‘Yes. As Sarah pointed out herself, Lew Wiseman would have either rung her or Cotton – or possibly both – once he got the letter, and the whole delicate plan would have fallen apart. So what she intended was that the letter would reach Lew Wiseman when Mark Cotton was already dead. But somehow she slipped up, and sent the letter too soon. And once she’d realized that mistake, she didn’t dare wait until Tuesday night.’
‘We have to find some way to connect that letter to Sarah Audley,’ Beresford said.
‘Yes,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘We do. It’s the only chance we have. I want you to show it to all the other members of the cast, and also to the landlady. Maybe they’ll recognize it. Maybe they saw it in her hand.’
‘But there’s a pretty slim chance they did, isn’t there?’ Beresford asked pessimistically.
Neither Paniatowski nor Meadows bothered to answer him. There was no need to.
Crane was watching the staged conversation between Cotton and Sarah Audley that had been filmed after the Friday dress rehearsal.
‘And with just a little bit of luck, we may get the chance to work together again,’ Cotton says.
‘Oh, there’ll be no luck about it,’ Sarah replies.
‘No luck about it?’ Cotton repeats.
‘Well, we’ll be co-starring in the next series of DCI Prince, won’t we?’
She might be ice-cold most of the time, but she was being very human at that moment, Crane thought. In fact, she was really relishing it.
Cotton laughs uncertainly. ‘You’re joking, of course.’
A sudden look of concern came to Sarah’s face. ‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘I have rather put my foot in it, haven’t I? But you see, I thought they would have told you by now.’
For a second, Cotton had gazed at her with pure hatred, Crane thought, and anyone who had seen that tape would not have been surprised if someone had told them that Sarah Audley had been murdered, and that Mark Cotton had been the murderer.
Suddenly, none of it made any sense to Crane.
Sarah was plotting the ultimate revenge. She was going to rob Mark Cotton of his life – and for her plan to work perfectly it was necessary that Cotton should not suspect that anything was wrong. Why then – for the sake of a much more petty revenge – would she risk throwing a spanner in the works on Friday?
As he reached for the phone to ring Bill Sikes, bits of the tapes he had watched earlier were playing in rapid sequence through Crane’s mind.
‘Do you remember ever having seen this envelope before, Mrs Hodge?’ Beresford asked the landlady.
The old woman squinted at it. ‘Yes, I have,’ she said.
Beresford felt the briefest flicker of a flame of hope.
‘You’re sure,’ he asked.
‘I’m absolutely certain. As a matter of fact, Inspector, I was the one who posted it.’
The hope died as quickly as it had been born. There was no way on God’s green earth that Sarah Audley would have given this woman the letter with which she hoped to run rings round the police, so it must be quite another letter Mrs Hodge was talking about.
‘I think it was last Wednesday,’ Mrs Hodge said. ‘Yes, it was, because that’s when I give the rooms on that floor a thorough cleaning. Anyway, I was in Miss Audley’s room, and I happened to see the letter lying on the dressing table. And since I was already planning to go to the post office in the afternoon, I decided I might as well take it with me. I thought I was doing her a favour, you see – what with her being so busy with the play and everything – but that night, when I asked her for the money for the stamp, she gave me such a look that – well, I really don’t want to say what it was like.’
‘I want to make sure I’ve got this absolutely right,’ Beresford said. ‘You saw this letter on Sarah Audley’s dressing table and—’
‘No, not Sarah Audley’s,’ Mrs Hodge interrupted him. ‘Ruth Audley’s.’
TWENTY-THREE
‘Well, this is certainly a turn-up for the books,’ Ruth Audley said brightly. ‘Last night, if you remember, I was confessing my little cotton socks off, and you quite simply didn’t want to know anything about it.’
She was treating the whole thing as a game, Paniatowski thought, from the other side of the interview table. And that was understandable, because as long as she could keep things on a superficial level, she could avoid making the journey into the deep dark recesses of her own soul.
