16 - The Three Kings of Cologne (30 page)

‘But there’s only your word for that,’ I pointed out. ‘Supposing you’d found out about “Melchior” or “Caspar”—’

‘Who? What in God’s name are you babbling about?’ He was looking at me as though I had lost my mind. Not, I suppose, without good reason.

‘Robert Moresby and Ralph Mynott,’ I amended hurriedly. ‘Just two nicknames I used for them before I discovered who they really were.’ He was still eyeing me somewhat askance. ‘You must see that it was difficult not knowing what they were called.’

I realized that he had forced me on to the defensive and that, if I didn’t take care, I should lose the advantage over him. Once again, I returned to the attack.

‘As I was saying, if you had suddenly found out about the existence of one, or both, of these men, you might well have killed Isabella in a rage. Particularly as you admit that you loved her and had assumed you were the only one.’

‘Well, I didn’t,’ he answered truculently. ‘Sweet Jesu!’ His anger exploded. ‘I wouldn’t have laid a finger on her, you purblind fool! The other man, perhaps. But not Isabella. She was my sun, moon, stars! She meant everything to me. I worshipped the ground she walked on.’

‘So what happened when she suddenly disappeared? What did you think? What did you do?’

Richard subsided on to his stool again, running a hand across his forehead.

‘I didn’t know what to think,’ he said, more quietly. ‘At first, I thought that terrible old father of hers had found out about our meetings and imprisoned her in the house. I went there, only to discover from the servants that she really had vanished. Run away. It didn’t come as too much of a shock. I’d been urging her to leave home for months. A year, maybe. Almost as long as I’d known her, anyway. The only surprise was why she hadn’t run to me. But then I told myself she wouldn’t have wanted to have put me at risk from her father’s anger. I had only just been enrolled in the Sheriff’s Office and had my way to make in the world. Isabella understood that, and was protecting me. A father’s rights over his children are the greatest there are. I could have found myself in serious trouble if I had been sheltering Isabella. I convinced myself that it was merely a matter of time before she got a message to me somehow or another. Then it would have been up to me whether I left Bristol and went to her or not.’

‘But you must have heard what her parents were claiming about her,’ I objected. ‘That she had run off with a man.’

Richard Manifold shrugged. ‘I knew what they were saying, of course. The whole city knew it eventually. I just didn’t believe them. I thought it was spite; lies because they wouldn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, accept that their daughter hated them enough to run away.’

‘But,’ I insisted, ‘as the weeks, months, then years went by and you still didn’t hear from Isabella, what conclusion did you come to regarding her disappearance?’

Richard slowly shook his head. ‘Eventually, gradually, as all hope died, I decided that she must have had an accident. Her horse must have thrown her, or she’d been set upon and killed by footpads somewhere in the forests. And in the end, of course, I stopped wondering. There was nothing I could have done. And she became lost to me. A dream. Other women came along: Adela, for one. I forgot her. That’s all.’

There was silence between us. Then I asked abruptly, ‘When was the last time you saw and spoke to Isabella?’

‘T
he last time I …’ He broke off, looking shocked, as though I had awakened him too abruptly from a dream world to reality; as though, for a few brief seconds, he did not know where he was. ‘The last time I spoke to Isabella?’

I nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ in confirmation. I could see at once by the look in his eyes, by the slightly shifty expression that lurked at the back of them, that he remembered the occasion quite clearly, but was reluctant to divulge it, so gave him a helping hand. ‘Was it the morning of the day she disappeared?’

‘It’s … it’s difficult to recall after all this time. Twenty years seems like an aeon ago.’ He gave a nervous laugh that rang hollow. ‘I was young, I know that. A green youth in the throes of my first great passion.’

I was unimpressed by this blatant bid for my understanding and sympathy.

‘It was a March morning of rain and wind,’ I said. ‘You met her near your usual trysting place of Westbury village. She was seen talking to someone – a man, wearing a cloak with his hood pulled forward over his face.’

‘And why should you think that man was me? It seems now that there were at least two other men whom Isabella knew and was friendly with, so why should it necessarily have been me? Has someone claimed to have recognized me?’

‘I told you, whoever it was had his hood pulled well forward, concealing his features.’

