Lydia had been watching the whole exchange – mainly, I think, because she had already been watching me – and as I advanced towards her, she smiled and held out her hand.
‘It’s good to see you, Rob,’ she said.
‘How are you, Lydia?’ I asked, noncommittally.
‘Well, as you can imagine, I’ve been better,’ she said. She looked around the room. ‘We need to talk, Rob.’
‘That’s funny,’ I told her. ‘I was just about to say exactly the same thing to you.’
‘In private,’ Lydia said, with emphasis.
‘Where do you suggest?’
‘I don’t suppose Philip would mind if we used his study, would he?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I agreed.
As I followed her down the hallway, I was working out the best way to deal with her. My instinct was to grab hold of her and shake her until she told me the truth – but as personally satisfying as that would have been, it wasn’t the way to find out what I wanted to know.
We entered the study. When it had been Uncle Tony’s workplace, a large, antique roll-top desk had dominated the room. To the left of it, there’d been bookcases, weighed down by heavy leather-bound volumes which my uncle had never opened. Facing that had been a plain wall which had been covered with nineteenth-century hunting prints, purchased in bulk, I’d always suspected, by an interior designer who specialized in country themes. Now, the old desk had been replaced by an expensive – but functional – chrome and glass desk, the bookcase held glossy company reports, and the hunting prints had been replaced by flow charts and a whiteboard. King Tony – who had reigned ever so briefly – was dead. Long live King Philip!
Lydia sat on the edge of the desk and crossed her legs. Though I didn’t want to look at those legs – the very act of looking seemed almost incestuous – I found my eyes drawn momentarily to them.
They were shapely legs, I thought – very feminine – and I wondered how I could ever have thought of her as boyish.
‘I wish I’d done more for John,’ my sister-in-law said.
‘More?’ I repeated.
‘Yes. I could have worked so much harder than I did at making him really count in the village. I should have pushed him to stand for the parish council. He’d have been bound to be elected. I should have been able to persuade him to join the hunt – with my backing, you know, he’d have stood a good chance of being master in a few years.’
‘Perhaps that’s true,’ I said, ‘but would he have cared about those things, one way or the other?’ I asked.
‘But of course he would. Everyone wants a better position in society,’ my sister-in-law said fiercely, ‘and anyone who says he doesn’t is nothing but a liar.’
There was an air of unreality about the way the conversation was going. We didn’t need the privacy of Philip’s study to discuss Lydia’s social aspirations – and we both knew it. Besides, I sensed that if my sister-in-law wasn’t exactly fearful of saying what she had led me into the study to say, she was at least extremely apprehensive about it.
‘What’s really on your mind, Lydia?’ I asked.
But she wasn’t ready to tell me yet and, reading her uncertainty, I thought it likely that before she took a leap into the dark, she wanted to prepare some soft ground for her landing.
‘They’re like a pack of hounds out there, baying for blood,’ my sister-in-law said.
‘Who are?’
‘People.’
‘That’s a rather broad generalization.’
‘Maybe it is – but it’s still true.’ Lydia paused. ‘If I tell you a secret, will you promise to keep it to yourself?’
Ah, the let me tell you a secret tactic!
I’d done enough negotiating over the years in Cormorant Publishing to recognize how the tactic was expected to work. The first thing it was designed to do was flatter me – I would, after all, have been entrusted with something that the rest of the world was being denied – and draw me into a camp in which Lydia and I were ‘us’ and everybody else was ‘them’. Then, once my defences were breached, she would attempt to slip something through the gap – in this case, I was betting that she would try to make me feel sorry for her, which could have the additional bonus that it just might stop me from probing for any darker secrets which she’d do almost anything to protect.
The tactic wasn’t going to work on me, but before any advance could be made in any direction, I had to give her the chance to employ it.
‘Please, Rob, it was hard enough for me to pluck up the nerve to ask that question, and your silence is nearly killing me,’ Lydia said.
‘If what you’re going to tell me has anything to do with my brother’s death, then I can’t keep quiet,’ I said. ‘If it hasn’t, then I promise you I won’t tell another living soul.’
‘It’s nothing to do with John at all,’ Lydia assured me. ‘Do you remember, when we first met in that sweet little country pub, that I told you my parents had died in a plane crash?’
‘Of course I remember.’
‘I wasn’t telling the whole truth. Mother did die in the crash, but Father wasn’t even on the plane. Not that that made much difference in the long run – he couldn’t handle Mother being gone, and within a year of her accident, he’d managed to drink himself to death.’
‘That’s why no one from your past was invited to the wedding,’ I said, with sudden realization. ‘You didn’t want any of them shooting their mouths off about your father.’
‘That’s right,’ Lydia agreed, looking down at the floor. ‘Most people are so mean and narrow minded that they’ll look for any way to bring you down. If they’d found out my father was an alcoholic, it would have given them just the weapon they needed.’
