After the Armistice Ball (37 page)

From the table beside him, Mr Duffy lifted a small stout chest and passed it to me. It was plain mahogany with silver hasps and a silver crest worn with polishing in the middle of the lid. He waved at me to open it. Inside, bedded snugly in velvet nests, were more cases, lizard skin this time I thought, six lizard skin cases from a huge bulbous one in the middle, to a tiny one like a bread bun, almost too small to support the elaborate hinges. I noticed the scuff marks and the snags in the soft silver of the locks. One by one, I opened the lids.

The stone in the centre of the necklace caught the sunlight and made me blink. People called it pear-shaped; ‘a pear-shaped blue-white diamond’ was how it was always described in the society pages when it was worn at Court, but I thought it looked like a quail’s egg. It
was
blue-white, even against the faded pinkish silk of its case, and the light skipping off it was as cold and as sharp as icicles. Two more of the same stones in the earrings, three in the headdress, then the small ones in rings and bracelets, all looking like little nubs and chips and crystals of ice. They were mesmerizing, quite breath-taking the way they seemed to hum and shimmer with light. But hard on that thought a voice in my head said: two lives lost. Pink cheeks, brown eyes, red blood, all lost while these blue-white stones glittered on and on.

‘She loved them so much,’ said Mr Duffy. I closed the cases and shut the lid of the chest. ‘I should have been warned right then. No one who can feel real love for something as useless as a diamond could possibly be a wife. Or a mother. You only have to look at Clemence to see that a mother with that kind of flaw is a dangerous thing. She passes it on in the blood and then she teaches the child that there is nothing wrong with it and so any check that there might have been is missing.’ He swirled his glass around and stared down into it.

‘Of course
I
could have been the check, but all I thought about was my beloved girl. And Clemence turned out as cold as her mother before her. Not a bad girl – hard to like, you know, very proper, very concerned about right and wrong – but nothing really bad about her.’

He fell silent again and then roused himself with a brave smile that it hurt to see.

‘Nothing can bring her back,’ he said. ‘I realize that I am quite alone now, but still I want to know what happened. It’s clear that Lena was planning to kill poor Mrs Esslemont that day if you had not arrived in time. That in itself does not surprise me, but I don’t know why. I want to know why.’

Alec stared at me and then looked away out of the dusty window and across the gardens, and his message could not have been plainer. I cleared my throat.

‘We believe, I’m afraid, that Lena killed her daughter.’

‘Cara?’ said Mr Duffy.

‘Yes,’ I said. I should not be afraid to use her name, I told myself. I should not hide behind ‘her daughter’, ‘your wife’, ‘her sister’, but should speak plainly. ‘Lena used Cara to expose the theft of the diamonds and then planned to kill her to ensure her silence. I know it seems unbelievable –’

‘But it doesn’t, my dear,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Haven’t you been listening? Lena loved them more than almost anything else in the world and she was quite ruthless. So I am not at all surprised. Anyway, I knew, I suppose. At least, I never believed the fire was an accident. Oh, I did not want any more trouble than I could avoid, certainly did not want a murder trial. With my beloved girl gone, what was the point? All I could do was get rid of the pair of them as far as possible as soon as I could.’

‘Was Lena’s intention to go to Canada with Clemence, then?’ I said.

‘Yes, I expect so,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Not that I cared where she went. I couldn’t cast off Clemence into destitution – it wasn’t her fault who she was and what she was and, as I say, perhaps I should have tried harder not to let her turn into her mother’s child, but by then it was too late.’ He shook himself out of the reverie into which he was sinking. ‘I suppose Daisy Esslemont knew something, then? But how did she get involved?’

I told him and he listened with no more than a rueful shake of his head.

‘Quite ruthless, you see,’ he said. ‘Of course I knew what had happened when Lena started all the nonsense with the cleaning. The jeweller came to me and told me about the pastes and I said to him just to give the things back to Lena and say nothing. Then I quietly stopped paying the insurance premiums, in case she should get greedy. I am surprised at her going after the Esslemonts in particular, though. Why them?’

‘We’ve never been able to work that out,’ I said.

