“I wonder if you’ll tell me why you look like the cat who got the cream,” James said later, when they were putting on their hats and coats in preparation for a walk that Leo desperately hoped would lead them to a tea shop. He had skipped breakfast, such as it was, and was determined not be done out of lunch. “Where were you off skulking about while I fought to the death over the last teaspoon of milk for my tea?”
“This is slander and calumny,” said Leo lightly as he held the door for James to precede him into the garden. “I didn’t skulk at all. Not even a little.” He was conscious of being pleased that James had guessed what Leo was up to during breakfast, and even more pleased that James didn’t seem put off despite his innate distaste for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. “I just took myself on a little tour of the upper stories of the house.”
James snorted. “And what did you learn on your tour?”
“Marchand only brought bespoke suits. Not a jumper or cardigan in sight.” He gestured between them, demonstrating what normal people wore in the country. Beneath his winter coat, James wore a cream-colored Aran jumper and corduroy trousers. Leo wore one of James’s cardigans that always seemed to find its way to Leo’s half of the closet and a pair of nondescript brown trousers. They each had on one of the mufflers that Edith knit in such quantity that everyone in Wychcomb St. Mary had at least one. “There’s a fine line between being posh and being a pillock.”
“Honestly, not that fine a line,” James said.
“Even rich people let themselves get a bit rumpled in the country. Otherwise they look even more untrustworthy than usual.”
“You just don’t like him,” said James, smiling a little into his muffler.
“Of course I don’t like him,” Leo protested. “Anyway. Lilah’s room is a tip. Do we know why she’s even here this weekend? She wasn’t mentioned in the will and Martha didn’t have a room prepared.”
“She seems close to Martha,” James said. “But in that case, you’d expect her to have at least rung ahead.”
“Right. Madame Fournier keeps her room as neat as a pin. So does Lady Marchand, surprisingly. A delight to search, both of them. The only interesting item was a carpetbag in Madame’s room with the initials GB sewn inside. Of course, she might have bought it secondhand or borrowed it from this GB. But it’s still worth noting. Also, she isn’t foreign. I’d say East London, but with a pretty convincing effort to sound middle class.”
“And that’s it?”
They appeared to be alone in the garden, but Leo lowered his voice anyway. “Except for the small matter of a blackmail note that I found in Marchand’s bedroom. He was using it as a bookmark, if you can believe it. He’s reading The Eustace Diamonds, of all things.”
“I don’t care what he’s reading!” James said, laughing. “What did the note say?”
Leo recalled the note. It was typed on paper that was thin and slightly gray, but not the cheapest money could buy. “It said ‘I’m sure that after twenty years you’ve got quite comfortable, but remember that there’s one other who knows your secret.’” As far as threatening letters went, this was pretty mild. To start with, there was no threat, nor even a demand.
James hummed pensively. “Do you think it was written to Sir Anthony or from him?”
Leo’s heart gave a little thrill that James even thought of the latter. In some other world where Leo was able to tell him the details of his job, James might just understand. “The paper was cheaper than what I’d expect from Marchand, but anyone can buy inexpensive paper.”
“It might have nothing to do with Rose. He could have received it in London. Although I don’t know why he’d bring it with him to Cornwall. I suppose it would be too much to ask for blackmailers to specify exactly what secrets they’re referencing.”
“Unsporting of them not to, really.”
James then proceeded to tell Leo about his conversations with Martha and Camilla.
“So, I’m trying to decide whether gently born young ladies murder one another over failure to wear proper frocks,” Leo said.
“Some might, but I don’t think Martha does.”
Leo didn’t think so either, but the animosity between the cousins still made him curious.
They began to make their way down a path that James said would lead toward the village. Neglected garden beds gave way to an expanse of brownish scrub, which in turn led to a low stone wall with a gate that swung open on rusty hinges.
This footpath ran parallel to the shoreline, as best as Leo could tell, but he still hadn’t glimpsed so much as an inch of the sea. He could smell it, he could feel the sharp sea breeze, and if he strained he thought he could almost hear it. Hell, he could taste the salt in the air.
