The Lake House (41 page)

The horizon was golden as she drove east. The sea glimmered as if someone had sprinkled it with iron filings and Sadie wound down the window to enjoy the crisp, briny breeze on her face. It was going to be a warm, clear day for the festival and she was glad for Bertie. Glad, too, that she'd escaped before he woke, thereby dodging a rehash of their conversation from the previous night. It wasn't that she regretted telling him about the letter, only that she didn't want to discuss it further. He was disappointed, she knew, by her decision not to meet Charlotte Sutherland, convinced that she was wilfully misinterpreting Ruth's advice, but it was a situation he couldn't possibly understand. She would find the words to explain it to him, what it was to give up a child, how keenly she'd had to struggle to move beyond the fact that there was someone out there, her own flesh and blood, whom she could never know, but at the moment, with everything else going on, it was just too complicated.

Sadie reached the leaning signpost, its white paint peeling after years of bracing wind, and turned left. The road that led away from the coast was narrow, long clumps of grass encroaching on the faded tarmac, and it became thinner still as it snaked into the woods. Dawn hadn't breached the canopy yet, and Sadie had to switch on the car's headlights to make her way through the trees. She drove slowly, scouring the overgrown verge for the entrance to Loeanneth. According to Alice Edevane's instructions, the wrought-iron gates would be difficult to spot. They were tucked back from the road, she'd said, and the elaborate, woven design was such that even during the family's heyday, they'd been threatened with consumption by the ivy tendrils that reached out from the trees to climb and cling.

Sure enough, Sadie almost missed them. It was only as her headlights glanced off the edge of a tarnished post that she realised this was it. She reversed quickly, pulled off the road, leapt from the car and fiddled with the keys Alice had given her, looking for the one marked
Gate
. Her fingers were clumsy with excitement and it took a few attempts to slot the key into the latch. Finally, though, she managed. The gate was rusty and stiff, but Sadie had always been able to find unexpected physical strength when sufficiently motivated. She forced the pair of gates open, wide enough, just, to drive her car through.

She'd never approached the house from this direction, and was struck, when she finally emerged through the thick woods, by how emphatically hidden it was from the rest of the world, tucked within its own valley, the house and inner gardens concealed by a protective planting of elms. She followed the driveway across a stone bridge and parked her car beneath the boughs of an enormous tree in a gravelled area colonised by wily tussocks of grass. The sun was still rising as she hitched up the old gate and entered the garden.

“You're early,” she called, when she saw the old man sitting on the rim of the big old urn.

Clive waved. “I've been waiting for this for seventy years. I wasn't about to wait a minute longer than I had to.”

Sadie had called him the night before and brought him up to speed on her meeting with Alice. He'd listened, shocked when he learned their new theory that Theo Edevane had been killed by his father. “I was sure the boy had been taken,” he'd said when Sadie had finished. “All this time I held out hope that I could still find him.” There'd been a tremble in his voice, and Sadie could tell just how much he'd personally invested in the case. She knew the feeling. “We still have a job to do,” she'd said. “We owe it to the little boy to learn exactly what happened that night.” She'd told him then about the key and Alice's invitation to search the house. “I called her just before I spoke to you last night and mentioned your ongoing interest. I told her how invaluable you've been so far.”

Now they stood together beneath the portico as Sadie struggled with the front door. For one heartstopping instant it seemed as if the lock were stuck and the key wasn't going to turn, but then there came the welcome click of the mechanism giving way. Moments later, Sadie and Clive stepped across the threshold, into the entrance hall of the Lake House.

The room smelled musty, and the air was cooler than Sadie had expected. The front door was still wide open and when she glanced over her shoulder the waking world outside seemed brighter than it had before. She could see all the way along the overgrown path to where the surface of the lake was sparkling with the first rays of morning sun.

“It's like time stood still,” said Clive softly. “The house hasn't changed since we were here all those years ago.” He craned to take in every angle and added, “Except for the spiders. They're new.” He met her gaze. “So now, where would you like to start?”

