“I haven’t got the full gist of what you’ve been saying,” Arthur said, getting up from the sofa to take the snifter away from me, “but explain the last bit first.”
I turned towards Richard, who had moved away from the armoire to stand beside the glass-and-chrome amoeba-shaped coffee table. “When I ignored your request that I stay away from the Old Rectory, perhaps you decided that you needed to make your point clearer. How do I know that you aren’t making up this business about my mother’s being murdered to scare me away because you’ve got some evil plot afoot that I could ruin just by being here? Could it be that you’re in league with Sir Clifford Heath, for instance? Maybe he’s promised you some vast sum of money if you agree to help him get the bridesmaids—I mean, Rosemary and the other two—to let him have the Old Rectory? Maybe, for all Amelia Chambers’s confident talk, there is some legal stumbling block to his forcing them out?”
“That does sound plausible,” Richard responded without visible rancor. “It doesn’t happen to be the case. I can’t tell you with certainty that Mina was deliberately pushed down those steps at Kings Cross, but I feel—with every bone in my seventy-odd-year-old body—that such was indeed the case.”
“There’s more to it than your masculine intuition.” Arthur went over and placed a hand on Richard’s shoulder. “But before you lay out the reasons one by one, why don’t we have Ellie explain exactly what happened last night from the time Jane brought her the cocoa?”
“I’ve told you. But all right.” I sat back down in the rust-colored art deco chair. “I’ll take it step by step. Not leaving anything out, including the book,
Secrets of the Crypt,
that Thora gave me to take up to bed. It was one of those gothic novels, with the usual beleaguered heroine trapped in a house of secrets and things that go bump in the night. That’s what helped me convince myself that I had dreamed up the woman coming into my room.”
“Are you sure it was a woman?” Arthur asked, handing me back the brandy snifter, which he had replenished.
“Of course I’m not a hundred percent sure.” I finally took a swallow and felt the fumes ignite my mouth like a Christmas pudding. “I just accused Richard, didn’t I? It was a muttering voice and it’s hard to tell sometimes, even when someone is talking out loud. Some women have deep voices. Thora does, and Hope, the woman with the black and orange hair.”
“We know who she is.” Richard sat down on the sofa next to Arthur, who told him not to interrupt.
“She has a rich, full-bodied voice. I remember thinking that when she spoke to me it was like hot chocolate.”
“Wonder if she drinks a lot of cocoa.” Arthur raised a bushy eyebrow and it was Richard’s turn to tell him to be quiet. I swallowed some more of the brandy and felt its molten heat settle in my chest. “Anyway, it can’t be all that difficult to disguise one’s voice sufficiently to make it unrecognizable to someone in a drugged state. But to get on with what happened ...”
Once I got going it seemed I couldn’t stop. I even told them about finding the wedding and bridesmaid dresses in the trunk in the attic. And when I mentioned the veil which I had at first thought was a mantilla and how it had been out of what had to have been its box because of the silk orange blossom circlet inside, Richard’s eyes turned unmistakably thoughtful.
“What are you thinking?” I asked him.
“That it could be that someone took the veil out of the box when searching for something else and, hearing somebody coming, didn’t have time to replace it for fear of being caught.”
“What could the person”—I didn’t say “woman,” although that’s what I was thinking—“have been looking for?”
“Sophia’s diary.”
Richard was making this up. He was trying to make a little joke to cap off my predilection for gothic romance. Undoubtedly, had I but read on I would have discovered Phoebe Phillpot had kept a diary into which she had poured out her woes while locked in her turret room and restricted to a diet of bread and water. Then my heart did a half-turn and I knew what he was going to say next.
“She started keeping it during those weeks when she hardly left her room. The ones between the time she left boarding school and finally agreed to marry William Fitzsimons. The whole situation was really quite”—he gave me a sad smile—“Victorian. None of her friends were allowed to see her, for the obvious reason that she might have used them as go-betweens in making contact with Hawthorn. That diary became her main source of company.”
“You don’t think Sophia found a way around her parents’ restrictions to communicate with him?” I asked. “From what I’ve heard she sounds the resourceful sort. And surely she would have wanted him to know she was only pretending to give in to the engagement, so that he wouldn’t respond by doing something wild and foolish when word leaked out.”
