The Lake House (17 page)

“You can smell the tide rising, can't you?” Bertie said.

“And here I was blaming the dogs.”

Bertie laughed and made a judicious snip to the stem of a small flowering tree.

Sadie sat on the seat beside him, propping her feet on the steel rim of a watering can. Her grandfather had green fingers, no doubt about that. Aside from the small paved square in the centre of the garden, the rest was given over to flowers and foliage that tumbled together like sea foam.

Amid the ordered disorder, a cluster of small blue flowers with yellow starlike centres caught her eye. “Chatham Island forget-me-nots,” she said, remembering suddenly the garden he and Ruth had created in the courtyard behind their place in London. “I always liked them.” He'd kept them in terracotta pots back then, hung on the brick walls; amazing what he'd been able to do with nine square metres and an hour of full sun each day. She'd used to sit with him and Ruth in the evenings after the shop was closed; not at first, but later, when she'd been there a few months and the due date was drawing near. Ruth with her steaming cup of Earl Grey and her kind eyes, her infinite goodness:
Whatever you decide, Sadie, love, we'll support you
.

Sadie was surprised by a fresh surge of grief. Shocking the way it could creep up on her even now, a year later. How deeply she missed her grandmother; what she'd have given to have her here today, warm and familiar, seemingly eternal. No, not here. To have Ruth back and for Bertie never to have left their London home. It seemed like all the important decisions had been made in that small, walled garden with its pots and hanging baskets, so different from this open, sunlit place. She felt a deep, sudden resistance to change well up inside her, a childish swirl of petulant rage she swallowed like a bitter pill. “Must be nice to have more garden room,” she said with brittle brightness.

Bertie smiled at her in agreement, and then gestured towards a tatty folder of papers beneath two used teacups with what looked like sludgy grass clippings in the bottom. “You just missed Louise. Those are for you. Not much help with the case, but she thought you might like to see them anyway.”

Louise. Sadie bristled before reminding herself that the other woman was a perfectly genial human being who had just done her a favour. She glanced through the pile. They were newspapers of a sort, amateurish, each a single sheet with a masthead reading
The Loeanneth Gazette
, written in Old English font and embellished with a pen-and-ink sketch of the house and its lake. The pages were blotched and discoloured, and a couple of silverfish made bids for freedom as she turned them. The paper smelled of mildew and neglect; the headlines, however, still sparked with life, trumpeting such news as:
new arrival: baby boy at last!
;
interview with mr llewellyn, author extraordinaire!
;
rare sighting: short-tailed blue spotted in loeanneth garden!
Each article was accompanied by an illustration credited to Clementine, Deborah or Alice Edevane, but the by-lines belonged without exception to Alice.

Sadie's gaze lingered on the name and she experienced the same tightening knot of connection she felt each time one of the
a-l-i-c-e
engravings revealed itself at Loeanneth. “Where did they come from?” she asked.

“One of Louise's patients at the hospital had an aunt who was a housemaid at the lake house
.
She stopped working for the Edevanes back in the thirties when the family left Cornwall but these must've got mixed up with her other possessions. There was a printing press in the schoolroom, apparently, up in the attic near the maids' accommodation. The children of the house used to play with it.”

“Listen to this . . .” Sadie held the paper out of the glare and read aloud: “
interview with a gross deporter: the accused speaks!
Today we publish an exclusive interview with Clementine Edevane, who stands accused by The Mother of ‘gross deportment' after a recent incident in which she offended Nanny Rose. ‘But she did look fat,
' the accused was heard to shout from behind the gaol of her closed bedroom door. ‘I was only being truthful!' Truth or travesty? You, dear reader, be the judge. Story by Alice Edevane, investigative reporter.”

“Alice Edevane,” Bertie said. “She's the one who owns the house.”

Sadie nodded. “Also known as A.C. Edevane, crime writer extraordinaire. I wish she'd write back to my letters.”

“It hasn't been a week yet.”

“So?” said Sadie, who didn't count patience among her virtues. “Four perfectly good days of postal service.”

