The Lake House

by Kate Morton

Alice stayed on the tube all afternoon, barely aware of the other passengers. She’d believed her own version of events for such a long time, but Deborah’s revelation had brought small, niggling queries to the surface. She’d always taken the lack of ransom note to mean that something had gone wrong during the kidnapping. But now, seen from outside the swelter of her guilt, it seemed a long bow to draw, a presumption with scant evidence to back it up. It seemed an idea out of fiction, and bad fiction at that.

  Her certainty that she’d glimpsed Ben in the woods that night—a sighting upon which she’d based her entire conviction—now seemed like the wishful thinking of an excitable young girl who’d wanted nothing more than to see him again. It had been dark, she’d been at some distance, there’d been three hundred strangers at Loeannth for the Midsummer party. It could have been anyone. It might have been no one. The woods could be sly like that, casting shadows, playing tricks on a person. Would that she’d never gone there. A number of things might have turned out differently had she waited for Mr Llewellyn as she’d promised. Not least, her old friend might have lived. (Now there was a thought she tried ordinarily to keep at bay. Her failure to meet him as arranged, the “important’ thing he’d wanted to discuss with her, the poor old man lying down by the stream to die. Would she have been able to save him if she’d gone looking, instead of heading into the woods?)

  The admission of doubts was like the lighting of a match. The whole idea now seemed an extraordinary folly: a gardener whose friend needs money kidnaps the child of his employer on the night of a huge party intending to extract a ransom. He uses a secret tunnel and a bottle of sleeping pills, executing the exact plan outlined to him by a sixteen-year-old girl with a bent for fiction . . . It was laughable. Ben wasn’t a kidnapper. Alice had allowed her guilt to blind her. Teenage convictions had set like concrete, and no amount of adult reasoning had been able to shift them. But then she hadn’t tried to shift them. She’d gone out of her way to avoid thinking about them at all.

  Deborah’s version of events, by comparison, though unpalatable, had a clarity to them that Alice’s did not. There was a logic and simplicity underlying the sequence of events, an inevitability even. Theo had never left Loeanneth. That’s why the police had found no trace of him out there in the world. He’d met his end at home, at the hands of someone he loved and trusted. Yet another casualty of the Great War and its enduring horrors.

  The knowledge was an old death made new and there on the tube, hiding behind her dark sunglasses, Alice had felt tears pricking her eyes. Tears for her baby brother, but also for her father, a good man guilty of the most heinous deed. Life in that moment had seemed very cruel and cold, and she’d suddenly felt very tired. Alice didn’t believe in God but she’d thanked him all the same that Clemmie had died none the wiser. That she’d died believing her fairy-tale fiction about the childless couple and Theo’s happy new life.

  Embarrassment and remorse, horror and grief, and yet still another emotion had been playing at the edges of her experience when she finally made her way home that day, a lighter one whose tail she’d struggled to grasp. It wasn’t until early evening, when she walked out of Hampstead station, that Alice realised it was relief. That all this time she’d blamed herself for telling Ben about the tunnel, but after seventy years, Deborah’s revelation—the possibility it allowed that a different version of events occurred that night—had freed her in some way.

  It wasn’t relief that had decided her to have Peter contact Sadie Sparrow, though: it was curiosity. Once upon a time, Alice would have laughed had somebody suggested she trust a stranger with the most intimate details of her family’s history. Pride and a craving for privacy would have prevented it. But now Alice was old. Time was running out. And since hearing Deborah’s story, lying awake at night as her mind went through every permutation, as one realisation led to another and the accepted facts of her life shifted like the gems in a kaleidoscope to form new pictures, Alice had to know the truth.

  Years of plotting novels had trained her mind to sift through information and make of it a narrative, and it hadn’t taken long to arrange the facts into linear form. But there were gaps, including the small matter of proof, and Alice wanted to fill them. She needed the full picture. She’d have carried out the necessary investigations herself, but there was a time and place to admit impediments, and at the age of eighty-six Alice had to concede certain physical limitations. At the risk of sounding too much like her mother, the arrival of a professional investigator, keen to get to the bottom of things right when Alice needed her, seemed somehow serendipitous. Besides, after the character research Alice had done since Tuesday, calling in favours from every contact she had within CID, Sadie Sparrow was no longer a stranger.

