The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  But no—Alice frowned. She was being unfair. Eleanor might have retained her childhood fluency in the fairy-tale language of fate and superstitions, but her romantic nature wasn’t all love affairs and happily-ever-afters; it was a way of looking at the world, an entire moral system all of her own. She possessed an innate sense of justice, a complex system of checks and balances that determined the measure of something she called “rightness.”

  This instinct for moral balance had been in evidence during the last conversation they ever had. Eleanor had just returned home after seeing An Inspector Calls at the New Theatre and had telephoned Alice at once to declare the evening “uplifting.” (Mother had relaxed a little during the war. All that death and destruction must have made the small, arbitrary rules of society to which she’d long been captive seem far less important.) Alice, who’d seen the play already, had been silent for a moment before replying, “The part where the innocent young girl is mistreated and driven to suicide, or the depiction of the despicable Birling family who couldn’t care less about her suffering other than to save their own skins?”

  Eleanor had ignored the irony, pressing on with her critique: “The ending was so portentous, so right. Each member of the family was guilty in his or her own way, and one was left with an entirely satisfying sense that the truth would out.” She had also, rather predictably, admired the uncertainty of the Inspector Goole character. “Oh, Alice,” she’d said disappointedly, when Alice suggested his appearance might feasibly have been explained more clearly. “It’s beside the point. He’s an archetype, a symbol, justice personified. It doesn’t matter how he knew about the poor girl, or just who, or what, he really was; all that matters is the restoration of proper order.”

  Alice had grumbled something about characterisation and believability, but Eleanor, tired, had brought the conversation to a temporary close. “I’ll convince you yet. We’ll revisit the topic in person tomorrow.” They never did, of course. Eleanor had been due to visit Alice in her flat in Shoreditch when she stepped out onto Marylebone Road in front of the driver who’d taken his eyes from the road. Alice sat in her dim kitchen all the while, a fresh pint of milk in the fridge and a salvaged cloth on the table, with no inkling that the world had been tipped off its axis while she waited.

  That’s where Ben had been wrong. Alice blinked away the sudden unexpected heat of loss. His preference for people over places was all well and good, but people had a nasty habit of changing. Or leaving. Or dying. Places were far more reliable. They prevailed. And, if damaged, could be rebuilt, even improved. People could not be trusted to stick around. “Except family.” Alice heard Eleanor’s voice in her head. “That’s why I had so many daughters. So you’d always have someone. I knew what it was to grow up alone.”

  Walking down Exhibition Road towards the museums, she was confronted by many an awkward example of adolescent stretching and swelling. Alice felt a surge of pity for them, stuck as they were within the white-hot glow of youth, when everything seemed so vital, so essential, so important. She wondered where they were going. To the Science Museum or the V&A, or perhaps even the Natural History Museum, where they would file past the insects that had fluttered their last in the sunshine of Loeanneth? “I wish you wouldn’t kill them,” Eleanor had said one day, the closest Alice had heard her come to criticising Daddy. “It seems so cruel. Such beautiful creatures.” It was Alice, wearing the white assistant’s gloves, who’d leapt to her father’s defence, though in truth she hated those pins too. “Nature is cruel. Isn’t that right, Daddy? Every living thing has to die. And they’re still beautiful. Now they’ll stay that way.”

  A group of girls rushed past, laughing, and turned to joke over their shoulders at a good-looking boy with black hair who shouted something indecipherable in return. Their youth and exuberance radiated off them in waves that Alice could almost see. Alice remembered what it was to be like them. To feel for the first time a passion that made everything hyper-real. Ben’s pull, back then, had been inexorable; her attraction such that she’d have sooner stopped blinking than give him up. She’d ignored her mother’s entreaties and continued to meet with him, she’d simply been more careful than before, more deceitful.

  Over the next few weeks, as Ben listened and made occasional interjections, Alice refined her idea for how to stage the perfect kidnapping. One fine spring morning, when the air was clear after a night of rain and the trout were leaping in the stream, she set up her blanket beneath a willow. Ben was digging post holes for a new fence and Alice lay on her stomach, ankles folded, legs swinging as she frowned at her notebook. Suddenly, she said, “It occurs to me that I’m going to need an accomplice. No one’s going to believe the criminal acted alone.”

  “No?”

  She shook her head. “Too hard. Too many loose ends to take care of. It isn’t easy kidnapping a child, you know. It’s certainly not a one-man job.”

  “An accomplice then.”

  “Someone who knows about children. Preferably someone who knows this particular child. A trusted adult, all the better to keep the little darling quiet as a mouse. Unless of course they use some sort of sleeping draught?”

  He shot her a look over his shoulder. “I didn’t realise quite how devious you were.”

  Alice took the compliment with a light shrug of the shoulders and sucked thoughtfully on a strand of hair. She watched as a blotted band of clouds drifted across the blue sky.

  Ben had paused in his planting to roll a cigarette. “Bit of a long shot though, isn’t it?”

  Alice looked up at him, shifting her head so his shoulder blocked the sun. “Why is that?”