“Your faith in the Royal Mail is touching.”

To be honest, Sadie had presumed Alice Edevane would be thrilled to hear from her. A bona fide police detective willing to reopen, if only unofficially, the case of her brother's disappearance? She'd expected to hear back by return post. Even if, as Bertie said, the postal service were was less than perfect, she should have heard by now.

“People can be funny about the past,” said Bertie, running his fingers lightly along a fine stem. “Especially after something painful.”

His tone remained even, his focus on the tree didn't falter, yet within his words Sadie felt the heat of an unasked question. He couldn't possibly know about Charlotte Sutherland and the letter that had brought the whole awful business back into the present. A gull cawed, slicing through the sky above them, and for a split second Sadie considered telling him about the girl with the clear, confident handwriting and clever turn of phrase.

But it would be a stupid thing to do, especially when she'd just got rid of the letter. He'd want to talk things over and there'd be no forgetting the whole thing then, and so, instead, she said, “The newspaper report finally arrived,” pulling her research from the backpack, making a small stack on her lap of library books, archive folders and the writing pad she'd picked up at WHSmith. “There were some photos I hadn't seen, but nothing particularly useful.”

She thought she heard him sigh, sensing perhaps the unspoken confidence, and was beset by a sudden sliver of awareness that he was the only person in the world she loved, that if she lost him she'd be all alone. “So,” he said, knowing better than to push, “we're pretty sure he was taken, but we're no closer to knowing how or by whom.”

“Right.”

“Any theories as to why?”

“Well, I think we can rule out opportunistic predators. There was a party going on, and the house is well off the beaten track. Not the sort of place a person just happens upon.”

“Unless they're chasing a dog, of course.”

Sadie returned his smile. “Which leaves two possibilities. He was taken because someone wanted money, or because they wanted a child for themselves.”

“But there was no ransom note?”

“Not according to Pickering, but police don't always make these things public. It's on the list for Clive Robinson.”

“You've heard from him?”

“No, but he was due back yesterday, so fingers crossed.”

Bertie pruned another stem from his tree. “Let's say it wasn't about money.”

“Then it was about the boy. And this boy in particular. It doesn't make sense that someone who simply wanted a child would choose the son of a wealthy, upper-class family with all possible resources at their fingertips to find him.”

“It would seem a foolish choice,” Bertie agreed. “There must've been easier pickings.”

“Which means whoever took Theo Edevane wanted him because of who he was. But why?” Sadie jittered her pen on the writing pad. It was cheap paper, thin to the point of near-translucence, and sunlight picked out the imprints from the last letter she'd written. She sighed. “It's no use. Until I get more information—hear back from Alice Edevane, speak to Clive Robinson, get a better feel for the people involved and find out who had means, motive and opportunity—it's all just guesswork.”

There was a new sense of frustration in her voice and Bertie noticed. “You're really intent on solving it, aren't you?”

“I don't like loose ends.”

“It's been a long time. Most of the people who might have missed that little boy are long gone.”

“That's not the point. He was taken; it isn't right; his family deserve to know what happened to him. Here . . .” She held out the newspaper. “Look at his mother, look at her face. She created him, named him, loved him. He was her child and she lived the whole rest of her life without him, never knowing what happened; what he grew up to be, whether he was happy Never being certain if he was alive or dead.”

Bertie hardly glanced at the paper, fixing Sadie instead with a look of kind perplexity. “Sadie, love—”

“It's a puzzle,” she went on quickly, aware that she was sounding strident but unable to rein it in. “You know me, you know I can't let them go unsolved. How on earth was a child removed from a house filled with people? There's something I'm not seeing. Doors, windows, a ladder like in the Lindbergh kidnapping?”

“Sadie, this holiday of yours—”

Ash barked suddenly and both dogs scrambled to their feet, racing to the rock wall on the side of the garden that bordered the lane.

Sadie heard it too, then, a small motorbike approaching the cottage and stopping. There was a squeak and a soft thud as the letterbox on the front door opened and a clutch of letters dropped through onto the mat. “Post,” she said.

