Juliana stared at him.
“A letter?” she said. “You came back for a letter?”
Jamie smiled sadly, his eyes faraway. Whatever he was looking at, it was not there, on the cliff with them.
“It was a very private letter,” he said finally. “I couldn’t risk anyone seeing it. I knew that Mother snooped. She would look and she would find it. So I had to come back. I had to get it back.”
Juliana looked at him and realised the truth.
“It was from Simon, wasn’t it?” she asked.
Jamie turned to her, and she saw from his eyes that she was right. He opened his mouth, but she continued before he could speak.
“It was a love letter. You and he loved each other.”
She looked at him with some compassion. That their friendship had become love did not shock her; she was just surprised that it had taken her so long to see it. Was this what Simon had tried to tell her before he died? He had been unable to put the words together; perhaps he had been afraid of her reaction. She was crestfallen that she had not understood what he had wanted to explain. Maybe if she had, he would not now be dead. Then she saw the wildness in Jamie’s face and understood that even had she realised, even if she had made Simon understand that it made no difference to her, Jamie had gone too far by then for a different conclusion to have been reached. This had been coming ever since Andrew Fenton had found her in London.
Jamie touched his mouth with his hands, his eyes half-closed.
“It’s been like that ever since that day he came out to rescue me. Ridiculous, to understand love finally, when you are about to drown in a pit full of mud and dead men. He kissed me, for the first time, surrounded by death, soaked in it, both of us nearly dead ourselves, and it made everything all right. Afterwards, when we came home, we tried to stop. But we kept coming back to each other. How can that be bad?”
“It’s not bad. I understand how difficult that could be.” She took a half-step towards him, reassuring him. “But love is always good, Jamie. Love is what makes us whole. Without it, we drift away.”
Jamie looked at her. “Thinking of Adrien?” he asked, with sympathy rather than the anger she expected. “Simon and I—it was more than love. We needed each other, just to stay sane. I couldn’t get away. You were the only other person I thought might be able to help me get free. Oddly, I think Simon felt the same way about you. That you might be the person to free him. Well, we were both wrong, weren’t we? You didn’t want us.”
“That’s not true,” she said, irritated by his single-mindedness. “I’m just one person, Jamie. I can’t split myself up.”
He looked around, seeing through the dark the familiar wall of furze and bent trees, then out to where the surf was pushing fast now over the rocks below, starting to suck at the base of the cliff with a hungry grunt.
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” he said finally. “Not now. The night of the storm, I came back because I had to. I saw you, standing on the edge, so wrapped up in yourself that nothing was reaching you. And in your hand was my letter.”
In a flash Juliana remembered it. Putting her cold hands into her pockets, and finding the envelope. She had pulled it out in surprise. The rain had made the ink run, and she had been straining to read the name when she had sensed someone behind her.
“I didn’t read it. I had just found it. You must have put it in my pocket by mistake.” She stared at him.
“I panicked. I grabbed at it, and you stepped back,” said Jamie. “I could see by your face that you had been crying, and for a moment I reached out to comfort you.”
“But you didn’t. You pushed me. Why?”
Juliana felt sick. She watched Jamie step around, cutting off her way back to the path.
“I wasn’t thinking clearly. But I knew I needed money, for Simon, and in an instant, I knew how to get it.”
“You knew what was in my will?” she asked, her mind spinning.
“I saw it, the day you signed it. I needed stamps, and I knew you had some in the desk. I didn’t mean to pry, but I saw it then.”
“I would have given you whatever you wanted, Jamie! I wanted to help you both. All you had to do was ask!”
He smacked his hand on the back of the bench, again and again.
“I didn’t want to have to ask for anything, ever again.” He spat the words out, shaking. “It’s all I’ve done since my father died. Mother wouldn’t have given me anything, not for Simon. And I owed him. He took me from the mud. He saved me. There was mud in my mouth; God, the taste of it is still with me. Decay, blood, filth, all pouring into my mouth, like death had liquefied itself to take me over. But Simon came out and found me and carried me back. Don’t you understand? I owed him my life! I had to do what I could for him. Even if it meant killing you.”
