‘All bets are off?’ suggested Umber.
‘Yes.’ Hall smiled at him. But the smile did not reach his eyes. ‘If you want to put it like that.’
* * *
Nothing was said during their ride down in the lift. For no logical reason, Umber felt unable to speak freely until he was off the premises. Sharp evidently felt much the same. They were in fact halfway between Kingsley House and the van before either of them broke the silence.
‘He thinks he’s got us where he wants us,’ said Sharp.
‘And has he?’
‘This trip to Marlborough he’s oh-so-reasonably agreed to take is just for show. He’ll come back after a couple of days and tell us they’re all singing from the same hymn-sheet: Radd guilty; Radd dead; end of story.’
‘What can you do if that’s the plan, George? You can’t stop him going. Or dictate what he says to the Questreds when he gets there.’
‘No. I can’t.’
They reached the van and climbed in. Sharp started away promptly and did not speak again until they were turning into Berkeley Square.
‘I don’t have to sit around twiddling my thumbs while he plays his little game, Umber. And I don’t intend to.’
‘So what do you intend to do?’
‘I’m going to Jersey.’
‘You are?’
‘No better time to size up Jeremy Hall than when his father isn’t there to interfere.’
‘You promised his mother you’d leave him out of it.’
‘If I could. Well, I can’t. Not any longer.’
‘When do we go?’
‘We don’t. I do. I’m driving down to Portsmouth tonight. I’ve booked Molly and me on tomorrow morning’s ferry. We sail at nine.’
‘You’ve already booked the ferry?’
‘Yup.’
‘But … you couldn’t have known … what Oliver Hall was going to say.’
‘I could have cancelled if he’d proved more open-minded than I expected. Doubted he would, though. And I was right.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘Go see Sally’s therapist. Knuckle down to your research on Mrs Dallyroll. And cover my tracks if Hall or the Questreds get in touch before we’re ready for them.’
‘When’ll that be?’
‘No way to tell.’ Sharp braked to a halt at the traffic lights on Piccadilly and glanced round at Umber. ‘Let’s just hope it’s before they’re ready for us.’
THIRTEEN
IRRITATED THOUGH HE was at Sharp for booking his passage to Jersey without telling him, Umber could not deny that it made sense for one of them to go while Oliver Hall was out of the way. Umber was not free to leave London, so there was no choice: it had to be Sharp. His excuse for keeping Umber in the dark was that it had spared him from lying to Hall. Umber reckoned it was more likely Sharp feared he might give the game away. Since he had not been entirely open with Sharp about his dealings with Marilyn Hall, however, he was in no position to complain.
With Sharp aboard the ferry to Jersey, due to dock in the late afternoon, Umber spent Monday morning at the British Library. He ordered a further batch of books, which were certain to take several hours at least to be fetched, then worked his way through various entries in the Dictionary of National Biography in search of background information on what he now remembered referring to in his original researches as the Dayrolles Connection.
* * *
The known facts were tantalizingly meagre. Solomon Dayrolles was the nephew and heir of James Dayrolles, British Resident at The Hague for many years until his death in 1739. The date of Solomon Dayrolles’s birth was unrecorded, but could hardly have been later than 1710 and was very possibly earlier, given that his first diplomatic appointment was as secretary to Lord Waldegrave, Ambassador to Vienna, a post Waldegrave held from 1727 to 1730. Dayrolles’s uncle obtained the position for him through the influence of the young Lord Chesterfield, who was Solomon’s godfather, despite the fact that he was born in 1694 and could therefore have been no more than a youth at the time of Dayrolles’s birth.
Chesterfield was at this period winning his spurs as the great wit and cynic of Georgian political life. He had been a favourite of George II when the latter was still Prince of Wales, but offended the King after his accession by his attacks on the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Chesterfield drifted into the opposition camp and the circles of the new Prince of Wales, George’s hated son, Frederick.
