I said.

‘But I’m not surprised in any general sense,’ Mr Duffy went on. ‘She was a greedy, ruthless woman. But not really bad, I don’t think.’

I wondered how much whisky he had drunk before Alec and I arrived. Even if he did not know the truth yet, how could he say that a woman who had killed her own child in cold blood was not really bad? Perhaps the big gulps of whisky had affected me too, for I was not aware of deciding to speak, but simply found myself speaking.

‘She was bad, Gregory. Worse than you yet know. Cara did not die in the fire.’ His head jerked up and I saw a quick leap of hope in his eyes.

‘No! I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘she is certainly dead. But Lena killed her in anger, killed her brutally. It almost ruined everything. She was ruthless, you are right to call her so. But there was rage and evil in her too. It’s as though she was two quite different people. She laid all her plans and then just smashed through them as though they were nothing.’ I was speaking without a trace of kindness now. ‘Cara, your beloved girl, is buried in an unmarked grave not a mile from your house in Edinburgh, buried as a servant, given a death certificate full of lies by an idiot of a doctor who cares only about niceties. I’m sorry, Gregory, but Lena was not just greedy and ruthless, she was evil. She must have been, to do such a thing to her child.’

Gregory shook his head at me, smiling, and I thought once more that he must be drunk.

‘Lena would never have harmed her child, Dandy my dear. Lena kill her child? Why, her child was the only living thing in the world she ever loved.’ I stared at him, and felt Alec turn and stare too. Those deep down things were shifting again, bumping gently against each other, making low echoes I had to strain to hear.

‘Let me tell you,’ said Gregory. ‘I must start from a long way back, I’m afraid, but it’s the only way to explain.

‘We went to Ontario straight after our honeymoon and before we had docked I knew what a mistake I’d made. Of course, no one else knew a thing. As far as anyone was aware, we left in ’99, a happy young couple, and came back five years later a happy family with two little daughters. No. No. The truth was this. I went on a long trip up-country shortly after we got there and when I came back my wife tried to pass off her condition as happy news, but I was not such a fool as all that. I was only a big enough fool to throw myself immediately into the arms of someone else, and so before the year was out we did indeed have two little girls, one hers and one mine, born four months apart.

‘If the lady who was Cara’s mother had not died, I might have – I like to think I might have – dared to divorce Lena then. But on my own with a baby girl, all I could think was to make a deal. I should give a name to her brat if she would make a home for mine.

‘And so we went on. I wanted to make a family for the girls, but Lena would have none of it. Clemence was hers alone and it was only too plain that all she wanted from me was a share. Her share, she called it. Clemence’s share. Such arrogance. I gave up trying to tell her that she had no right to anything, that Clemence had no call on me, and then I grew stubborn. I stopped discussing it, but I determined that neither Lena nor Clemence would ever see a penny of my money nor an inch of my land. I was going to settle everything on Cara. Oh, I know this place and Culreoch must go through the male line, but they are nothing really, white elephants. Cara would have been a very wealthy woman.

‘Lena was incensed, of course. And I should not be surprised if the idea of killing Cara started as long ago as then. I think she had forgotten the details of our arrangement. At any rate, she was shocked that I did not intend to settle anything on Clemence and she blamed that for Clemence’s inability to attract a husband, but I always thought that had more to do with Clemence herself, poor thing. Lena wasn’t supposed to tell her that I was not her father – we agreed that neither of the girls would know – but I think she must have. Certainly she managed to stamp out any chance of affection between us. She spent her entire life bringing Clemence up and it’s a dangerous thing for a child – too much devotion, and a constant drip-drip of hints that she’d been wronged – it turned her out so prim, but with no real goodness underneath.

‘Towards the end of the war, Lena came to me and said that since Cara was to have everything else, was I really going to split up the diamonds and hand Cara a share of them too? Didn’t I see it made more sense for all of them to come to Lena and thence to Clemence in time? I laughed, and she didn’t understand why I was laughing. I asked her what on earth made her think that she and Clemence would have any of my diamonds? I can still remember her face. It was as though I had told her the sky was the ground and the ground was the sky. She loved them so much, you see, so much, that the idea that they were not hers was quite unthinkable.’

