“I have to say,” Grant Thompson said, “you are not a dull date, Gemma.”
“Sorry to dump you like this,” I said, “but what we have to talk about is highly confidential.”
He moved as though he were about to kiss me on the mouth but changed direction at the last minute and dropped a peck on my cheek. I wondered if that had something to do with the fact that Ryan Ashburton was standing by his car, watching us and tapping his foot.
On the drive from the hospital to my house, I had only enough time to ask Ryan what Renee had to say for herself. “You know I’m not going to tell you any private details, but as we overheard when Pat was talking to her, it was all about a boyfriend who’d done her wrong and her career not doing well. Louise out-and-out asked her if she’d killed Nigel Bellingham, and she seemed to have no idea why we’d even think that.”
He pulled up in front of my house. I undid my seat belt and put my hand on the door handle.
“Gemma,” he said, “this isn’t exactly a suitable time to talk, but I have to ask. Are you dating Grant?”
“No.” If I’d stopped to think about it, I wouldn’t have known what to answer. Instead, the word popped out, and I realized I was glad it had. “We’re friends. We have things in common: love of books, memories of jolly old England. We were going to have dinner together tonight, but that’s all.” I didn’t bother to mention that I was using Grant to do some investigating on my behalf. I took a deep breath and focused on Ryan’s face. “Does it matter to you if I were?”
“It does, Gemma. I . . .” He stared into my eyes. “I want to be with you. I’ve never not wanted that. But as long as you keep getting involved in my work, I don’t see how that can be.”
I touched his face. The bristle scratched the pads of my fingers. “I can’t help the things I observe or the conclusions I come to. I want to, sometimes, you know I do, but it never works out. I can’t stop my mind working the way it does.”
“If you did try to change your whole personality—to hide your intelligence, your perceptiveness, your incredible memory—you’d be bitter and miserable. So I guess all I can say is that I want you to be happy, Gemma. And if I’m not the guy who can—”
We jumped at a rap on the window. I turned to see Jayne’s face peering in. “Geeze, you two, my mom’s about to spill her life’s secret, and you’re making out in the car like a couple of teenagers.”
I opened my door. “We’re having a personal conversation. We are not making out.”
“Coulda fooled me. Mom’s inside. I knew you wouldn’t mind us letting ourselves in.” Jayne kept a spare key to my house as I did to hers.
* * *
We gathered in my kitchen. Jayne fussed with coffee and tea things, and I put together sandwiches while Leslie told Ryan her story. About her affair with Nigel thirty-five years ago, his rejection of her, coming home brokenhearted and pregnant to marry Jayne’s father.
“When I heard Nigel was coming to West London, I was conflicted. It reminded me of all my pain, but in some way, it also reminded me of those exciting, heady days when I believed the New York theater world lay at my feet. I didn’t have any expectations of us picking up our”—she made quotations marks with her fingers—“‘romance.’ I wouldn’t have wanted that in any case. It was so long ago. Another lifetime. But I was looking forward to seeing him, and perhaps that’s why. Because it was in another lifetime. A chance to remember my youth and my dreams and the fun times. New York in the early eighties, the most exciting city in the world, struggling to make it on Broadway. My acting career didn’t end well, but it’s a life experience I’m glad I had. I haven’t spent a lot of time over the years worrying about what Nigel Bellingham was up to, but I did keep casual track of his career. I was well aware that he probably never gave me so much as another thought since the last time we were together, but I guess I thought—hoped?—he’d at least remember me if prompted. I should have realized that he loomed far larger in my memory than I would have in his. I volunteered to pick him up at the inn on Wednesday and bring him into town. He didn’t recognize me. Okay, I’ve changed more than a little bit in the last thirty-five years. Other people were with him, so we didn’t have a chance to talk. It was chaotic in the shop, and when I did try to tell him my name, he brushed me off.”
I sliced the sandwiches and arranged them on a plate. Jayne poured coffee and set the table. Violet, as always so aware of human emotions, sat beside Leslie’s chair. Jayne’s mother twisted a tissue between her fingers and occasionally let her hand drop to the top of the dog’s head, seeking—and finding—comfort there. Leslie wasn’t crying, but her eyes were red, and deep lines had appeared around her mouth.
“I tried to talk to him at the tea on Saturday. When he first arrived, before the guests gathered around him, I grabbed a chance to speak to him privately.” Leslie lowered her head. Jayne put a hand on her shoulder.
