After the Armistice Ball (22 page)

Finding the diamonds seemed to be the best idea all round, and the best way to go about it seemed just as clear: find Cara. I turned with relief to something I knew, spreading the album open on the sofa between us. Alec looked as pleased as I was at the change of topic.

‘Two pieces of earth-shattering news, darling,’ I said. ‘These pictures, this one and this one,’ I flipped back and forth between the two images of Cara’s smiling face, ‘were not taken at the cottage at all.’

Alec looked at each them for a long time, then at the others, and began nodding slowly. I was disappointed; I had hoped for a chance to explain. Gratifyingly though, when he spoke at last, he said: ‘I think you’re right. There’s something funny about them, but I can’t put my finger on it.’

‘Look,’ I said, eagerly, bending over the album with my head beside his. ‘Here she’s resting her arm on a mantelpiece, and it’s directly opposite a window, which means it’s in the middle of a flat wall. Now the fireplaces in the cottage were all set across the corners of the room. Look at the picture of the garden, see? Just one chimney with eight pots right in the middle of the roof. Sitting room, dining room, morning room, kitchen range and four bedrooms; I could practically draw you a floor plan. And just to make sure, if you look closely at this one of Lena in what is supposed to be the same sitting room, same wallpaper, same curtains, you can just see that this corner of the wall doesn’t turn at a right-angle and look! What’s that?’ Alec bent even closer over the picture and scrutinized the object in the corner.

‘Dark wood and brass hoops,’ he said. ‘It’s a coal bucket.’

‘A coal bucket, yes. By the fire in the corner. That dark block that stops halfway up the wall is the fireplace. And there’s no way it could be the same fireplace as in the picture of Cara, is there?’ Alec shook his head.

‘Now the one on the staircase. This one isn’t at the beach cottage either. You see how the window behind her is set into the wall like an ordinary window? Well, the upstairs windows at the cottage were all dormers, you know, set into the roof. And once again if we look at the picture in the garden you can see the side of the upstairs windows sticking out. If there was a landing window flat on a wall on the front of the house we should be able to see the taller part sticking up from this angle and we can’t. These two pictures were not taken at the cottage.’ I waited for the praise that was to come. Alec flipped back and forward a couple more times and then nodded firmly, with his lips pushed out in a pout of either satisfaction or grudging admiration, I was not sure which. I should tell him, I knew, about the other cottage and not let him think I had got all this from looking with a better eye at what he himself had also seen. Perhaps I would some day, but for the moment I was content to be thought of as a detective genius.

‘Now,’ I went on. ‘The question is why? Why did Lena go to all the trouble of redecorating the cottage to make it look as though these pictures were taken there? Why not simply take pictures of Cara at the cottage?’

‘Are you really asking?’ said Alec. ‘Or do you already know?’ He said it in a good-natured enough way, but I thought I should be careful not to be so triumphant as to be sickening.

‘There are two possible reasons,’ I said. ‘Either because Cara was never there, or because the pictures had to be taken after she left, or without her knowledge.’

‘That’s three,’ said Alec, but I ignored him. ‘And we know that she was there because of the other pictures.’ He flipped through the album until he came to the snap of Mrs Duffy in the garden with Cara disappearing into the house behind her.

‘That,’ I said and paused dramatically with my finger on the crêpe-de-Chine back, ‘is not Cara. It’s Clemence in Cara’s dress.’

‘Did you find the person who took the picture?’ said Alec.

‘You are looking at her,’ I said. ‘She’s there.’ Alec stared first at me and then at Clemence/Cara’s back in the photograph, and I took my finger and put it down on the paper, just where Lena’s hand disappeared behind a fold of her dress, then I traced the path of the cable down the back of the chair leg and under the picnic rug into the foreground, stopping where just the tiniest little piece of it was visible at the edge of the frame.

‘Very clever,’ said Alec. ‘It did seem odd that Cara should flounce off the way Clemence described. Not typical Cara at all.’

‘And if she were flouncing,’ I said, ‘she’d be blurred.’ We both looked in silence at the sharp outline of the figure in the dark doorway.

‘But what about all the others?’ said Alec. I waited in smug silence for him to discover what I had discovered as soon as this idea began to take hold.

‘There’s only one more,’ he said, presently. ‘On the cliff.’

