The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  He took the hint; didn’t press further on the Bailey case. He seemed to consider for a moment before nodding. “Back in a minute.”

  He shuffled down the hallway and Sadie could hear him rummaging and cursing in a room at the back of the house. The cat was watching her, green eyes wide, tail pulsing in slow critical flecks. Well, well, well, that tail seemed to be saying.

  “What do you want from me?” Sadie grumbled beneath her breath. “I’ve already said it was my fault.”

  She played idly with the tablecloth tag and tried not to think of Nancy Bailey. Don’t even think of making contact with the grandmother. Tried to ignore the sensation of that warm little hand in hers. She glanced at the clock and wondered whether it was possible Clive was back there right now on the phone to the Met.

  Another two numerals quivered and flipped, and finally, after what seemed a slow-motion age, Clive returned, looking, Sadie fancied, as nervous as she felt. There was an inexplicable animation to his expression and she decided that unless he was a sadist, and there’d been no indication of that so far, he was not returning from reporting her to Ashford. She noticed that he wasn’t carrying a photograph either; rather he had a thick folder under one arm. It was of a familiar type. “I was waiting to see what I thought of you,” Clive said as he reached the table. “Only, when I retired, I didn’t think anyone would notice, let alone mind, so I took—”

  “The file!” Sadie’s eyes widened.

  A short nod.

  “You took the Edevane case file.”

  “Borrowed. I’m going to put it back once the case is closed.”

  “You . . . !” Admiration warmed her face as she considered the folder, now on the table between them, brimming with interview transcripts, illustrations, names, numbers, theories. “You devil! You wonderful devil.”

  He jutted his chin. “Wasn’t doing any good in archives, was it? There was no one there who’d miss it. Most of the others, their parents weren’t even born when it happened.” His bottom lip trembled slightly. “It’s my case. My unfinished business.”

  He handed her a large black-and-white photograph from the top of the file: a good-looking, well-heeled family whose hairstyles, dresses, suits and hats marked them as belonging to the 1930s. It had been taken outside during a picnic and they were lounging on a plaid blanket spread with plates and teacups; there was a stone wall behind them that Sadie recognised as belonging to the bottom garden near the stream. Eleanor and her husband Anthony were in the centre of the group. Sadie knew them from the newspaper photo, though they looked happy here, and therefore younger. An older woman, who must be Constance deShiel, was sitting in a wicker chair to the left of her daughter, and three girls, teenagers or thereabouts, were gathered together on the other side, legs outstretched, ankles crossed in the sun. Deborah, the eldest and most conventionally beautiful, was sitting closest to her father, a scarf tied over her hair; Alice was next, her arresting gaze familiar from her author photo; and on the end, a girl who was tall and rangy but obviously younger than the others, who must be Clementine. Her light-brown hair, wavy and side-parted, sat just above her shoulders, but her face was difficult to make out. She wasn’t looking at the photographer, but rather was smiling at the little boy sitting by his mother’s feet. Baby Theo, an arm outstretched towards his sister, a soft toy in his fist.

  Despite herself, Sadie was moved by the photo. The tufty grass, the spill of shadows on a long-ago summer’s day, the small white flecks of daisies in the picture’s foreground. It was a brief, single moment in the life of a happy family, caught before everything changed. Clive had said the Edevanes were unlike anyone he’d met before, but it was the ordinariness of these people, this scene, that struck Sadie more. Anthony’s jacket, tossed casually behind him, the piece of half-eaten cake in Deborah’s hand, the glossy labrador sitting to attention, eyeing the prize.

  She frowned and looked closer. “Who’s that?” There was another woman in the photograph. Sadie had missed her at first; she was lost in the dappled light beneath the stone wall.

  Clive peered at the image. “That’s the boy’s nanny. Rose Waters was her name.”

  “Nanny,” Sadie said thoughtfully. She knew a little about nannies; she’d seen Mary Poppins. “Didn’t they used to sleep in the nursery with children?”