“I told him who I was. I told him my name, and I told him we had once meant something to each other.” The tears began to flow. I put the tray of sandwiches on the table and then took myself to the far side of the room where I stood against the counter.
No one picked up a sandwich.
“Take your time, Mrs. Wilson,” Ryan said.
“He could have said something polite like ‘How have you been?’ or lied and told me that I hadn’t changed a bit. Instead, he said he met so many people over the course of his life, how could he possibly remember one . . . average-looking, middle-aged woman?” She fumbled for a napkin and blew her nose. “He . . . he told me to get him a glass of wine.”
The look on Jayne’s face was something I have never seen before and hope never to see again. I do believe that if Sir Nigel Bellingham had walked through the door at that moment, Jayne herself would have killed him.
Ryan gave Leslie a minute and then asked in a soft gentle voice, “What happened then?”
“I left him to get his own blasted drink,” she said, “and I went back to work. I was furious, as you can imagine. Humiliated, at first, but as the afternoon progressed, I began to realize that I wasn’t the one who should be ashamed. I’d had a wonderful life, married a man who loved me beyond words and whom I loved in return. I had two beautiful children.” She reached up and took Jayne’s hand in hers. “I’ve been so very lucky. Nigel Bellingham, Sir Nigel, was a lonely, bitter old drunk.”
She wiped the tears away and put the napkin down. Sensing the worst of the emotion was over, Violet wandered away to check her food bowl. Discovering it still empty, she sighed heavily and dropped beside it with a thud of disapproval.
“I decided to leave it alone,” Leslie continued. “Let the miserable man stew in his glass of Prosecco. I could still, I told myself, enjoy the afternoon and the festival and have nothing more to do with him.” She shook her head. “But you know me, honey, always got to get the last word.”
Jayne nodded silently.
“After his fiasco of a speech, I tried to help, but he was rude to me all over again. Everyone abandoned him and left him sitting at the patio table all by himself. Even the likes of Gerald and Pat were either too embarrassed or too angry to go near him. So I went over, full of righteous indignation, and told him I had something to say to him, and he was going to listen to me.”
“You went into the woods,” Ryan said.
“I didn’t want anyone else hearing what I had to say. Once he was on his feet, he seemed to want to walk, so I followed. We went into that patch of woods and down to the cliff edge to watch the waves. I had no intention of telling him about Jeff. But, well, once more I had to get the last word in, and so I did. And then, I swear, Detective Ashburton—Ryan—I walked away and left him standing alone at the edge of that cliff.”
“Did anyone follow you?” Ryan asked. “Did you see anyone else in the woods at that time?”
Leslie shook her head. “No, but I wouldn’t have been likely to notice. I was totally wrapped up in my own thoughts. It’s my fault he died, and I am sorry.”
“Don’t say that, Mom!” Jayne said.
Leslie gave her a small smile. “I’m not confessing, honey. All I’m saying is that, knowing the state he was in, I shouldn’t have left him alone.”
“Babysitting him wasn’t your responsibility,” Jayne said.
“Isn’t anyone going to have something to eat?” I pulled out a chair and sat at the table. “Now that we know the circumstances which led to Nigel standing on that cliff, we have to discuss what might have happened next.”
Ryan attempted to hide a grin. “We do, do we?”
“Yes, we do.” I selected a ham and cheddar on a baguette. “In this case, I’m prepared to accept the premise of Occam’s razor.” I took a big bite.
“What’s that?” Jayne asked.
Ryan answered while I chewed. “The theory that the simplest explanation is almost always the correct one. Meaning, don’t complicate things if you don’t have to.” He helped himself to a sandwich. “Although, at the moment, I don’t see what the simplest explanation might be.”
“He killed himself,” I said. “He jumped off the cliff under his own free will. No one else was observed in the woods. I did see, at the time in question, a young couple heading to the water’s edge, but they were not going in the same direction as Leslie and Nigel. I assume you questioned everyone who was there.”
“We did. Not only the people who were still on-site when we arrived, but everyone on the guest list, as well as all the theater people and the volunteers. Mrs. Stanton assured us that no one would have gotten onto the grounds without either a job to do or a ticket. The Stanton property is fenced and posted, but it’s possible someone crept unobserved over the fence. There are no alarms or security apart from in the house and immediate grounds. She told me the occasional group of teenagers looking for a place to party or tourists who don’t think signs apply to them wander in following the cliff’s edge. We have looked but can find no signs of illicit entry on the day in question.”