‘And that could be anyone,’ I said, peering at the figure in the billowing dress standing beside Lena in the distance, with her hands jammed into her pockets while Lena waved. ‘Although in fact I think it’s no one. I think it’s a dressmaker’s dummy and that’s why it was taken from so far away and why they had to pose in long grass. You know, I had thought that it was a silly mistake to take all of the pictures with “Cara” in the same dress, but actually it was only the dress that made us believe it was Cara in the first place, and it almost worked.’

‘So she wasn’t there?’ said Alec, closing the album. ‘She was never there at all. She just wrote the letters at home before they left and Mrs Duffy or Clemence posted them from the cottage, timing them perfectly so that I should arrive just too late.’

‘Now for my second staggering piece of news,’ I said. ‘She was there. At least for one night. Mrs Marshall saw her on Tuesday.’ I described to him the old woman’s glimpse of the ‘third’ girl and the elaborate attempts to establish the existence of two identical sisters during the rest of the week. Alec shook his head as I spoke and looked increasingly troubled.

‘I should have got to the truth much quicker,’ I said. ‘Only when Mrs Marshall mentioned this girl on a bicycle pedalling hell for leather I naturally thought it was the poor little maid.’

Alec’s mouth had dropped open and far too late I realized what I had said.

‘A poor little maid? Why is this the first I’ve heard about a poor little maid? And why poor?’ I shrugged, hoping to avoid the unpleasantness of explaining. Alec spread his hands wide and practically shouted at me.

‘You must find her, Dandy, and see what she has to say. You must talk to her as soon as you can. I don’t know what’s got into you!’

‘I . . . Well, I can’t talk to her, if you must know,’ I said, and took a deep breath. ‘She died.’

‘When? How? What are you talking about?’

‘Suicide, I suppose you would call it,’ I said. ‘Dr Milne told me. Rather against his will since he had hushed it up for them and was embarrassed. And I didn’t tell you because Dr Milne asked me to keep it to myself.’ Alec was still looking at me as though I were a halfwit, and I suppose with good reason. I was still bowdlerizing. No wonder men end up unable to deal with the grislier aspects of life, when they go through their lives being invited by nannies, wives and daughters to look the other way while hurried drapes are thrown over anything ugly.

‘Suicide,’ said Alec and whistled. ‘That must have given them pause. I wonder they had the nerve to go ahead with the fire. And I wonder why she did it.’ I looked back at him blankly.

‘But about your Mrs Marshall seeing Cara,’ he said presently and I was glad that the little maid was dropped. ‘Why would they let her bicycle away in the daylight after all the other precautions? The redecoration, the photographs, the letters. These things are all so very careful and elaborate, and Cara rolling along the country lanes would ruin it.’

‘Well then, perhaps she wasn’t “leaving”. Perhaps she had just slipped out on some errand or other.’

Alec thumped his hand down on the black leather of the album, making me start and rattle my cup which was, thankfully, empty by now.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We know she slipped out on an errand. She went to post a letter, didn’t she?’

Once again the letters were taken from his inside pocket and spread out side by side.

‘“If you could pretend to Mummy”,’ he read, ‘“that you came in search of me off your own bat . . . I think she’s being perfectly ridiculous, but I don’t want to make her any crosser.” She sneaked out to post this to me, Dandy. I’m sure of it.’

‘As we thought. You were never meant to be there,’ I said. ‘I was supposed to turn up on my own and be taken in.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ said Alec. ‘I’m afraid so. I’m rather afraid Lena was grooming you for the role of the stooge from the time she got her claws into you at Croys. Yes, I’m sure of this now. The second letter was the only one I was ever supposed to see.’

‘Yes!’ I said, suddenly remembering. ‘Lena referred to “a silly letter” when I saw her in her bedroom on the day of the inquiry. And I remember now, when I mentioned about you showing the Fiscal the letters – plural – she flinched.’ I knew this was right, unflattering as it might be to have been cast as Lena’s puppet.

‘I still don’t see what the point was, though,’ I said. ‘All that furious bicycling to deliver such a casual letter. If she wanted to see you badly enough to send it she would have told you to hurry, not said you might like to come when you had a free minute. Why did she not ask you to come straight away?’

