After Clare (28 page)

‘We've been told he carried her photograph everywhere with him – and that he was hoping to marry her.'

‘
Marry her
?' Edmund smiled. ‘You must be mistaken. Peter was in no position to marry anyone. And I can tell you there was no photograph with what the adjutant called his personal effects, when he returned his things to me.' His smile froze as the thought came to him:
but there wouldn't have been, would there?
If Peter had in fact been in the habit of carrying a photograph around with him, it must have suffered the same fate as everything else on his person after he was killed. Edmund's gorge rose again at the sickening reminder of his son's body slowly rotting under that pile of rubbish.

It took a moment before he was able to speak. ‘I didn't know anything about her and Peter, and I have to say I find it hard to believe. He would have said something.'
But would he
? Edmund knew that it was all too likely Peter might have kept this quiet, too.

‘Miss Drummond herself has confirmed this.'

There was a pause. ‘What are you driving at? What has all this to do with my boy being murdered?'

‘Maybe nothing. But I'm hoping we might find whether it had or not if we clear up one or two things first. Remember the sample of glue Willard brought you the other day?'

Speaking for the first time, the taciturn sergeant reminded him: ‘Which you confirmed was what your son used for his woodworking.'

‘It appeared to be the same sort, yes. It's common enough, what most cabinet-makers use – and anyone else for that matter. I couldn't say any more than that. Why?'

‘It was used to attach something to the underside of a drawer. This letter, in fact,' Novak said, producing it. ‘Have you seen it before?'

‘A letter? The underside of a drawer?' His heart began a slow thud, so heavy he felt it must be visible under the thin cotton of his shirt. ‘And presumably you think it's something that concerns me?'

‘You're a schoolmaster, I suppose you might read French, Mr Sholto? Good, then perhaps you'd like to look at it and tell me whether it does or not.'

He took another long pull of the cool lemonade. The sweat was so thick on his forehead that this time he was forced to wipe it away before fishing for his reading glasses and accepting the letter. As he read it through, he was aware of Novak's deep-set regard, of the sergeant's silent attention. ‘I'm afraid I can't understand all of this,' he said at last, as he came to the end.

‘Enough, I suspect, to know that it
does
concern you?'

There had been no mention of his name, but somewhere, reading between the lines, they had presumably found some connection. He folded the paper and then leaned back. His hand was trembling. With an effort of will, he managed to steady it, wishing they would go away, wanting nothing more than to be left alone.

Novak let the silence continue until at last Edmund was forced to ask, ‘Where did you find it?'

‘It was with some old drawings and sketches Lady Fitzallan's sister did many years ago. Peter apparently hid it there.'

‘Peter did?' Edmund attempted incredulity. ‘If I thought it meant more to him than it does to me I might be inclined to believe you. What's it all about?' He thrust the letter back at Novak. ‘Who is this Christian?'

‘He was an art student from Grenoble who tutored the young Vavasour girls at Leysmorton for a time – Emily and her sister Clare. His name was – or is, if he's still alive – Gautier. Does that mean anything to you?'

Edmund shook his head emphatically. ‘No.'

‘Well, even if you don't know the sender, I think you certainly knew the woman this is addressed to, Mr Sholto.' Edmund didn't answer and Novak went on, ‘I think you know it was your mother. She was Clare Vavasour, wasn't she?' The silence was even longer this time, and Edmund actually felt the blood draining from his face. There was nothing you could do to control that sort of reaction.

‘You swear you haven't seen this letter before?'

‘Never. How could I have done?'

Suddenly aware of the bee's frantic buzzing in the confines of the small room, he levered himself up from his chair and cupped his hand carefully around it, guiding it to the open pane where it flew off, released. Feeling a reaction out of all proportion to the effort, he sat down heavily. ‘What has all this to do with my son?'