He stopped for a moment and retched, moaning softly, a curious animal sound that came from deep within him. His eyes looked frightened and he reached out towards her as if for reassurance. She just stared at him. She had held this man in her arms, comforted him, felt the warmth of his skin through her clothes and wondered what it would be like to love him, and all the time he had been the one who had tried to kill her. He was a murderer, and he was planning to kill again. To kill her again.
“And then you came back. The dead woman who lived, that’s what Simon used to call you. And everything went wrong! I couldn’t make things right again!”
“It was all you,” she said, oddly calm now she could see it laid out. “You put the poison in the decanter, but you put it in the wrong one, because of Florence’s accident. And your mother drank it.”
Juliana remembered his reaction to Fancy’s death. There had been surprise there. Real surprise. But it had not been surprise over the death, rather over the fact that it had been Fancy that lay dead, not Juliana. Then she recalled what he had said earlier, about blood draining away, and knew definitely that Simon had not killed himself.
“And you killed him, didn’t you? You killed Simon!”
She was appalled at the realisation that the death of that gentle man had been an act of betrayal beyond simple murder. The man he had loved had allowed him to bleed to death up on the moor tops. Tears welled up in Jamie’s dark eyes and ran down his drawn face, unimpeded.
“Don’t talk about him like he was yours. He was mine!” he hissed. “And because of you I had to let him go. He got to know you, after you found the dog. You and he, in the quarry, risking your lives for Hobbs. After that he looked at you differently. I think he almost fell in love with you himself. When Daphne’s dog died, he thought it odd, that he should have died right there. Then Mother died and he started to ask questions, about Gwenna and about you. I think I must have been talking in my sleep again. He was going to tell. He said he had to.”
She closed her eyes and thought back. The old dog, quietly licking at the puddle from the fallen bottle. Poor Herodotus, whose love for all things ginger had finally ended his life. The death of the dog in itself would have been enough to anger Simon beyond reason.
“I didn’t intend to kill Simon this morning, but he turned on me,” continued Jamie, the disbelief and hurt clear in his voice. “He said that he was going to go to Joe Vercoe and tell him.”
Juliana thought of what Alistair had said. How he had found Simon. “I don’t see how you could have done that,” she said. “No one would sit still and let someone else cut their wrists open!”
Jamie hiccupped and wiped his nose, which had started to run. “You didn’t know he still had fits, did you? I don’t think anyone thought of it. It happened so occasionally now. He took a fit when we were arguing, and I knew I had to do it then. Before he told everyone the truth. He was going to send me to the rope, even if it meant going to prison himself.”
He shook himself here, gulping down the clean air, as if to cleanse himself.
“He wouldn’t have survived prison. He couldn’t stand being locked up, and can you imagine what they would have done to him when th
ey knew what he was? I did it for him, Julie, really.”
He looked at her beseechingly, but Juliana could only stare at him in disdain.
“You walked away and let your lover die like a pig! How could you?”
“I didn’t leave him!” he shouted, tears pouring from his reddened eyes. “I sat with him. I stayed with him.”
He reached out towards Juliana, but she stepped back and crossed her arms over her chest, tucking her shaking hands under her elbows. She lifted her chin and looked at him coldly, her fear leaving her as Jamie disintegrated before her.
“I held him,” he almost crooned, “I held him and told him it would be over soon. And it was. I had to help him. He would never have survived being inside. I gave him peace.”
Juliana heard Jamie’s words and realised that he had almost persuaded himself that he been altruistic. He was right, in a way. Simon would have had a monstrous time in jail. But she thought then of the other woman who had died, right at the beginning. There had been no good in that.
“And Gwenna, Jamie! What did she do to deserve that end?”
Juliana realised as she spoke exactly what Jamie had done to Gwenna, and she caught her breath. Jamie looked at her blankly.