‘Isn’t that true?’ Ruth said, sounding a little irritated now. ‘You simply didn’t want to know.’
‘It’s time to stop play acting, Ruth,’ Paniatowski said quietly.
‘You didn’t want my confession then because you thought you could bring the real murderer – my sister Sarah – to justice,’ Ruth said, ignoring her, ‘but now that you’ve found out you can’t make the charges stick against her, you’ve decided that I’m a much easier target. Well, sorry, but one chance of a confession from me is all you get.’
Paniatowski sighed. ‘When you confessed last night, you never expected me to believe you,’ she said. ‘It was all part of playing the role of the loving sister. If you’d really been confessing, you’d have corrected me when I said the harness had been cut through with a knife, because you knew it had been cut with your mother’s scissors.’
‘How do you know Sarah didn’t kill Mark?’ Ruth demanded, as her emotional barometer swung towards anger. ‘Is it because she told you she was innocent? I bet that’s it! Sarah’s so perfect, isn’t she – and if she said she didn’t do it, then she simply can’t have.’
At some point in the tirade, Ruth had stopped speaking to her, Paniatowski realized, and was now addressing an invisible presence a few inches to her left.
‘We know Sarah didn’t do it because she didn’t send the letter to Lew Wiseman,’ Paniatowski said. ‘You wrote it – and Mrs Hodge posted it.’
‘Even if I did write it – which I don’t admit for a second – that doesn’t prove I killed Mark,’ Ruth said – and now it was Paniatowski, not the presence, that she was talking to. ‘It could just have been my idea of a joke – a joke in bad taste, I now accept, but a joke nonetheless.’
‘The letter’s only the starting point,’ Paniatowski told her. ‘It does no more than identify our killer for us. But once we know – because of the letter – who killed Mark Cotton, we also know where to start looking for the proof.’
‘What you really mean is that you know where to start doctoring the evidence.’
‘Maggie Maitland saw you switching the ropes in the fly loft. You didn’t know she was there, but she got a good look at you.’
‘From what I’ve heard, Maggie Maitland is a real lunatic,’ Ruth said.
‘Only when she’s not taking her medication,’ Paniatowski lied. ‘But she was taking it when she saw you, and she will be taking it when she stands in the witness box at your trial.’
‘It’ll be her word against mine,’ Ruth said, ‘and I’ll look so distressed – and so wronged – that the jury will believe me.’
‘We know you made the switch at half-past twelve on Monday,’ Paniatowski said. ‘The reason we can be so exact is because Lucy Cavendish was lying on the stage, playing dead, and saw you doing it. Every other member of the company – in other words, every other person who could have had the opportunity to engineer the murder – will have an alibi, and you won’t. So why don’t you just face the facts, Ruth – we’ve got you cold.’
Except they hadn’t, she thought. Maggie would be useless as a witness, and a good QC could easily plant doubts in the jury’s minds about when exactly the rope was switched.
‘I didn’t kill Mark Cotton,’ Ruth Audley said firmly.
The interview was slipping away from her, Paniatowski told herself, and unless she took a gamble – a real leap into the dark – she was lost.
‘I know why you won’t confess,’ she said. ‘It’s because of your mother.’
‘My mother?’ Ruth said, in a voice that was suddenly harsh an
d scarcely human – a voice which seemed to mingle fear with loathing and disgust. ‘My mother!’
‘Yes. She was the moral compass in your life, and even now she’s dead you daren’t admit you killed Cotton – because that would be the same as admitting that you’d let her down.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Ruth said. Her face had turned almost black, but now, as she made a determined effort to regulate her breathing, her normal colour began to return. ‘You simply don’t understand,’ she continued, in a much calmer tone, ‘but you will, when I’ve told you about my childhood.’
‘I’d rather talk about Mark Cotton’s murder,’ Paniatowski said.
‘I really don’t care what you’d rather do,’ Ruth countered. ‘The spotlight’s on me, now. It’s my story that’s being told, and for once – for once – I will have it told my way. So do you want to listen – or don’t you?’