  “Well, it’s one thing for our criminal to plot a kidnapping. He’s a criminal, he wants money. But what are the chances of him finding a second person, someone he trusts enough to reveal his dastardly plans to, who’s also willing to get involved?”

  “Simple. He has a criminal friend, someone he met in gaol.”

  Ben sealed the tobacco paper. “It’s too weak.”

  “A friend with whom he agrees to split the money?”

  “It would have to be an awful lot of money. There’s a lot of risk.”

  Alice pressed the end of her pen against her lips, tapping lightly as she pondered. She wondered aloud, “Why would a person agree to such a thing? Why would someone help commit a serious crime? There has to be something in it for the woman as well.”

  “Woman?”

  Alice smiled slyly. “People tend not to suspect women of crimes—not when they’re to do with children, anyway. A woman will make the perfect accomplice.”

  “Well then—” he knelt by the edge of the blanket—“they’re in love. People do all sorts of things they shouldn’t for love.”

  Alice’s heart thumped against the hard earth as if it might burst free from her ribcage. His words were full of hidden meaning. Suggestions, a promise. Lately he’d been saying a lot more things like that, steering the conversation on to subjects like love and life and sacrifice. She tried to keep the quiver out of her voice. “Love. Yes.” Her mind was filled with the things she’d willingly do for love. She could feel the skin on her neck beginning to flush; she was sure Ben would notice, that he must be able to feel the tremors beneath him from her hammering heart. She forced herself to think of her story, to concentrate only on its plot. “At least, he thinks that they’re in love.”

  “They’re not?”

  “Sadly for him, no. She has her own reason for getting involved.”

  “She’s a white-slaver?”

  “She wants revenge.”

  “Revenge?”

  “Against the boy’s family.”

  “Why?”

  Alice hadn’t thought that far ahead. She waved her hand impatiently. “What’s important is that she plans to doublecross her lover. She agrees to help him, they come up with a scheme, steal the child from his nursery, and
then they take him to another place. They write the ransom note but they never send it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . because . . .” The swell of a plot breakthrough warmed her from within. She sat up quickly. “Because you’re right. The woman doesn’t want half the money. She wants the child.”

  “She does?”

  “She doesn’t want to send him back; she wants to keep him. She’s come to love him.”

  “That was quick.”

  “He’s a lovely child, or else she already loved him, she’s related to him in some way. It doesn’t matter why, only that she does. Perhaps it’s been her plan all along, to keep him for herself.”

  “Our criminal isn’t going to like that.”

  “No, he certainly isn’t. He needs that money, it was his plan in the first place, and he’s gone to a lot of trouble and expense already to carry out the kidnapping.”

  “So?”

  “So, they argue. The woman tries to take the child, the man threatens her, they struggle.” A smile of realisation spread across her face and she sighed with delighted satisfaction. “The child dies!”

  “In the struggle?”

  “Why not?”

  “It just seems rather grim.”

  “Then in his sleep . . . it hardly matters why. Perhaps he’s already unwell and he’s sleeping very deeply. Or else—” she sat bolt upright—“they’ve drugged him. They meant to make the kidnapping go more smoothly, but they miscalculated. The sleeping pills are for adults and the dose is too strong. They foil their own plan. The ransom note is never sent, and neither one of them gets a single penny or the child. Oh, Ben . . .” She reached out impulsively to squeeze his hand. “It’s perfect.”

  * * *

  Crossing at the lights near South Kensington tube station, Alice spotted the green-painted flower stall on the nearby traffic island. In the tub at the front of the display were bunches of roses and one arrangement in particular caught her eye, an assortment of colours that brought to mind her mother’s description of the costume in Le Spectre de la Rose. On a whim, she decided to take a bunch for Deborah, who would be waiting now, glancing at the clock in her morning room, the elegant black mantel clock that had been a wedding gift, and wondering when Alice would arrive. She wouldn’t be idly waiting, mind, that was not Deborah’s way. She would be using the time wisely, dealing with correspondence or polishing silver heirlooms, taking care of one of the many tasks with which genteel ladies of a certain age and class filled their time.

  A small dark-haired man in a florist’s apron appeared and Alice gestured at the roses. “Are they fragrant?”

  “Very.”

  “Natural?” She leaned and sniffed.

  “As the rain that falls.”

  Alice was dubious. She couldn’t abide the spritzing of flowers with scented oils, but made the purchase anyway. The day of reckoning was upon her and she felt strangely reckless. She waited as the florist wrapped the stems in butcher’s paper and tied the bundle with brown string, and then continued towards Chelsea, eyeing the blooms as she walked. Deborah would be pleased with them and Alice was glad. Her satisfaction was only slightly soured by the creeping concern that Deborah might suppose the gift an attempt to soften her up.

  It was a strange thing to be on the way to confess a terrible secret to someone who knew her almost as well as she knew herself. Alice had never told anybody else. In the immediate aftermath of Theo’s kidnapping she’d come very close to disclosing to the police everything she knew. “It was Ben,” she practised over and over in her mind, going so far as to tiptoe down the stairs and lurk by the library door. “Ben Munro took Theo. I told him about the tunnel, it was my idea, but I never meant for this to happen.” She imagined their uncertain glances and heard herself saying, “I saw him that night, on the edge of the woods. I left the party and went for a walk. It was dark, but the fireworks had started and I saw him near the tunnel trapdoor. I know it was him.”