“Simon met her one night. She and Simon had an argument, she was taunting him about something, she liked to do that. He knocked her down and she hit her head. He thought he’d killed her. I said I’d deal with it. And as I looked at her lying there, I realised that perhaps there was a way to ensure you were considered dead. Your body had not washed up, and I needed you to be found. Simon’s mind was disintegrating. I needed that money. I strangled her, and dressed her in your slip and made her look like you.”
Juliana felt sick. His voice was oddly toneless as he talked of Gwenna.
“Everyone was so desperate for it to be over that they fell over themselves to believe the body was you. It was easy.”
“Not Adrien,” she replied, straightening up again. She took a step towards Jamie, her head high and her grey eyes cold.
“Adrien didn’t believe it,” she said clearly.
She slapped his face, hard, as hard as ever she could. He looked at her in anger, then almost laughed. He touched his cheek and winced. She had put all her weight and anger behind it and the blow had bruised. The cut above his eye opened again, and a thin line of blood appeared.
“He didn’t want to,” Jamie admitted, rubbing blood away. “He fought it. But they convinced him. Told him he had to put it behind him. I saw his face, when they gave him back your rings. That was when he gave up.”
He straightened himself and adjusted his collar, then moved towards her, reaching to pull her close. Juliana could do nothing but look into his eyes, petrified by the fire she saw there.
“I can’t be alone,” he murmured, pressing his mouth against hers. She was too scared to move, just stood there in his arms, letting him kiss her. She could taste the fear in her mouth, metal mixing with Jamie’s sweet breath as his lips moved against hers. “I’m scared to go on my own. You have to come with me, Julie. We can all be together—you, me and Simon. I know he’s waiting for me. For us. He can be yours as well as mine.”
As his hands slid around to hold her, she realised the full extent of his madness, and that he intended both of them to die. For a dizzying moment she could imagine them falling through the air together, wrapped around each other, his lips pressing against her own as they smashed onto the rocks at the same time. She wondered fleetingly if it would make it any less horrendous to be with someone else at that final moment. Then there was another crack of a stick behind the thorn bush. Jamie looked round and Juliana watched in amazement as his face turned soft with pleasure. He dropped his grip on her coat and took a step away, towards the shadow.
“Simon?”
A look of desperate happiness washed over Jamie’s features, softening the tension in his brows and jaw, relaxing the wrinkles around his mouth. He looked absurdly young, leaving Juliana to understand how the terrors of the last week had affected him. Then he froze. His eyes widened, then darkened with fear. Juliana watched as the smile on his lips turned to a grimace, his lips pulling back from his teeth in a frightened snarl. He babbled under his breath, spittle bubbling at the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t, Simon. I’m sorry!”
The rest of his words were unclear with his mumbling; there was horror now, and Juliana turned again to where Jamie’s eyes were focussed. The man’s vision was so clear to him that she could almost see it herself, Simon’s corpse looming through the mist under the trees instead of the indistinct form of Alistair, who was moving cautiously towards the babbling man on the cliff. Jamie took a step backwards, holding his hands out in supplication to a vision that brought a rash of sweat to his pale brow.
Juliana felt her knees give away. Although she should have dropped to the ground, she instead just sagged forward. Someone had grabbed at her coat sleeves with both hands. Her eyes burned with unshed tears as she knew she was finally safe. At the same time, Alistair stepped out into the torchlight, Joe Vercoe at his shoulder. Jamie didn’t see them. He was buckling at the knees now, pleading for forgiveness. Juliana could almost see a cold arm reach out for him as Jamie sobbed and turned to run, realising only as he began to pitch forward where he was.
There were words in his cry, as he fell into the darkness, but Juliana didn’t hear them. Instead, she turned away to find her husband right behind her. She hid her face in his shirt and cried, listening to the thumping of his heart.
Chapter 32
The family were sitting together in the library. The fire was roaring, and the lamps lit. It felt a world away from the cliff edge.
“I’m still furious that you set this up without telling me exactly what was going on,” said Adrien, tipping back the whisky in his glass.
