Fallen Skies

by Philippa Gregory

  The inspector looked at Coventry’s brown eyes, which were suddenly shielded and almost opaque.

  “Did anyone see you this morning, parked outside the courtroom?” he asked.

  Coventry glanced away, as if to recall. He wrote on the pad: “Newspaper boy—bawt paper,” and pushed the note over to the inspector.

  “Thank you,” Inspector Walker said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  The sergeant came in when Coventry left. He closed the door behind him and raised an eyebrow at his chief.

  “Well, well, well,” the inspector said thoughtfully. “We’re uncovering a scandal if not a kidnap suspect. A husband who likes to take a drink on the wrong side of the tracks, and a wife who goes out for walks with a piano player. But no motive for a kidnap.” He thought for a moment, drumming his fingers on the desk. “I’ll see the nanny,” he announced briefly.

  Nanny Janes kept him waiting, and she was stiff with disapproval when she finally entered.

  “I hope this is not an inconvenient time,” Inspector Walker said apologetically.

  “I was tidying Baby’s wardrobe,” she said icily.

  “I am sorry. I do need your help, Miss Janes.”

  She inclined her head and sank into a chair.

  “When did you last see the baby?”

  “As I have said, I glanced from the nursery window and saw his mother sitting with him and keeping him awake at about a quarter to ten.”

  “Did you see her go into the house?”

  Nanny Janes shook her head.

  “And did you look out again after that?”

  “No.” She hesitated.

  “Why not?” the inspector asked gently.

  “Mother had obviously taken charge of the child,” Nanny Janes said through compressed lips. “I had enough to do with tidying the nursery and supervising the tweeny’s cleaning.”

  “Mrs. Winters tends to interfere, does she?” the inspector prompted.

  Nanny Janes swelled a little in her chair. It was clearly a sore point. “I think the young Mrs. Winters is unaccustomed to life in a large household,” she said. “She cannot handle the servants and she does not understand how a child should be brought up.” She hesitated. “I am accustomed to a rather bigger household. In my previous employment I had my own nursery maid under my direction. Here I have to supervise the tweeny.”

  The inspector nodded sympathetically. “Why did you leave your previous employers?”

  “The children died,” Nanny Janes said unemotionally. “They were drowned in a yachting accident.”

  “Dreadful.”

  Nanny Janes nodded as if conceding that the death of twin four-year-old boys might indeed be seen as dreadful, but that she was made of sterner stuff, a professional.

  “Were the family much distressed?”

  “Mother went quite mad,” Nanny Janes said temperately. “They had to have her committed. The father was much distressed too. He had insisted on taking them sailing. I believe they closed up their house and went abroad.”

  “What was their name?”

  Nanny Janes hesitated. “I am sure they would not wish to be troubled,” she said discreetly. “It is hardly connected with them.”

  The inspector curbed his impatience. “This is a kidnap inquiry,” he said. “It could hardly be more serious. I will want to contact them.”

  “Sir Charles and Lady Harcourt, Harcourt Hall, Wisbech, Cambridge,” Nanny Janes said begrudgingly. “But I hardly think it is relevant. What possible connection could there be?”

  The inspector shrugged. “I don’t know at this stage,” he said. “I’m just checking everything. If you were doing my job—who would you think took the baby, Miss Janes?”

  She shot him a sly downcast look. “It’s not my place to speculate about my employers,” she said.

  “Mrs. Winters? Mrs. Lily Winters?”

  Nanny Janes shrugged. “An unhealthy anxiety about her child, so she can’t leave him alone for a moment. And a wide circle of friends . . . irresponsible wild people . . .” She trailed off. “Who knows what they might think of? As a joke, maybe? As a way of getting even.”

  “Even with whom?”

  She shrugged again. “With respectable people. With me, with Mr. Winters. I can’t say. But some of the visitors to this house would never be allowed beyond the tradesman’s entrance of a respectable residence. Some of Mrs. Winters’s friends are little better than gypsies. I am not surprised that something like this has happened. They are a wild set of people. A baby has to have routine: routine and no interference.”

