Although Daniel spent much of his time alone and was content to do so, Kate’s sudden departure for Corsica left him feeling unusually restless, not so much lonely as undefended. No need to look for reasons, Kate had even mentioned one: they were embarking on a defiant course of action against rich and powerful people who lived less than a mile away over the hill. If his sister was even half correct in her hypothesis—if, for instance, Mark Ackland had been forced to shut his mother’s mouth for fear of what she might say, he was going to be enraged and possibly frightened to find that so many years later a new generation was in pursuit of the same secret.
Like many crippled people, Daniel was seldom afraid; the accident and its endless aftermath had given him a blessedly fatalistic attitude towards life; but from a physical, practical point of view it was obvious that under certain conditions he’d be quite helpless, alone at Woodman’s in the middle of nowhere. To be sure, he could always depend on his friend Tom; but supposing Tom wasn’t at the Woolpack when the crucial moment arose—he could be miles away playing rugger.
Just at this moment, with his research for Dr Forrester completed and already posted off to Oxford, he had too much time on his hands for introspection. Whether or not he believed his sister to be on the right track, the least—and best—he could do would be to apply his mind to the same problem; and oddly enough, on the morning of her departure, something occurred which led him to a disturbing discovery.
It was not one of Ava’s days for cleaning; he had made his bed, not too difficult since it only consisted of a duvet, and was about to go downstairs again, had in fact already sat on the miraculous chair-lift, when his eye was caught by something he’d never consciously noticed before even though he must have looked at it a thousand times. The sturdy post at the top of the stair-rail had at some point been capped with a plain wooden knob which didn’t match either post or banisters. He looked at it for a few seconds, and then at the foot of the stairs where the corresponding post was surmounted by that heavily carved newel upon which, according to Kate, their grandmother had hit her head in falling.
He had not visited Lydia at Woodman’s more than half a dozen times during the years she’d lived there, and when he concentrated on the matter he could remember the plain knob: something solid and comfortable for an old hand to grip before beginning the descent; but—and now he was quite sure of it—he could also remember, perhaps from his very first visit, that there had once been a matching and equally hideous newel crowning this top post as well. And it wasn’t all he remembered. When he’d first moved to the cottage, he and Kate had stored in the attic some of his excess possessions and several unnecessary pieces of furniture which merely got in the way of his wheelchair; and unless he was very much mistaken …
It was by no means an easy operation for him to carry out alone, but at least the trap door to the roof space was opened by pulling on a rope cleated to the wall of the upstairs landing, and, by the same mechanism, two sections of aluminium ladder then slid forward and downwards. This contraption may have been put in for his grandmother’s convenience, in the days when she could still see a little, but was even more of a necessity for Daniel; without it, the attic would have been inaccessible.
Climbing the ladder was in any case something of an undertaking, but dependence on his arms had made them very strong, and his comparatively ‘good’ leg helped considerably: though once again he realized, with a pang, how much weaker it was getting. He reached for the light switch and revealed the usual attic clutter: not only his own boxes and the unwanted furniture, but several rotting deckchairs, croquet mallets, hoops, balls (croquet at Woodman’s! There wasn’t a flat piece of ground for miles), abandoned picture-frames, an old ironing-board, cartons of unwanted kitchen implements—he had brought his own—and piles of magazines and pieces of wood, supreme fire hazards, including chair- and table-legs, golf-clubs, a torn garden sunshade, and …
He hauled himself forward to look more closely. No, his memory had not played him false; there lay the top newel, an ugly and heavy piece of carved wood identical to the one at the bottom of the stairs. Moreover, it had once slotted into a hole in the post, now covered by the knob; had indeed slotted deeply into it, some nine inches. When Daniel picked it up, this thick wooden pin fitted into his hand with ease, so that the whole thing suddenly became a weighty club.
The idea popped into his mind as effortlessly as it would have occurred to his sister, famous for jumping to conclusions. If somebody had hit Lydia Ackland over the head with this weapon, the wound would automatically have presented itself to the Coroner’s doctor as having been caused by the old lady’s head striking the bottom newel-post. If! Only two days ago, when Kate had said she could easily believe that Mark might have killed his mother, Daniel had replied that her theory was ‘based on a hundred ifs’. And here was another which his pragmatical mind could both accept and refute. He did not as yet have enough evidence, not even circumstantial evidence, to make any accurate judgements; and neither did Kate herself who ought, at this moment, to be crossing the Alps at thirty thousand feet. Time would instruct both of them.
