Memory and Desire (21 page)

Allowing herself a smile of her own, Claire sat down and turned on the light. She reached for the needle she was using to baste a fresh piece of canvas to the back of a tear. There. Two corners secure. She started making microscopic stitches between them.

The one good thing about her own personal threatening letter was how it had re-opened her dialog with Richard. In the past week they'd eased their way from allies to friends. She tidied up the Lodge while he watched in bemusement. He teased her that she was only hanging around so she could use his computer. They sat side by side watching videos, pretending they weren't breathing heavily during the sex scenes in
Shakespeare in Love.

But every time the friendship—promised? threatened?—to catch fire, a chill draft of the unresolved past, the mysterious present, the doubtful future, damped it down. The last week or so might be a prologue. Eventually she and Richard might be able to write a play of their own. And yet it could just as easily turn out to be tragedy or farce as romance.

As for the rest of the cast and crew, the townspeople and those volunteers who'd been in Somerstowe last year had gone one by one to the empty shop where Blake now had his command post. They'd emerged looking like students released from detention, and hurried to the pub for liquid reassurance and spin control—it being better to volunteer some sort of explanation for getting blackmail letters than to let the village grapevine invent one.

After his interview Alec had methodically downed a pint of beer. Only then had he insisted that his letter “was only a bit of mischief, like knocking off the bobby's hat and legging it down the street.” This said to his glass, followed by, “Of course you had to be giving the envelope to Blake, Claire. You thought it was a clue, didn't you?” Which had only made her feel worse about ratting on him.

She could see the scene in the interview room, Pakenham sneering, Blake stern, Alec sitting there if not with blood on his hands at least with egg on his face. Richard had confessed his secret, she told herself. Why not Alec? Claire couldn't see him killing the deer whose antlers hung above his mantel, let alone Melinda, and yet he was hiding something that must give him a good motive. Could even Alec be driven to murder, if threatened?

Rob had glared belligerently at everyone. “Think I've been cooking the books, do they? I told them get on with it, bring in the Inland Revenue, everything's shipshape and Bristol fashion, it is, down to the last penny. Alec, are you needing a receipt for that beer? Elliot, are you wanting an accounting for each sandwich I send up to rehearsal? It's getting so's a man can't run his business without some ponce of a government official asking who paid what to who and when and for what."

The blackmailer must've been accusing Rob of skimping on his taxes or selling duty-free liquor. She wasn't about to ask. Elliot might shadow box, but Rob came out throwing hard punches straight to the stomach.

Diana had flounced in after her interview. “Bloody rozzers, always digging dirt, aren't they? They make it out to be me own fault I had a bit of an intrigue when I was a lass. Well what pretty girl didn't? Had the boys round me like paparazzi round a princess, I did. So what if one of them had a rich father, filthy rich and a title too.” She tapped her finger against her nose, hinting that everyone would recognize the name. “So he gave me a bit of a consideration, like, to bugger off and forget the lad so's he could have himself a posh wedding to some kiss-me-hand society bird."

She was more irritated with the police than with the anonymous letter-writer, thought Claire. Diana's secret wouldn't cause much of a scandal, not in this day and time. Although if she'd signed some sort of formal agreement, publicizing the story could get her into legal hot water—and that would hardly sit well with Rob.

Elliot had been eager to talk, explaining that he was being blackmailed for an indiscretion with a famous rock star's wife. “She craved a gentleman, don't you know. That great hairy baboon of a husband just wasn't adequate. Unfortunately the baboon's entourage includes several yobbos with spiky hair and hobnailed boots. I preferred his not sending them to belabor the point, if you know what I mean, so I dutifully paid out."

His story was plausible. Just. So was Richard's own story about some academic scandal in his parents’ past, which was true up to a point. Was anyone else being any more candid—to each other, at least—than he was? She stabbed her finger. “Ouch!"

Kate jumped.

“Stuck myself,” Claire told her. “No problem, it's not even bleeding."

Since Susan's realization she'd seen Melinda instead of Elizabeth the night of the murder, she'd inundated anyone who'd listen with detail after detail, trying to find something else helpful. She seemed miffed she hadn't gotten any blackmail letters.

