The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  Sadie had offered a slight smile of understanding. Nothing like the police force for bringing the horrors of life up close and personal. The only people who had it worse were paramedics. “So you started with the theory that Theo Edevane had wandered?”

  A brief nod. “We just presumed that’s what had happened. Nobody thought of kidnappings in those days. There’d been the Lindbergh case in America the year before but that made news because it was so rare. We were sure we’d find the lad within hours, that being so young he couldn’t have got far. We searched until nightfall, combed the meadows and the woods on the edge of the estate, but we couldn’t find a trace. Not a clue. Next day, we brought in divers to check the lake, and when nothing turned up, that’s when we started looking at who might have wanted to take him.”

  Which led Sadie to her second series of questions. She’d scribbled them down the night before, sitting in the window of Seaview Cottage. Ordinarily, she fought against questions of “why’, particularly when she was just getting started on an investigation. “Motive’s for fiction writers,” Donald was fond of grumbling. “Fiction writers and TV detectives.” Typically blunt, but he had a point. Police officers needed evidence; they had to satisfy questions of how the crime was committed and who had the chance to commit it. Why was a distraction, and oftentimes misleading.

  In this case, however, with evidence particularly scant and seventy years having elapsed since the crime’s commission, Sadie figured exceptions had to be made. Plus, the new map changed things. That mysterious alcove in the wall cavity, the possibility of another tunnel connecting the house to the outside world, a tunnel that had long ago disappeared from most maps and memories. If it were so, then one of the most puzzling aspects of the case, the how, might be solved. And with it, hopefully, the who, for the group of people who knew of the tunnel’s existence must have been small and exclusive. A line from A Dish Served Cold had been going round and round in Sadie’s head since she’d made the appointment with Clive: Diggory always started with the family. It was a mistake to presume that grief and guilt were mutually exclusive. The line had preceded Diggory Brent’s first visit to the dead man’s ex-wife and daughter. Sadie said, “You interviewed the parents?”

  “First thing we did. There was no evidence to incriminate either, and both had alibis. The boy’s mother, in particular, had been very visible as hostess of the party. She spent most of the night at the boathouse, where they had gondola rides set up for the guests. Everything they told us checked out. No real surprise there; why would a parent kidnap their own child?”

  A valid point, but Sadie wasn’t prepared to let them off the hook so easily, even if she had developed a certain feeling of kinship towards Eleanor Edevane. “The Pickering book suggested a period of about three hours between the end of the party and the discovery that the boy was missing. What were the whereabouts of the parents then?”

  “They both retired to bed at the same time. Neither left the bedroom until eight am, when the maid came to tell them the lad wasn’t in his cot.”

  “Anything to suggest either was lying?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That they might have acted together?”

  “To spirit the boy away, you mean? After they’d said goodnight to their three hundred guests?”

  It sounded absurd now he put it like that, but Sadie was nothing if not thorough. She nodded.

  “We couldn’t find anyone who didn’t say how well-loved the boy was. More than that, how wanted. The Edevanes had waited a long time for their son. They had three daughters already, the youngest was twelve in June 1933, and the boy was prized. All those wealthy families wanted boys back then, someone to pass the name and fortune on to. Not anymore. My granddaughter tells me all her friends want girls—better behaved, more fun to dress, easier all round.” He raised his neat white brows incredulously. “Having had daughters myself, I can assure you that’s not the case.”

  Sadie gave a slight smile as Clive helped himself to a biscuit. “I’ll have to take your word for it,” she said, focusing with assiduous care on the list of family members he’d given her when she first arrived. “You said the boy’s grandmother lived with the family?”

  A slight frown crossed his otherwise kind face. “Constance deShiel. Insufferable woman. One of those snooty, over-bred types who look as if they’d as soon eat you as answer your questions. Except when we asked about her daughter and son-in-law—she was rather more forthcoming then.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Little jibes of the ‘things aren’t always as they seem’ variety. She alluded more than once to infidelity, insinuating there’d been some sort of affair, but pulled up short of offering specifics.”

  “You pushed her on it?”

  “Back then, someone in the gentry, especially a woman—well, there were different rules of conduct, we couldn’t press her as we might have liked.”

  “You looked into it, though?”

  “Of course. As you’d know, family disharmony’s a policeman’s bread and butter; there’s those who’ll stop at nothing to punish a spouse. The dad who turns up for a custody visit, takes the kids and never brings them back; the mum who feeds her kids a bunch of lies about their old man. The rights of children are often lost in the battle between their parents.”

  “But not in this case?”

  “People went out of their way to tell us how devoted the Edevanes were, what an inseparable couple.”

  Sadie considered this. Marriages were mysterious things. She’d never had one of her own, but it seemed to her that each was its own beast, with secrets, lies and promises simmering beneath the surface. “Why would Constance deShiel have suggested otherwise if it wasn’t true? Had she seen something? Had her daughter confided in her, perhaps?”

  “Mother and daughter weren’t close; more than one person told us that.”

  “And yet they lived together?”