  The inspector assumed a look of puzzled anxiety. “Do you think,” he said slowly, “do you think that Mrs. Lily Winters is so flighty, and so interfering, that she might have asked one of her friends to take the baby from the garden so that it was out of your care, and away from her husband’s rules?”

  The gleam Nanny Janes shot at him was assent. “I really couldn’t speculate,” she said primly. “It’s not my place.”

  • • •

  The inspector interviewed every member of staff. He checked and double-checked their whereabouts at the time of the kidnap, and what they had seen. Then casually, at the end of the interviews, he asked them what they knew of Lily’s friends, and in particular, Charlie Smith.

  To his surprise Charlie was a popular visitor. All the household staff liked to hear his music, they all like to hear Lily sing and welcomed the sound of her laughter when she played with her baby in the drawing room and Charlie joked with her. Nanny Janes was the sole dissenting voice.

  Browning would say nothing about the marriage of Stephen and Lily. But Sally, the tweeny, was less trained and less discreet. She confirmed that they quarrelled. She had seen Lily in tears more than once. She said the house had been as quiet as a grave since Mr. Rory Winters’s stroke, but Lily had brought a new lease of life to the whole house. Her friends were gay and fashionable and brightened the place up. In her opinion, Mr. Stephen Winters was a dry old stick who didn’t know that a bit of fun and a bit of music brightened up the place.

  None of the staff could believe that any of Lily’s friends, including Charlie Smith, could have had anything to do with the kidnap, and Sally went so far as to be impertinent to the inspector. She accused him of being blind as a bat if he couldn’t see that Charlie Smith loved Christopher like he was his own dad. The inspector nodded at that, and looked thoughtful, rather than offended.

  • • •

  Upstairs in her bedroom Lily slept in a deep drugged sleep though the afternoon sun shone brightly through the yellow curtains. Dr. Mobey, summoned by Muriel, had been shocked by Lily’s brittle calm. When he asked her what the police were doing she had used language that no lady should know, let alone use. He gave her a dose of strong opium-based sleeping powder and ordered her to rest. Muriel confirmed his diagnosis that the girl was near hysteria.

  “No self-control,” she said to him as they stood in the drawing room.

  “A terrible thing to happen to a young mother,” he offered, closing his bag.

  “The worse the event, the more one should rise to it,” Muriel said firmly. “Not collapse in a heap.”

  The doctor nodded. He had admired Muriel’s courage over the years, through her loss of her favourite son and the paralysis of her husband. She was a fine woman, the sort of woman who had held the Empire together by uncompromising standards in impossible situations.

  “You’re an example to us all,” he said gently. “If the strain starts to tell, you know where to find me.”

  Muriel smiled at him, her brave shell-hearted smile. “I shan’t need to be put to bed,” she said. “I think I’m made of sterner stuff!”

  “I know it,” he said. “They’re lucky to have you.”

  “Will you have a cup of tea?” Muriel asked, a little pink at the compliment.

  “I have to leave. Duty calls I’m afraid. If she is still distressed when she wakes she can have another dose at bedtime. It’ll be easies
t for you all if she sleeps through this, I should imagine.”

  “She’s certainly no help,” Muriel said sharply. “She’s been in tears ever since the child first disappeared.” She paused, and then her innate sense of fairness asserted itself. “The difficulty is that there really is nothing that one can do. The police are here, talking to everyone, but they seem to be no further forward. There are no clues in the garden, and my servants are all absolutely reliable. It’s difficult to know what should be done.”

  “Leave it to the experts,” the doctor said comfortably. “And you do what you’ve always done: hold the family together. They’ll look to you in this crisis.”

  Muriel nodded. “Thank you,” she said, knowing it was true.

  He snapped the locks on his case and picked it up. “I shall call tomorrow morning and see how you all are,” he said. “Rory at least seems to be taking this reasonably well.”

  Muriel followed him out to the hall. “He dotes on the baby, of course,” she said. “But he’s been calm. We just have to wait.”