  Alice took out her dossier and perused the notes, her glance lingering on the information she’d gathered about DC Sparrow’s recent investigative work. By all accounts the woman was an excellent detective, described variously as passionate, dogged and downright pig-headed; it hadn’t been easy to find anything even remotely grubby in her records. Even Derek Maitland had been reluctant to speak against her integrity and that really was saying something, but Alice could be very convincing. She’d followed the Bailey case in the press; Alice was always interested in a disappearing-person story. She’d seen the case declared closed, police confident that the little girl’s mother had abandoned her, and she’d seen the subsequent article claiming a cover-up. She’d known someone in CID must have been talking, and now she knew whom. It always paid to have a safeguard, and although Alice flinched at the very idea (the sordidness of blackmail, for really there was no dressing it up), with Derek Maitland’s ace up her sleeve she felt sure she’d be able to trust Detective Sparrow to be discreet with the Edevane legacy.

  She closed her file and glanced at the clock. The minute hand was almost at the twelve, which meant in a matter of seconds Sadie Sparrow would be late and Alice would be able to derive a petty but no less enjoyable sense of advantage. She would have the upper hand and all would be right with the world. She realised she was holding her breath and shook her head, amused at her own brief lapse into superstition. What a goose. Behaving as if the success of the meeting, the entire favourable resolution of her family’s mystery, depended on her guest’s tardy arrival. Alice composed herself, picked up the newspaper crossword she’d been trying to finish since breakfast, and watched impassively as the second hand ticked neatly towards the twelve. The minute hand prepared itself to leap, and when a knock came at the door, despite her best intentions, Alice’s heart did the same.

  Twenty-four

  Sadie stood on the front steps, catching her breath. She’d run all the way from the bus stop, which wasn’t easy in the dress shoes she’d extricated from the back of her cupboard at the last minute. They were dusty and musty and, as it turned out, the heel of one was hanging on by a single strip of glue. She bent down and swiped away a patch of scuff she’d missed earlier. Her feet looked like someone else’s, someone she wasn’t sure she liked, but A.C. Edevane was a snappy dresser, and Sadie had no intention of offending the old woman’s sensibilities by presenting her usual sorry self on the doorstep. Neither had she had any intention of being late, no matter the trouble she’d had running in precarious heels. A.C. Edevane was pernickety about punctuality. She’d once refused to complete an interview with a tardy journalist, and had famously taken a BBC night show host to task on air when he’d kept her waiting. Sadie knew this because she’d spent the better part of the last two and a half days in an electric swotting haze, watching old interviews and reading everything she could on A.C. Edevane. (It had been a surprisingly enjoyable task—there was something strangely compelling about Alice Edevane—made all the more agreeable for having distracted Sadie from the arrival of Charlotte Sutherland’s second letter.) She also knew the author preferred shrubs to flowers and noted with a nod of satisfaction the pots of box on the windowsills of the house. So far so good. Sadi
e was pleased to feel a fresh wave of confidence wash over her as she straightened her sleeve cuffs. She was going to run this interview to script and she was not leaving without the information she needed.

  Sadie lifted her hand to knock again, but before she could make contact with the door it swung open. It wasn’t Alice Edevane standing on the other side, but a man of about thirty with long legs and a scrappy beard. He looked like an extra in a film about the Rolling Stones. Sadie felt a surprising and not entirely unwelcome frisson of attraction. “Peter?” she guessed.

  “DC Sparrow.” He smiled. “Come on in, Alice is expecting you.”

  The floorboards creaked as they walked and a clock somewhere was ticking time away. Peter led her to a sitting room off the hall, overly furnished, elegant, with a resoundingly masculine feel.