  “Reluctantly, as I understand it. The old woman had lost everything in a bad investment after her husband died and relied on her daughter and son-in-law’s charity, a situation she resented.” He shrugged. “Her insinuations might’ve been a simple case of mischief-making.”

  “When a child was missing?”

  He waved a hand and his expression suggested nothing would have surprised him, that he’d seen people do all sorts of things in his time. “It’s possible, though there were other explanations. The old woman was suffering from the early stages of dementia in 1933. Her doctor advised us to take what she said with a grain of salt. In fact—” they were alone but he leaned a little nearer, as if to share a confidence he didn’t want overheard—“Dr Gibbons suggested that Constance had been rather inconstant in her own marriage, that it was possible her comments were actually confused memories rather than reliable reports. They say the past and the present become difficult to separate.”

  “What do you think?”

  He spread his hands. “I think she was bitter but harmless. Old and lonely and she had a captive audience.”

  “You think she was making herself important?”

  “It was almost like she wanted us to ask her questions, to imagine her the architect of some great nefarious scheme. I dare say she’d have been well pleased if we’d arrested her. It would have given her all the attention she was seeking, and then some.” Clive picked a crumb from the tablecloth, setting it carefully on the edge of his plate. “It’s not easy, getting old, feeling one’s relevance slip away. She’d been beautiful once, and important, mistress of the house. There was a portrait of her hanging over the fireplace in the library; formidable, she was. I still shudder to remember the way those painted eyes seemed to watch my every move.” He glanced at Sadie, his own gaze narrowing so that she glimpsed the hardened policeman he must once have been. “All the same, a lead’s a lead, Lord knows we hadn’t many of them, and I watched the pair of them, Anthony and
Eleanor, very closely after that.”

  “And?”

  “The loss of a child is like a grenade in most families, statistics on parents who split up in the wake of a tragedy bear that out, but they were lovely together. He was so careful with her, gentle and protective, making sure she rested, stopping her from tearing outside to join the search. He barely let her out of his sight.” His mouth tightened as he remembered. “It really was a dreadful time. Poor woman, it has to be a mother’s worst nightmare, but she handled herself with such grace. You know, for years after the family left she used to come back here.”

  “To the village?”

  “To the house. Just her on her own.”

  This was new. Bertie’s friend Louise had suggested that no one from the family had been near the place since Theo’s disappearance. “You saw her?”

  “Police hear things, news would filter into town that there was someone back at the Lake House. I dropped in on her a few times, just to make sure she was all right, see if there was anything I could do to help. She was always polite, said it was kind of me but she was just enjoying a little respite from London.” He smiled sadly. “I knew, though, she was hoping he’d come back.

  “It wasn’t over for her.”

  “’Course it wasn’t. Her baby was out there somewhere. She thanked me once or twice, said she appreciated the work we’d all put in, how hard we’d searched for her boy. Even made an exceptionally generous donation to the local station. Very dignified, she was. Very sad.” He frowned, lost in his memories. When he spoke again, a bitter, wistful note had crept into his voice. “I used to hope I could still find the boy for her. Didn’t sit well with me, that open file. Children don’t just disappear, do they? They go somewhere. There’s always a path, it’s just a matter of knowing where to look.” He glanced at her. “Ever had a case like that? Eats away at you.”

  “Once or twice,” said Sadie, picturing Caitlyn Bailey in the hallway of that flat. Remembering the sensation of that little hand, warm and trusting in hers, the tickle of the child’s messy hair when she fetched her storybook and laid her head on Sadie’s shoulder.

  “This was mine,” he said. “Made all the worse because we had so little to work with.”

  “You must have had theories, though?”

  “There were leads, some of them stronger than others. Recent staff changes, a missing bottle of sleeping tablets we thought might have been used in the kidnapping, and a family friend who died in unusual circumstances, fellow by the name of Daffyd Llewellyn—”

  “The writer—”

  “That’s him. Quite well known in his time.”

  Sadie cursed herself for having left the library dissertation with its chapter on Llewellyn unopened. She remembered the introduction to Eleanor’s Magic Doorway and its mention of a posthumous OBE awarded in 1934. She hadn’t made the connection that his death had come so soon after Theo’s disappearance. “What happened?”

  “A few days into the search we were down by the stream, a little way from the boathouse, and someone called out, “A body!” But it wasn’t the baby, it was an old man. Suicide, as it turned out. We thought it must’ve been guilt, that he’d had something to do with the boy’s disappearance.”

  “Are you sure he hadn’t?”

  “We looked into it, but there was no motive. He adored the boy, and everyone we interviewed confirmed him as Eleanor’s closest friend. He wrote a book about her when she was a girl, did you know?”

  Sadie nodded.

  “She was completely devastated—collapsed when she was told. Awful, it was.” He was shaking his head. “One of the worst things I’ve seen.”

  Sadie considered this. A child goes missing and a close family friend kills himself in the hours or days afterwards. “The timing seems extraordinary.”

  “Grant you that, but we spoke to the local doctor, who told us Llewellyn had been suffering anxiety in the weeks prior. We found a bottle of barbiturates in his pocket.”

  “That’s what he used?”