Dayrolles meanwhile became a wealthy man on the death of his uncle and bought Henley Park, a country estate near Guildford, as his English residence. When the fall of Walpole restored Chesterfield’s political fortunes and he was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Dayrolles accompanied him to Dublin as his secretary.
In 1751, Dayrolles married the eighteen-year-old Christabella Peterson, daughter of an Irish colonel. The couple had four children – a son and three daughters – and the marriage in no way affected his relations with Chesterfield, who had by then retired from active politics.
Chesterfield’s old age was afflicted by tragedy – the sudden death of a beloved son – and illness. When he died, in March 1773, his godson-cum-friend was at his bedside. The Earl’s last words were reported to be: ‘Give Dayrolles a chair.’
Solomon Dayrolles died in March 1786, his widow Christabella in August 1791. Not until William Cramp produced his book Junius and his Works compared with the Character and Writings of the Earl of Chesterfield in 1851 did anyone suspect or suggest that Mrs Dayrolles might have written the letters of Junius at Chesterfield’s dictation. Cramp’s theory was generally ridiculed on account of the Earl’s age and infirmity, the similarities between Mrs Dayrolles’s handwriting and that of Junius dismissed as insignificant.
The handwriting. That was the nub of it. The similarities were too striking to be rejected without further study. Umber could remember thinking that when he had inspected some examples for himself, wildly improbable though Chesterfield’s authorship of the Junius letters nevertheless seemed. He had learned what more he could about Christabella Dayrolles, though it had not been much and it had taken him nowhere. But where had he learned it from? There was no clue in the DNB entry for her husband.
Or was there? Umber read the two columns devoted to the life of Solomon Dayrolles again. Then he recognized a long-forgotten name. Ventry. The Dayrolles’ eldest daughter, also called Christabella, had married, in 1784, the Hon. Townsend Ventry. There were some documents, categorized as the Ventry Papers, lodged in a county records office somewhere. Umber had gone to take a look at them.
But where had he gone? The dusty interior of one records office was much the same as another. He recalled an airless Midlands town on a hot afternoon. Derby. Nottingham. Leicester. Somewhere like that. But it was all he could recall.
Nor did he have time to dwell on the point, a glance at the Reading Room clock reminding him that he would be late for his appointment with Claire Wheatley if he did not stir himself. He made a hasty exit and headed for the street.
A taxi ride got him to his destination with several minutes to spare. Claire Wheatley’s practice was not in Harley Street, but it was close enough to the medical heartland to count. She shared a smart address in Wimpole Street with an acupuncturist and a reflexologist.
The first-floor waiting room was empty and the door to the room beyond ajar. Somebody on the other side of it was playing back telephone messages. Umber half-pushed, half-knocked, at the door and went in.
Claire Wheatley was sitting at a desk, with her feet propped on one end, munching a sandwich between sips from a small bottle of mineral water. Umber did not recognize her. She was thinner and shorter-haired than the woman he had persuaded himself he remembered and looked several years younger, big-eyed and pixie-faced. She was dressed all in black: zip-fronted top, pleated mini-skirt, tights and suede boots. Her legs were long and shapely and hard not to notice, given how prominently they were on display. Her spikily cropped hair was black as we
ll, though most of the colours of the rainbow glistened in her dangling earrings. They swayed kaleidoscopically as she put down the bottle, switched off the answerphone and swung her legs to the floor.
‘Sorry,’ she said, swallowing a mouthful of sandwich. ‘I’d planned to have finished this before you arrived.’
‘We did say one fifteen, didn’t we?’
‘Yeah. But my noon appointment … kind of overran.’ She packed the rest of the sandwich back in its wrapper and stood up. ‘Do you want to sit down?’ She gestured towards a pair of soft leather armchairs as she rounded the desk. ‘What about a cup of tea or coffee?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘You don’t look it.’
‘Sorry?’ He stopped and stared at her.
‘You don’t look fine.’ She smiled blithely. ‘I’m just telling it like it is.’
‘Do you take that line with your patients?’
