The Lake House (48 page)

Just as she was making a silent resolution to call in every favour she was owed, to stop at nothing until Caitlyn and Nancy were reunited, she caught a glimpse through the crowd of two people she recognised.

“Look, Don, I've got to go.”

“All right, Sparrow, I get it, I should've listened and I'm—”

“Don't worry about it. I'll talk to you later. Just do me a favour.”

“Right.”

“Make sure that little girl and her grandmother are together.”

She ended the call, Donald's voice still sounding tinnily from her phone as she pocketed it, weaving through the crowd as quickly as she could towards the spot where she'd seen Alice and Peter. She paused a second when she got there, glancing this way and that, until she saw the tell-tale white hair.

“Alice!” She waved a hand above the crowd. “Peter!”

They stopped and looked about, mystified, until Peter, a head taller than most other people, caught sight of Sadie and smiled. There was that spark again. No doubt about it.

“DC Sparrow,” said Alice, surprised, as Sadie reached them.

“I'm so glad I found you.” Sadie was breathless. “It was Ben. It was him all along.”

She noticed then that Peter had a shovel in a sack over his shoulder and Alice was clutching something in her arms, a largish box of some sort. Now, the old woman seemed to hold it tighter. “What on earth do you mean?” she said.

“Ben took Theo. Your father, Anthony—it wasn't him. He was innocent.”

“She's delirious,” said Alice to Peter. “Help her, Peter, she's talking nonsense.”

Sadie shook her head. She was still reeling elatedly from the conversation with Donald, she needed to calm down, to start at the beginning, to make them see. “Is there somewhere we can talk? Somewhere quiet?”

“There's the hotel,” said Alice, “but I have serious doubts as to how quiet it will be.”

Sadie glanced up at the hotel. Alice was right; there'd be no escaping the noise there. She thought of Bertie's courtyard, high above the village, with its view to the sea. “Come with me,” she said. “I know the perfect place.”

Although Bertie was still down at the festival, he'd left the porch light on and the door unlocked. The dogs milled about the newcomers, sniffing curiously, before accepting they were friend not foe and following them into the kitchen.

“Would you like a cup of something?” Sadie offered, vaguely recalling there were certain duties concomitant with playing host.

“I suspect I'm going to need a glass of something,” said Alice. “Something strong.”

Sadie found a bottle of sherry at the back of Bertie's pantry, gathered a clutch of glasses, and led the others outside to the courtyard. The fairy lights draped around the stone walls of the garden were already twinkling, and as Alice and Peter pulled up chairs at the table, Sadie lit the candles in the hurricane lamps. She poured them each a drink.

“So,” said Alice, clearly not in the mood for social niceties, “what's all this about Benjamin Munro taking my brother? I thought we'd decided. My father, the shell shock . . .”

“Yes,” said Sadie, “we had, and that certainly played its part, but Theo didn't die that night. Ben took him and he didn't act alone. He and your mother planned it.”

“Whatever are you talking about?” Alice's hand went to rest on the top of the metal box she'd brought with her. It was covered with dirt, and in the space of an instant Sadie connected the dirt with Peter's shovel before letting the oddity go and pressing on.

“We were right about the threat your father's shell shock presented, but wrong that he'd harmed Theo. Ben and your mother decided the baby needed to be protected, and the tunnel, the party, the fireworks display, all of it gave them the perfect opportunity to make him disappear. It's in their letters. At least, it is if you know what to look for. Your mother agonised, but she couldn't think of any other way to keep Theo safe. She couldn't leave your father, she loved him, and she'd made her promise not to go public with his suffering. As she saw it, there was no other choice.”

“And Ben was Theo's biological father,” said Peter, who'd been nodding along. “The best possible person to whom she could entrust him.”

“The only person,” Sadie agreed.

“That's why she wouldn't offer a reward,” Alice said suddenly, connecting the dots with the speed and accuracy one might expect from a woman who'd been plotting mystery novels for half a century. “It always troubled me. I couldn't understand why she was so adamant about it. At the time, she said it brought desperate people, opportunists, out of the woodwork and muddied the water. Now it makes sense: she just didn't want people looking for Ben and Theo. She didn't want them found.”

