The Scold's Bridle (34 page)

"It wasn't until ten years later when my husband and I met James in Hong Kong and he told us the truth about Joanna's parentage that it made sense." She sighed. "Not that I've ever really understood exactly what happened because, of course, child abuse and incest were kept under wraps in those days. James believed she encouraged Gerald, but I never did. It's the one area where I always felt sorry for her. She was emotionally crippled by it, I think."

"So you've known for a long time that Mrs. Lascelles wasn't James Gillespie's daughter?"

"Yes."

"Did Mrs. Gillespie know you knew?"

"Oh, yes."

"Didn't that worry her?"

"She knew I wouldn't tell anyone."

"How could she know?"

"She just did," said Jane flatly.

Without warning, as the back door closed behind him, Jack's huge hand circled Joanna's throat and drove her through the kitchen and into the hall. "Didn't what happened to Mathilda teach you anything, you silly bitch?" he said in a savage undertone.

Cooper took out a cigarette, remembered where he was and put it back again. "Was it you who was friendly with Mr. Gillespie, or your husband?" he asked Jane.

"Paul and he went through the war together, but I'd known him a long time as well."

"Why did it shock you so much to see him coming out of Cedar House that day?"

"I'd always hoped he was dead." She sighed. "I know you've seen him. Sarah told me. Did he tell you anything?"

"About what, Mrs. Marriott?"

She gave a tired smile. "You'd know if he'd told you, Sergeant."

"Then I don't think he can have done," he said honestly. "But you're obviously afraid he will, so wouldn't it be better coming from you? I presume it's something that only you, he and Mathilda were privy to. You were confident she wouldn't say anything because you could reveal the truth about Joanna's father, but he's a different matter. You have no hold over him, which is why you were so shocked to see him back in England and why you went to see Mathilda, to find out if he was going to spill the beans. Am I right?"

Joanna showed only the slightest flicker of alarm before she relaxed against the wall and stared into his eyes with a look of triumph. "I knew you'd come back."

He didn't say anything, just searched her beautiful face and marvelled again at its absolute perfection. It was the face of the Madonna in Michelangelo's Pieta, the face of a mother gazing down in quiet contemplation on the body of her adored son, a study of such simple purity that it had brought tears to his eyes when he first saw it. For years, he had wondered about the woman behind the Madonna. Was she real? Or was she something fabulous that Michelangelo had conjured from his own imagination? Until Joanna, he had believed she must have existed in the eye of her creator because only an artist could have made a thing of such immeasurable beauty. Now he held it beneath his hand and knew that its conception had been as random and as accidental as his own. He closed his eyes to stem the tears that threatened to well again.

Jane nodded unhappily. "James blackmailed me for five years after we returned home from Hong Kong. In the end, I paid him over ten thousand pounds, which was all the money my mother left me." Her voice shook. "He stopped when I sent him copies of my bank statement which showed I had nothing more to give him, but he warned me he'd come back." She was silent for a moment, striving for control. "I never saw or heard from him again until that awful day when he came out of Cedar House."

Cooper studied her bent head with compassion. He could only assume she'd had an affair that James and Mathilda Gillespie had found out about, but why was it so hard to confess to all these years on? "Everyone has skeletons somewhere in their closet, Mrs. Marriott. Mine still bring a blush to my cheeks when I think about them. But do you really think your husband would hold yours against you after thirty-odd years?"

"Oh, yes," she said honestly. "Paul always wanted children, you see, and I could never give him any."

Cooper waited for her to go on but, when she didn't, he prompted her gently: "What do children have to do with it?"

"Paul had an affair with Mathilda and Mathilda got pregnant. That's why James went to Hong Kong. He said it was the last straw, that he might have coped with Gerald's incestuous bastard but not with Paul's love child as well."

Cooper was very taken aback. "And that's what James was blackmailing you over?" But no, he thought, that didn't make sense. It was the adulterous husband who paid the blackmailer not the deceived wife.

"Not about the affair," said Jane. "I knew all about that. Paul told me himself after he resigned. He was Sir William's agent and used to stay with James and Mathilda in their flat in London whenever he had business in town. I don't think the affair was anything more than a brief infatuation on both their parts. She was bored with the tedious domestic routine of washing nappies and keeping house and he..." she sighed, "he was flattered by the attention. You really must try to understand how captivating Mathilda could be, and it wasn't just beauty, you know. There was something about her that drew men like magnets. I think it was the remoteness, the dislike of being touched. They saw it as a challenge, so when she let her guard down for Paul, he fell for it." She gave a sad little smile. "And I understood that, believe me. It may sound odd to you but there was a time-when we were young-when I was almost as in love with her as he was. She was everything I always wanted to be and never was." Her eyes filled. "Well, you know how attractive she could be. Sarah fell in love with her, just the way I did."

"Show me how much you love me, Jack." Joanna's voice, soft and husky, was a lover's caress.

Gently his fingers smoothed the white column of her throat. How could someone so ugly be
so
beautiful? She made a mockery of the wonder of creation. He raised his other hand to the silver-gold hair and, with a violent twist, wrapped the strands around his palm and jerked her head backwards with his fingers still clamped about her throat. "I love you this much," he said quietly.

"You're hurting me." This time her voice rose in alarm.

He tightened his grip on her hair. "But I enjoy hurting you, Joanna." His voice echoed through the emptiness of the hall.

"I don't understand," she cried out, her voice rasping against his fingers on her larynx. "What do you want?"

She saw something in his eyes that brought the fear leaping into hers. "Oh, my God. It was you who killed my mother." She opened her mouth to scream but only a thread of sound came out as the pressure on her throat tightened.