“Next time we decide to go to the sea, we ought to do it in the summer,” James said.
“And when we aren’t investigating a decades-old mystery in a creepy house,” Leo suggested.
“Or trying to be civil with family members who were perfectly content to have nothing to do with me for twenty years.”
“And who don’t have any food in the kitchen despite the house being littered with Meissen porcelain and priceless art,” Leo added, and only then realized that James had suggested taking a holiday together. Several months in the future, in fact. It wasn’t as if Leo didn’t know that James wanted Leo to stick around; it wasn’t as if Leo didn’t plan to do precisely that.
It was just that hearing James assume this, hearing James speak of a future of shared holidays as if it were a foregone conclusion, made Leo feel appalled with himself. He felt like Mrs. Patel had been on to something when she asked if Leo was running a con.
A path that at first seemed like a shortcut to the village now thinned out to the point of disappearing. “So help me, if this doesn’t lead to the village,” Leo said, striving for a light tone, “I will eat the first sheep or goat or what have you that crosses our path.”
“Not much in the way of goats at Blackthorn, I’m afraid. Nor sheep.”
Leo shoved his hands in his pockets and kept his eyes on the path. “Say, you know I’m going to look for any dirt I can find on your family, right?”
If James was brought up short by this sudden change in topic, he didn’t let on. “I think that’s rather the point of this exercise. If the mystery of Rose’s disappearance could be solved without a lot of unpleasantness, it would have been done twenty years ago. Why, did you think I was going to be cross with you for being ungentlemanly or something?”
“There’s a difference between unpleasantness that occurred twenty years ago and the knowledge that the person responsible for the unpleasantness is sitting across from you at dinner and a few branches over on the family tree.” He scuffed the toe of his shoe along the dirt path. “I’d much rather discover a nonmurderous explanation. I’d rather you have a living cousin than a dead one.”
James looked at him oddly. “You expect me to go to pieces.”
“I expect you to be slightly miffed that I’m treating your family as murder suspects.”
James was silent for a few paces. “Huh. I might have expected to react that way too, if I had thought about it. But I know you and trust you a good deal better than I know or trust this lot.”
“Why on earth would you do a thing like that?”
“Don’t be daft.” James bumped his shoulder against Leo’s.
Leo wanted to lay out an itemized list of reasons James shouldn’t trust him, and possibly shouldn’t trust anybody, but judged it a sad waste of both their time. “That had better be the village up there,” he said instead.
It was indeed the village, and high time, because Leo’s stomach was rumbling and he was beginning to suspect that he was getting too old to think on an empty stomach.
At the tea shop, they settled into a small table in a shadowy corner.
“So,” Leo said when a plate of scones and sandwiches and a scalding hot pot of tea arrived. He had saved this bit of information for when they were sitting face-to-face. “It turns out there was never any inquest. Rose was never declared dead and her body was never found.” He gave James a moment to consider this. “That’s extremely unusual. Typically, a body washes ashore. You can even predict when and where it will turn up.”
“All right,” James said slowly. “So she didn’t drown?”
“Almost certainly not.”
“Either she was killed and”—James swallowed—“disposed of elsewhere, or she didn’t die.”
The complete picture was a bit more complicated than that, but James had the basic lay of the land and Leo didn’t want to muddle things. “Yes. Let’s dispense with the low-lying fruit. One, who would have had a motive to kill your cousin? Two, would she have had a reason to run off and let people think she had died? Three, did she seem distressed or disturbed? Afraid? Angry?”
“I don’t know,” said James, frustrated.
“I know. I know,” said Leo, backtracking. “I don’t expect you to. Those are just the questions we need to keep in mind as we look for answers.” Under the table he pressed his foot against James’s. “So,” he went on, keeping his voice light and conversational to avoid the impression of interrogating James. “Who was at Blackthorn the day Rose disappeared?”
“Like I said, Martha told me—”
“I know what Martha said. I want to know what you remember. If you remember anything. And if you don’t, that’s fine too.”
James hummed thoughtfully. “Sir Anthony must have been there when Rose vanished, because I remember him telling me to stay in my room while the police were around. And Camilla brought me tea and biscuits while the police were there. Uncle Rupert and Martha must have been around as well, but I don’t remember talking to them. They probably had their hands full with the police.”
