The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  The note had been written on an elegant piece of card stock. Maggie had worked at WHSmith, and according to Nancy had acquired a taste for nice stationery. The writing had been neat as far as Sadie was concerned, but there’d been a jagged scribble at the top of the card that had given her pause. She was testing the pen, Donald had said with a shrug. I’ve done it hundreds of times myself. So had Sadie, and yet somehow it didn’t fit. Why, Sadie had wondered, would a person whose belongings and life gave the impression of a fastidious nature, test a pen on the piece of expensive card she intended to use for an important message?

  “She wasn’t in her right mind,” Donald had said when Sadie raised it. “She was about to walk out on her daughter, she was under pressure, I doubt she was thinking about how pretty the paper looked.” Sadie had bitten her tongue at the time. The letter had been a shock, scuppering her theories and making her seem a crazy fantasist. The last thing she needed was to keep harping on about a bit of ink on a piece of card. Nancy had agreed, though. “Maggie never would have done that,” she’d said. “Maggie liked things neat and tidy, ever since she was small she needed things to be just so.”

  Suddenly that scribble seemed rather important. What if it were proof that someone else had been there with Maggie? Someone who’d stood over her, perhaps even tested the pen before dictating the message she was to write?

  Sadie managed to articulate these thoughts for the others, kneeling as she dug in her pocket for her phone. Thankfully, not remotely legally, she’d snapped a picture of the note before it was officially tagged and filed. Now, she searched through the photo library until she found it, handing over the phone so they could each take their turn.

  She stood and began to pace. Could Steve have planned something so terrible, executed a plan so horrific? It was possible she was going mad, clutching at straws, but when she looked at the others, Sadie was reassured. An ex-cop, a crime writer and a PhD researcher. With their combined credentials, they were a crack investigation team, and they all seemed to think there was something in the new theory.

  Bertie smiled, his kind, familiar face filled with something rather like pride. “What are you going to do, Sadie, love?” he asked again. “What happens next?”

  Whether she was right or wrong, no matter what the consequences for her, if there was even the slightest chance that Steve had stood over Maggie as she wrote that note, if she’d anticipated that things were not going to end well and yet still summoned enough defiance to send a clue to investigators, then Sadie owed it to her to follow up. Or to make sure someone else did. “I think I have to call it in,” she said.

  Bertie nodded. “I think you do, too.”

  But not to Donald. There was a chance this new lead would go nowhere. She couldn’t risk getting him in trouble on her account again. She was going to have to go right to the top, even if it meant revealing herself as the leak. As Bertie and the others packed up the picnic, Sadie dialled the Met and asked to speak to Superintendent Ashford.

  * * *

  When the others went back to the village that afternoon, Sadie didn’t go with them. Clive left in the Jenny straight after lunch, having extracted a firm promise from Sadie that she’d let him know as soon as she heard anything back from the Met, and Bertie, who was taking the first shift on the hospital stall, needed to report for duty by three o’clock, when the festival officially opened. He’d tried to entice Sadie with promises of fresh scones and clotted cream, but the thought of being surrounded by good cheer while every nerve in her body was wound tighter than a tick was nauseating.

  Alice, however, gave Bertie one of her very rare smiles and said, “I haven’t had proper Cornish clotted cream in an age.” She frowned when Peter reminded her delicately about the mysterious task she’d been so intent on since they’d arrived, and then waved a hand declaring that it had waited this long, it would jolly well wait one more day. Besides, it would be better to check in at the hotel before the festival started and the village square became overcrowded. Alice had promised to sign books for their hotelier, a vital step in securing two rooms on festival weekend at such short notice.

  So it was that Sadie stood alone, watching as the two cars disappeared down the driveway and were swallowed, one after the other, by the woods. The moment they were gone, she took out her phone. It was becoming a habit. There’d been no missed calls—not a surprise given she’d turned the volume up as high as it would go—and she put it away with a sigh of deep disgruntlement.