‘They’re clients, not patients. And no, I don’t. But this is my lunch hour. So, you get the real me, not the therapist. Please. Sit down.’
He lowered himself into one of the armchairs. Oddly, Claire made no move to sit down herself. She stood behind the chair opposite him, leaning over its back and frowning at him. ‘Well,’ he said, with an effort at ingratiation, ‘it was good of you to agree to see me. Thanks.’
‘What have you been doing since Sally died, David?’
‘Teaching, mostly. In Prague for the last two or three years.’
‘Prague’s a beautiful city.’
‘So it is.’
‘I’d have looked you up when I was there, if I’d known.’
‘When was that?’
‘Summer before last.’ She grimaced. ‘Not good timing, actually.’
‘The floods.’
‘Exactly. Of course, I was just a visitor, so there was a kind of grim fascination about it. How did it affect you?’
‘I was in England at the time. My flat had the Vltava flowing through it and there wasn’t a thing I could do.’
‘Lose much?’
‘Not much. Just everything.’
Claire nodded thoughtfully, then walked slowly round the chair and sat down in it. She straightened her legs and leaned forward slightly, her hands clasped between her knees. She fixed him with her round-eyed gaze. ‘Alice seems to think you’re out of work. Is that right?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to spot the equivocation in that answer, David.’
‘How I make a living is irrelevant.’
‘Not really. You lost your wife five years ago. You lost most of your possessions – including most of your tangible reminders of Sally, I assume – eighteen months ago. Now you’ve lost your job. Sounds like there’s a gaping hole where most people your age have a family, a career and a fairly clear idea of the direction they’re headed in.’
‘A hole you think I’m trying to fill by chasing after Sally’s ghost?’
‘That’s not exactly how I’d put it.’
‘How would you put it, then?’
‘Are you sure you want to know?’
‘I can take it, Claire.’ Umber forced a smile. ‘Remember. It’s your lunch hour.’
‘OK.’ She smiled too, gently acknowledging the riposte. ‘I have the advantage of knowing you quite well already, you see, through Sally. And through Alice too. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily give me a balanced view, but even Alice admits you have some redeeming qualities. You’re not a monster in anyone’s eyes. You left Sally because you were worn out by her. Maybe you’d have gone back to her eventually. We’ll never know, will we? Because Sally’s dead. She committed suicide, David. You know it. I know it. Those left behind tend to blame themselves for not doing enough to prevent a suicide. We know that as well. Because we’ve both blamed ourselves for not saving Sally. But if she didn’t kill herself – if she was murdered – well, we wouldn’t be to blame, would we? We’d be off the hook.’
‘Did Alice tell you why I think Sally was murdered?’
‘Yes.’
‘It obviously didn’t impress you.’
She shrugged. ‘I saw Sally at weekly intervals during the last months of her life. You didn’t.’
‘You never suspected she might do away with herself, though, did you?’
‘I was aware we were … treading a thin line. I thought we were the right side of it. I was wrong.’
‘Why do you think she did it?’
‘Because she’d spent eighteen years believing in the possibility that Tamsin Hall wasn’t dead, but couldn’t go on believing it. Because she’d lost you for the sake of that fantasy and ruined her life in the process. Because, in the end, she’d run out of hope.’
‘Not a success story for your style of therapy, then?’
‘All right. I’m not going to hide behind some elaborate conspiracy theory so I can deny failing her. I should have done more. I should have intervened.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘It’s not always easy to spot the warning signs.’
‘Maybe there weren’t any.’
‘Perhaps there weren’t enough. The change in her behaviour was certainly sudden. It became irrational by anyone’s standards. You’ve spoken to Alice. You know what I mean.’
‘She might have walked out on her appointment with you because she’d suddenly realized you weren’t doing anything for her.’
‘OK.’ Claire smiled weakly. ‘I guess I deserved that.’ She leaned back in the chair. ‘I admit our last meeting went badly.’
‘The appointment before the one she broke, you mean?’
