The Lake House (26 page)

The lights of Seaview Cottage were on when Sadie rounded the bend in the narrow cliff road. Bertie was in the kitchen making a pot of tea and he took a second cup from the draining board when Sadie sat down at the table. “Hello there, love,” he said. “You've had a big day.”

“I could say the same thing about you.”

“Twelve boxes of toys packed and ready to be sold.”

“You must be hungry. You missed dinner.”

“I'm all right. I had a bite while I was out.”

With Louise, no doubt. Her grandfather didn't offer further details and Sadie didn't want to seem petty or begrudging so resisted prompting. She smiled—a little thinly—as he passed her a steaming cup and sat opposite.

She noticed the embroidered gift from Louise was hanging on a hook by the door. “I haven't missed your birthday, have I?”

He followed her gaze and smiled. “It was a just-because gift.”

“That's kind.”

“Louise is kind.”

“Nice-enough message. A little simplistic, perhaps.”

“Sadie—”

“I know where Ruth would've put it. Remember that framed copy of ‘Desiderata' she kept on the back of the toilet door?” She laughed. It sounded hollow.

“Sadie—”

“She said if a person couldn't go placidly amid the noise and haste in the WC, then what hope was there?”

Bertie reached across the table and took her hand. “Sadie. Lovely girl.”

Sadie bit her bottom lip. Unaccountably, infuriatingly, his words made a sob lodge halfway up her throat.

“You're like a daughter to me. I'm closer to you than I ever was to my own daughter. Funny thing, that. My own child but I've nothing at all in common with your mother. Even as a little girl she was so worried about what other people might think, concerned that we weren't doing things “properly', that Ruth or I would embarrass her if we didn't dress or speak or think precisely like the other parents.” He smiled softly and brushed at the white stubbly beard he'd been sporting since he came to Cornwall. “You and I, we're much more alike. I think of you as a daughter, and I know you look to me as a parent. But Sadie, love, I'm just a person.”

“You're different here, Granddad.” She hadn't known she was going to say it. She hadn't even known she felt it. She sounded like a child.

“I hope I am. I mean to be. I'm trying to move on.”

“You even got your licence.”

“I'm living in the country! I can hardly be relying on the tube to get me from A to B.”

“But all that talk Louise goes on with, about magic happening and letting the universe decide, that wall-hanging. That's not you.”

“It used to be, when I was a boy. I'd forgotten—”

“It's certainly not Ruth.”

“Ruth's gone.”

“And it's up to us to remember her.”

His voice was unusually brittle. “Your grandmother and I met when I was twelve years old. I can't remember a time
without
her. My grief, her loss—it would swallow me if I let it.” He drained his teacup. “The wall-hanging was a gift.” He smiled, but there was sadness behind it and Sadie felt chagrin at knowing she was its cause. She wanted to say sorry, but then they hadn't really argued, and she felt criticised somehow, and prickly, and that made apology difficult. She was still deciding what to say when he beat her to it. “I'm missing my favourite colander. I might just pop upstairs and see if I can't find it among the boxes.”

* * *

Sadie spent the rest of the evening sitting cross-legged on the floor of her room. She struggled through the first three pages of Fictional Escap(e)ades, before realising the chapter on Daffyd Llewellyn was an interpretation of his book rather than a biography of the man himself, and impenetrable into the bargain. She turned instead to the notes she'd taken at Clive's, flicking between them and the Edevane sisters' little newspapers. She'd been thinking about Clive's certainty that Alice held the key, and that had brought her to the engraving she'd found that afternoon in the stone. She had a vague feeling she'd come across the name “Ben' somewhere over the past day, but couldn't for the life of her remember where.

Rain slid down the window panes, the sweet scent of pipe smoke seeped through the ceiling, and Sadie cast her gaze over the sprawl of pages, scribbled notes and books spread across the floor before her. Somewhere, within the mess, she just knew there were details itching to connect, she could
feel
it. Never mind that it looked like anarchy in paper form.