  “They did,” said Clive. “Unfortunately she’d left the Lake House a couple of weeks before the party. It took us a while to find her. We traced her through a sister in Yorkshire in the end. Just in time, too: she was at a hotel in London, about to set sail to start another job.” He scratched his head. “Canada, I think it was. We spoke to her, but she wasn’t much help.”

  “So there was no nanny at Loeanneth over midsummer?”

  “Oh, there was a replacement, all right. Hilda Bruen. A real old battleaxe, one of those ancient nannies, the sort who got her thrills from feeding cod-liver oil to children, making them cry and telling them it’s for their own good. Younger than I am now, but to me as a lad she seemed like Methuselah. She’d worked at the Lake House when Eleanor was a girl and been pulled out of retirement after Rose Waters left.”

  “She was there the night the boy went missing?”

  “The very same room.”

  This was rather big news. “She must have seen or heard something?”

  Clive was shaking his head. “Sleeping like a baby. Seems she’d taken a draught of whisky to help shut out the party noise. Not an unusual occurrence, from what I could gather.”

  “Bollocks!”

  “Indeed.”

  “There was no mention of her in Pickering’s book.”

  “No, well, there wouldn’t be, would there? He was a fool of a man and no one gave him the time of day, so he was limited to what he could find in the papers.”

  “I’m not sure I understand how something like this could be kept out of the papers—someone sleeping in the same room as the boy?”

  “The family was insistent. Eleanor Edevane came to see my boss, seeking assurances that nothing would be said publicly about Hilda Bruen. The nanny had a long association with the family and they wouldn’t permit her reputation to be tarnished. The Detective Inspector didn’t like it—” he shrugged—“but as I said, times were different then. A family like the Edevanes, gentry, they were allowed a certain leeway they wouldn’t be granted now.”

  Sadie wondered how many other leads had been lost through such leeway. She heaved a sigh and leaned back against her seat, swivelled her pen back and forth before tossing it lightly onto her writing pad. “There’s so little to go on.”

  Clive smiled with sad apology. He gestured towards the bloated file. “You know, in all that lot, out of hundreds of interviews, there was only one eyewitness who thought she might have seen something useful.”

  Sadie raised her brows in excited query.

  “One of the party guests reported seeing the silhouette of a figure, a woman’s figure, in the nursery window on the night of the party. Just after midnight, according to her. The fireworks were underway. Almost didn’t tell us, she said. She’d been skulking around with a fellow who wasn’t her husband.”

  Sadie’s brows went higher.

  “Said she wouldn’t have been able to live with herself if the boy wasn’t found because she hadn’t come forward.”

  “Was she credible?”

  “She swore to what she’d seen, but you could still smell the alcohol on her the next day.”

  “Could it have been the old nanny she saw?”

  Clive shook his head. “Doubtful. She insisted the silhouette was slim and Hilda Bruen was decidedly stout.”

  Sadie took up the picnic photograph again. There were a lot of women in the Edevane family and all of them were slim. Indeed, it struck her as she considered the image that Anthony Edevane was the only man among them—aside from baby Theo, of course. He was a handsome man; in his
early forties here, but with dark-blond hair and a heavy, intelligent brow, and the sort of smile Sadie suspected was bestowed freely on those he loved.

  Her gaze slid to the woman beneath the stone wall, obscured by shade but for one slender ankle that had sneaked into sunlight. “Why did she leave? Rose Waters, I mean.”

  “She was let go.”

  “Fired?” Sadie glanced up sharply.

  “A difference of opinion, according to Eleanor Edevane.”

  “Which opinion?”

  “Something to do with taking liberties. It was all rather vague.”