  A woman Sadie recognised immediately from her publicity photos as Alice Edevane was sitting in a chair by the empty fireplace. As is often the case when one meets a very famous person in real life, Sadie experienced an overwhelming sense of familiarity. Not a wafty feeling of déjà vu, but an honest-to-goodness impression of already knowing the other woman. The way her trouser-clad legs were crossed and folded to one side, her casual grip on the newspaper, even the jut of her chin were somehow known. Though of course she wasn’t known at all, not beyond the copious interviews Sadie had been bingeing on. A line came to her—There is nothing so tiresome as a person who mistakes recognition for friendship—and Sadie blushed, realising it was from the Diggory Brent she’d read the week before.

  “Alice,” said Peter, “DC Sparrow is here to see you.” He turned to Sadie and gestured kindly towards a green leather armchair with button studs. “I’ll leave you to it. I’m only in the kitchen if you need me.”

  The clock on the mantelpiece grew immediately louder in his absence and Sadie felt a burning urge to say something. She bit her tongue, remembering a disdainful comment Alice had made in an interview about the inability of people these days to weather silence. Sadie was determined not to let the other woman catch even the merest whiff of trepidation; to do so, she suspected, would be calamitous.

  Alice was watching her. Small, keen eyes that seemed unusually bright in an otherwise faded face. They were the sort of eyes, Sadie was suddenly sure, that could see inside a person’s soul. After a few seconds that felt much longer, the old woman spoke. Her voice was that of a theatre actress, her elocution from another time. “So,” she said. “At last we meet, DC Sparrow.”

  “Please, call me Sadie. I’m not working in an official capacity.”

  “No, I should say you’re not.”

  Sadie pulled up short. It wasn’t the words themselves—they were simple agreement—but the way Alice said them. Those eyes that knew things.

  “I’ve made enquiries about you, Detective Sparrow. I’m sure you’d agree it was the prudent thing to do. You wrote requesting permission to enter my family home, to rifle through our archives, no doubt, and you expressed a special desire to discuss my brother’s disappearance. I’m a very private person, as you may have gathered, despite my occupation; I wouldn’t agree to talk about my family with just anyone. I needed to know that I could trust you, and that meant doing a little bit of research of my own to gain a better picture of who you are.”

  Sadie fought to hide dread beneath a calm smile, wondering what the hell that picture looked like.

  Alice continued, “I know about the Bailey case. In particular, I know about your off-the-record chat with the journalist Derek Maitland.”

  Sadie felt the blood drain from her head to her fingertips, where it proceeded to pulse as though it hadn’t gone far enough. Alice knew she was the leak. The words were neon and for a moment their hot panicky glow prevented any other thoughts from forming. Slowly, though, reason returned. Alice knew she was the leak and still she had invited her here.

  “I’m intrigued, DC Sparrow, as to what made you so certain your missing woman, Maggie Bailey, met with foul play when, from what I can tell, there was no evidence to suggest such a scenario.”

  Sadie had not expected to be talking about the Bailey case today, but there was a reason the other woman had brought it up. Alice could have reported Sadie to her superiors and refused to have anything else to do with her. Instead, she’d invited her into her home. Sadie could only surmise that the other woman was trying to get beneath her skin. She knew this play. Interview gamesmanship was one of Sadie’s favourite sports. She experienced a surge of collegial respect for the old woman. “It’s not an easy thing to explain.”

  Disappointment brought a sag to Alice’s cheeks. The answer was weak and dull and Sadie knew she had to do better. She continued quickly, “To begin with, there was the way the flat looked, the small details that showed thought, if not money, had gone into the interior decoration: the piano that had been painted a bright sunny yellow, the wall devoted to pictures the little girl had drawn, her name printed proudly in the corner. I found it difficult to believe that a woman responsible for those showings of love would abandon her child. It didn’t sit right with me and when we started talking to the people who knew her they agreed.”

  “Which people?”

  “Her mother, for one.”

  Alice’s eyebrows arched. “But DC Sparrow, surely a mother is always going to support her child in a situation like this. Did you interview others who knew her? There was an ex-husband, wasn’t there? Did he give you the same impression?”