‘I’m listening,’ Paniatowski said, reassuringly. ‘I want to hear what you have to say.’
‘When Sarah was born, my mother made a great fuss of her,’ Ruth began. ‘That didn’t bother me at first. I was old enough, you see, to know that mothers did make quite a fuss of new babies, and I loved Sarah, too. I assumed that I’d received the same love and attention when I was a baby, but as Sarah grew and reached an age that I could remember being myself, I began to see the differences. The four-year-old Sarah seemed to be getting much more affection than I had when I was four, and the eight-year-old Sarah had an infinitely happier life than the eight-year-old Ruth had had.’
‘It must have been hard,’ Paniatowski said sympathetically.
‘It was very hard. Sarah could do no wrong as far as Mother was concerned, and so, of course, she did whatever she liked. She thought that nothing could touch her – and she was right. She actually screwed a boy behind the bike sheds – in broad daylight – you know.’
‘Yes, I did know that.’
‘After I left to pursue my career, Mother hardly contacted me at all, but as soon as Sarah got herself into that mess, I was summoned home.’
‘It’s not right that people are spreading these filthy disgusting lies about your sister,’ Mrs Audley says. ‘I won’t have it. I’ll take them to court – all of them!’
‘Have you … have you spoken to any of these people?’ Ruth asks.
‘Of course not. I wouldn’t lower myself.’
‘I have spoken to some of them, Mother, because I thought we needed to get the story clear.’
‘Who have you spoken to?’
‘To the teacher who was on duty, and to some of the pupils. And it seems that while what Sarah did may have been exaggerated—’
‘You’ve always been so jealous of her, haven’t you? That’s why you’re so willing to accept their lies.’
‘No, Mother, it’s—’
‘Sarah did not do those things, and I could not possibly love anyone who believed that she did. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘I had to make Mother see Sarah as she really was, even if it was by arranging things so that she got the blame for something she hadn’t done,’ Ruth said. ‘And that’s why I killed Sarah’s headmistress’s cat.’
‘It was Sarah who did that – not you,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Her fingerprints were on the plant pot holder.’
‘It was me,’ Ruth said.
Sarah and Ruth are sitting in the Yew Tree Cafe when Ruth notices Sergeant Parry hiding behind one of the pillars.
For a moment, she wonders what he is doing there – and then it hits her.
She should have worn gloves when she went to the headmistress’s house, but she had been so distressed at the thought of what she was about to do that she had forgotten. And that meant she must have left fingerprints – just like the fingerprints she will have left on the coffee cup she is holding now.
The threat of being exposed – of failing in her mission – terrifies her, and out of that terror comes a brilliant idea. She waits until Sarah has stood up, thus blocking Parry’s view of the table, and then simply switches the coffee cups around.
Ruth shuddered. ‘It was a terrible experience, killing that poor, helpless little cat. I really didn’t want to do it. But I had to do something.’
‘And the reason you had to do it was because you hated your sister so much?’
‘No, I didn’t hate her at all – not then. All I wanted was for Mother to love her a little less, so there might be some love left over for me.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Paniatowski said – and she meant it.
‘It didn’t work, of course,’ Ruth said, as a solitary tear trickled its way down her left cheek.
‘Sarah is being made a scapegoat for everything vile or disgusting that happens in this town,’ Mrs Audley said. ‘She will have to go away. It will break my heart, but there is no choice in the matter. You will take her back to Whitebridge with you.’
‘But Mother, I have my own life to lead, and—’
‘You will take her back to Whitebridge with you, and that is the end of the matter.’
‘I didn’t want to bring her here,’ Ruth told Paniatowski as she wiped away more tears with her sleeve. ‘I can’t say I was happy in Whitebridge – I don’t think I’ve ever really been happy anywhere – it was just a little less painful than other periods of my life. But it was what Mother wanted and I didn’t dare say no, in case I lost the little of her that I had.’
‘Were you still having your affair with Mark Cotton at the time?’
‘Yes, but I gave him up to save myself the humiliation.’