"I'm sorry if I'm being particularly slow on the uptake," said Cooper apologetically, "but I don't quite see what hold James Gillespie could have had over you that would prompt you to pay him ten thousand pounds. If you already knew about the affair from your husband-" he broke off. "It was something to do with the pregnancy, presumably. Did you not know about that?"

She compressed her lips in an effort to hold back tears. "Yes, I did. It was Paul who never knew." She drew another deep sigh. "It's so awful. I've kept it secret for so long. I wanted to tell him but there was never a good time. Rather like the lie I told your constable. At what point do you come clean, as it were?" She touched her fingers to her lips in a gesture of despair. "Being a father. It was all he ever wanted. I prayed and prayed that we would have children of our own, but of course we never did..." She tailed off into silence.

Cooper put a large, comforting hand over hers. He was completely at sea here, but was reluctant to press too hard in case she clammed up on him. "How did you know about the pregnancy if your husband didn't?"

"Mathilda told me. She rang me and asked me to go to London, said if I didn't she'd make sure the whole of Fontwell knew about her and Paul. He'd written her some letters and she said she'd make them public if I didn't do what she wanted."

"What did she want?"

It was some moments before she could speak. "She wanted me to help her murder the baby when it came."

"Good God!" said Cooper with feeling. And she must have done it, he thought, or James Gillespie would never have been able to blackmail her.

There was the sound of footsteps on the gravel outside and a ring on the doorbell. "Joanna!" called Violet's high-pitched, nervous voice. "Joanna! Are you all right. dear? I thought I
heard
something." When she received no answer, she called again: "Is someone with you? Do answer, please." Her voice rose even higher. "Duncan! Duncan!" she called. "There
is
something wrong. I know there is. You must call the police. I'm going to get help." Her footsteps skittered away as she ran towards the gate.

Jack stared down into Joanna's drawn and haunted face, then lowered her with surprising gentleness on to the nearest chair. "You don't deserve it, but you were luckier than your mother," was all he said, before walking off towards the kitchen and the back door.

Joanna Lascelles was still screaming when Duncan Orloff, in a state of complete panic, used a sledgehammer to break open the front door and confront whatever awaited him in the hall of Cedar House.

"And did you help her?" Cooper asked with a calm that belied his true feelings.

She looked wretched. "I don't know-I don't know what she did-I can only guess." She wrung her hands in distress. "She didn't say anything in so many words. She just asked me to steal some sleeping pills-barbiturates-from my father's dispensary. She said they were for her because she couldn't sleep. I hoped-I thought -she was going to kill herself-and I was glad. I hated her by that time."

"So you got her the pills?"

"Yes."

"But she didn't kill herself."

"No."

"But you said she wanted you to help her kill the baby."

"That's what I thought for ten years." The long-held-back tears oozed slowly from between her lids. "There was only Joanna, you see. The other baby might never have existed. I didn't think it had ever existed." She held a shaking hand to her face. "I thought I'd helped her kill it-and then in Hong Kong, James kept asking me how Gerald could have killed himself with barbiturates, because no doctor would have prescribed them for him, ind I realized it was Gerald she'd wanted to kill all along, and I'd given her the means to do it." She took out a handkerchief and blew her nose. "I was so
shocked
that James guessed what I'd done. I think he'd always known, though. In many ways, he and Mathilda were very alike."

Cooper sought desperately to break this down into manageable proportions. There were so many unanswered questions. "Why would no doctor prescribe barbiturates for Gerald Cavendish? I've checked the coroner's report. There was no question of murder, only a choice between misadventure and suicide."

"Gerald was..." Jane sought for the right word, "feeble-minded, I suppose, like the Spedes, but today they call it educationally subnormal. It's why the property was kept intact for William. Mathilda's grandfather was afraid Gerald would give it away to anyone who asked for it. But I've never really understood how Mathilda came to sleep with him. He was a very pathetic person. I've always assumed her father forced her into it to protect his legacy somehow, but James said it was all Mathilda's idea. I don't believe that. James hated her so much he'd have said anything to blacken her."

Cooper shook his head in bewilderment. How uneventful his own life had been, compared with the agonies of this grey-haired motherly soul who looked as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. "Why did you visit James Gillespie in Hong Kong if your husband had had an affair with his wife? There can't have been much love lost between the three of you in all conscience."

"We didn't or at least not like that. We had no idea James had gone to Hong Kong. Mathilda never told us-why would she?-and we moved away from here after the affair and went to live in Southampton. I became a teacher and Paul worked for a shipping company. We put it all behind us, and then Paul had to go to Hong Kong on business and took me with him for a holiday." She shook her head. "And almost the first person we met when we arrived was James. The expatriate community was so small"-she raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness-"we were bound to meet him. If we'd only known he was there, we'd never have gone. Fate is very cruel, Sergeant."

He couldn't argue with that. "Then why did you come back here to live, Mrs. Marriott, knowing that Mrs. Gillespie was in Cedar House? Weren't you tempting fate a second time?"

"Yes," she said simply, "but what could I do about it? Paul knows nothing of any of this, Sergeant, and he's dying-slowly-of emphysema. We kept our house here-it was his parents' house and he was too fond of it to sell it, so we let it out to tenants-and then five years ago, he was retired on health grounds and he begged me to let us come home." Her eyes flooded again. "He said I needn't worry about Mathilda, that the only thing he had ever felt for her was compassion, while the only woman he had ever loved was me. How could I tell him then what had really happened? I still thought his baby was dead." She held her handkerchief to her streaming eyes. "It wasn't until I went to Cedar House and asked Mathilda about James that she told me she'd put the baby up for adoption." She buried her face in her hands. "It was a boy and he's still alive somewhere."

Cooper pondered the sad ironies of life. Was it providence, God or random selection that made some women fertile and some barren? With a deep reluctance he took her back to the day Mathilda died, knowing there was little chance that what she told him could ever remain a secret.