What he was saying made perfect sense, but what a sorry, silly little mess it was. Surely they could have done better than that. Could not Gregory have broken through the walls Lena put up between him and Clemence? Could he not have seen that his devotion to Cara, while it bathed his own daughter in warmth and light, did Clemence damage? I could well believe that Lena had spent her life pouring poison into Clemence and twisting her little mind into horrid shapes, and although I had never thought it before, I could see he was right about what lay behind the mask – prim, cold piousness – but if all Gregory had ever given her was his name he was as much to blame.

‘And you see now, don’t you, Dandy my dear, why I say Lena is not actually as bad as all that. There was something wrong with her somewhere deep down, something missing where the rest of us keep our morals, but harm her own child? She would never have done that. That, perhaps, is the only thing she and I shared. We each of us would have gone to the ends of the earth for our girls. We each of us would forgive any wrong.’ He shook his head and spoke even more softly. ‘The only thing we had in common. We loved our little girls.’

The three of us sat in silence for a while until, the sun having moved behind a tree on the lawn, the room started to feel chilly and my toes sticking out of their plaster cast in their little sock began to nip with cold.

‘So Alec,’ said Gregory, in a brisker tone, ‘it is yours for the taking. All of it. And please don’t spend your life in mourning. I should like to think of this place ringing with children’s footsteps, even if they are not to be Cara’s children after all. The Edinburgh house you will probably sell, I expect. Terribly dull kind of a life for a young woman, and I don’t expect that you will feel the same compulsion as I did to keep your wife dull and quiet for fear of what she would do if you let her have her head. Choose wisely, when the time comes.’

‘I hope, sir,’ said Alec gallantly, squirming a little, ‘to be an old man myself before any of this becomes a matter of concern.’

‘Well, I’m afraid you will be disappointed then,’ said Gregory, in the same brusque voice. ‘I have nothing left now and I have no intention of going on. I’m an old man anyway, but however short my time is it’s too long to spend missing my girl and thinking of all the things I could have done better. I shan’t do it here, of course, or anywhere else that will make a mess and a fuss for you, but you must prepare yourself for it soon.’ After a long pause, he spoke again. ‘I would like to see her grave, though. I would like that very much.’ And then, businesslike and chilling: ‘Alec, let’s you and I meet at the cemetery at ten tomorrow morning and you can take me to see her grave.’

Alec and I stared at each other glumly, each hoping I think that the other had something to say to him that might change his mind. After a few minutes of silence we rose to leave and drove back to Gilverton without speaking.

‘You stupid woman,’ said Cara, wagging her finger at me as she wheeled past me in the glittering ballroom. ‘You stupid woman,’ she called over the shoulder of her partner, possibly Alec, before he bore her away. She was wearing some kind of shroud, but a shroud encrusted with diamonds from the neck to the hem and all of the dowagers gathered around the dusty windows of the ballroom amongst the palms whispered greedily and reached out to touch her as she passed. ‘You stupid woman,’ she shouted from the far end of the room, bellowing to make herself heard above the din that was drilling into my head, making the chandeliers tinkle and causing little falls of dust from the ceiling. The noise grew louder and louder and I noticed now that it was not music after all, but footsteps. It sounded as though dozens of tiny little feet were spattering back and forth on the stone passageway above our heads, thundering about in all the rooms around us, drumming up and down the felt-covered stairs and clattering around and around in the echoing hall below.

I lay still, waiting to see if it made as much sense awake as it had in the dream, and then, realizing that it did, I clapped my hands, threw back the bedclothes and pulled the bell. It was seven o’clock. Three hours before they were to meet at the cemetery, and just enough time, if I was lucky.

Grant appeared, shiny-faced and frowning in her night-clothes, a frown which deepened as I told her to get Drysdale to bring the car round right now and to help me on with some clothes, any clothes, and it did not matter which.