With a deep sigh, she extricated herself from her research and climbed into bed. She opened
A Dish Served Cold
and read for a while in an attempt to clear her mind. Turned out the restaurateur had indeed been murdered, and it was looking increasingly likely the man's ex-wife had done it. Twenty years they'd been divorced, decades in which the man had built his career and fortune, while his ex-wife devoted herself to the care of their disabled daughter. Her own career aspirations had been sacrificed along with her freedom, but she loved their daughter and the arrangement had seemed amiable enough.

The trigger, it transpired—Sadie turned the pages faster now—was the man's casual announcement that he was going away for a fortnight's holiday to South America. All her life, his ex-wife had nursed ambitions to visit Machu Picchu, but her daughter couldn't accompany her and wouldn't be left alone. That her ex-husband—a man who'd always found himself far too busy and important to help with their child's care—was now poised to live out her great dream was more than the woman could take. Decades of maternal grief, the isolation felt by all carers, the sublimation of a lifetime's worth of personal desires had snowballed, leading the otherwise mild-mannered woman to an inevitable conclusion that her ex-husband must be prevented from making the trip.

Surprised, satisfied and strangely invigorated, Sadie turned off the light and closed her eyes, listening to the storm and the choppy sea, the dogs dreaming and snorting on the end of her bed. A.C. Edevane had an interesting take on morality. Her detective had discovered the truth about the man's seemingly natural death but chosen not to disclose it to police. His duty as a private detective, Diggory Brent reasoned, had been to meet his brief by discovering where the money trail led. He had done that. No one had asked him to look into the manner of the restaurateur's death; it wasn't even considered suspicious. The man's ex-wife had shouldered an enormous burden for a long time and for very little recompense; if she were to be arrested, the daughter would be very much the worse off. Diggory decided he would say nothing and let justice take its course without him.

Sadie remembered Clive's description of a young Alice Edevane skulking around the library while police investigations were underway, his sense that she'd known more than she was letting on and his more recent hunch (somewhat desperate) that one of her books might reveal a clue.
A Dish Served Cold
might not mirror the events of Theo Edevane's disappearance, but it certainly suggested Alice had a nuanced outlook on matters of justice and its course. The novel had rather a lot to say about the complicated relationship between parents and children, too, describing the bond as both a burden and a privilege; an inextricable link, for better or for worse. Evidently Alice did not look kindly on those who shirked their responsibilities.

Sadie tried to sleep, but she wasn't a good sleeper at the best of times and thoughts of Rose Waters intruded. It was all the stuff about parenting and devotion and the commitment of carers, she supposed. The love the nanny had shown towards Theo, “like he was her own'; her spotless employment record and the sudden, “unfair' dismissal that had left her devastated; the eyewitness who'd sworn she saw a slim woman's figure moving in the nursery after midnight . . .

With a huff, Sadie rolled over and tried to clear her mind. An image came to her unbidden of the Edevane family picnic. The husband and wife at the centre, the loved little boy in the foreground, that slender ankle and leg in the shadows. Clive's voice came to mind, telling her how wanted the little boy had been, how long the Edevanes had waited for him. She thought about the 1939 interview with Constance deShiel, in which the old woman was said to have “rambled on about Eleanor and a stillborn child.” Perhaps it hadn't been a figment of her addled imagination after all. Maybe Eleanor had been pregnant between Clementine and Theo.
“It was no secret they'd wanted a son,”
one of the interviews in Clive's file had read.
“It was such a blessing when they had him. So unexpected.”

Sadie opened her eyes in the dark. Something else was flagging her attention.

She turned on the light and leaned over the side of the bed, riffling through the papers on the floor for the page she was after. It was one of the little newspapers written and produced by the Edevane sisters on the old printing press. She was sure she remembered reading something about Nanny Rose.

There it was.

She took the old pages up into bed with her. An article by Alice, detailing Clementine Edevane's punishment for having referred to Nanny Rose as fat. Sadie checked the date, did a quick mental calculation, and then jumped out of bed to get her notebook. She scrabbled through the pages until she came to her notes outlining Rose Waters's employment record—in particular, her absence of a month in July 1932 when she was called away on “a family matter.” The dates matched.