‘Then why …?’

‘Because Master Robert Moresby has a witness to the fact that, on that particular morning, he was elsewhere.’

‘And the second man? Ralph Mynott, I believe he’s called. If, that is, Jack Gload has the name aright. Can he, too, claim a witness as to his whereabouts that morning?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘And if you asked me to produce evidence to exonerate him, I couldn’t. It’s just a feeling I have that he was not the man Isabella encountered on the downs that day.’

‘A feeling!’ Richard exclaimed scathingly. ‘Feelings don’t count, man, when you’re searching for the truth. If you ask me, Roger, these mysteries that you claim to have solved – if, indeed, you have solved them and it’s not just so much moonshine – have been more by luck than judgement.’

He was trying to goad me into losing my temper, and was very nearly succeeding. But I realized that the attempt was for a purpose and that to play his game was to hand him the advantage over me, so I suppressed my anger and answered coolly, ‘You, yourself, have been witness to some of my successes. And if you have never been guided by your feelings – what women would call intuition – then I shall own myself very much surprised. Moreover, if you claim otherwise, I shan’t believe you. I recollect an occasion when you would have pinned a murder on me for no better reason than you disliked me for being Adela’s husband. Fortunately, I had a witness to testify to my innocence.’

His eyes met mine for a moment, then dropped to study his hands, clasped on the table in front of him.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said quietly. He began picking at a piece of loose skin around one of his thumb nails. ‘It’s true. I’ve always resented Adela’s preference for you. Nor, I admit, have I ever understood it.’

He was, I realized, adopting another tactic: leading me away from the subject of Isabella Linkinhorne by trying to start a dispute between us over our rival merits in the eyes of my wife.

‘Nor have I ever understood it,’ I agreed, beating him at his own game. ‘It is, moreover, undeserved,’ I added with far more sincerity than he could possibly have guessed at. ‘But all this is beside the point. I still think you were the man that Isabella was seen talking to on what proved to be the last morning of her life.’

Richard bit his lip. ‘Oh, very well,’ he admitted savagely after a moment’s silence. ‘Yes, the last time I ever saw her was on a very stormy morning early in the year. It might have been March. I don’t really remember. But that it was the last morning of her life is more than I know. Or you, either, I fancy.’

‘Perhaps. But it seems to be the last occasion on which anyone saw her alive. What did you talk about? How did you come to meet her? Had you arranged to do so, or was it by chance?’

He stood up suddenly, his face contorted with fury, his stool clattering to the floor behind him, his fingers gripping the edge of the table until the skin of his knuckles seemed in danger of splitting.

‘Hell’s teeth! Who do you think you are, Roger Chapman, to come here questioning me in this fashion?
Me!
’

I half expected him to order me from the cottage, and was preparing to retreat in good order. Instead, he began pacing up and down the floor, looking daggers at me, it was true, but also appearing to be debating with himself. Finally, he came back to the table, righted the stool and sat down again.

‘I didn’t kill Isabella Linkinhorne,’ he said quietly, ‘although it grieves me very much to have to say so. That anyone could think me capable of murder, least of all you, is shaming.’

‘Why?’ I demanded bluntly. ‘Whatever face you choose to present to the world, Richard, I know you’re quite capable of paying someone to beat me black and blue in order to protect yourself; capable, as I reminded you just now, of trying to arrest me for a killing I didn’t do—’

‘The evidence pointed to you,’ he defended himself, and I was forced to admit that that was true. But spite had informed the attempt. And as though in sudden acknowledgment of the fact, he raised his head and looked me straight in the eye. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I met Isabella by chance that morning. We hadn’t arranged a rendezvous, and when I saw what the weather was like, I doubted if even she would go out riding. Yet it was worth the risk. Little deterred her from taking those daily gallops across the downs. But by the time I’d reached the heights above Bristol, the wind and rain had increased twofold – threefold – to what they had been down here in the shelter of the city walls, and I had no real expectation of seeing her.’

‘But you did.’

‘Yes. I chided her for coming out in such weather, but she said she’d been unable to remain cooped up indoors.’

‘Did she say why?’