‘I’ll just run your bath, madam,’ she said, to give her an excuse to leave the room and indulge her huff.

‘I’ve no time for a bath,’ I said. ‘Help me with this damn leg, Grant, please. I’ll have two baths when I get back.’

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the car at the front door just in time to see Hugh open a shutter in his room and stare blearily out at me.

‘Pallister,’ I said, leaning out of the window and fixing him with the best haughty stare I could manage – Pallister had of course considered himself obliged to dress and present himself to see me off, for how could he have felt chagrined at the trouble I was putting him to if he had not made sure to be put to it? ‘Pallister, since you’re here. Please will you try to contact either Mr Duffy or Mr Osborne or ideally both. Tell them I am coming to town. Tell Mr Duffy to wait for me.’

Pallister blinked pompously. He is the only person I have ever known who can do this.

‘And where might I find the gentlemen, madam?’ he asked.

‘I have no idea where Mr Osborne is,’ I said. ‘Try his mother in Dorset and see if she knows. Wake my husband to get Mrs Osborne’s number if you need to.’

With this shocking suggestion, I swept away.

Nothing could have pleased Drysdale more, even at this hour, than to be told to drive to Edinburgh as though his life depended on it, and I had to stop him five minutes into the journey and move into the front seat for fear I should be sick in the back. He got me there, though. I sat with my fingers crossed that we should not meet some zealous policeman on his way into work on an early shift, but he got me there. We drew up at the cemetery at ten minutes past ten. I got myself out without waiting and hobbled on my cane to the far gloomy corner where I could see the two figures, heads bowed, at the foot of the grave.

‘Alec! Mr Duffy!’ They turned and I saw that not only Gregory Duffy’s but Alec’s face too was wet with tears which neither of them troubled to wipe away.

‘Did Pallister ring you?’ I asked, but knew at once from their puzzled expressions that he had not – had not even tried, I would bet – and so if I had only been another half an hour, Gregory Duffy would have walked away and we might never have been able to find him. I determined to award Drysdale a huge tip, and to ‘get’ Pallister, as my boys say, the first chance I had.

‘What is it?’ said Alec.

‘Did you tell Mr Duffy anything else this morning?’ I said. Alec shook his head, still puzzled I think, but also with a growing look of relief. My heart swelled with pride, or with something anyway, to think that even though he did not know what it was I had thought of, knowing I had thought of something was enough to relieve him. I leaned my cane against my leg and put out my hands to take Gregory’s in mine.

‘Mr Duffy, Lena lost her temper, more than that – went mad – because she found out a secret that Cara had been keeping for years. You don’t know, do you? Lena’s life had gone wrong, you see, because she had the affair and so when she saw someone who had made the same mistake getting away with it and being rewarded with everything Lena thought was hers… Or maybe when she thought that her girl, who was good, was to be overlooked in favour of a girl who had been bad… I’m not explaining this very well and, you know, none of it matters.

‘What does matter is this. I have a piece of wonderful news for you. Some time ago, we are not sure when, Cara had a baby. You have a grandchild, Gregory, Cara’s child.’

‘Are you sure?’ he asked, in a whisper.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, we’re sure she had the child, but we don’t know that it survived and we have no idea at all where it is, but…’ I stopped as a new idea suddenly emerged, like a whale from the breakers, in front of me.

‘It’s worth a try,’ said Alec.

‘A try?’ said Gregory, rounding on him. ‘It’s worth more than a try. Cara’s child? The ends of the earth, Alec, the ends of the earth. You’ll understand that one day. Now,’ he said, turning back to me, ‘where do I start? What do you know?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I know who the father is, so you can start there. If the child survived he may well be paying for its upbringing somewhere, or if it’s been given away he might at least know who it was…’

Gregory Duffy’s spurt of energy had faded again and he waved me and my bright suggestions into silence, looking down once more at the grave.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said softly.

Alec and I made our slow way back to the gate and sat on a bench watching him.

‘You know who the father is?’ said Alec as soon as we were out of Gregory’s hearing. ‘When did you find out?’