“Do you remember there being guests?”
“I remember that I got one of the rooms in the guest wing—the room we’re staying in now—instead of bunking in one of the tiny attic rooms where children and unattached gentlemen usually stayed. I think Martha was telling the truth about the house being relatively empty that summer.”
“How do you know it was that summer in particular that you got that room?”
“Because it looks out onto the tennis courts, and I remember watching the policemen traipse across the court, ruining the lines.”
Interesting. Leo would check either the police reports or the newspaper accounts to see if other guests were mentioned.
“Why do you think that the house was empty that summer, when it was usually filled with guests?”
“Well, Camilla had just married Sir Anthony that spring. Maybe there was no point in having all these parties if she had already found a husband.”
Leo’s eyebrows shot up. “That same year? You’re quite certain?”
“I remember because I had to come down from school for the party and missed a cricket match. It was my first year on the team and I was none too pleased about it.”
“A cricket match would be when—April at the earliest, right? Lilah was born in August of that year.”
James raised his eyebrows. “How can you know that?”
“I went through Miss Marchand’s luggage and found her passport.”
“Why would Lilah have her passport with her?” James asked.
Leo smiled at the fact that this, not his invasion of Lilah’s privacy, was what James asked about. “She also had some French coins in there, so I’d wager she recently returned from a trip. Furthermore, she had about five tubes of lipstick, keys to a car that certainly isn’t in the garage at Blackthorn, and about half a pound of hair pins. She does not strike me as a woman of tidy habits. More interestingly, if she was born in August, then her mother was several months into her pregnancy on her wedding day.”
“That’s hardly unusual.”
“It is when you have the sort of grand party that necessitates people coming down from school for the event. That doesn’t sound like a rushed wedding. And she must have been very pregnant indeed that summer.”
James hummed his agreement. “It just goes to show how unobservant a twelve-year-old boy can be.”
Leo thought it suggested something quite different, but he wasn’t going to say so. “Well, I daresay there are wedding photographs somewhere in the house. What about Rose? Did Rose have any boyfriends? Or any lovers at all?”
“I was twelve years old, Leo, and I guarantee that I wouldn’t have noticed one way or the other.”
“You said that Rose taught you to swim and play tennis. What else did she do? Who else did she play tennis with? Camilla? Martha?”
James furrowed his brow. “I don’t remember names. I remember a few faces. A young blond man who made everybody laugh, for example.”
“We need to find the picture albums. They have to be around somewhere, because that photograph your uncle left you had paste on the back. It must have been in an album at some point. Speaking of that picture, how close were Camilla and Rose? It looks like they were nearly the same age.”
“Rose was a year older. She was twenty-one when she disappeared.”
Every time the door to the tea shop opened, a bell rang, and every time the bell rang, Leo casually looked up to catch a glimpse of the newcomer. Now the chime rang, and Leo leaned back so his face would be obscured by shadows.
“Don’t turn around,” Leo murmured. About half the people in the universe immediately turned when given such an order, but James only calmly buttered a scone.
“Oh?” he asked. “Who is it?”
“Madame Fournier. She’s wearing quite a sensible coat. Dark blue,” he said approvingly. “And a matching hat.”
“What does her coat have to do with it?” James asked.
“I would have thought her the type to wear a cape or maybe something trimmed with cheap fur. Not a dark blue wool single-breasted coat and matching hat. Very smart.”
“Leo,” laughed James.
The bell chimed again and another woman entered, this time a stranger. She looked around the room once, then again, and seemed on the verge of leaving when she went still, then proceeded across the floor to sit with Madame Fournier. This woman was plump, with rosy cheeks and fair hair that was fading into gray. She wore a brown tweed skirt and coat, a pair of sensible brogues, and worn but respectable fawn gloves.
Leo thought of the little girls in that photograph with James’s parents. They both had dark hair, and few people became fairer with age. Unless, of course, they employed peroxide. But the gray at the woman’s temples argued against that.
“What are you thinking?” asked James.