‘Well, I think Peter discovered the letter when he was poking about among the furniture at Leysmorton, going through the drawers where some of Clare's work was stored – maybe he was even looking for it, or something like it, that would provide him with the means he wanted to exert pressure on someone. Maybe he just came across it accidentally and put two and two together. Or maybe he already suspected your reasons for coming to live in this part of the world – for one thing, to be near Leysmorton where your mother had grown up. But let's be frank. I think it's more probable you were in it together, that you'd told him about the fortune that was waiting to be claimed – your mother's, his grandmother's share of the Vavasour inheritance. Even though you were illegitimate, there were grounds for thinking there might be a moral if not a legal claim. On Lady Fitzallan, whose heir at present is Dirk Stronglove.'

Silence once more, while Edmund searched for what he could possibly say.

‘No,' he said at last. ‘It wasn't like that, not at all. I grew up knowing nothing of any inheritance. My mother would never speak about her family, who they were, whether they were rich or poor. I didn't even know what her maiden name was. Before I came here, I had never heard of Leysmorton House and the Vavasours, and how wealthy they were reputed to be.'

‘And when you did it was like a fairy tale come true? Oh, I know coincidences do happen, Mr Sholto, but I don't believe in ones as large as this.'

‘You may believe what you like, Inspector,' Edmund said wearily. ‘I'm telling you the truth – which is precisely what I told you before, about why I came here. I'll admit that this part of the world drew me because I had somehow picked up that it was around here my mother had been brought up, but I had no idea where. And the only coincidence is that I came to this village by having met Hugh Markham, through my bookshop.'

‘That really won't do, Mr Sholto,' Novak said mildly.

‘Then I don't know what else to say.'

‘I think there's a lot more you could tell us.'

For a long time, Edmund sat without speaking. Novak, arms folded across his chest, waited. The room was heavy with the heat of the day and Willard ran a hand round the side of his collar. At last, his shoulders sagging, Edmund spoke. ‘Very well.'

He made himself sit very still for a moment or two longer, then he stood up and walked across to the drawer where he'd asked Willard to drop the snapshots, and from it he removed a pencil sketch, framed in gilt, handling it almost reverently. ‘I have never spoken to a soul about this before, I swore I never would, but . . .' He held out the sketch.

Novak looked at it with interest before passing it over to Willard.

Willard said, ‘This is Lady Fitzallan as a girl, isn't it – and her sister?'

‘It was the only thing my mother had kept of her previous life; it always hung on the wall of her bedroom. It was her most cherished possession. I hung it on the wall when I came here until Hugh Markham saw it one day. I noticed that for some reason the sight of it had quite upset him, though he denied that it had. When I later learnt there was another drawing like this of the two girls, I thought it best to remove it.' He stopped, overcome with the effort, but then he pulled himself together and went on, gesturing towards the letter Novak still held. ‘So my father was this Christian – Gautier, you say? From Grenoble?'

Novak repeated what he had already said to Emily Fitzallan. ‘The chances of you finding him are slim, non-existent, I'd say.'

‘Finding him? Oh, but I haven't the least desire to do that. Ethan Sholto was the only father I ever knew. I loved him and respect his memory more than ever I could respect anyone who deserted my mother as this man appears to have done.'

‘You'd better tell us the rest.'

‘Yes, I had,' he replied, after a moment's further debate with himself. ‘Then maybe you'll see what I mean.'

Once launched, he found no difficulty in speaking freely. In fact it seemed to be a release, much like the cessation of pain after a carbuncle had been lanced, or a rotten tooth drawn.

In the oddly assorted marriage of his parents, it had often seemed to him as though the man he called father, though only fifteen years older than his mother, was more like his grandfather. A short, dark and dour Cornish tin miner from St Just, a widower who had married his mother when Edmund was seven years old, Ethan Sholto had nevertheless been a significant presence in Edmund's life, although it wasn't until after his death that he realized just how much he had loved him. When he was young, he had thought him hard as the ore he mined, and maybe he was, in a way. That was what had got him part-ownership of the mine.

‘He was a wealthy man then?'