‘What humiliation?’
‘I knew Sarah would have him. Sarah always got everything that she wanted – everything that should have been mine – and I thought that at least this way it would look as if I didn’t care.’
‘After he broke up with her, you persuaded her to stay on. Was that so you could see her suffer?’
‘No, it was because if I hadn’t, she’d have gone back home, and Mother would have blamed me for things going wrong. But once the Whitebridge Players were disbanded, I couldn’t be blamed any more, and we went our separate ways. Then, eventually, Mother fell ill.’ Ruth paused. ‘I told you I wanted to look after her, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘I wasn’t lying. I really did want to look after her. I thought … I thought she might finally see for herself just how much I loved her.’
‘And did she?’
Ruth laughed. ‘Let me tell you about the day she died.’
There have been false alarms before, but Ruth can tell that this time it is the real thing, and that her mother is dying.
‘Is that you, Sarah?’ the old woman croaks.
And because she knows it is what her mother wants to hear, Ruth says, ‘Yes, Mother.’
‘I’m so happy you’re here,’ the old woman says. ‘I love you so much, you know.’
‘I know,’ Ruth says.
‘I’ve tried to love your sister, too, but it hasn’t been easy. She was the reason I had to get married, you know. I’d had a lovely life up to then, and I didn’t even like Arthur very much, but when I got pregnant, I married him. It was what you did in those days. But I resented Ruth for it – I really did.’
‘It wasn’t her fault,’ Ruth says.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ her mother agrees. ‘But we can’t help how we feel, can we? And then you came along, and it was the happiest day of my life. You were a child born out of love.’
‘So you’d learned to love Father by then, had you?’ Ruth asks.
And she is thinking, Why couldn’t you have learned to love him before I was born. Why did you have to wait until you were making Sarah?
‘I always loved your father,’ the old woman says.
‘I don’t understand. You said you didn’t …’
‘Oh, I knew he was a rascal and that he’d probably let me down in the end. And he did. When I told him I was pregnant, he ran away, and when Ruth�
��s father came home on leave from the army, I had to force myself to sleep with him again, so he’d believe the baby was his. But I don’t regret it, because I’ve got my memories of your father – and I’ve got you.’
‘You’re wondering if I killed her, aren’t you?’ Ruth asked.
‘Did you?’
‘No. I might have done, if she’d lived a bit longer, but she died almost as soon as she’d finishing telling me what a hollow mockery my whole life had been. Then Sarah came down for the funeral. And do you know what she said to me?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘She said, “It’s almost as if Mother chose to die now, so you’d be able to make it to Whitebridge after all. That would have been so like her – she never wanted to be any trouble to anyone.” She had no idea of what I’d been through, you see. She had no idea what an easy life she’d had. That was when I snapped. That was when I knew what I had to do.’
It was now or never, Paniatowski decided. She took a deep breath.
‘That was when you decided to kill Mark Cotton,’ she said.
Ruth shook her head. ‘No, not then. That came later – and it was never any more than a means to an end.’
‘But you do admit to killing him?’
‘Yes,’ Ruth said – and seemed almost surprised to hear herself confess.
‘You had no trouble making the noose, did you?’
‘None at all. I was a Girl Guide. I joined because I thought it would make Mother proud of me. How pathetic is that?’
‘It’s not pathetic at all,’ Paniatowski said softly.
‘The day I was made a Queen’s Guide – and there were only a few hundred of those in the whole country – she didn’t even come to the ceremony. She said she wasn’t feeling well enough.’
‘How did you manage to get Mark Cotton’s signature?’ Paniatowski prodded.
Ruth smiled. ‘That was very clever. I dressed up as an old woman and got him to sign my petition to stop the council poisoning pigeons. Imagine that. We’d been working together only an hour earlier, but even close up, he didn’t recognize me. Now that’s acting.’
‘It’s very impressive,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘And once you’d cut down the paper to the right size, you wrote the letter. Why did you do it sooner than you actually needed to?’
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