I leaned forward in my chair, gripping the bowl of the brandy snifter. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she had the whole thing planned out from day one, but she realized that patience was the name of the game. If she’d acceded too quickly to her parents’ demands that she accept William’s proposal, they would very likely have smelled a rat.”
“It’s what you would have done, isn’t it, Richard?” Arthur grinned. “If your mum and dad had thought I wasn’t good enough for you and had tried to force you into the arms of the curate?”
“You’ve got a remarkably short memory. Mother wasn’t always as devoted to you as she is now.” Richard looked at me with compelling eyes. “But I am sure, Ellie, you would appreciate my not straying too much further off the beaten path.”
“It’s not a particularly pleasant one.” I had managed for several minutes to block out my mother’s image as a faceless someone edged up behind her at Kings Cross and, under cover of an armload of shopping bags, gave her a vicious shove in the small of her back. I wasn’t sure why I knew, but I could see those shopping bags as whoever it was beat a cautiously speedy retreat. “Let’s get back to Sophia and how she managed to stay in touch with Hawthorn Lane, now reinvented as Sir Clifford Heath. Could it have been Edna Wilks’s mother, Gladys, who smuggled their notes in and out for them? Logically, wouldn’t she have been the one to take up Sophia’s meals, at least during the daytime? From what I’ve heard of her, I can’t picture Mrs. McNair trotting up and down stairs with loaded trays of bread and water. Let alone,” I added bitterly, “a cup of cocoa.”
“You look even more like Sophia with that assessing look on your face.” Richard stood next to my chair and laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. “I suppose it could have been Gladys. But I’d say more likely it was Edna who agreed to act as messenger. She was at the Old Rectory quite a lot at that time, helping her mother out on those days when Gladys was ... under the weather. Meaning under the table. And Edna was close enough to Sophia in age to probably be thrilled to bits at playing a pivotal role in an exciting romance being thwarted by parental insensitivity. Besides, she was in love herself, or thought she was, with the late Ted.”
“I think she really was,” I said.
“There’s no accounting for what one person sees in another.” Arthur leaned back on the sofa and propped his large boots on the coffee table.
“I saw their engagement photo,” I said, “at her cousin Gwen Fiddler’s house, and there was this radiance in Edna’s eyes, in her whole face, that took her from being pretty to beautiful. Yesterday it was clear from the way she talked that despite the difficult life she’d had with Ted she hadn’t taken off the rose-colored glasses. We’ll never know, will we, if it would have stayed that way for Sophia and Hawthorn Lane?”
“I believe it would,” Richard joined Arthur on the sofa. “It’s a cliché, but they were two halves of one person.”
“The diary?” I prompted. “Did she tell you she had been keeping one?”
“I knew nothing about it until Rosemary brought it to me the day after your mother’s accident.”
“How did Rosemary come to have the diary?”
“It turned up in an attic trunk,” said Richard. “I’m not sure whether it was Rosemary or one of the other two who found it. And I don’t think it was the trunk containing the bridal gown, bridesmaid dresses, and veil. Rosemary said it contained possessions of Sophia’s that William Fitzsimons must have brought back with him from the Belgian Congo when he returned with Mina. It was the sort of thing he would have relished, putting what little that was left of her in another coffin.”
“I wonder if it was in the trunk that’s now at the foot of the bed in the room where I’m sleeping? Nothing was in it when I looked but a pair of children’s ballet slippers.”
Lines that hadn’t shown before cut into Richard’s thin cheeks. “Rosemary told me that in addition to the diary there were Sophia’s wedding ring and the marriage certificate. Other than those things, nothing but clothes, a handbag, handkerchiefs. Oh, and a bottle of perfume ...”
“So he could ceremonially bury the very essence of her,” Arthur added in a surprisingly angry tone.
“Rosemary said she had opened the lid of the trunk when she first moved into the Old Rectory but had closed it immediately when she saw it contained Sophia’s things. She couldn’t bring herself to go through it then and put it out of her mind until years later when she, Thora, and Jane took some chairs that they were no longer using up to the attic. And the three of them decided it was time to go through the trunk.”
“And that was how long before my mother’s death?”
“A matter of weeks—perhaps days.”