Sadie matched his slightly reverent tone. There was something about a house left sealed for so long that invited such theatre. “Alice thought it most likely that we'd find what we're looking for in Anthony's study or Eleanor's writing bureau.”

“And what is it exactly that we're looking for?”

“Anything detailing Anthony's condition, particularly in the weeks leading up to Midsummer 1933. Letters, diaries—a signed confession would be ideal.”

Clive grinned as she continued,

“We'll get more done if we split up. How about you take the study, I'll take the desk, and we reconvene to compare notes in a couple of hours?”

Sadie was aware of Clive's silence as they climbed the staircase side by side, the way he glanced about him, his deep sigh as they paused on the first-floor landing. She could only imagine what it must be like for him to be back inside the house after so many decades. Seventy years in which the Edevane case had remained alive for him, in which he'd never given up hope of solving the crime. She wondered if he'd thought back over the initial investigation overnight, and whether pieces of the puzzle, previously innocuous, had slotted into place.

“I thought of nothing else,” he said when she asked him. “I was on my way to bed when you rang, but there was no chance of sleeping afterwards. I kept thinking about the way he stuck close to her during the interviews. At the time I presumed it was so he could protect her, so she wouldn't fall apart in the aftermath of the boy's disappearance. But it occurs to me now there was something almost unnatural about their closeness. Almost as if he were standing guard, making sure she wouldn't, or couldn't, reveal what he had done.”

Sadie was about to answer when her phone rang in the pocket of her jeans. Clive signalled that he was going to head on up to Anthony's study and she nodded, pulling out her mobile. Her heart sank when she recognised Nancy Bailey's phone number on the screen. Sadie considered herself something of an expert at breaking up and had thought “Goodbye and take care of yourself' was clear enough: a discreet, even gentle, way of letting the other woman down. Evidently it was going to require a more explicit approach. But not now. She muted the phone and shoved it back into her pocket. She would deal with Nancy Bailey another day.

Eleanor's bedroom was along the corridor, only two doors away, but Sadie didn't move. Her gaze was drawn instead to the faded red carpet runner, rotting in patches, which stretched up a further flight of stairs. There was something else she needed to do first. She climbed a floor higher and then followed the hallway to its end. It had become warmer as she rose and the air was stuffier. The walls were still hung with framed pictures commemorating generations of deShiel family members, and behind each partially opened door, the rooms were furnished, right down to the small decorative items on bedside tables: lamps, books, comb-andmirror sets. It was eerie and she was overcome by a strong, though completely irrational, sense that she needed to walk without making a sound. The contrary part of her coughed, just to shatter the pervasive silence.

At the end of the hallway, the nursery door was closed. Sadie stopped when she reached it. She had envisaged this moment many times over the past fortnight, but now that she was actually standing on the threshold of Theo's nursery, the whole thing felt more
real
than she'd imagined it would. She didn't usually hold with rituals and superstitions, but Sadie made a point of picturing Theo Edevane, the wide-eyed, round-cheeked baby from the newspaper photos, reminding herself that the room she was about to enter was sacred.

She opened the door quietly and stepped inside. The room was stuffy, and although the once-white curtains were drawn they were grey now, and moth-eaten, and light spilled through them unhindered. It was smaller than she'd imagined. The quaint cast-iron cot in the middle of the nursery was a stark reminder of how young and vulnerable Theo Edevane had been in 1933. It stood on a round woven rug, and beyond it, by the window, was an armchair covered in chintz that must once have been a bright and cheerful yellow but had faded and thinned to a sad, nondescript beige. Little wonder, after decades of dust and insects and summer sun stealing in. The shelf of vintage wooden toys, the rocking horse beneath the window, the ancient baby bath in the corner: all were familiar from the newspaper photographs, and Sadie experienced a slightly jarring sensation of distant recognition, as if it were a room she'd dreamed about, or one she remembered vaguely from her own childhood.

She went to inspect the cot. Its mattress was still made up with sheets, and a knitted blanket had been stretched smooth and tight at one end. It was dusty now, sad. Sadie ran her hand lightly over the iron rail and there came a faint jingling. One of the four brass knobs wobbled unevenly at the top of its post. This was where Theo Edevane had been put to bed on the night of the party. Nanny Bruen had been asleep on the single bed against the far wall, tucked beneath the slanting roof, and outside, on the lawn by the lake, hundreds of people had been ushering in Midsummer.