‘But I’m not surprised in any general sense,’ Mr Duffy went on. ‘She was a greedy, ruthless woman. But not really bad, I don’t think.’

I wondered how much whisky he had drunk before Alec and I arrived. Even if he did not know the truth yet, how could he say that a woman who had killed her own child in cold blood was not really bad? Perhaps the big gulps of whisky had affected me too, for I was not aware of deciding to speak, but simply found myself speaking.

‘She was bad, Gregory. Worse than you yet know. Cara did not die in the fire.’ His head jerked up and I saw a quick leap of hope in his eyes.

‘No! I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘she is certainly dead. But Lena killed her in anger, killed her brutally. It almost ruined everything. She was ruthless, you are right to call her so. But there was rage and evil in her too. It’s as though she was two quite different people. She laid all her plans and then just smashed through them as though they were nothing.’ I was speaking without a trace of kindness now. ‘Cara, your beloved girl, is buried in an unmarked grave not a mile from your house in Edinburgh, buried as a servant, given a death certificate full of lies by an idiot of a doctor who cares only about niceties. I’m sorry, Gregory, but Lena was not just greedy and ruthless, she was evil. She must have been, to do such a thing to her child.’

Gregory shook his head at me, smiling, and I thought once more that he must be drunk.

‘Lena would never have harmed her child, Dandy my dear. Lena kill her child? Why, her child was the only
living
thing in the world she ever loved.’ I stared at him, and felt Alec turn and stare too. Those deep down things were shifting again, bumping gently against each other, making low echoes I had to strain to hear.

‘Let me tell you,’ said Gregory. ‘I must start from a long way back, I’m afraid, but it’s the only way to explain.

‘We went to Ontario straight after our honeymoon and before we had docked I knew what a mistake I’d made. Of course, no one else knew a thing. As far as anyone was aware, we left in ’99, a happy young couple, and came back five years later a happy family with two little daughters. No. No. The truth was this. I went on a long trip up-country shortly after we got there and when I came back my wife tried to pass off her condition as happy news, but I was not such a fool as all that. I was only a big enough fool to throw myself immediately into the arms of someone else, and so before the year was out we did indeed have two little girls, one hers and one mine, born four months apart.

‘If the lady who was Cara’s mother had not died, I might have – I like to think I might have – dared to divorce Lena then. But on my own with a baby girl, all I could think was to make a deal. I should give a name to her brat if she would make a home for mine.

‘And so we went on. I wanted to make a family for the girls, but Lena would have none of it. Clemence was hers alone and it was only too plain that all she wanted from me was a share. Her share, she called it. Clemence’s share. Such arrogance. I gave up trying to tell her that she had no right to anything, that Clemence had no call on me, and then I grew stubborn. I stopped discussing it, but I determined that neither Lena nor Clemence would ever see a penny of my money nor an inch of my land. I was going to settle everything on Cara. Oh, I know this place and Culreoch must go through the male line, but they are nothing really, white elephants. Cara would have been a very wealthy woman.

‘Lena was incensed, of course. And I should not be surprised if the idea of killing Cara started as long ago as then. I think she had forgotten the details of our arrangement. At any rate, she was shocked that I did not intend to settle anything on Clemence and she blamed that for Clemence’s inability to attract a husband, but I always thought that had more to do with Clemence herself, poor thing. Lena wasn’t supposed to tell her that I was not her father – we agreed that neither of the girls would know – but I think she must have. Certainly she managed to stamp out any chance of affection between us. She spent her entire life bringing Clemence up and it’s a dangerous thing for a child – too much devotion, and a constant drip-drip of hints that she’d been wronged – it turned her out so prim, but with no real goodness underneath.

‘Towards the end of the war, Lena came to me and said that since Cara was to have everything else, was I really going to split up the diamonds and hand Cara a share of them too? Didn’t I see it made more sense for all of them to come to Lena and thence to Clemence in time? I laughed, and she didn’t understand why I was laughing. I asked her what on earth made her think that she and Clemence would have any of my diamonds? I can still remember her face. It was as though I had told her the sky was the ground and the ground was the sky. She loved them so much, you see, so much, that the idea that they were not hers was quite unthinkable.’