  The doctor shook her limp hand and put on his hat. Muriel nodded to the constable who stood by the front door and he opened the door smartly.

  “Good day,” Dr. Mobey said. He raised his hat and then went down the steps to his small black car, and drove off.

  Nothing happened for the whole long afternoon. On the other side of England, in Cambridgeshire, a police constable went to interview Nanny Janes’s previous employers and found the house closed and shuttered. The family had left the country and the caretaker did not remember the nanny at all. “A long-shot,” Inspector Walker said briefly when the Cambridge duty sergeant telephoned to report that it had been a wild goose chase. “Sorry to trouble you. Was there any local gossip about Lady Harcourt?”

  “She had some kind of crack-up after the death of the boys. But she recovered and now they’re touring in Europe.”

  “No question of her being insane? Vengeful?”

  There was a long silence from the other end of the telephone. “Against her husband?” the sergeant queried. “It was his boat.”

  “Against the nanny? I’m investigating a kidnap here and the baby was in the nanny’s charge. I just thought, maybe if her ladyship traced the nanny . . .”

  “I never heard that Lady Harcourt blamed anyone. It was a clear accident. I’ve got the coroner’s report here.”

  “A long-shot,” the inspector said again. “But as nannies go she’s been remarkably unlucky with her charges.” He put down the telephone and drummed his fingers on the surface of the polished desk. “Remarkably unlucky,” he said.

  • • •

  Stephen sat in the drawing room, reading a newspaper and sighing heavily with boredom. Muriel sat opposite him. She had taken up her old hobby of petit-point. Stephen was irritated by the neat small movements of her sewing, by the pointlessness of her labour. She had started sewing when Christopher had gone off to war. It was as if she could not completely deny the nervous agitation of her body but had to hide it in this little fretting activity. After his death she had laid the embroidery frame to one side. Stephen knew, without asking, that she had never sewn away the hours of his dangerous days at Ypres. By then she was busy with her husband, and anyway, the worst possible blow had already fallen.

  But now, with another Christopher missing, she started to sew again.

  At four o’clock they had tea. Muriel went upstairs to visit first Rory, and then Lily. “My two invalids,” she called them to herself, despising them both for weakness. Rory was working on papers from the office but he did not wish to come downstairs until dinner time. He was pale and tense and the tremor in his hands was worse. His speech was not impaired. He had talked to the inspector earlier in the day. His bedroom, facing over the sea, meant he could volunteer nothing. He had not heard the garden gate, nor running footsteps. He was useless to rescue Christopher from whoever had taken him, and he knew it. His smile when Muriel popped her head around the door was painful.

  Upstairs Lily had been in a drugged doze, but when Muriel opened the bedroom door she raised herself up on one elbow, her hair all bedraggled and her face stupid with sleep.

  “Is he safe?” she asked.

  “There’s no news,” Muriel said. “It’s four o’clock. I wondered if you would like some tea?”

  Lily made a face. “My throat’s dry,” she said.

  Muriel compressed her lips on her irritation. “I daresay that’s the sleeping powder,” she said. “Shall I ask Browning to bring you up a cup? And some sandwiches? You had no lunch.”

  “I can’t eat,” Lily said. “But I’d like a cup of tea.”

  Muriel nodded. She went to the door and then paused. “I think you should get up for dinner,” she said firmly. “You don’t help Christopher by lying around in bed, you know, Lily.”

  At her son’s name Lily’s eyes brimmed instantly with tears. She shook her head at Muriel as if there were no words to answer the older woman, as if her pain was speechless. Despite herself, Muriel was shaken by the bare agony on Lily’s face. The young woman was ugly with grief, her face robbed of its clear lines and sunny contours.

  “Well, you should get up,” she said defensively. “Or you won’t sleep tonight, and then you’ll be complaining of insomnia.”

  Lily nodded humbly, turning her face away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll get up after I’ve had a cup of tea.”