‘Oh, Dandy,’ said Alec, suddenly reaching out and taking hold of my hand. ‘Don’t you see? Can’t you?’ I didn’t and couldn’t, but I knew some part of our story would soon have to give way under the weight of all the things that no longer made any sense.

‘I don’t think she knew she had to tell me to hurry,’ said Alec. ‘I don’t think she
knew.
Back to your reasons for faking the pictures – she
was
there and if they were all done on the same day, they could easily have been done at the start of the week while she was
still
there. So it must be the third reason. They had to be done without her knowledge. She didn’t know what was going on.’

‘But the second letter?’ I said, but even while I was speaking I began to wonder. ‘She did write it, didn’t she?’ Alec shook his head.

‘No. Clemence wrote the second letter.’

‘But it’s so perfectly identical,’ I said.

‘As was Chrissie Dalrymple’s letter of condolence,’ said Alec. ‘They all were at school together. Why did we not think of it that day at the George when Chrissie’s letter came? And I should have known from that “C”. Cara always signed herself “Cara” even on a note, but I suppose . . .’

‘Clemence knew that her handwriting would convince but she wasn’t so sure about attempting a signature?’

‘Precisely,’ said Alec. ‘Now where does that leave us? What exactly are we saying?’

‘We seem to be saying,’ I said, ‘that Cara was not in on the plot. That’s good, in one way, isn’t it? From your point of view, I mean. Doesn’t it make you feel a little better to know that your wife-to-be was innocent – at least to begin with? I do hope she was filled in at some point, though. I mean, I hope Lena and Clemence and whoever came to take Cara away told her what it was all about and got her consent, because otherwise . . . Well, it sounds too silly for words, but otherwise it’s kidnap.’

‘I have the most dreadful feeling,’ said Alec, ‘that I’d be quite happy to settle for kidnap, Dandy, right at this moment.’

I got up to throw logs on to the fire and was astonished to find, glancing at the clock, that it was after eleven. Hugh, it seemed, would not be joining us at all. I sat down again, rather heavily, and scrubbed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, doing who knew what to my makeup, but the lights were low.

‘So, what if the plan was to kill her?’ said Alec. ‘Let’s just allow ourselves to think it for a while, think it through.’ For I was shaking my head already. ‘Just go along with it, Dandy, please. Kill her at the beginning of the week, dry out the cottage, fake the pictures, fake her presence and make sure the fire was so severe that no one could tell she was dead before it began. That would explain why she didn’t take part in the fakery.’

‘But why?’ I breathed, trying and failing to stop myself from believing such a repulsive idea. ‘Never mind how – and Alec, my dear, the how is a huge obstacle. I don’t mean how was it managed? I mean how
could
she? It’s unspeakable.’

‘Unspeakable things happen, Dandy. Every day they do. And as for why: to stop Cara from telling me she had stolen the diamonds. To stop me from telling the police. To save the family name –’

‘To cover up a theft!’ I said. ‘For pride? Alec, please listen to me. A mother, any mother, and God knows I’m far from being the Madonna in modern form, but any mother would rather have her two daughters at her side in the workhouse than that one should die so she could hold her head up.’

‘Your opinion does you credit,’ he said. ‘Do you have a better theory?’

‘How about this?’ I said. ‘Cara stole the jewels. Mrs Duffy and Clemence planned the fire to cover her disappearance and were to collect the insurance money for the diamonds. Cara, though, was not convinced until the very last minute that she
had
to disappear, hence her letter to you saying that she thought she might be able to talk you round.’

‘And did Cara have to get away because she stole the jewels or did she steal the jewels to fund an escape? In which case what did she have to get away from?’

‘Well, I suppose the obvious thing is you,’ I said. ‘Her engagement.’

There was a very long silence at this, and one for which I could hardly blame him.

‘Why not just break it off?’ he said at last.

‘Because you are her father’s heir. We keep forgetting about Cara’s father in all of this, because we’re so sure her mother and sister worked the whole thing themselves. Perhaps she dared not tell her father she wouldn’t marry you.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Alec. ‘Cara could wind Gregory around her finger and frequently did. And why wasn’t she in on the faked photographs? Can you explain that?’

No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I’m too tired. In fact, we’re both exhausted; we’re probably just seeing shadows.’ Alec shook his head.