Her tactic appeared to be working after all – though not in the way she’d intended. I did feel sorry for her – sorry that she was so pathetic that she put such a high value on her social life.
She seemed to sense the change in my mood – and to decide to take advantage of it, while it lasted.
‘There’s something else I want to tell you,’ she said, ‘something even John didn’t know.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘I … I was having an affair with Paul Taylor.’
I was almost certain that John had known. Why else would he have waited until one o’clock, that night we had gone for a drink in Lower Peover, before returning home?
‘Did you ever intend to go with John to his Greek island?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t believe you. I can’t see you giving up your garden parties and your committees for that kind of life.’
‘You’re very harsh,’ she said.
‘Then convince me I’m wrong.’
‘You are wrong. Of course I would have missed my parties, but it was what John wanted, and after what I’d done to him – even though he didn’t know I’d done it – what John wanted was the most important thing in the world to me. And it wouldn’t have been too bad – there’s an English community of sorts out there, and I’d soon have got them organized.’
‘How did Paul Taylor feel about you leaving him? Or hadn’t you got around to telling him the news?’
‘I’d told him. That’s what my trip to the spa hotel near Bath was really all about.’
‘Do you want to spell that out for me?’ I asked.
‘If I’d broken off the affair here – in the village – there was a chance the whole thing would have blown up in our faces, and John would have been humiliated. What Paul and I needed was a few days together, so he could get used to the idea.’
‘Is that what he thought was going to happen?’
‘Of course not! He thought we were just slipping away for a dirty weekend, during which he might finally be able to persuade me to leave John.’
‘Did you tell him it was all over?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how did he take it?’
‘Very badly. He said he couldn’t imagi
ne a life without me. I tell you honestly, I was afraid he’d go and do something silly.’
‘Like kill your husband?’
‘Good God, no! But I was worried that he might kill himself.’
‘You are aware that there’s a nationwide police hunt for him, aren’t you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I heard it on the radio – but they’re only looking for him because they want him to help them with their inquiries.’
‘That’s code for saying he’s their number one suspect.’
Lydia looked as shocked as if I’d just slapped her in the face. ‘But they can’t possibly think that!’ she protested.
‘Were you with him on the night before the murder?’
Lydia shook her head ‘No. I was where I was supposed to be – at the health farm.’
‘So isn’t it possible that he decided that if he couldn’t have you, John couldn’t either? Isn’t there a chance that he drove to Bristol that night, snuck into our hotel and damaged the braking system of the BMW that he could easily have found out John would be driving?’
‘No!’ Lydia said, bunching her hands into tight little balls. ‘No, no, no! You don’t know him like I do, Rob. He’s a gentle person. He’d never be capable of such violence.’
‘That’s the beauty of a murder like this one,’ I pointed out. ‘The killer never gets to see the violence he’s caused with his own eyes.’
‘Paul’s a sensitive soul,’ Lydia said stubbornly. ‘He wouldn’t have had to see the crash to imagine what it was like – and he would never have been able to rob three people of their lives.’
‘So if he didn’t do it, why has he disappeared?’
Lydia shrugged. ‘Who knows how his mind was working? Maybe he couldn’t face the fuss, on top of everything else that had happened to him. Maybe he thought he was protecting me.’
‘Why would he think that?’
‘Oh, you know how people always add up two and two and make five – especially the police. Perhaps he thought that if it became public knowledge that we’d been lovers, Chief Inspector Flint would automatically suspect us.’
‘Well, when they find him – and they will find him, you know – the truth will come out,’ I said. ‘And it’ll look all the worse for having tried to hide it.’
‘You’re right,’ Lydia said with a sigh. ‘Isn’t it all such a bloody, bloody mess?’
She was saying just what I might have expected her to say in this situation, but somehow it didn’t quite ring true to me.
The simple fact was that she seemed more relaxed than she had a few minutes earlier – and I had no idea why that should be.
I was walking up the High Street when I saw the car coming towards me. It was a black Golf GTI which I’d seen many times before. I recognized the driver, too, because even from a distance the shock of red hair was unmistakable. My perverse nature stopped me from waving or showing any other outward sign of recognition, but the driver had seen me and slowed down to a halt.
‘I think we’d better go and have a drink somewhere,’ she said to me, through her open window.
We sat facing each other across one of the rough wooden tables outside the George and Dragon – more like adversaries than friends.
‘What are you doing here in the village?’ I demanded angrily.
‘I came to see you,’ Marie said.
‘Why now?’ I asked, my anger cranking up by the second. ‘You never bothered to visit me in hospital, so why now?’
Marie lit a cigarette. ‘I rang the hospital just after you were admitted,’ she said. ‘They told me your injuries weren’t serious.’
‘And you never thought to ask to be put through to me?’
‘I’ve … I’ve had troubles of my own,’ Marie stammered, uncharacteristically. ‘I couldn’t face talking to you just then.’
‘What kind of troubles?’ I asked harshly – unforgiving. ‘An income tax demand? The clutch going on your Golf? I imagine it must have been at least as serious as that for you to neglect me.’