What he was saying made perfect sense, but what a sorry, silly little mess it was. Surely they could have done better than that. Could not Gregory have broken through the walls Lena put up between him and Clemence? Could he not have seen that his devotion to Cara, while it bathed his own daughter in warmth and light, did Clemence damage? I could well believe that Lena had spent her life pouring poison into Clemence and twisting her little mind into horrid shapes, and although I had never thought it before, I could see he was right about what lay behind the mask – prim, cold piousness – but if all Gregory had ever given her was his name he was as much to blame.

‘And you see now, don’t you, Dandy my dear, why I say Lena is not actually as bad as all that. There was something wrong with her somewhere deep down, something missing where the rest of us keep our morals, but harm her own child? She would never have done that. That, perhaps, is the only thing she and I shared. We each of us would have gone to the ends of the earth for our girls. We each of us would forgive any wrong.’ He shook his head and spoke even more softly. ‘The only thing we had in common. We loved our little girls.’

The three of us sat in silence for a while until, the sun having moved behind a tree on the lawn, the room started to feel chilly and my toes sticking out of their plaster cast in their little sock began to nip with cold.

‘So Alec,’ said Gregory, in a brisker tone, ‘it is yours for the taking. All of it. And please don’t spend your life in mourning. I should like to think of this place ringing with children’s footsteps, even if they are not to be Cara’s children after all. The Edinburgh house you will probably sell, I expect. Terribly dull kind of a life for a young woman, and I don’t expect that you will feel the same compulsion as I did to keep your wife dull and quiet for fear of what she would do if you let her have her head. Choose wisely, when the time comes.’

‘I hope, sir,’ said Alec gallantly, squirming a little, ‘to be an old man myself before any of this becomes a matter of concern.’

‘Well, I’m afraid you will be disappointed then,’ said Gregory, in the same brusque voice. ‘I have nothing left now and I have no intention of going on. I’m an old man anyway, but however short my time is it’s too long to spend missing my girl and thinking of all the things I could have done better. I shan’t do it here, of course, or anywhere else that will make a mess and a fuss for you, but you must prepare yourself for it soon.’ After a long pause, he spoke again. ‘I would like to see her grave, though. I would like that very much.’ And then, businesslike and chilling: ‘Alec, let’s you and I meet at the cemetery at ten tomorrow morning and you can take me to see her grave.’

Alec and I stared at each other glumly, each hoping I think that the other had something to say to him that might change his mind. After a few minutes of silence we rose to leave and drove back to Gilverton without speaking.

‘You stupid woman,’ said Cara, wagging her finger at me as she wheeled past me in the glittering ballroom. ‘You stupid woman,’ she called over the shoulder of her partner, possibly Alec, before he bore her away. She was wearing some kind of shroud, but a shroud encrusted with diamonds from the neck to the hem and all of the dowagers gathered around the dusty windows of the ballroom amongst the palms whispered greedily and reached out to touch her as she passed. ‘You stupid woman,’ she shouted from the far end of the room, bellowing to make herself heard above the din that was drilling into my head, making the chandeliers tinkle and causing little falls of dust from the ceiling. The noise grew louder and louder and I noticed now that it was not music after all, but footsteps. It sounded as though dozens of tiny little feet were spattering back and forth on the stone passageway above our heads, thundering about in all the rooms around us, drumming up and down the felt-covered stairs and clattering around and around in the echoing hall below.

I lay still, waiting to see if it made as much sense awake as it had in the dream, and then, realizing that it did, I clapped my hands, threw back the bedclothes and pulled the bell. It was seven o’clock. Three hours before they were to meet at the cemetery, and just enough time, if I was lucky.

Grant appeared, shiny-faced and frowning in her night-clothes, a frown which deepened as I told her to get Drysdale to bring the car round right now and to help me on with some clothes, any clothes, and it did not matter which.

‘I’ll just run your bath, madam,’ she said, to give her an excuse to leave the room and indulge her huff.

‘I’ve no time for a bath,’ I said. ‘Help me with this damn leg, Grant, please. I’ll have two baths when I get back.’

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the car at the front door just in time to see Hugh open a shutter in his room and stare blearily out at me.