  Sadie considered this. It sounded like an excuse to her; the sort of thing people said when they were trying to mask an unpleasant truth. She looked at Eleanor. At first glance, Sadie had presumed the photograph was of a happy, carefree family enjoying a warm summer’s day. It occurred to her now that she’d fallen under the same spell Clive described. Letting the Edevane family’s charm and wealth and attractiveness dazzle her. She peered closer. Was she imagining strain in the pretty features of Eleanor’s face? Sadie gave a slow, thoughtful sigh. “What about Rose Waters? Did she report the same?”

  “She did. Very distressed she was, too. She described the dismissal as unexpected and unfair. Particularly upsetting because it had been her first nannying job. She’d been there ten years, ever since she was eighteen years old. Not much she could do about it, though; the means of making a complaint didn’t exist back then. She was lucky to have been given a good reference.”

  The timing, Rose Waters’s sense of an injustice having been done to her, her familiarity with the family and their rhythms. Sadie had a funny feeling. “She must have been a suspect.”

  “Everyone was a suspect. Everyone and no one. That was half the problem: the field never got any narrower. Rose Waters became very agitated when we interviewed her, frantic when she heard what had happened. She was terribly worried about the boy. They’d been very close according to the other servants. More than one commented that she loved the boy like he was her own.”

  Sadie’s heart had started to beat faster.

  Clive appeared to notice. “I know how it sounds,” he said, “but it happened a lot back then, after the first war. A whole generation was sunk beneath the mud in France and with them went the marriage hopes of millions of young women. Employment as a nanny by a family like the Edevanes was as close to having a child as most of them would ever come.”

  “Must’ve been hard being sent away from a little boy she loved.”

  Clive, anticipating the line of thinking, said calmly, “No doubt, but loving someone else’s child is very different from stealing them. There was nothing to link her to the crime.”

  “Except an eyewitness who saw a woman in the boy’s nursery.”

  He nodded ambivalently, clearly of the opinion that, while anything was possible, he considered the theory unlikely. “No one saw her on the estate, she wasn’t at the party, and a fellow on the desk at the hotel in London said he’d served her breakfast on the twenty-second of June.”

  Alibis could be flimsy things. There were any number of reasons why one person might be induced to vouch for another. As to Rose Waters not being seen at Loeanneth, if Sadie’s tunnel hunch proved correct, it was irrelevant.

  Sadie felt the divine zing of a credible lead opening. It was a sensation she didn’t think she’d ever tire of. The nanny had loved the boy; she’d been dismissed suddenly, and in her view unfairly; an eyewitness had reported seeing a woman’s silhouette in the nursery. Furthermore, Rose Waters had lived for a time within the house. It was not unthinkable that she’d learned, during her tenure, of the tunnel. From one of the daughters, perhaps? Clementine? Was that the secret Clive suspected the youngest Edevane daughter of keeping?

  To take the boy was an extreme measure, granted, but wasn’t all crime the execution of an extreme reaction? Sadie tapped her fingertips against the table rim. Rose Waters’s dismissal was important, she just knew it.

  “I’ll tell you one thing. It was a great shame she wasn’t at Loeanneth that night,” Clive said. “More than one person we interviewed commented on how vigilant Rose Waters was when it came to the little lad. Even Eleanor Edevane said it never would have happened if Nanny Rose had still been there. Full of remorse, she was.”

  “For firing the nanny?”

  He nodded. “Of course, parents usually find a way to blame themselves, don’t they?” He took up the photo and inspected it, gently brushing away a piece of dust with the back of his fingers. “You know, she stopped coming back to the house during the Second World War. I thought it was just the war, such a bloody mess that made of everything, but even when it was over Eleanor Edevane never came back. I wondered about her sometimes, whether she’d been hit by a bomb. Terrible thing to say, but the war was like that: we all got used to people dying. Sad to think of the house left all alone, but it made sense she stayed away. So much death and destruction, time just kept dragging on, six long, hard years of war. The world was a different place once it ended. More than eleven years since the lad went missing. Whatever vigil she was keeping here, I think she’d moved beyond it, finally let the little lad go.”