Marie’s eyes were reddening. ‘There’s been a death in my family, too,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘My father.’
I felt rivers of shame course through my whole body.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know. Was it … was it a …?’
‘A quick death?’ she supplied. ‘Yes, he didn’t suffer for long.’
‘At least you’ve that to be thankful for,’ I said inanely.
‘I was never really very close to him,’ Marie said musingly. ‘But in a way that makes it even worse. Now he’s gone I keep feeling so … so guilty. Do you know what I mean?’
Oh God, did I ever! I felt guilty that I never seemed to be able to protect anyone I loved. That I had survived while my brother and father had died. That, in the middle of her own grieving process, Marie had had the courage to come and try to share mine – only to be treated as if she were nothing more than pond scum.
‘Forgive me,’ I pleaded.
‘It’s already forgotten,’ she told me, and I didn’t think I had ever loved her more than I did at that moment.
‘Where are you planning to spend the night?’ I asked.
‘I booked a room in a hotel in Knutsford,’ Marie said.
‘But that’s miles away! Why don’t you cancel it?’
Marie checked her watch.
‘It’s far too late now. I’ll have to pay, whether I use the room or not.’
‘So lose the money – or let me pay it,’ I said. ‘Whichever you prefer.’
‘And where would I sleep if it wasn’t at the hotel?’
‘At my father’s house.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Marie said seriously.
‘There are five bedrooms,’ I pointed out. ‘I’ll be using one. That leaves four spare.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not a good idea.’
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, trying to hide my annoyance as best I could. ‘Why isn’t it a good idea? Do you think I’ll burst into your room at three o’clock in the morning, and try to have my wicked way with you? Can’t you trust me? Even for one night?’
‘Oh, I can trust you,’ Marie said. ‘I’ve known you long enough to be sure of that.’
‘Well, then?’
A strange, crooked smile came to her face. ‘What I’m not sure of is just how much I trust myself,’ she said. She stood up. ‘And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the toilet.’
I watched her disappear inside the pub and noted that I was not the only man admiring the view.
Women were an enigma to me, I decided. I didn’t understand Marie – and I certainly didn’t understand Lydia!
I tried to puzzle out exactly what had gone on during my talk with my sister-in-law. What had she been worried about at the beginning of the conversation? And what had caused her to suddenly relax?
As I saw things now, it was almost as if she’d been more eager to learn what I didn’t know, rather than find out what I did? And in her need to do that, she’d been willing to both confess to her affair and place Paul and herself close to the murders.
So just what was the secret she was trying to hide? And what could possibly make it more important than the secrets which – after a show of reluctance – she’d had absolutely no qualms about revealing?
‘You look very deep in thought,’ said a voice, and looking up I saw that Marie had returned to the table. ‘What’s on your mind? Is it your brother?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ I replied. ‘As I matter of fact, I was thinking about my sister-in-law, Lydia.’
‘Ah yes,’ Marie said. ‘The lady of the manor.’
A sudden thought struck me. ‘I’ve told you quite a lot about her, haven’t I?’ I asked.
‘You’ve told me quite a lot about all your family.’
Yes, I had, hadn’t I? I’d fallen completely into the trap which Jill had warned me about so many years earlier, and if Marie had listened to what I was sayi
ng as keenly as she seemed to, she probably knew almost as much about the Conroys as I did.
Yet what did I really know about Lydia? I could talk about her snobbery and social climbing, but her life before she came to the village was a complete mystery to me. And how could I make up my mind about whether or not she’d had anything to do with my brother’s death, when I had no knowledge of what it was that had moulded her into the person she’d become?
‘I may have some more work for you,’ I told Marie.
‘Investigative work?’ Marie answered cautiously.
‘That’s right.’
‘And what would it involve?’
The caution was still there.
‘I want you to check into my sister-in-law’s background.’
Marie took a packet of cigarettes out of her handbag and lit one.
‘I can’t do it,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I have all the work I can handle at the moment.’
‘So why didn’t you say that in the first place, instead of sitting there and letting me waste my breath?’ I asked.
‘You’re right, that’s what I should have done,’ Marie agreed.
‘Or is it a case of you wanting to find out what specific job I was offering you before you knew whether you were going to turn it down?’ I probed.
Marie hesitated. ‘We’re talking as friends here, aren’t we, Rob?’ she said finally.
‘Of course.’
‘And as friends, I would expect you to hear what I’m about to tell you in confidence.’
‘Again, of course.’
‘And not to use the information in any way which might damage me or my business relationships?’
‘Why are you speaking all this legalese?’ I asked. ‘Everything you’ve asked goes without saying. You should know that by now.’
Marie took a long drag of her cigarette.
‘All right. The other reason I can’t work for you at this particular time is that it would mean I’d be investigating one of my own clients.’
‘Lydia!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’re working for Lydia!’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Since when?’
‘That’s not really relevant, is it?’
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