  Muriel nodded and went downstairs, feeling obscurely better for having made an attempt to bring Lily up to scratch, but hiding from her memory the picture of Lily’s face—anguished at the very mention of her baby’s name.

  • • •

  At six o’clock the telephone rang. The police constable, a new man appointed for the evening shift, hovered around Stephen as he answered it. Muriel stood in the drawing room doorway. Inspector Walker, who was on the verge of leaving for the day, opened the study door and waited, intent. From above they heard Lily’s door open and the sound of her running feet coming down the stairs.

  “Hello,” Stephen said. “Oh, Charlie! Hello! No, we’re all at sixes and sevens here.” He glanced towards the inspector who shook his head urgently and waved a hand. “Hang on a minute,” Stephen said. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “It’s Charlie Smith,” he said. “He’s back in Portsmouth.”

  “Could you ask him to come around at once?” Inspector Walker asked. “But don’t mention the baby.”

  Stephen raised an eyebrow. Lily arriving in the hall went to take the telephone, but the inspector shook his head. They all froze as Stephen spoke casually and confidently into the telephone.

  “You still there, old man? We’ve got a bit of a flap on here—no, she’s fine—but I’d be glad if you could come round. No, I’ll tell you when you get here. In a few minutes? Oh, you’re at the station now? Well, good show. See you in a moment.”

  He put down the telephone. “He came in to Southsea station so he’s walking round,” he said. “D’you want to see him on your own?”

  Inspector Walker nodded. “Please have him shown into the study,” he said.

  “Just a moment,” Lily said. She was a little slurred and languid from the drug. “Why can’t I talk to him?”

  Inspector Walker smiled at her gently. “Just routine procedure,” he said. “It keeps me straight if we do it by the book.”

  “You don’t think he did anything,” Lily said slowly. “Not Charlie.”

  The inspector looked at Stephen, who took Lily by the elbow and led her firmly into the drawing room. “Best to let the inspector do it his way,” he said. “For Christopher.”

  At her son’s name he could feel a shiver pass through her. The thin bones of her arm seemed to quake in his hand. “Sherry,” Stephen said. He thrust Lily gently into a chair and rang the bell for Browning to bring the drinks tray. “We’ve all had a hell of a day.”

  They sat in uncomfortable alertness, their drinks in their hands, until they heard Charlie’s rapid footsteps
coming down the street, his familiar rat-tat-tat at the door, Browning opening it, and then the closing of the study door.

  “I want to see him,” Lily said. Her lower lip quivered like a child about to cry.

  “When the inspector’s finished with him,” Stephen said. “Of course. But shall we have dinner now, Mother?”

  39

  CHARLIE RECOILED when he saw the inspector behind the desk, the sergeant at his side. The police constable silently closed the study door behind him.

  “Good God, what’s this?” he demanded. “Where’s Lily?”

  “Mrs. Winters is quite safe,” Inspector Walker said slowly. “Won’t you take a seat, Sir? There are a few questions I need to ask you.”

  Charlie remained standing. “About what?” he asked.

  “I am afraid a crime has been committed in this household and we need your help,” the inspector said levelly.

  Charlie flushed a deep scarlet and then went pale. “I am sorry,” he said. “But I cannot help you until I know that Mrs. Winters is all right.”

  “I have said that she is safe.”

  “Do I have your word?”

  “Indeed, yes.”

  “Is she in the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “After we have concluded our conversation you may certainly see her.”

  “Is she under suspicion?”

  The inspector hesitated for a long moment, his mind whirling around what Charlie Smith might fear Lily had done.

  “She is not,” he said slowly. “What is it that you fear, Mr. Smith?”

  Charlie’s colour returned. “I have your word for it, that whatever is going on, that Lily is not affected by it?”

  “She is neither the victim nor the perpetrator of any crime as far as I believe,” the inspector said slowly. “What is it that you fear has taken place?”

  Charlie hesitated, and then he drew out the chair before the desk and sat down. He took out a cigarette. “I feared there might have been some violence between her and her husband,” he said very quietly.