  “His character reference wasn’t so glowing.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “No, but surely an ex-husband is always going to be less than effusive in a situation like this.”

  Alice allowed a fleeting smile, faintly amused, to cross her lips. She leaned back further into her chair and regarded Sadie over her steepled fingers. “People can be unreliable, can’t they? Even the most conscientious witness, eager to please and with nothing to gain, is liable to make mistakes, littering their testimony with small mis-recollections, assumptions and opinions rather than facts.”

  Sadie’s mind went to Clive’s account of Alice as a reluctant interview subject in 1933. The way she’d lurked in the corridor outside the library, his sense that she was either hiding something or anxious to hear what the other interviewees said.

  “We are all victims of our human experience,” Alice continued, “apt to view the present through the lens of our own past.”

  Sadie had the distinct impression they were no longer speaking generally. Alice had fixed her again with that birdlike stare. “That’s true,” she said.

  “I’m curious, DC Sparrow; leaving aside witness statements for a moment, was there any actual evidence to support your feeling that something untoward had happened to the young mother?”

  “No,” Sadie conceded. “In fact, there was a letter, signed by Maggie, supporting the theory that she’d walked out.”

  “I remember from the newspaper reports. You found the letter a week after you found the child.”

  “Yes, by which time we’d gone a fair way down the path of investigating other possibilities. It had fallen somehow and become lodged down the side of the fridge.”

  “But even after it was found, you didn’t accept that Maggie Bailey had simply left.”

  “I had difficulty letting go of my theory.”

  “So much so that you went outside the Met and spoke to the press.”

  Sadie met Alice’s gaze. Denial was not an option; Alice wasn’t a fool. Besides, Sadie didn’t want to deny it. The old woman had the information necessary to ruin her career and the fact was unexpectedly liberating. In the time since she’d taken leave, there’d been very few people Sadie could talk to honestly about the Bailey case. Donald refused to hear a word, Sadie had needed to maintain some professional standing with Clive, and she hadn’t wanted to disappoint Bertie with the truth. But now, suddenly, she could speak freely. There was nothing
to lose: Alice already knew the worst. “I saw no other way to keep Maggie’s fate in the public eye. The Met had moved on—there’s not a lot of sympathy for officers intent on spending taxpayer’s money on cases without a shred of real evidence—but I couldn’t stand to think something had happened to her and no one was prepared to keep looking.”

  “You’ll lose your job if they find out it was you.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you enjoy your job?”

  “Wholeheartedly.”

  “Yet you still did it.”

  “I had to.”

  “Are you a reckless person, DC Sparrow?”

  Sadie considered the question. “I hope not. I certainly didn’t approach Derek Maitland hastily. And I’d like to think I was being responsible to Maggie, rather than irresponsible to my job.” She exhaled decisively. “No, I’m not a reckless person. I’m conscientious. Maybe with a dash of headstrong.”

  As she was offering up her own psychological profile, Peter had arrived back in the room. Sadie glanced at him expectantly, wondering whether she’d somehow triggered a hidden removal button so that he was here to see her to the door. He didn’t say anything, but looked queryingly at Alice. She nodded once, efficiently, and said, “I think we’d like some tea, thank you, Peter.”

  He seemed inordinately pleased. “Oh, brilliant news. I’m so glad.” He flashed Sadie the warmest of smiles as he went, leaving her touched, though unsure what she’d done to deserve it. Yes, she was definitely attracted to him. Strange, because he wasn’t at all her type. He intrigued her, with his long, shaggy hair and old-fashioned manners. He couldn’t be much older than she was, and he was charming in a bookish sort of way. How had he ended up here, working as a modern-day Lurch?

  “He’s a doctor, literature not medicine,” said Alice Edevane, reading her mind. “And quite the best assistant I’ve ever had.”

  Sadie realised she’d been staring and glanced away, her gaze falling to her knee, where she flicked avidly at an invisible piece of lint.