Time, in Daniel’s case, took him first of all into the local town where he visited his bank. Since shopping was always easier in the village, where he and his disability were well known, he stopped there on his way home, and afterwards went to the Woolpack for half a pint of bitter. He was too honest with himself to pretend he’d gone there for any other reason than that uneasy sense of being undefended which had haunted him all morning: or, since they were so closely intertwined, the equally disturbing thought that Kate was putting herself in a far more undefended position.
Either way, Tom’s large presence behind the bar was reassuring. Daniel always felt that his friend’s world was so extrovert, so blithely uncomplicated, that nothing untoward could ever occur within it. He said nothing about how he was feeling, having promised Kate to keep quiet about her journey and thus her absence, but something was understood between the two young men. Tom felt, without analysis, of course, that Daniel would not have come in for his bitter without being motivated by some obscure reason (to Tom, Daniel was in every way an obscure person) and he took it for granted that Daniel must sometimes feel lonely. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t imagine Daniel ever not feeling lonely, stuck up there in the woods on his tod, but it seemed he seldom did.
So, as usual, it was an encouraging encounter for both of them, the simpler character liking to feel needed, for whatever reason; the more complicated one comforted by the fact that if he should want help it was not all that far away.
This interdependence was forcibly emphasized when Daniel returned to Woodman’s and at once realized that the place had been searched: unprofessionally searched. There was hardly a paper in his desk, a book left lying on the arm of a chair or a newspaper on the table which didn’t reveal to him the clumsy hand of an interloper. Because he was an ordinary—if private—young man, his immediate reaction was one of rage; because he was painfully crippled, an ever-present guardian grabbed the rage and subdued it, advising caution: stealthy caution perhaps, but caution none the less.
He had no doubt at all that this was the fourth step in a sequence, starting with Kate’s ill-advised visit to The Cousins—continuing with their joint, and perhaps equally ill-advised, journey to talk to old Rosemary Howard—which had led directly to her son’s arrival at Longwater. If Kate was at Woodman’s right now, Daniel realized that he’d be arguing with her because she would have jumped to the conclusion that Mark himself was the intruder; but he was in the habit of arguing with her in order to steady her flights of fancy, he was the self-appointed tail to her uncontrollable kite. Alone, he could drop this role and admit that there had been no breaking and entering, not even a token pretence of it, therefore a key had been used, therefore Uncle Mark, or someone dispatched by him, had searched the cottage.
For what? Andrew Howard knew that they were asking questions about their grandmother’s death, and he knew that they’d shown Rosemary Howard the letter she’d written to Lydia—the letter he’d so desperately wanted to possess. The fact that this letter was the sole piece of actual evidence surely proved beyond a shadow of doubt that it was the object of the search. Daniel congratulated himself on his own foresight; Rosemary’s letter had been his reason for visiting the bank that morning; it now reposed in his deposit-box.
He ate some bread and cheese and drank some apple juice, not reading as he usually did, but staring out of the window at what had become a cloudy day, and wondering what the next move might be. A visit, he decided, from Uncle Mark Ackland. He found himself wishing that Kate was going to be there to lend moral support; on the other hand, if moral support turned into loss of temper, it was perhaps just as well that she was now, if her flight was on schedule, just setting foot in Corsica.
Following these thoughts he wasn’t in the least surprised to hear the approach of a distant vehicle which he presently identified as Mark Ackland’s Range-Rover. Since the accident and his imprisonment in a wheelchair Daniel was used to people looming over him, but when his uncle’s massive shoulders filled the front doorway he did wish, for a second, that he’d been standing up with his crutches. Not that they made him any less vulnerable, rather more so, but being, in theory, on his own two feet tended to give him confidence. From the look on Mark’s face, brown from weather, red from lunch-time wine, confidence would have been an asset.
‘Hello, Daniel. How’s Kate?’
‘Fine. Back at work.’
‘No point in beating about the bush. When she came to see us the other morning she mentioned you’d found a letter here—to my mother from an old friend …’
At least there’d been no phoney-polite conversation: straight to the point—with a whopping great lie. It was on the tip of Daniel’s tongue to reply, ‘Kate never mentioned it, Uncle Mark; Andrew Howard did.’ The response would be fascinating, but he held his tongue; the physically weak know how best to preserve their mental advantages.
‘As you’ll appreciate, it’s my property. Like everything else that belonged to Mother.’
Daniel allowed himself to think about this for a long time, watching his uncle’s growing irritation; then he took a leaf out of fat Andrew’s book by saying, ‘I should’ve thought it was the property of the person who wrote it.’
Because Mark Ackland had become accustomed to the role, among others, of bluff land-owning gentleman, it didn’t mean that he was quite that simplistic under the surface, and he now realized that the bluff approach was not cutting any ice with this intelligent cripple. He smiled, charmingly, as he knew, pulled up a chair and sat down. Assessing the smile, Daniel thought it was easy to see, even now, what an attractive young man he must have been: yet quite unlike their own equally attractive father, so often the way with brothers. ‘Not,’ he was saying, ‘that there’s anything important about the letter, as far as one can tell. I just thought I’d like to have a look at it.’