‘Comfortable, no more. It was only a small concern. But he died suddenly, without making a will – like many more, he thought there was still plenty of time to do that – and everything went to my stepbrothers, the children of his previous marriage. Which was fair enough by me. He had put me through college and by then I was married, working as a schoolmaster and earning my own living.'

‘How did your mother come to choose Cornwall as a place to live?'

‘I don't know. She never spoke about her past life, but she knew several of the artists painting down there at that time, so I suppose that's why she went to live among them. They had a fairly free and easy lifestyle, not judgemental. A woman with a baby and no husband wouldn't be condemned by them, and if they'd known anything about her previous life, they never said so to me. She met my father, Ethan Sholto, and he braved local opinion to marry her. I always called him my father, I always shall. Not this unknown man who fathered me.'

No one said anything for a while, until Novak said, gesturing towards the framed sketch, ‘Tell us how you learnt about the other drawing of your mother.'

‘It was Peter who found it. He came across it at Leysmorton one day just before the war, and borrowed it to show me. He was full of excitement, saying he had found his grandmother. When I saw it I was stunned, because there was really no question about it. One of the girls was undoubtedly Clare, my mother. The pictures were a companion pair, and I had the other.' His eyes closed, momentarily reliving that moment of shock. ‘That, I'm afraid, was when Peter started talking about making a claim on Lady Fitzallan. He wouldn't listen, even though I told him categorically that I would have nothing to do with anything like that.'

Novak regarded him steadily. ‘Not for yourself, maybe,' he said, ‘but it would have been a different proposition, surely, if you were thinking of your son's future? Are you sure you didn't in fact encourage him to go ahead? It would have been only natural if you had.'

‘Except that I did not,' Edmund said shortly. He said nothing more for some time, weighing up whether he had not already said too much. At last he said, ‘Besides, there was something else, something Peter didn't know.'

‘Go on, Mr Sholto.'

He looked at the photograph on the mantel.
Forgive me, Morwenna
. When he could, he said, ‘He was determined to go ahead, with or without me. But what he didn't know was that he had no claim without me. He was not Lady Fitzallan's grandson. He was in fact in no way related to the Vavasours. Peter was not my son.'

Silence.

‘My wife and I could not have children, but then her brother died in a fishing boat accident, and his wife, Peter's mother, lost her will to live and threw herself from the cliffs into the sea. It was the natural thing for us to take the child and bring him up as our own.'

‘That's a tragic story.'

‘Too tragic, we decided, ever to tell him – which I see now was a mistake, but . . . hindsight is a wonderful thing. He was only three years old, and he very soon forgot his parents, and never questioned the fact that we were not his true mother and father. Then Morwenna, my wife, died. Peter was growing up, it was a small community we lived in, and I began to be afraid he would sooner or later hear talk, that he would never forgive me if he learned I had kept the truth of his birth from him. I see now it was a monstrous thing to do. If Morwenna had lived, she would have known what to do, but I . . . As it was, I decided to move. Peter never knew he wasn't my son.'

‘And you couldn't bring yourself to tell him, even in the light of your own upbringing, when he began to talk of those false claims?'

‘My circumstances were entirely different. Ethan Sholto never pretended to be my real father – and there was my mother to consider. There had to have been a strong reason why she had suffered poverty by cutting herself off from her family. She had been at pains not to let them know about me, nor me about them, and nothing would have made me go against her wishes – even if I'd had the slightest inclination to involve myself in a sordid, long-drawn-out and expensive lawsuit. But Peter wouldn't listen. It became an obsession with him. He even had some foolish notion of going out to Madeira and appealing to Lady Fitzallan, though in view of the difficulties – the war had just begun, for one thing – I couldn't imagine how he envisaged getting there.'

But Peter had known how. And as soon as Edmund had opened the laburnum box and seen those banknotes stashed there, he had surely known what they were for. He said sadly, ‘As the boy saw it, she had unfairly come into what should have been my mother's share of their inheritance along with her own, and had a moral duty to put things right.'