“It also explains why she insisted there be no mention made in the press of Nanny Bruen's negligence,” said Sadie. “And why she made sure Rose Waters and the local police were remunerated handsomely.”

“Did she?” said Alice. “I didn't know that.”

“Rose was devastated by her dismissal, and little wonder—she was let go
because
she was so vigilant. There was no way the plan would've worked if Rose had been watching over Theo. When she was fired, your mother gave her a glowing reference, and a bonus that allowed her to study. It set her up for the rest of her life.”

“She was making restitution,” said Peter.

Sadie nodded. “The ‘kidnapping' was a fiction of her own creation, so she made sure anyone who suffered as a consequence was compensated for loss of income and unnecessary trouble.”

“That sounds like Mother,” said Alice. “Her sense of justice, of ‘rightness', was her guiding concern.”

“So what happened next?” said Peter. “Ben took Theo through the tunnel and away from Loeanneth. Do you think he raised him?”

Alice frowned, rocking her sherry glass back and forth between her fingers. “Ben fought during the Second World War. He was killed in the Normandy landings, poor man—so cruel, to die like that, right at the very end. He'd been fighting for a long time, too. My sister Clementine saw him in France in 1940.”

“Theo was still a boy during World War Two,” said Sadie, performing a quick mental calculation. “Only seven when it started. If Ben enlisted at the beginning, he can't have been raising Theo as his son. Unless he married someone else?”

“Or Theo ended up somewhere else,” said Peter.

“Which leaves us no better off than when we started,” concluded Alice.

A despondency settled over the group, given vocal expression by Ash, who let out a long doggy sigh in his sleep. Sadie topped up their sherry glasses and they drank in silence. The distant burr of festival cheer, building towards midnight, drifted up from the village.

“What about the letters?” said Alice at last. “Was there anything in them that might indicate where Ben and Theo went after leaving Loeanneth?”

“Not that I could see. In fact, your mother was very keen that Ben
shouldn't
tell her where they were going.”

“Perhaps he gave her a hint anyway?”

“I don't think so.”

“Something subtle. Something personal that you might have missed.”

Sadie's certainty was no match for Alice's obstinacy. “It's worth a look,” she said. “Let me get the file from inside. I brought a few of them home with me.”

Bertie was just coming in the front door when she reached the kitchen. “Hello, Sadie, love,” he said, with a tired but happy smile. “I managed to escape before the party really got going. Fancy some supper?”

Sadie explained that Alice and Peter were in the courtyard, talking over the Edevane case. “We've had a breakthrough, but it's left us with a whole new list of questions.”

“Supper for four, then. Coming right up.”

“Aren't you tired of serving pear cake?”

“Never! What sacrilege.”

As she took the file from her backpack, Bertie hummed softly by the kettle. “What about the other matter?” he said, dropping teabags into cups. “Did you hear back from the Met?”

Sadie filled him in quickly about Donald's call.

“So,” he said with grim satisfaction. “You were right. I told you your instincts were good.” He shook his head and his lips tightened in sympathy. “That poor woman, that poor child. I trust you got your job back?”

“I'm not so sure about that. Ashford knows I was the leak. He's not going to want to condone my actions, regardless of how things turned out. I'll have to wait and see. In the meantime . . .” She held up the file and motioned over her shoulder towards the courtyard.

“Of course. I'll see you out there in a few minutes.”

Sadie rejoined the others just as Alice was saying to Peter, “You know, I always thought I saw Ben in the woods that night.”

“Why didn't you say something to the police?” Sadie asked, sitting back down and sliding the file into the centre of the table.