‘It just came to me,’ I said. We sat in silence for a moment.

‘Well?’ said Alec at last. ‘Who is it?’

‘Oh, come on,’ I said, almost laughing. ‘It’s obvious. Think about it for half a minute and you’ll see.’ Alec frowned at me and then he opened his eyes wide and groaned.

‘Do you think Gregory will find it?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think he will. If it had been Lena who arranged it all, the information might have died with her. But as it is, I think he will.’

‘But why have you changed your mind about it being Lena?’ said Alec. ‘I can’t keep up.’

‘Because she can’t have known,’ I said. ‘The baby was the thing she found out about that last night at the cottage, remember.’

‘Of course,’ said Alec, then he frowned again. ‘Only… if that’s true then what was it that Lena knew about Cara? What was it she was holding over her?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘But we can’t have it both ways. She can’t have known all along and suddenly found out.’ Alec conceded this with a sigh, then he nodded towards Mr Duffy.

‘Do you really think it’s a good idea?’ he said. ‘Gregory looking for this baby? I hate to think of more trouble coming to him. I don’t think he could bear it.’

‘I shouldn’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘The question of whether or not it’s a good idea doesn’t enter into it. He has no choice. He’s seen only too clearly what can go wrong with secrets, how useless it is to keep the surface smooth when things are all wrong underneath. He won’t let Cara’s baby grow up as Cara did, out of place.’

‘But how did you know he wouldn’t be angry?’ said Alec. ‘I can imagine some fathers spitting on their daughters’ graves if they suddenly heard what you just told him. I mean, look what Lena did when she found out.’

I nodded slowly.

‘But Cara wasn’t Lena’s child,’ I said. ‘You heard Gregory: it doesn’t matter what your own child does, you would do anything for her, forgive her anything.’

‘What’s still puzzling me,’ said Alec, ‘is that for someone who was supposed to have a great hole where her morals should have been, Lena certainly showed enough outrage when she found out about Cara’s baby.’

‘That was the whole point,’ I said. ‘She suddenly found out that this girl into whose lap everything was to pour, was just the same as she was and while she had been punished, Cara was to be rewarded.’

‘Yes, but Lena wasn’t punished, was she?’ said Alec. ‘She had her houses and her diamonds and her respectability. So long as she kept quiet. It was Clemence who was punished.’

I nodded but said nothing. Alec went on.

‘It was poor Clemence who suddenly found out that the “golden girl” had done the very thing that had brought such misfortune on her head. Clemence’s head, I mean. Anyway,’ he went on, ‘even if Gregory had been as angry as Lena was, it might have had the same effect – to break the spell and stop him from feeling he couldn’t go on. Is that what you thought?’

‘Such depths of cynicism, Alec,’ I said. ‘Why won’t you hear what you’re being told? He could forgive Cara anything, would go to the ends of the earth for her no matter what she had done, loved her more than life itself.’

‘I suppose so. Like Lena loved her diamonds.’

‘She loved her daughter too,’ I said, but he did not hear me. He was standing to meet Gregory who had turned at last away from the grave and was walking towards us.

‘That’s the one thing they had in common,’ I said. ‘They both loved their little girls.’ I saw Lena’s face again as it had been in the ballroom – defiant, triumphant, laughing at me, yet still trying to hide the fear in her eyes. What had she to fear by then? What was she still hiding? ‘I killed her,’ she had said, so dramatically, heroically. But of course she had killed her; that was never in question. ‘It was me,’ she had said. Of course it was. ‘And even if I hang it will still be worth it,’ she had said. But worth what? What were the diamonds if she hanged? Nothing. And what else was there?

I watched Gregory walk away from his daughter’s grave, and knew that he would gladly have taken her place. I thought of Lena in her grave, and of Clemence halfway to Canada, and I remembered Lena’s face as she spoke those last words, just to me.

‘You stupid woman,’ she had said.

Finally, the last piece fell into place. No, I thought, grasping my cane and preparing to stand. No, Lena, not so stupid after all.