Sadie looked through the window—the moonlit cliffs, the turbulent inky sea, lightning on the horizon—trying to straighten her thoughts. Clive had said,
Why would a parent kidnap their own child?
He'd been talking about Anthony and Eleanor Edevane and the question had been rhetorical, a joke, because of course parents didn't need to kidnap their own children. They already had them.

But what about in cases where they didn't?

Sadie's face was pulsing warm. A new scenario was forming. She could think of a reason why a parent might kidnap their own child.

Details folded into place, as if they belonged together, as if they'd been
waiting
for someone. A maid in trouble . . . A mistress who couldn't have her own child . . .

It had been a solution that suited everybody. Until suddenly it didn't.

S
eventeen

London, 2003

The message was curt, even by Alice's standards. She had gone out, she would be back later. He pondered the piece of paper—he couldn't bring himself to call it a note—and wondered what it meant. Alice's behaviour lately had been odd. She'd been prickly, even more so than usual, and very distracted. Peter suspected things weren't going well with the new book, beyond the typical authorial angst he'd come to expect, and that Alice's creative problems were a symptom rather than the cause of her troubles.

He had a feeling he knew the cause. Her face when he'd relayed Deborah's phone message on Friday had drained of colour, and her reaction, the slight quiver in her voice, had reminded him of earlier in the week when the letter from the detective arrived asking about the old unsolved police case. The two things were connected, Peter was sure of it. Furthermore, he was convinced they related to the real-life crime in Alice's family's past. He knew now about the little boy, about Theo. Alice had tried to conceal her shock when the letter arrived, but Peter had noticed the way her hands started to shake, how she'd hidden them beneath the table where he couldn't see. The reaction, combined with her vehement denial of the letter's contents, had piqued his interest sufficiently that when he was sitting at his home computer that night, he found himself typing
Edevane
and
missing child
into the internet search engine. That's how he knew Alice's baby brother had disappeared in 1933 and never been found.

What he didn't know was why on earth she'd lie about it, and why the whole affair had her so rattled. He'd arrived for work one morning and found her passed out in an armchair in the library. His heart had thumped and for a split second he'd feared the worst. He'd been on the verge of administering uncertain CPR when she omitted a spluttery snore and he realised she was sleeping. Alice Edevane did not take naps. Peter would have been less surprised had he opened the door and found her belly-dancing in coin-rimmed silken robes. She'd woken with a jolt and he'd slipped back into the hall so they could both pretend he hadn't seen. He'd made a noisy show of removing his shoes and given the coat rack an extra shake for good measure, before returning to find her reading over a draft chapter, red pen in hand. And now this. An unexpected break from routine. Only Alice Edevane did not break routine, not once in the three years he'd been working for her.

The unexpected turn of events was perplexing, but it did at least give him an opportunity to finish the website FAQ page. Alice's publishers had been in contact again, patience straining as the publication date drew nearer, and Peter had promised he'd have the final content to them by the end of the week. He would, too. All that remained was to ascertain whether or not Alice had written a manuscript before
In the Blink of an Eye
. The
Yorkshire Post
article from 1956 that he wanted to crib his answer from quoted Alice as saying she'd written an entire mystery novel, her first, in the notebook she'd received for her fifteenth birthday, and Peter figured it would be simple enough to confirm. Alice was pathological about her notebooks; she never went anywhere without the current one and she kept all of them, without exception, on a set of shelves in her writing room. All he had to do was check.

He started up the stairs, caught himself whistling selfconsciously and stopped. There was no need for an outward show of innocence. Only guilty people did that and there was nothing untoward in what he was doing. Entry to Alice's office was not forbidden; at least, nothing had ever been said to that effect. Peter didn't ordinarily go in there, but that was merely a matter of circumstance. The opportunity rarely arose. They always held their meetings in the library, and Peter worked at the large kitchen table or, sometimes, in the spare room that had long ago been given over to files.

It was a hot day and sun streamed through the narrow window at the top of the stairs. Warm air had risen up the stairwell, pooling on the landing with nowhere else to go, and Peter was glad to open the door to Alice's dim, cool writing room and slip inside.