Considering how boring and frustrating it must have been for this man to search the cottage without result, Daniel thought his uncle was putting a pretty good face on it. He said, ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not sure where it is. I think Kate gave it back to Mrs Howard.’
It was a clever move (he was a good chess-player) because Mark Ackland had purposely not mentioned their visit to Bournemouth in order to conceal his source of information; and here was his nephew taking it for granted that he knew all about it anyway. Daniel could almost see him wondering whether this meant that he’d somehow traced Andrew Howard as the source of information, and if so, how? He also saw Mark take the middle ground, choosing to say, ‘I’m not sure it’s any of your business, either of you.’
‘Well,’ replied Daniel judicially, and, as he knew, maddeningly, ‘as you say, it wasn’t an important letter. We were just interested—after all, she was our grandmother.’ He knew that this utterance could be interpreted in several different ways, from the ingenuous to the obliquely threatening. And he could now witness further anger overcoming his Uncle Mark who was doubtless thinking that this bloody little cripple and his sister had actually seen the letter, whereas all he had to go on was a second hand account of it from a dodgy lawyer, who also hadn’t seen it and was basing his own information on the word of an ancient mother; and she (as Daniel himself well knew) was capable of anything from downright misinformation to loss of memory. Not a strong position on the board.
In as smooth a voice as he could muster, Mark Ackland said, ‘If your sister gave it back to Mrs Howard you’d remember, no doubt about that. So I don’t think she did anything of the sort. Which means, my dear nephew, that you’re lying to me.’
Daniel spread his hands. ‘I can’t stop you thinking whatever you like.’
‘Frankly, I find your attitude bloody insolent. Has it ever entered your head, you can only afford to live here because I charge you virtually nothing?’
‘Yes, I’m very grateful.’
‘I could chuck you out tomorrow.’
‘Not tomorrow,’ replied Daniel. ‘We have a contract. April the first next year.’
His uncle leaned closer; Daniel could even smell the stale aroma of the lunch-time wine. ‘I want that letter.’
‘I’m sorry, I wish I could give it to you—particularly with eviction staring me in the face.’ His heart was pounding, but he was damned if he was going to be bullied by this arrogant old brute.
In a much quieter voice, Mark Ackland said, ‘You’re a damn fool. There are worse things than eviction, you’d better consider that!’ He pushed back his chair and stood up; then turned to the door which slammed behind him.
Daniel grimaced to himself. Certainly there were worse things than eviction: like being hit over the head with a great chunk of wood and thrown downstairs. He had no idea how far his uncle would go: quite a long way, he now suspected. Too many years of being top dog, lord of the manor with friends in the very highest of places, had warped his sense of values—which must have already been misshapen by a dissolute youth. ‘Justice, c’est moi,’ seemed to be the attitude, and a very dangerous one it was; he, Daniel, would have to be a great deal more cautious than he’d supposed.
Not that he felt in the least cautious; in fact, he was surprised to find that his whole attitude had changed. The searching of his cottage, and now the threatening interview just ended, seemed to have obliterated all those logical arguments with which he’d felt compelled to counter Kate’s wild guesses and even wilder reasoning. He found that he too could now believe that Mark Ackland might have killed his own mother, and could sympathize with his sister’s determination to go to Corsica. He wasn’t quite sure why they’d embarked on this unequivocal course of action. Kate’s idea of raising money to send him to the Blake Clinic still struck him as fanciful, but he could recognize a tyrant when he saw one, and was glad they were defying the old monster; he had no intention of running away from the consequences.
However, when he considered his situation more carefully, he came to the conclusion that he was, in this case, a little afraid. And the answer to that was to take steps; he wheeled himself to the table, put on his glasses, and wrote three short notes stating that if anything untoward or suspicious should happen to him, or conceivably to his sister, urgent inquiry should be instigated, starting with Mark Ackland of Longwater House; and it might be no bad thing to inquire at the same time into the death of Mark Ackland’s mother, Lydia. He addressed these to his ex-army stepfather, Alistair, in Aberdeen, to Alex at Hill Manor Hotel, and to his bank manager: all honourable men who would obey the instruction not to open them unless something highly suspect occurred.
Then he heaved himself out to his little car, drove down to the village and posted them. After this he felt a lot better; but there was no doubt in his mind that before very long his uncle would bring some sort of pressure to bear on him. All he could do was sit and wait; experience had made him good at sitting and waiting.