  Sadie hadn’t been completely honest with the others when she’d told them the Met were grateful for the new lead. In truth, Ashford hadn’t been remotely pleased to hear from her, and when he heard what she’d had to say he’d been incandescent with rage. Her ear still burned from the blasting she’d received. She couldn’t swear that his spittle hadn’t travelled down the phone line to scald her. She’d felt her own ire rising in response, but had fought to keep it contained. She’d let him say his piece, and then, as calmly as she could, she’d apologised for her misstep and told him she had new information. He hadn’t wanted to hear it, and so, with the sinking stomach of someone gambling with the job she loved, Sadie reminded him she had Derek Maitland’s number and it wouldn’t look good if it turned out she was right, that a woman had been murdered, and the Met hadn’t wanted to know about it.

  He’d listened all right then, his breaths as hot as a dragon’s, and when she finished, he’d said gruffly, “I’ll put someone on it,” and hung up in her ear. There’d been nothing more to do after that, other than to wait, and hope he felt inclined to give her the courtesy of a phone call to let her know what they’d uncovered.

  And so, here she was. Sadie had to admit there were worse places to kill time. The house was different in the afternoon. With the changed angle of the sun, it was as if the whole place had breathed a sigh of settlement. The frenetic morning activity of the birds and the insects had ceased, the roof was stretching and cracking its warm joints with habitual ease, and the light that streamed through the windows was slow and satisfied.

  Sadie poked about in Anthony’s study for a while. His anatomy textbooks were still on the shelf above his desk, his name written neatly, hopefully, on the frontispiece, and in his bottom drawer she found his school prizes: first in Classics, Latin Hexameters and countless others. There was a photograph hidden in the dark back corner, a group of young men in scholars’ gowns and caps, one of whom she recognised as a very young Anthony. The fellow standing next to him, laughing, was featured again in a framed studio portrait on the top of Anthony’s desk, a soldier with wild black hair and an intelligent face. A sprig of rosemary had been placed beneath the glass, held in position by the firm setting of the frame, but Sadie could tell by its brittle brown colour it would crumble to dust and be blown away if released. There was a framed photograph of Eleanor on the desk, too, standing in front of a stone building. Sadie picked it up to have a closer look. The picture had been taken in Cambridge, she guessed, where they’d lived before Anthony surprised his wife with the rescue and return of Loeanneth.

  Anthony’s journals filled a whole shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase against the far wall, and Sadie selected a few at random. She quickly became engrossed, reading until the dying light made her eyes strain. The entries gave no indication whatsoever that Anthony was harbouring murderous intentions. On the contrary, they were filled with his earnest attempts to “fix’ himself; his self-reproach for having let down his wife, his brother, his nation; and page after page of memory games, just like Clive had said, as he tried to force his fractured mind back together again. The guilt he felt for having survived when others had not was all-consuming; his letters to Howard, his lost friend, were heartbreaking. Simple, elegant descriptions of what it was to live, as he put it, beyond one’s usefulness, to feel that one’s life was an undeserved prize, stolen at the expense of others.

  Expressions of the gratitude he felt towards Eleanor,
and his deep shame in himself, were hard to read, but worse were the whispered descriptions of his terror that he would accidentally harm the people he loved most in the world. You, dear friend, more than any other, know I’m capable of that. (Why? Sadie frowned. Did it mean anything, or was Anthony simply saying that his friend knew him well?)

  It was clear, too, that Anthony’s inability to qualify as a surgeon plagued him. It was the only thing in my mind, he wrote, after what happened in France. The only way I could make it right was to ensure my survival mattered, to get home to England, to work as a doctor, and help more people than I’d harmed. But he hadn’t, and Sadie felt desperately sorry for him. Her own brief taste of living without the work she loved had been punishing enough.

  She turned around in the stiff wooden swivel chair to take in the rest of the dim room. It was a lonely space, sad and stale. She tried to imagine what it must have been like for Anthony, confined to such a place with only his demons and disappointments for company, frightened always that they’d overcome him. He was right to be fearful, too, for in the end that was just what happened.