As expected, on the shelf beneath all her international first editions he found the notebooks. The first was small and thin, clad in brown leather that had softened and faded with time. Peter opened the cover and saw, on the yellowing frontispiece, the careful, rounded penmanship of a conscientious child.
Alice Cecilia Edevane, age 8 years old
. He smiled. The handwritten line offered a glimpse of the Alice he knew—confident, formidable, set in her ways—as a diligent young girl with her whole life ahead of her. He returned the notebook and counted lightly along the row. By his calculations, the book he was looking for was the one she'd received in 1932 and used into the following year. He stopped and took a rather larger volume from the shelf.

Peter knew at once something was amiss. The notebook was far too light for its size, and too thin in his hand. Sure enough, when he opened it, half the pages were gone, only a thick fringe of rough stubs remaining where they'd been torn. He confirmed that it was indeed the book from 1932/3, and ran his finger thoughtfully down the tattered ends. In and of itself it meant nothing. As Peter understood it, plenty of teenage girls tore pages from their diaries. Only this wasn't a diary per se, it was a notebook. And it wasn't a few pages; more than half the book was missing. Enough for the draft of a novel? That depended on the novel's length.

Peter skimmed through the early extant pages. The peculiarity of the find had attached an air of unease to the task and he felt suddenly like a thief. He reminded himself he was merely doing his job. That this was what Alice paid him to do.
I don't want to know about it
, she'd said when she told him to get on with the website.
Just make it happen
. Simply find the answer, he told himself, then put the book back and be done with it.

The early pages looked promising. They appeared to be filled with observations from her life (Peter smiled when he recognised Alice's description of her grandmother—“a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress”—as a quote from
Great Expectations
), and ideas for a novel about people called Laura and Lord Hallington, who were involved in a terribly complicated love affair. There were also frequent references to a person called “Mr Llewellyn', who Peter gathered was the published writer Alice had mentioned in her interview, her childhood mentor.

But then the plotting came to an abrupt halt, abandoned, it seemed, for a numerical list titled:
The Rules According to Mr Ronald Knox, Adapted from the Preface to
Best Detective Stories.

The list of rules, though old-fashioned and didactic by today's standards, seemed to usher in a new era of Alice's creative life, for afterwards there was no further mention of Laura and Mr Hallington (or Mr Llewellyn, for that matter), their childish interactions replaced by more general musings on life and love, earnest and touchingly idealistic in their naive tone of optimism.

Peter glanced quickly through Alice's teenage exhortations on the purpose of literature, her attempts to replicate the ecstatic descriptions of nature in the romantic poems she cited as favourites, her eager articulation of her aspirations for the future:
to desire fewer possessions and to possess greater love
. He was beginning to feel uncomfortably voyeuristic, ready almost to give up the search, when he came across something that made him start. The initials BM had begun to appear in Alice's jottings.
According to BM . . .
,
BM says . . .
,
I will ask BM . . .
Anyone else might not have remembered the name Deborah had asked him to pass on to Alice in her phone message, but Peter had gone to school with a boy called Benjamin and the two of them had worked a paper round for a shopkeeper called Mr Munro, so when Deborah said the name, the coincidence had cemented the name in Peter's mind. Benjamin Munro, the man whose mention had made Alice pale.

Around the same time mentions of “BM' began to pepper the journal, Alice appeared to start plotting a new novel.
A mystery, this time, a proper detective story with an ingenious method that no one will ever guess!
Planning continued over the next few pages, arrows and scribbled questions and hastily sketched maps and diagrams—techniques that were familiar from her current notebooks—and then an entry dated April 1933:
I am going to start BBB first thing tomorrow. I already have the first and last lines in mind, and a clear idea of everything that needs to happen in between (thanks, in part, to BM). I know this is going to be the one I'll finish. It already feels different from everything I've written before.
Whether or not she started BBB, and whether or not she finished, Peter couldn't say. Beneath her mission statement, something had been scribbled out with such vehemence that a hole had been torn in the paper, and then there was nothing. The rest of the pages had been removed.