“No reason for anyone to do so,” I said. “Not to kill Nigel anyway. Now that we know the theft of the Chihuly bowl and imitations was not random . . .”
“How do we know that?” Ryan said.
“What theft?” Leslie asked.
Jayne guilty dipped her head, and Ryan gave her a suspicious look.
“Oh,” I said. “Didn’t I tell you? Sir Nigel was a kleptomaniac, and Gerald was highly paid to cover it up and return the pilfered items when possible.”
“Gemma!” Ryan said. “How do you know that, and why didn’t you tell me?”
“Slipped my mind,” I said. “Sorry. I called Rebecca and told her she could find her items in a plant pot. I didn’t think to remind her to tell the police she’d found them.”
“We checked with the police in England, and Greene has no record of anything more serious than a parking ticket. I interviewed him myself. He said he was devastated at Bellingham’s death and had no idea why anyone would want to do him harm. He told me nothing about any theft, but he mentioned that Bellingham had a considerable drinking problem. Part of his job, he said, was to get Sir Nigel home safely and without incident after a bender.”
“Sometimes,” I said. “People talk more freely over a drink in a bar than under the bright lights in the police interrogation room. Figuratively speaking, of course.”
“Helps if the questioner knows what questions to ask. How did you?”
I hesitated and took another bite of my sandwich to cover up my hesitation. This was the point at which I should tell Ryan that I knew Nigel was a thief because I’d found stolen goods in his hotel room. There was, however, absolutely no way of giving him that information without having to confess how I knew it. And if I did that, not only would Ryan feel he had to do something about my confession to breaking and entering (like arrest me), but we would be distracted from my main point.
“We can come back to that later,” I said quickly. Ryan gave me that look, but he didn’t press the point.
“Saturday afternoon,” I said. “Nigel was extremely drunk, not an unusual occurrence as we have learned, and he totally humiliated himself in front of his colleagues and a group of people who’d paid a lot of money to meet him. His career was on the skids, as anyone could see by the fact that the hero of Roman Wars was reduced to doing summer repertory theater in West London, Massachusetts. A younger actor had stepped in and saved the performance. And then, on top of all of that, he had it thrown in his face that he was such a failure in life, he had son he didn’t even know about. A depressed man. A cliff. The conclusion is obvious.”
“I drove him to his death,” Leslie said.
“Don’t you even think that, Mom,” Jayne said. “It seems to me that all his problems were of his own making.”
“No one at the theater seems to be missing him,” I said, “other than Rebecca Stanton, who wanted a big name actor to front her festival. The professionals are happy Nigel’s gone, although they’ll never come right out and say so.”
Ryan let out a long sigh. “I agree with you, Gemma. We’ve seen nothing to indicate that anyone else, other than you, Leslie, joined Nigel at the cliff top. Not that absence of evidence . . .”
“. . . is evidence of absence,” I said.
“The autopsy results showed a man in poor condition,” Ryan said. “His lungs were what you’d expect from a lifetime smoker, and his liver was a mess. He’d had a bad heart attack a year or so ago and probably a smaller, earlier one. That is confidential, by the way.”
“Understood,” I said.
“Putting all that together—bad health, failing career, drunk, and embarrassed. Occam’s razor does point to suicide. We have more lab results to come in, some record checks to finish, and further analysis to do of statements from people who’d been at the party. If that doesn’t show me anything indicating otherwise, I’m going to declare this a suicide. The missing piece of pink ribbon has been bothering me, but I’ll have to assume it blew off the cliff and out to sea after it came off your apron, Leslie.”
I said nothing.
“Poor Nigel,” Leslie said with a shake of her head. “What a sad end to a brilliant career.”
“I’ll do what I can to keep the details of your confidence, Leslie,” Ryan said, “but as you were the last person, as far as we know, to see Nigel Bellingham alive, I can’t keep you totally out of this. I have to tell my partner and my chief why I’m closing the investigation. I will only say, unless they push me, that you and he talked about your mutual past and you left him sad and despondent. If they insist on knowing the details of that conversation . . .”
“I understand,” Leslie said.
Jayne wrapped her arms around her mother. “I’m here for you, Mom. Always.”
“I’ve finished with your Sherlock Holmes tea set, Jayne,” Ryan said. “You can pick it up at the station at any time.”
“I’m not eating all those sandwiches myself,” I said.