Fred and Janet, though, had both had letters last year. After her interview Janet had demanded lemonade with ice and muttered, “Hey, I came clean about it, okay? So my brother got into trouble with the law back home. It's nobody's business except mine and Fred's. He served his time, he's out now, in a rehab program, everything's okay. I swear, the cops get hung up on totally insignificant details when they could be out catching murderers."

Fred had eyed Janet, his jowls drooping as though contemplating the horrors of crime without punishment. “That's what they're trying to do, catch a murderer. Not that I have anything to do with that or blackmail or anything. So some jerk decides to accuse me taking stuff from the Hall. I wasn't even inside the Hall, most days, to take anything. What'd they think I was doing, selling wheelbarrows and trowels on the tool black market? Sheesh."

Even Trevor Digby had received a letter. “Suggesting that several members of my flock are laboring beneath the burden of sin,” he'd explained. “Which is the equivalent of telling me the sun rises in the east. I'd have no work at all if everyone were a saint, now would I? I assumed the letter was meant to stir up trouble and threw it away, never thought for a moment of paying up."

Claire had never thought the Digbys were serious suspects. They always had a prayer vigil on one of the shortest nights of the year, it turned out. And after The Play, with its tragedy of sexual and religious prejudice, a little positive prayer probably went a long way.

She worked her needle behind the stitches she'd already done, securing the end of the thread. There. The stitches were nice and neat. Like her notes on the case, which were starting to look like the old card file in the library. She'd done everything but assign accession numbers to the suspects. Any conclusions she'd reached, though, had been about herself.

Until now her life had been pretty much organized, alphabetized, and properly spelled. Richard had described his prior relationship as “intense.” Claire's had been bland and bloodless. Steve had wanted things to stay that way. No wonder he'd never been comfortable around Melinda, Claire's alter ego. No wonder Melinda's death had turned Claire's temblor of discontent into an earthquake.

Melinda's life had been measured on the Richter scale. Everyone in Somerstowe had been rocked by her seismic wave. She hadn't intended to bring down someone's house, but she had. That someone had struck back. And now that same someone was out to get Claire. For revenge for re-opening the case? Or did someone else besides Richard think she knew what Melinda had known?

Claire mopped at her forehead. Her brain was leaking. She was drowning in the scent of mothballs, which overwhelmed the not unpleasant odors of potpourri and rush. The Hall was even more silent than usual, the thick walls absorbing noise. The punk-punk-punk of her needle punching through canvas sounded like distant cannon. Across the canvas Kate moved like a robot, hardly blinking.

Claire cut the basting thread and reached for some fine green wool. Adjusting the lamp, she carefully repeated two stitches in the leaf at the edge of the tear and then stitched in the same style across the new piece of canvas. If it weren't for the chart she was filling in, no one would notice where the original stitches ended and hers began. Just as no one noticed where Phillip Lacey's text stopped and Julian and Dierdre's began.

The Play might be Richard's secret, but unless everyone in Somerstowe was lying it wasn't anyone else's. And she sure hoped everyone wasn't lying. Things were complicated enough.

Kate looked around. Blake, shadowed by Pakenham, walked in the door. “How are you getting on?” Blake asked.

“No one's gotten me yet, thanks to PC Shelton,” Claire replied.

“That's WPC. Woman police constable. No women's lib here,” corrected Pakenham, with a gesture dismissive of uppity women from Margaret Sanger to Margaret Thatcher.

Kate swept a box of pins onto Pakenham's feet. “Oops. Sorry, Sir."

Cursing, he bent over and started fishing pins out of his cuffs.

Blake's moustache crimped a bit. “My lads have located the typewriter that did the blackmail notes. An old manual in the vestry of the church. Digby's not used it since he bought a word processor. It had a new ribbon in it. The paper and envelopes came from supplies stored in a cupboard there."

“In the church,” Claire repeated. “Where anyone could get it."

“Lacey had three letters last year and the two this year,” said Pakenham, his voice muffled by his crouch. “No one else had more than two last year and none at all this—ow, sod it! Lacey's the only one saved his letters, more's the pity. Miss Varek's fingerprints were on the first one, but on none of the others or their envelopes. We couldn't test that first envelope, he says he lost it."