  Each time, though, she stopped herself, her instinct for self-preservation too strong. She’d been weak and frightened and so she’d fallen back on faith. There would be a ransom note, she reasoned; her parents had money, they would pay the sum it asked and Theo would be returned. Ben would have the amount he needed to help his friends and no one would ever know the part Alice had played.

  The days dragged by and she kept one eye on the investigation and the other on the post. She heard one of the housemaids tell police about a missing bottle of sleeping pills but she thought as little of it then as they did. It wasn’t until day three, when news came of Mr Llewellyn’s suicide and her mother’s grief threatened to overwhelm her, that Alice realised things were much worse than she’d thought. She overheard Dr Gibbons warning Mother that the sleeping pills he’d prescribed were very strong—“Too many and you won’t wake up”—and her mind had gone back to that afternoon with Ben, the way she’d laboured the importance of having help on the inside, made the case for sleeping tablets to help drug the child, raised the spectre of what would happen if the boy was given too many.

  All of a sudden she realised what the lack of ransom note meant. But by then it was too late to raise the alarm. Where once her confession might have led police to Theo, now there was no point. And she would have had to explain why she’d waited three days to say anything. They would know she was responsible, not just for Theo’s disappearance but for his death. They would never forgive her. How could they? And so she’d said nothing. She’d kept her secret for seventy years and told no one. Until now.

  If she had to tell anyone, Alice was glad that it was Deborah. They were close, the pair of them, a closeness that did not express itself in a need to spend copious amounts of time in one another’s company, but was something else entirely, something intrinsic. They had formed from the same soup. They were both still here. And as Deborah never tired of reminding her, she had been there the day Alice was born. “You weren’t at all what I’d expected. Red and indignant—and naked! What a surprise that was. I watched you squirming your raw little neck and screwing up your face the way babies do. Mother didn’t know I’d crept inside the room and was quite astonished when I walked up to the bed, held out my arms, and demanded that she give me my baby. It took us a few tense moments to sort out our differences. She’d told me so many times during the pregnancy that a new baby was coming, that I was to be the big sister and it was my job to take care of you for as long as we both should live. I’m afraid I took her quite at her word. I was rather shocked and terribly disappointed when she laughed and told me you weren’t, after all, mine to keep!”

  Good, kind, responsible Deborah. What was she going to say when she learned what Alice had done? Alice had spent much of the past week trying to guess. Her own guilt she’d come to terms with long ago. She had acted neither malignantly nor deliberately. She was culpable because the whole thing had been her idea, but there was no need to make a grand confession to the police; not now; it was too late for anything to be done, and her offence was not of the kind they prosecuted. Murder, she wrote? Besides, she had already been punished. She continued to be. Eleanor had been right. The world had its own way of keeping the scales in balance. Guilty characters might escape prosecution, but they never escaped justice.

  For all her attempts to differentiate herself from Eleanor, it was when she realised that her mother had been right about justice that Alice’s writing had taken a leap for the better. She’d left behind her slavish adherence to the rationalism of Golden Age detective stories and Diggory Brent had stepped into her life, taking the place of the priggish, self-satisfied cypher sleuths she’d been working with to that point. She told people—journalists, readers—he’d come to her in a dream, which was almost true. She’d found him at the bottom of a whisky bottle in the dying months of the war. She’d been thinking of Clemmie, the conversation they never got to have about what Clemmie had glimpsed through t
he boathouse window. It still made Alice grimace to think that her younger sister had been there that afternoon when she finally offered herself to Ben. She’d been so pleased with herself when she knocked lightly on his door, manuscript in hand. Agatha Christie was the only other mystery novelist she knew of who’d dared to kill a child, and Alice couldn’t wait for Ben to read her book and see how clever she was, the way she’d woven their plot into her story. Her sixteen-year-old voice came floating back to her now across the decades, the day she’d come up with the idea: “A tunnel, Ben, there’s a secret tunnel.”

  “Underground, you mean, beneath the earth?”

  “I know what you’re going to say, so you needn’t bother saying it. You’re going to say that it’s unrealistic, simplistic, pantomime-like. And it’s not!” She’d smiled then like the cat that had got the cream, and she’d told him all about their own hidden tunnel. The concealed entrance near the nursery on the second floor of the house, the latch with the old-fashioned combination that had to be jiggled just so to open, the final ladder hewn into the hard stone wall that led to the woods and the way to freedom. Everything he needed to know to sneak a child out of Loeanneth.

  * * *

  Alice had walked faster than she’d meant to. Shoppers with bags from boutiques along the King’s Road brushed past in both directions, and down the road she could glimpse the stairs that led up to Deborah’s house. The number 56 was painted in glossy black on the white column out front and a pair of pots with red geraniums stood either side of the bottom step. She steeled herself and headed towards them.