“Did they read the diary?”
“Rosemary said they didn’t. They agreed it would be a violation of Sophia’s privacy.” Richard’s brow furrowed.
“But you think one of them may have done so?”
“It points that way, doesn’t it?” Arthur still sat, looking powerfully muscular and set of jaw.
“What he means,” said Richard, “is that Rosemary told me that she and the others determined the appropriate course of action was to give the diary to your mother. She said she telephoned Mina on the morning of the day it was found and arranged to meet her in the railway cafeteria at Kings Cross, because Mina did not want her to come to your flat. My guess is that she didn’t want to prolong a meeting that would add a painful dimension to old memories.”
“Yes, I’m sure that was it.” My fingers tightened around the brandy snifter, and I eyed the amber liquid as if it contained some vital but unfathomable message. “Did the meeting take place? If Mother fell going down those steps, she had to have been entering the station.”
Neither man looked at me as if I were stupid for stating the obvious. “According to Rosemary,” Richard said gently, “her train arrived early—five or ten minutes before the appointed meeting time, and she continued to sit over a cup of coffee for an hour after Mina should have shown up. When she finally left the cafeteria, questioning whether she had somehow muddled the arrangements, she heard people talking about a woman who had been injured falling down the steps.”
“There’s something wrong here.” I put down the brandy. “There aren’t any steps into the mainline station where the cafeteria would be. And we were told at the time that the fall took place at the underground. That means someone had to have been waiting for her as she came up from the exit.” The picture was forming in my mind in all its stark horror. “Someone must have known she would take the tube from St. John’s Wood rather than the bus—that had probably all been discussed on the phone. And if that person was someone Mother knew, they might even have exchanged an embrace.” I drew a quivering breath. “And that embrace could have turned into a powerful shove. One that couldn’t be expected to kill her but would have prevented her from getting to Rosemary and the diary.”
“Which would seem to put Rosemary in the clear,” Arthur interjected.
“If she was telling the truth and had the diary with her.” My voice was every bit as cold as I felt inside.
“If she didn’t, why did she come to me with the story?” Richard closed his eyes for a moment. “And then, of course, we come to the big question, don’t we? What did someone know or fear Sophia might have put down on paper that would place them in sufficient danger, it was worth taking the risk of being seen pushing Mina down those steps? Of course, she could have claimed it was an accident. But that might still have opened up a wasp nest of questions.”
“But can we be sure it was a woman?” Arthur got up and ambled around the sofa. “What about Ted? He was a nasty customer if ever there was one. I can’t come up with a motive off the top of my head, other than that he might have been blackmailing Sophia, threatening to inform her parents that she was plotting to run off and marry Hawthorn Lane. Edna, not recognizing him for the snake he was, could have told him in the strictest of confidence that she was taking messages back and forth.”
“But now Ted’s dead.” My words echoed inside my head. “Perhaps he was blackmailing someone else. That parrot of the bridesmaids—Polly’s got a vicious tongue and does a lot of nasty name-calling. But the phrase that sticks with me, because it is the most chilling, is: ‘I’m telling! I’m telling!’ Surely Polly must have heard it more than once to repeat it. I remember now! The wretched bird said it, in perfect mimicry of Ted’s cackling voice when Edna came into the conservatory with news of his accident. An accident which she said several times didn’t make sense, because it would have seemed more likely he’d have fallen with the blades of the pruning shears pointing away from him if he didn’t drop them in the process. I made the assumption, and I suppose Rosemary, Thora, and Jane did, too, that he had swung them back towards him as he fell. Why didn’t Edna think the same, if she thought about it at all? Was she dazed with grief: Was there something that she had heard or seen that had stirred a feeling of uncertainty? Not enough to make her sure, just enough to make her wonder?”
“I concluded he’d been murdered.” Richard poured himself a
brandy. “I was just glad it wasn’t you, but I suppose rubbing you out the moment you crossed the threshold of the Old Rectory might have seemed precipitate.”
“But you didn’t come into my room last night to try and scare me away? Or leave a trail of confetti on the first landing and stand hidden somewhere singing a nasty version of ‘Here Comes the Bride’ as a warning that I was liable to meet with a tragic end, equal to Sophia’s?”