Sadie glanced at the smaller side window through which the single witness in the case claimed to have seen a slender woman. The party guest said that it was around midnight, but she must have been mistaken. Either she'd imagined the whole thing—and according to Clive she'd still been drunk the next morning—or else it had been a different window, a different room. It was possible she'd glimpsed Eleanor in the nursery, checking on Theo as was her habit, but if that were the case she'd been wrong about the time, for Eleanor had left the room at eleven o'clock, stopping on the stairs to give instructions to a housemaid. And witnesses had seen Eleanor by the boathouse where the gondolas were docked just before midnight.

A round clock with a stark white face loomed down from on high, its hands marking some long-ago quarter past three, and five Winnie the Pooh prints stepped along the wall. Those walls had seen everything, but the room wasn't talking. Sadie glanced at the doorway and a ghostly imprint of the night's events played out before her. At some point after midnight, Anthony Edevane had come through from the hall, crossing the room to stand above the cot, just as Sadie was doing now. What happened next? she wondered. Did he take the little boy from the nursery, or did it happen right here? Did Theo wake up? Did he recognise his father and smile or coo, or did he grasp somehow that there was something different about this visit, something terrible? Did he struggle or cry? And what happened afterwards? When did Eleanor learn what her husband had done?

Something on the floor beneath the cot caught Sadie's eye, a tiny, shiny something, lying on the rug in a patch of morning sunlight. She bent to retrieve it; a round silver button with a plump cupid on it. She was turning it over in her fingertips when something moved against her leg. She jumped, her heart racing, before she realised it was only her phone, vibrating in her pocket. Relief turned quickly to exasperation when she saw Nancy Bailey's number again. With a frown, Sadie hit “cancel', turned off the vibrate function, and pocketed both the phone and the button. She glanced around the room but the spell was broken now. She could no longer picture Anthony creeping across the floor towards the cot, or hear the noise of the party outside. It was just a lonely old room and here she was wasting time with lost buttons and morbid imaginings.

* * *

Eleanor Edevane's bedroom was dim and the air smelled stale, of sorrow and neglect. Thick velvet curtains were drawn against all four windows and the first thing Sadie did was drag them open, coughing as plumes of dust detached and dispersed. She opened the stiff sash windows as high as they would go, and paused for a second to admire the view down to the lake. The sun was bright now, and the ducks were busy. A faint twittering sound caught her attention and she glanced above her. Tucked beneath the shelter of the eaves she spotted the hint of a nest.

As a current of cool, clean air breezed through the open window, she felt a wave of motivation and determined to ride it. She noted the roll-top writing bureau against the far wall, exactly where Alice had said it would be. It was Eleanor who had started Sadie down this road; Eleanor with whom she'd originally felt a connection, sparked by the ivy-rimmed letter; and it was Eleanor who was going to help her prove what happened to baby Theo. Remembering Alice's instructions, Sadie felt beneath the desk chair, patting the tatty upholstery on the underside of the cushioned seat, running her fingertips along each wooden edge. Finally, where the right back leg joined the seat, her fingers met a pair of tiny keys hanging on a hook. Bingo.

Once unlocked, the bureau's wooden cover rolled back cleanly to reveal a neat desk with a leather jotter and pen-holder laid out on the writing surface. A series of journals lined the shelves at the back and a quick peek inside the first revealed them as the triplicate volumes Alice had said Eleanor used for correspondence. Her gaze ran greedily along the spines. There was nothing to suggest they were in chronological order, but a glance at the tidy, uncluttered desk suggested it was likely. The family had left Loeanneth at the end of 1933, which meant, presumably, that the last book covered the months leading up to Midsummer that year. Sadie slid it from the shelf and, sure enough, the first page was a letter dated January 1933, addressed in beautiful handwriting to someone called Dr Steinbach. She sat on the floor with her back propped against the side of the bed and started to read.