Melinda's fingerprints. No surprise there. Claire sewed another stitch. “And Alec's envelope?"

“None of the other letters had good enough prints to be going on with,” Blake said. “So far as we can tell, Lacey's first letter is the only one of the lot that didn't demand a pay-off."

Claire had at last seen a copy of the famous letter. She'd memorized it the way she'd memorized lines from The Play—and the letter had a much better chance of producing a clue. “Mr. Lacey, you think you have everything under control. Are you sure? Are you entirely confident in your own willpower, to paraphrase a line in The Play? But then, there's a secret behind The Play, isn't there? What would happen to you, Mr. Stone, if it got out?"

So far Claire had avoided discussing the letter with Richard—that would've come a little too close to picking at a scab. Not that she needed his help to read between the lines.

“Willpower” referred to a scene in Act One when Cecil, speaking bitterly about the woman he had, Lettice, and the woman he wanted, Elizabeth, quoted the Roman poet Terence. “I know the disposition of women: when you will, they won't; when you won't, they set their hearts upon you of their own inclination.” Which pretty well summed up Melinda's feelings toward Richard.

“Mr. Stone,” wasn't much of a puzzle either. Claire had the answer beneath her hands at this very moment—the story of Venus and Adonis, the hopeless pursuit of a handsome, self-centered man by a beautiful woman. As Shakespeare had Venus say scathingly to her quarry, “Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel, nay more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth...” Heck, Claire herself had used the rain-on-stone image about Richard that afternoon at the Digby's house.

Melinda had picked up a taste for word games and literary quotes from Claire, using them to prove she didn't come from the wrong side of the tracks. Maybe the police had had to find her actual fingerprints, but Claire knew who'd sent that letter the moment she read it. The other ones, though, weren't written in the same style.

She stuck the needle into her pincushion. “Richard's first letter was the only one Melinda sent. As a joke. She didn't need an accomplice to tease Richard about their, well, lack of a relationship. It was someone else, some opportunist, who read that first letter, took the envelope as a sample, and sent the rest."

“Which means her murder wasn't a falling-out among thieves. So to speak,” Kate added, with an apologetic glance at Claire.

“I expect you're right,” Blake went on. “When you arrived in Somerstowe that same opportunist started up again, with Lacey at the least."

Pakenham stood up and set the box of pins on the windowsill, out of Kate's reach. “Pity everyone was too timid to hand in their letters last year."

“Pity you didn't find the letter beneath the carpet of the flat last year,” Blake commented.

“Needed our village bobby with his ESP fiddle, didn't I?” retorted Pakenham. “Your letter last week, Claire, was very like that one, done quickly just after I found the body. Both had the same motive: to send off a tiresome outsider."

“I don't know what Melinda knew,” insisted Claire. “If anything."

“Perception can be more important than fact,” Blake said. “Like Lacey, the murderer thought Miss Varek was the blackmailer. The murder was a case of mistaken identity. The threat to you, however, is not at all mistaken."

Was it better for Melinda to have died by mistake? Claire picked up a loose pin and thought of the punctured snapshot.
No, it wasn't.
“So there are two people writing anonymous letters?"

“The murderer got the idea from the blackmailer. Plain as a pikestaff,” said Pakenham.

Blake went on, “Mrs. Nair says that the lock to her—your—flat's not been changed for donkey's years. Anyone could have copied the key."

“Someone knows something,” Pakenham said. “Everyone in a small town knows everyone else's business. If I keep at them long enough, they'll talk."

“Not necessarily. It was an outsider who died here,” Blake told him. “It was an outsider who brought the matter to a head. The villagers may well have closed ranks. As for The Play, well—you can't ask right out, ‘Do you know The Play is a fake?’ You can't lead your witness."

“Supposedly none of the other letters referenced The Play, just an assortment of grotty little secrets,” Pakenham said. “Think—the shopkeepers are outsiders. They've not received any letters and yet the post goes through their hands. Have they been opening letters, reading them, re-sealing them, and using what they learned to run a tidy little blackmail ring?"