  Because of course Theo’s death must have been an accident. Even if Ben Munro was Theo’s father, and even if Anthony had learned of Eleanor’s infidelity and been filled with a jealous rage, to kill his wife’s child was about as heinous as a crime could be. People changed, life happened, but Sadie just wasn’t able to believe it of him. Anthony’s self-awareness, his anxiety that he might be capable of violence, the lengths to which he’d gone to prevent it, surely contradicted Clive’s theory that he’d committed such a devastating crime on purpose. Theo’s parentage was irrelevant. The timing, Theo’s death and Anthony’s discovery of his wife’s affair, were a coincidence. Sadie frowned. Coincidence. That pesky word again.

  She sighed and stretched. The long summery dusk had started to fall. Crickets had begun their evening chant in the hidden spaces of the sunburned garden and shadows within the house were lengthening. The day’s warmth had pooled and was sitting now, still and thick, waiting for the cool of night to sweep it away. Sadie closed the journal and put it back into its place on the shelf. Shutting the door to Anthony’s study quietly behind her, she crept downstairs to retrieve her torch. A quick shine of the light on her phone’s screen—still nothing—and then she headed back up to Eleanor’s writing bureau.

  She had no idea, really, what she was looking for; she only knew that she was missing something and Eleanor’s letters were the best place she could think of to look for it. She would start before Theo was born and read everything in the hope that along the way she’d find the vital piece of information, the lens through which all the rest would suddenly reveal itself as linked. Rather than read by correspondent, she went chronologically, starting with Eleanor’s triplicate, and then finding and reading the relevant reply.

  It was slow going, but Sadie had time to fill, nowhere else to be, and a deep desire for distraction. She forced the Bailey case and Ashford out of her mind and let Eleanor’s world come to life instead. It was clear that Eleanor’s love for Anthony was the defining relationship of her life, a great love shadowed by the relentless horror and confusion of his awful condition. In letter after letter to doctor after doctor, she made continued pleas for help, her tone always cordial, her determination to find a cure undimmed.

  But behind the polite entreaties, Eleanor was in agony, a fact made plain in her letters to Daffyd Llewellyn. For a long time he alone was entrusted with the topic of Anthony’s diminishment and distress. The girls didn’t know, and neither, it seemed—except in the case of a few notable, trusted exceptions—did the servants. Nor did Constance, with whom Eleanor, and Daffyd Llewellyn, too, apparently, shared a longstanding enmity.

  Eleanor had made Anthony a promise, she wrote on more than one occasion, that she would keep his secret, and there was no question of breaking her word. For everyone else she had created a fantasy in which she and her husband were without a care: she busy with the running of the house; he occupied by his studies of the natural world and production of a Great Work. She wrote chatty missives to their few acquaintances about life at Loeanneth, filled with funny, sometimes poignant, observations of her daughters, each more eccentric than the one who came before.

  Sadie admired Eleanor’s stubborn insistence, even as she shook her head at the maddening impossibility of the task she’d set herself. Daffyd Llewellyn, too, had urged her to be honest with those around her, particularly, in early 1933, when her concerns took a worrying turn. She was anxious as always for Anthony, but now she feared, too, for her baby son, whose birth, she said, had triggered something terrible in her husband’s mind.

  A deep trauma had resurfaced, memories of a horrifying experience he’d had during the war when his best friend Howard had been lost. It’s as if it has all snowballed. He resents his good fortune, and regrets deeply his inability to work as a doctor, and somehow it has all become confused with his memories of the war, with one “incident’ in particular. In his sleep I hear him crying, calling out that they must go, that they must keep the dog and the baby quiet.

  And then, some weeks later: As you know, Daffyd, I have been making my own quiet enquiries for some time. It had perplexed me when I could find no mention of Howard on the honour roll, so I dug a little deeper, and oh, Daffyd, it’s awful! He was shot at dawn, the poor man, by our own army! I found a fellow who’d served in the same regiment as Howard and Anthony and he told me: Howard had been trying to desert and Anthony stopped him. My poor love must have thought he could keep it quiet, but evidently another officer got involved and things turned out as they did. The man I spoke with told me Anthony took it very hard and, knowing Anthony as I do, I’m certain he will have blamed himself just as surely as if he’d been the one to pull the trigger.