Alice glanced to where a gusty breeze had set the string of fairy lights to rattling against the stones. “I shouldn't have been there,” she said, shadows playing on her cheekbone. “I was supposed to be meeting Mr Llewellyn at the party. I've always blamed myself for what happened to him; wondered whether it all might have ended differently had I stayed at the arbour a little longer. He'd come to me earlier in the day, you see, very keen that we should meet. Insistent that there was something he needed to discuss with me. I waited, but he never came.”

“That's another ‘coincidence' I don't like,” said Sadie, frowning. “There's something not right about Mr Llewellyn's death. He was devoted to your mother, he knew what she was planning, how much was at stake for her—it doesn't sit right with me that he'd choose to end his own life then and there.”

“I quite agree,” said Alice. “It makes no sense. But depression, like so many nervous conditions, is not a rational illness.”

“If only we knew more about his particular depression.” Sadie stood, pacing back and forth along the bricks. “That initial breakdown, when he quit medicine and started writing books. In my experience, when someone makes a lifechanging decision like that, there's something else behind it. If we knew what it was, maybe it would shed some light?”

Peter held up his hand. “Actually, I think I might have the answer to that.”

Sadie spun around to face him; Alice peered over her glasses. “Peter?”

“At Loeanneth today, when you were talking about Llewellyn's breakdown, wondering what had caused it, I vaguely remembered reading something about it in one of my undergraduate classes at university. I popped into the village library this afternoon and met a very helpful man—”

“Alastair,” Sadie offered.

“—precisely, who happened to have the perfect book just sitting there on his desk. It had come in on inter-library loan and was packaged, ready to return, when I spied it. It really was the most remarkable coinciden—”

“Don't say it.”

“—piece of luck. It had a chapter devoted to Llewellyn and
Eleanor's Magic Doorway
, a very interesting allegorical analysis relying on Kantian principles of symbolic—”

“Peter,” said Alice sternly.

“Yes, yes, sorry. The author argued that Llewellyn's story could be read as an allegory for the experiences of his own life, in particular the breakdown he'd suffered as a young doctor, when he was forced to attend an emergency situation at a friend's country house and he lost a patient.”

“A baby,” Sadie gasped. “The patient was a newborn baby.”

“How do you know?” Alice said. “Which baby? Whose baby?”

Peter met Sadie's gaze, processing for a moment, and then he grinned with realisation. “You think it was Constance's baby.”

“Yes.” Sadie hurried to the table. “Yes, yes, yes.” She flicked quickly through the file, the candles in the hurricane lamps flickering beside her.

“That explains it,” said Peter, more to himself than to the others. “The tension between them, the animosity she felt towards him. She really was a Miss Havisham.”

Confusion made Alice cross. “Peter,” she said impatiently, “what the dickens does Dickens have to do with anything?”

He turned to her, his eyes bright. “When I was working on your website, you said not to bother you just to do it, and I had to find an answer to a question so I looked in one of your journals, up in your office.”

“Yes, and?”

“And you made a comment about your grandmother: you described her as a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, a quote from
Great Expectations
.”

“That sounds entirely likely. She was a dragon of a woman, and quite fond of dressing in the grand old frocks from her glory days—though not a wedding dress, I'm pleased to say. What in heaven's name does that have to do with a baby?”

“Here it is.” Sadie pulled out the page where she'd written her notes from the second interview that police had conducted with Constance at the care home. “The nurse said that Constance kept talking about Eleanor and a baby boy who'd died. I thought Eleanor must have had a stillborn son before Theo, but it wasn't Eleanor at all.”

Alice drew quick breath. “It was Grandmother.”

Sadie nodded. “And Daffyd Llewellyn was the doctor. It explains everything. His relationship with Constance; the cause of his depression; why he gave up medicine and sought solace in creating fairy tales for children . . .”

“It also explains the storyline of
Eleanor's Magic Doorway
,”
said Peter, “
the old man crippled with regret and locked outside the kingdom, the cruel queen whose grief for her lost child casts an eternal winter, the girl Eleanor whose innocence is the only thing strong enough to heal the rupture . . .” He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “The only thing it doesn't explain is why he became suicidal at the Midsummer party of 1933.”