He had one arm around his wife and looked daggers across the low table at his friend. Alistair looked back apologetically. Sylvia and Margaret were sitting close together nearby, arms around each other and listening intently.
“She agreed immediately,” Alistair said. “I couldn’t risk Jamie suspecting a trap. He had to believe it was real. There really was little danger. We were with her from the minute she left the house. Joe was already there, with Dawlish too. You know that.”
“There was always danger. He was desperate. As for Jamie believing it, I believed it!” said Adrien firmly. “I was aghast at the two of you. All that screaming!”
“Your wife has a hitherto unsuspected flair for the dramatic,” said Alistair, practically. “I shall henceforth think of her as Sarah Bernhardt.”
Juliana pushed back against Adrien’s chest and looked him in the eye.
“I insisted on being part of it,” said Juliana. “When Alistair told me what he suspected, I knew if there was a chance that he was correct, then I had to do it. For Simon, if nothing else. And I was the best bait, you know that.”
He shook her gently.
“Bait, indeed!” he said, but the severity of his tone was tempered by the look in his eyes.
“To be honest,” replied Juliana, “I didn’t accept it was Jamie until he spoke to me. My shock was real.”
Sylvia leaned forward. She and Geoffrey had come up when they heard of the final tragedy, and despite their distress, they had proven to be rocks. Helena and her father were caring for Damaris, who sat in the morning room shaking as if she might never get warm again. Her heartbreak at the news of Jamie’s death had been overtaken by horror at what her brother had attempted to do, and she had fallen apart. Geoffrey had taken her aside, aided by the ever-capable Helena, to sit with her until she felt capable of talking.
For once Inspector Willett had erred on the side of sympathy and caution and agreed to leave the household alone until the next day. He had Joe Vercoe’s eyewitness account of what had happened, and had agreed that wrapping up loose ends could easily wait until the next day now. The police were still outside on the cliff en masse with lanterns, t
rying to reach Jamie’s body before the waves turned and it was swept out to sea.
“Why did you suspect Jamie?” asked Sylvia, stroking her daughter’s head with her work-worn fingers. “And when? He seemed to be one of the people who simply could not have been involved.”
Margaret held her mother’s hand in her own, her eyes round and greener than ever due to the puffy red skin around them. She was still crying on and off, but quietly now.
“I don’t understand why he tried originally to kill Juliana.” she asked, wiping her cheeks. “Why did he push her?”
Alistair paused.
“A compound of factors, I think,” he answered. “First, he was in a real state of anger over his argument with his mother, and panicking that she would find the letter from Simon. Whatever was in it, it was enough for Fancy to have realised that the two of them were more than simple friends. Also, he was short of money, and without it could not help Simon as he knew Simon needed to be helped. And then there was Juliana, right in front of him. Alone and vulnerable.”
“But he said he didn’t intend it to happen,” added Juliana. “He didn’t mean to push me, right up until the actual moment. He panicked when he saw that I had the letter in my hand.”
“I believe him,” replied Alistair. “I think he went to you for comfort, as he was increasingly used to doing, and for a moment the anger and panic overwhelmed him. Kill you, and he gets a thousand pounds. Murder has been done for far, far less. And with that money he could pay for Simon to be taken into the clinic that would help to cure him.”
Margaret had stopped crying now. Her blotchy face was creased with concentration. A log broke and dropped in the hearth, sending out an umbrella of sparks and heat. She got to her feet and added some more wood on top before returning to her mother.
“It wasn’t until very recently that I realised that he might actually have been responsible,” Alistair continued. “He seemed to be the only one who had not been in Sancreed that night. He was genuinely overwrought at his mother’s death. He was poisoned himself. And he was the last person anyone would have suspected of killing Simon. But I couldn’t get rid of the thought that he might be involved. He had been the first one to mention Gwenna’s letters, right at the start. I wondered if he had done so to make sure I knew about them, and to throw doubt on the origins of the corpse. They were a smart move. To everyone else, it looked as though Gwenna had simply run off, with no intention of coming home.”
The Dead Woman Who Lived Page 47