  “The coroner confirmed an overdose. Llewellyn mixed the pills with champagne, lay down by the stream and never woke up. Extraordinary timing, as you say, given that the boy was taken the same night, but nothing suspicious in it. Certainly nothing to link him to Theo Edevane’s fate. Just a coincidence.”

  Sadie smiled thinly. She didn’t like coincidences. In her experience they were usually just links that hadn’t yet been proved. And, now, her antennae were quivering. She had a feeling there was more to this Llewellyn fellow’s death than met the eye. Clive had obviously dismissed the possibility a long time ago, but Sadie made a note to look into it further later. Llewellyn suicide—timing an accident or was he involved? Guilt?

  In the meantime . . . she tapped her pen against the pad thoughtfully, circling the word accident. Because of course there was a third possibility in the case of Theo Edevane, perhaps most chilling of all: that the child had never left the house—at least, not alive. Sadie had seen cases where children had been injured or killed—accidentally or otherwise—and then the crime covered up. Those responsible invariably sought to make it look like a case of running away or kidnap because it focused attention away from the scene of the crime.

  A series of clicks broke her train of thought and she noticed for the first time a large digital clock on the bench behind Clive. It was the sort with flip cards made from plastic and three had just turned at once to show the time as eleven o’clock. Sadie was suddenly aware that it was getting closer to midday, when Clive’s daughter would arrive and bring their meeting to an end.

  “What about the sisters?” she said, with renewed urgency. “You spoke to them?”

  “More than once.”

  “Anything useful?”

  “More of the same. The boy was loved, they’d seen nothing unusual, they promised to tell us if they thought of anything helpful. They all had alibis for the evening.”

  “You’re frowning.”

  “Am I?” Clive blinked at her, light blue eyes large behind his glasses. He ran a hand over the top of his white hair and then lifted a shoulder. “I suppose I just always felt there was something the youngest one wasn’t telling us. It was only a hunch, something to do with the awkward way she carried herself. She went red in the face when we were questioning her, crossed her arms and refused to look us in the eye. But she insisted she had no idea what could have happened to him, that nothing unusual had occurred in the household in the preceding weeks, and there wasn’t a shred of real evidence to suggest she’d been involved.”

  Sadie allowed herself to consider motive. Envy was the obvious one. A girl who’d been the baby of the family for almost twelve years until a little brother, a much-loved son, arrived to take her place. The party would have been the perfect time to do away with an obstacle, the noise and activity making it easy to slip beneath the radar.

  Or else . . . (and surely more likely than Clementine Edevane being a sociopathic little girl with murderous intent?) . . . Sadie remembered Pickering’s account of the girl’s habit of taking Theo out with her in the mornings, her insistence that the door to the nursery had been closed when she went past, that she hadn’t gone inside to fetch her little brother as she sometimes did. But what if she had, and something awful had happened to him, an accident, and she’d been too frightened, too ashamed, to tell anyone?

  “There was a clean-up team in the grounds,” Clive said, anticipating her line of thinking. “From the moment the last guest left, right through sunrise, contractors restoring the place to rights. No one saw anything.”

  But what if, as Sadie suspected, there was another way to leave the house unseen? She wrote the word Clementine on her notepad and circled it. “What was she like? Clementine Edevane.”

  “A tomboy, I suppose you’d have to say, but fey with it. They were all a bit different, the Edevanes. Charming, charismatic. I suppose I
was rather taken with them. Awed. I was only seventeen, remember, and green as a bean. I’d never met people like them. It was the romance, I suppose—the big house, the garden, the way they spoke, the things they talked about, their fine manners and the sense of unspoken rules they followed. They were bewitching.” He looked at her. “Would you like to see a photo?”

  “You have one?”

  The offer had been made openly, even eagerly, but now he hesitated. “I’m not sure . . . well, it’s a little awkward, you being a current member of the force . . .

  “Barely,” said Sadie, before she could help herself.

  “Barely?”

  She sighed in defeat. “There was this case,” she began, and then, maybe it was the calm of that kitchen, its distance from London and her real world, the professional connection she felt with Clive, or the relief at finally being able to tell someone the secret she’d been keeping so diligently from Bertie, but Sadie found herself giving him a potted summary of the Bailey case, the way she’d refused to let it go, convinced herself and tried to persuade all and sundry that there was more to it than met the eye, that she was here in Cornwall not on holiday but on enforced leave.

  Clive listened without interrupting, and when she finished, he didn’t frown, or start a lecture, or ask her to leave. He said simply, “I saw it in the paper. Terrible business.”

  “I should never have spoken to that journalist.”

  “You thought you were right.”

  “I didn’t give it enough thought, that’s the problem.” Her voice curdled with self-disgust. “I had a feeling.”

  “Well, no shame in that. Sometimes ‘feelings’ aren’t as airy-fairy as they seem. Sometimes they’re just the product of observations we haven’t realised we’ve been making.”

  He was being kind. Sadie had an instinctive antipathy towards kindness. Policing might have changed in the years since Clive retired, but Sadie was pretty sure breaking rank to go public on a hunch had never been considered acceptable practice. She managed a weak smile. “You said there was a photo?”