  Knowing the reason behind Anthony’s night terrors didn’t explain why they should be increasing at that time, however, and didn’t help Eleanor with the difficult task of soothing and steering him back to reality. He adored baby Theo, she wrote, and the fear that he might inadvertently harm him was causing him to despair and even, in his darkest moments, to talk about “ending it all.” I cannot let him, Eleanor wrote. I cannot allow the hope and promise of that tremendous man to end in such a way. I must find how to fix things. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that only by talking about what happened to Howard will he finally have a chance to escape the terrors that stalk him. I plan to ask him about “the incident’ myself, I must, but not until everything is settled here. Not until everyone is safe.

  Throughout it all, the one light in Eleanor’s existence, her single place of respite, was her relationship with Ben. Evidently she’d told Daffyd Llewellyn about Ben, and in turn she’d confided in Ben about Anthony’s state of mind. There was something about Ben’s itinerant nature, Eleanor had written, his lack of roots, that made him the perfect person with whom to share her secret. Not that we discuss it often, you mustn’t think that. There is so much else to talk about. He has travelled so far and wide, his childhood is like a treasure trove of anecdotes about people and places and I am greedy for them all. A form of vicarious escape, if only for a while. But on occasion when I simply have to free myself of my burden, he is the only one, aside from you, dear Daffyd, in whom I can trust. Talking to him is like writing in the sand or shouting into the wind. His nature is so elemental that I know I can tell him anything and it will go no further.

  Sadie wondered how Ben had felt about Anthony’s condition—in particular, the possible threat he posed to Eleanor and to baby Theo. His baby, after all. The letter Sadie had found in the boathouse made it clear that Ben had known the boy was his child. She fingered the pile of letters to Eleanor from Ben. To this point Sadie had avoided reading them. Poring over someone else’s love letters had felt like crossing a line. Now, though, it seemed she had to take a peek.

  She took more than a peek. She read them all. And when she reached the las
t letter the room was pitch-black and the house and garden so quiet she could hear the distant rolling of the sea. Sadie closed her eyes. Her brain was both weary and wired, a strange marriage of contradictory states, and everything she’d seen and read and heard and thought that day tumbled together. Alice telling Bertie about the tunnel entrance near the boathouse; Clive and his boat—“the easiest way to get between here and there . . . you can go the whole way without glimpsing another soul’; Eleanor’s promise to Anthony and her concerns for Theo; Ben’s stories of his childhood.

  She thought, too, of Maggie Bailey and the things a person would do to save their child from harm; of Caitlyn, and the way Gemma had smiled down at her; of Rose Waters, and the keen love a person could feel for a child who wasn’t their own. She pitied Eleanor, who’d lost Theo, Ben and Daffyd Llewellyn within a week of each other. And she kept coming back to Alice’s description of her mother: She believed that a promise, once made, should be kept . . .

  It wasn’t so much the discovery of a single clue, as the coming together of many small details. That moment when the sun shifts by a degree and a spider’s web, previously concealed, begins to shine like fine-spun silver. Because suddenly Sadie could see how it all connected and she knew what had happened that night. Anthony hadn’t killed Theo. Not on purpose, not by accident, not at all.

  Thirty-two

  Cornwall, 23 June 1933

  Out in the middle of the lake, the bonfire burned. Orange flames leapt jagged against the night-starred sky, and birds cut black above. Constance loved Midsummer. It was one of the few traditions of her husband’s family with which she held. She’d always appreciated an excuse for a party, and the fires and lanterns, the music and dancing, the shedding of inhibitions, made it especially exciting. Constance had never cared a jot for all the superstitious talk the deShiels spouted about renewals and transitions, the warding off of evil spirits, but this year she wondered whether perhaps there might be something in it. Tonight Constance intended to undertake a momentous renewal of her own. After almost forty years, she had decided, at last, to let go of an ancient enmity.