My companion shook his head. ‘She didn’t really need a reason. She was wild, was Isabella. Headstrong. It was part of her great charm, at least for me. And she hated her parents. Perhaps hated is too strong a word, but she disliked them. She found their overwhelming love oppressive. It drove her, literally, I think, a little mad. She told me once that, when she was a child, she had attacked her mother with a knife, and only her nurse’s timely intervention had prevented her from killing Mistress Linkinhorne. I longed to be able to free her by marrying her, but in those days I was in no position to support a wife.’

Once again, I was amazed by the inability of these men who had loved Isabella Linkinhorne to understand her. All three had wished to free her from her parents’ tyranny by making her their wife; by removing her from one golden cage to what she would undoubtedly have seen as yet another; by rescuing her from her mother’s and father’s overwhelming love only to smother her with their own.

‘What did you and she talk about that morning?’

‘God alone knows!’ Richard gave a sudden rueful grin, displaying one of his rare flashes of humour. ‘And probably even He’s forgotten.’ He was immediately serious again. ‘How do you expect me to remember after all this time?’ He sounded testy. ‘It wasn’t the weather for idle chatter. I told you, I chided her for being abroad on such a morning, but what she said in answer or what I said after that I’ve not the smallest recollection.’

‘She didn’t say that she was on her way to meet someone? That she was going to another man?’

‘No, she did not.’ Richard’s face was grim, as though the knowledge that this might have been the case, even after all those years, had the power to hurt him. ‘You don’t listen, Roger. I’ve explained that I had no idea, back then, that there was any other man – let alone two – but me.’ He hesitated before asking, ‘Are you telling me the truth?’

‘If Robert Moresby was telling me the truth, then yes. But,’ I went on quickly, ‘I think it extremely doubtful that Isabella ever intended to honour her pledge to meet him at Hambrook Manor. If you can bear the truth, I think she enjoyed making fools of you all.’

‘And what do you know of her?’ Richard asked, rounding on me savagely.

‘I’ve learned enough about her in these past three weeks and more to work that out.’ I softened my tone. ‘Does it rankle so much?’

‘I loved her,’ he answered simply. ‘And I thought she loved me.’

‘First love is often like that, I suppose.’ I rubbed my forehead, a sudden bleak feeling around my heart. ‘It’s the one you remember most.’

He glanced curiously at me. ‘Adela wasn’t your first love, then?’

I shook my head, recalling soft blue eyes, delicate, pale skin, lips that I had longed to kiss, but never had, a villainous father whom I had brought to justice, an act which made me her enemy and exiled me from her life …

I realized with a sudden shock that Richard and I were on the brink of becoming friends. Worse still, I was being unfaithful to Adela yet again, if only in my thoughts. With an effort, I pulled myself together and returned to the matter in hand.

But what else could I ask Richard Manifold? He had finally admitted to knowing the murdered woman; had acknowledged that he was the man seen speaking to her on the morning of the day she disappeared, and yet I was no nearer finding the killer than I had been at the outset of these enquiries. He could be any one of the three men I had spoken to, or none of them. If one, two, or all three were lying to me, how could I prove it after twenty years? Isabella Linkinhorne had, in some way, brought her death upon herself by her deliberate betrayal of the men who loved her. She had mocked their affection for her by abusing their trust and laughing at them behind their backs. It would be all too easy to say that what had happened to her was no one’s fault but her own.

But that would be to condone murder, to ignore the injunction laid on us by God: Thou shalt not kill. (Nor commit adultery either, whispered a voice inside my head, but I ignored it. I was finding it easier with practice.)

‘Well?’ Richard Manifold’s voice cut across my thoughts. ‘What have you decided, Chapman? Am I guilty of Isabella’s death, do you think?’

I sighed and rose to my feet.

‘The truth is,’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘No, nor never will,’ my companion sneered, also rising. ‘The real truth is that you would have done better to heed my warnings to leave well alone. It’s all too far in the past, and you and our Mayor between you have done nothing except open up old wounds, stir memories that are best forgotten and throw mud that all too readily sticks to the innocent as well as the guilty.’

‘You’d prefer a murderer to go unpunished, then?’ I asked, looking him straight in the eye.