  Sadie wondered if he was right, whether there was a point at which even the most determined sufferer of bereavement cut their losses. Whether half a decade of war and austerity, of mass destruction and waste, could blot out the memory of a comparatively small, personal grief, no matter how searing it had been. Perhaps a person could learn to live with a shadow child. Anything was possible—just look at Maggie Bailey. She’d walked away from her child. (“She did not, she never would’ve done a thing like that,” Nancy Bailey insisted. Sadie shook the voice away.)

  “So,” said Clive with a sorry smile. “There you have it. The Edevane case in a nutshell. Thousands of man-hours, the best of intentions, decades of personal obsession, and next to nothing to show for it. No more decent leads today than we had in the first days of the investigation.”

  Sadie felt the suspension of her unspoken theory heavy between them. Now was the time to tell him. He’d trusted her with his file, the least she could do was return the favour. She said, “I might have something new.”

  Clive cocked his head as if she’d spoken in a foreign language and he was trying to decode her statement for meaning.

  “A theory, I mean.”

  “I heard you.” His eyes brightened and, at the same time, narrowed, as if he were guarding against his own eagerness. His voice when he spoke was gravelly. “Go on then.”

  Sadie started with the map Alastair had found for her, its age and obscurity, its unusual provenance, moving on to describe the floorplan with its small unnamed wall cavity and her theory that it might lead to a tunnel.

  He nodded urgently as she finished and said, “I knew there was at least one tunnel, we checked it in the days following, even though the trapdoor in the garden had been sealed, but I didn’t know anything about a tunnel leading to that part of the house—nobody did. This map was old, you say?”

  “Very. It had been tucked away with other bits and pieces in a waterlogged cellar somewhere and was only found during recent renovations. The whole lot was sent for restoration and wound up at the County Archives, which is how I came by it.”

  Clive reached beneath his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. Eyes closed, thinking. “I wonder if it’s possible . . .” he mumbled. “But why wouldn’t someone have mentioned it? Perhaps they didn’t know?”

  “We don’t even know,” Sadie reminded him. “Not for certain. I need to get inside the house to check. I’ve written to Alice Edevane—”

  “Pah,” he said sharply, meeting her eyes. “You’ll as soon get blood from a stone as any help from her.”

  “I’ve noticed. Why is that? Why isn’t she as eager as we are to know what happened?”

  “No idea. Perversity? Pig-headedness? She’s
a crime writer. Did you know that? Very famous.”

  Sadie nodded distractedly. Was that why she hadn’t heard back? Had her letters become lost amongst the hundreds of others a writer like A.C. Edevane must receive? Fan letters, requests for money, that sort of thing.

  “Police officer called Brent,” Clive continued. “I’ve read a few of them. Not bad. Found myself trying to read between the lines, see whether there was anything in there that’d help with the case. I saw her on TV a while back. She was just as I remembered her.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “High and mighty, enigmatic, sure of herself. She was sixteen when her brother went missing, only a year younger than I was, but a different species. Cool as a cucumber when we interviewed her.”

  “Too cool?”

  A nod. “I wondered at the time whether it was an act. I couldn’t believe a young girl could be so self-possessed. Sure enough, I saw another side of her later. My gift as a policeman back then was my meekness. Like a church mouse, I was, always slipping beneath notice. It made me very useful. My boss had sent me out to find him a new pen—his old one had run out of ink—and as I was returning to the entrance hall I saw her lurking on the stairs, creeping towards the door of the library where we were conducting the interviews, before changing her mind and sneaking back again into the shadows.”

  “You think she was trying to work up the courage to knock on the door and tell you something?”

  “Either that, or she was awfully anxious to hear what was being said in there.”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “She turned those cool blue eyes on me and told me to stop haranguing her, to get on with finding her brother. Her voice was full of authority, but her face—it paled to almost white.” He leaned closer. “In my experience, people who know more than they should about a crime behave in one of two ways: they either make themselves invisible, or else they’re drawn to the investigation like a moth to a flame.”