“I'll go.” Bertie set down his pruning shears and dusted his hands on his gardening apron. He gave Sadie a light, thoughtful frown before ducking his head and disappearing through the door into the kitchen.

Sadie waited until he was gone before letting her smile collapse. Her face ached. It was getting harder to hold off Bertie's questions. She hated lying to him, it made fools of both of them, but she couldn't bear for him to know she'd messed up so prodigiously at work. What she'd done, going to the press, was embarrassing, shameful even. Worse, he'd be bound to ask
why
she'd behaved so wildly out of character. Which brought them back to Charlotte Sutherland and her letter. She couldn't tell him about that. She didn't think she'd be able to stand seeing his kind face contorting in sympathy as he listened. She had a terrible fear that to speak about it would make it real somehow and she'd be back there, trapped inside the body of her panicked, powerless younger self, cowering before the giant wave that was coming for her. She wasn't that girl anymore. She refused to be.

So why was she acting like it? Sadie frowned. That's exactly what she was doing, wasn't it? Letting Donald call all the shots while she languished indefinitely in limbo, waiting to be invited back to a job at which she excelled. At which she'd worked damn hard to succeed. She'd faced down countless adversities to rise in the ranks; why was she behaving so meekly now, hiding out beside the flat summery sea behind a case with a trail that had gone cold seventy years before?

On a whim, Sadie took her mobile from her pocket. She jostled it lightly back and forth between her hands for a few seconds, and then, with a decisive sigh, went over to the furthermost point of the garden. She climbed up onto the rock wall and leaned as far as she could away from the house until a single bar of connectivity showed up on her screen. She dialled Donald's number and waited, muttering beneath her breath, “Come on, come on . . .”

The phone went straight to voicemail and Sadie cursed into the breeze. Rather than hang up and try again, she listened to Donald's curt message and then left her own. “Yeah, Donald, look, it's Sadie. Just to let you know, I'm coming up to London. I've sorted things my end and I'm ready to get back to work, Monday week. It'd be great to catch up beforehand. You know, show you my holiday snaps . . .” The small joke fell flat even to her own ears, and she pressed on. “Anyway, let me know when and where suits. Sometime next week?” She left it at that, statement as question; it made it seem like she was giving him a choice. And then she ended the call.

There. Sadie heaved a purposeful sigh. It was done. Now, when Bertie asked her about her plans she'd be able to give him some proper answers: after a short, pleasant trip to Cornwall, she'd be returning to London next week.

She tucked the phone back into her pocket and returned to her seat near Bertie's tree, waiting for the onset of welcome peace of mind. But her mind was far from peaceful. Now that she'd done it, her thoughts comprised a list of things she should have done differently. She should have been more specific as to place and time. She should have been gentler, more apologetic, made it seem like it was his idea.

Sadie remembered now his threat to go to Ashford if she didn't follow his instructions to the letter. Donald was her partner, though; he was a reasonable man. He'd had her best interests at heart when he forced her to take leave and she'd learned her lesson, she wouldn't be leaking to journalists in the future; but the Bailey case was closed now, it had all but disappeared from the papers, no real harm had been done. (So long as she didn't take Nancy Bailey into account. Sadie winced as she pictured the look on the woman's face when she'd told her the investigation was over. “But I thought you believed me, that my girl never would've left like that. I thought you were going to find her?”)

Pushing Nancy Bailey from her mind (
Don't even think about making contact with the grandmother
), Sadie told herself she'd done the right thing and concentrated on believing it.

The new map of the Loeanneth estate was still on her lap and she forced her attention back to it, a resolute attempt at diversion. It was much older than the one Alastair had given her earlier—1664, according to the title at the top—drawn back when the Lake House had still been a smaller adjunct to the large manor on the property. Despite some antiquated spelling and a font that rendered certain words illegible, the layout was nonetheless instantly recognisable to Sadie, who'd spent the past week studying the floorplan in the hope she could somehow intuit the path taken by Theo's abductor that night. The rooms and spaces were all where they should be.