Why would Alice have expunged the draft of a novel? She who was meticulous, almost superstitious, about keeping everything that contributed to the creation of a book. “A writer never destroys her work!” she'd told the BBC. “Even if she loathes it. To do so would be akin to denying the existence of an awkward child.” Peter stood up and stretched, glancing through the window that overlooked the heath. It might mean nothing. They were missing pages in a teenage journal. Pages written seventy years before. But Peter couldn't shake the feeling of unease that had crept upon him. Alice's recent behaviour, the way she'd denied the old police case, her shock when he'd given her Deborah's message, when he'd spoken the name Benjamin Munro. Even the small inexplicable mystery as to why she'd started telling journalists she'd never written before her first published novel. Something was going on and Alice was worried.

Peter slipped the notebook back into place, taking extra care to do so quietly, as if that might somehow erase the fact that he'd ever taken it off the shelf and looked inside. He'd decided simply to omit the question about Alice's first completed work of fiction from the FAQ page. He wished he'd done that in the start instead of coming up here and opening Pandora's box.

Perhaps it was his haste to leave the attic and put the whole thing behind him that caused him to trip over the lamp. Perhaps it was simply his usual gift for clumsiness. Whatever the case, the lamp was tall and free-standing, and Peter sent the whole thing teetering sideways to land against Alice's desk. A glass, thankfully empty, was bowled over, and Peter was setting it back to rights when he saw the envelope addressed to Alice. This, in and of itself, was not unusual; they were in Alice's home, after all. However, the post was Peter's remit and this was a letter he had not seen. Which meant it had been intercepted from the morning's pile without his knowledge.

Peter hesitated, but only briefly. He was fond of Alice. They weren't exactly on a grandmother/grandson footing, but he cared for her, and in light of everything else that was going on he felt a responsibility to her. He opened the letter, just enough to see who it was from.
Sadie Sparrow.
It wasn't the sort of name a person with a predilection for words forgot and Peter remembered at once the letter that had arrived exactly a week before. The police detective investigating the old case of a missing child. The case from 1933, the same year BM made his appearance in Alice's journal and the disputed manuscript had been (presumably) torn out. Peter experienced the grim sense of pieces of a puzzle coming together, while remaining frustratingly in the dark as to what that puzzle's picture revealed. He tapped his fingers against his lips, considering, and then glanced again at the thin sheet of paper folded on the desk. This really was snooping. It most certainly wasn't part of his job description. Peter had a sense of himself perched on the edge of a cliff, deciding whether to jump or retreat. With a shake of his head, he sat down and began to read.

* * *

Alice decided to walk through the park. The fresh air, she told herself with more than a little constitutional irony, would do her good. She hopped off the tube at Hyde Park Corner and climbed the stairs. It was much warmer today than it had been earlier in the week. The air was still and the heat thick, that particular kind of city heat that seemed to magnify in the spaces between tarmac and building. The tube lines, with their seething serpents hissing through the tunnels, belching out sweaty commuters at each station, were like something out of Dante. She started along Rotten Row, taking assiduous note of the rose gardens and the faint scent of lilac, as if she really were walking because she fancied being alone with nature, and not simply to put off a little longer the awful task she knew was ahead.

It was Deborah who'd forced today's meeting. Alice, after Peter gave her the phone message on Friday (the horrific chill of hearing her assistant speak Benjamin Munro's name!), had decided the best course of action was denial. There was no reason she and Deborah needed to see one another over the coming months. Eleanor's anniversary had been and gone, the next family gathering wasn't until Christmas, which left plenty of time for the whole thing to blow over. For Alice to make
sure
it blew over. But Deborah had been insistent, employing that particular brand of gentle force she'd always wielded as the eldest sister and further mastered during her decades as a politician's wife. “There are things we simply must discuss.”

Whatever the extent of Deborah's knowledge about Theo, she'd evidently travelled a considerable distance down memory lane, arriving at a place that made Alice very nervous. How much, she wondered, did Deborah know? She remembered Ben, but did she know what Alice had done? She must. Why else would she insist they meet to talk about the past?