‘No. I saw Sally the day she died.’
That stopped Umber in his tracks. He stared at Claire in silence for a moment, then said, ‘Alice didn’t mention that.’
‘She doesn’t know. I guess I was too ashamed to tell her. Though I’d have told you, if you’d given me the chance … after the funeral.’
‘You’ve got the chance now.’
‘Yes. That’s really why I agreed to see you, to be honest. Even psychotherapists need to unburden themselves sometimes. And hearing how she was that day … may help you understand.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, I was worried about her. It’s as simple as that. Nothing I’d heard from Alice had reassured me. And I couldn’t get Sally to speak to me on the phone. So, I went to Hampstead to see her. As it turned out, I never got to Alice’s house. I spotted Sally sitting in a coffee shop near the Tube station. This was about … ten o’clock in the morning. I went in and tried to talk to her. It didn’t go well. Truth is, her attitude annoyed me. Stupid of me to let it happen. Very unprofessional. But there it is. I asked her about the broken appointment and she just dismissed the subject. “Something else cropped up.” That was her answer. Which made no sense, obviously. Then I spotted the magazine she’d been reading. It was from my waiting room. My PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE sticker was still on the cover. That riled me. Such a petty thing, too. Anyway, I asked if and when she was planning to return it. I must have sounded so pompous. She got up, threw the magazine at me and walked out. “You don’t need to worry about me any more,” she shouted. Those were the last words she ever spoke to me. I should have realized, of course, what they really meant.’
‘Which was?’
‘That I needed to worry about her like never before.’ Claire rubbed her hands together, then parted them in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I’m sorry I let her go like that, David. Sorry I didn’t … save her from herself.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘Because it wasn’t herself she needed saving from? That won’t wash. You know it won’t.’
‘Maybe something else really had cropped up. Maybe something else is why she was murdered.’
‘The truth about what happened at Avebury twenty-three years ago?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Don’t you think Oliver Hall would have uncovered that, given the lengths he went to?’
/> ‘Sally told you about the private detective he employed, did she?’
Claire frowned. ‘No. How could she?’
‘We’re taking about Alan Wisby, right? The guy Oliver Hall hired when he gave up on the police investigation. The guy who came out to Barcelona to question Sally and me.’
Claire was still frowning. ‘Wisby was his name, yeah. But he came to see me a few months after Sally’s death.’
‘He did?’
‘Yes. I had no idea he’d been working for Hall from way back. He never said so.’
‘But he did say he was working for Hall then?’
‘Yes. He explained that Oliver Hall wanted to find out why Sally had killed herself in case it had some bearing on his daughters’ deaths.’
Wisby had still been on the trail five years ago. That meant Oliver Hall had been on the trail. Why would he have been? He had claimed only yesterday to have accepted Radd’s guilt long since. Had Sally been in contact with him, despite his assurances to the contrary? ‘What did you tell Wisby?’ Umber asked, hastening to catch up with the lie he had caught Hall out in.
‘Nothing. I don’t discuss my clients with passing strangers. I’m only discussing Sally with you because you were married to her.’
‘So you gave Wisby the brush-off?’
‘I told him his employer had no reason to enquire into the matter.’
‘Wisby accepted that?’
‘He asked a few questions. When he realized he wasn’t going to get anywhere, he gave up and left.’
‘What sort of questions?’
‘He wanted to know what had been on Sally’s mind in the months before her death. He quoted a name at me. Asked if Sally had mentioned it. Well, she hadn’t and I said so. It seemed the easiest way to get rid of him.’
‘What was the name?’
‘Gosh, I can’t remember now. Somebody linked with the Avebury case, I suppose. I didn’t recognize it.’
‘Nevinson?’
‘He was the other witness, right? No. That wasn’t it.’
‘Collingwood?’
‘No.’
‘Sharp?’
‘The policeman? No.’
Umber hesitated, then threw out one more name, sure in his own mind of the answer Claire would give. ‘Griffin?’
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