“I’m weighing the probability that your cousin ran off and married…a traveling salesman? A grocer?” He eyed the sensible brogues more closely. “A prosperous grocer, at any rate.”
“What can you possibly be talking about?” James asked, nudging Leo’s foot with his own.
“Madame Fournier is talking to a mysterious stranger. And that, I’ll bet, is the first time anyone ever referred to that lady as mysterious. Could Madame Fournier be your cousin? All that makeup and henna could be a disguise.”
“I think Camilla and Martha would have recognized her. Besides, I don’t think she’s tall enough. The Bellamys were always very tall. You’ve seen Camilla.”
“Lilah’s rather petite. And so is Martha. Let’s see. Who else could be your cousin in disguise?”
“But why should anyone be Rose in disguise? Why would she run off and come back twenty years later in disguise? People don’t simply run off. People don’t disappear.”
Leo paused with his cup halfway to his mouth and then gently set it back in the saucer. “People run off all the time. People disappear all the time. I disappear. I disappeared yesterday morning, in fact, as far as any of my associates in—in that city will be concerned.” The dead Soviet had disappeared too—there probably wasn’t a trace of the kid left. Twenty years from now, her family would probably talk about her in much the same way that James spoke of his cousin.
“Your circumstances are different,” James protested.
“I ran away from home when I was a good deal younger than your cousin and I never went back. It was years before I dared to go within ten miles of Bristol.” He held up his hand to forestall whatever James was going to say. “And people get disappeared all the time. But because they’re poor, nobody pays attention. Everybody’s used to poor people disappearing. Maybe they ran off, maybe they went to prison, maybe they got involved with the wrong kind of man. Maybe home was dangerous. Maybe they were—” He lowered his voice. “Maybe they were like us and needed to go someplace new, someplace safe, and knew nobody at home would want to hear about it. We disappear all the time.” By the time he finished, he didn’t know whether he was talking about poor people or queer people or what. He just knew that the idea of everyone kicking up a fuss about a girl who ran off twenty years earlier was something that only happened when the girl was born with a silver spoon in her mouth.
“I apologize,” James said, even though Leo would have bet five quid that he had no idea what he was apologizing for. How could he? For all the horrors he had seen, he was innocent when it came to some things. There was a gulf between them that Leo didn’t know how to bridge, or whether James would even want him to.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not—” Leo shook his head. “I just want you to understand that whatever happened to your cousin, the only reason it’s noteworthy is that she was rich. People don’t usually walk away from a rich father without good reason. In any event, I think we can dismiss the idea that she ran off with a man. If she had, she would have turned up before now.” Well, unless something had happened to her after running away, but that wasn’t worth pointing out.
“It’s a pity,” James said, “because that’s the happiest outcome.”
Leo wasn’t sure he agreed. There were any number of good reasons to run away. But he understood that James, who had spent his entire childhood being sent away, might not understand this. “We’re assuming that your uncle didn’t know what happened to Rose. For all we know, the pair of them were in constant communication and he’s set you all on this goose chase for one last laugh.” He pushed his sandwich crusts around his plate. “So, this afternoon let’s visit the Plymouth library to get a look at some moldy old newspapers, then go back to Blackthorn so I can pick up the car.”
James furrowed his brow. “Martha will let you stay another night.”
“I’m certain she would. But I don’t want anyone to look too closely at us.” This wasn’t the entire truth. Something about this conversation had left him feeling unmoored.
“Leo, we live together.” He peered into his teacup. “Don’t we?”
Leo swallowed. Denying it would be untrue as well as upsetting to James, but he couldn’t agree without feeling like he had committed James to more than he could possibly understand. The fact was that he stayed with James when he was in England. What little he possessed, he kept at James’s house. But the idea of sharing a home with James seemed so grossly improbable that he felt like a charlatan saying it aloud.
“All the more reason for us not to be in one another’s pockets when we’re away from home,” he managed. “We don’t want anyone to think that I’m anything more than a bachelor friend who stays in your spare room when I’m not traveling for business.” Under the table, he pressed his leg against James’s.
“All right,” James conceded. He looked so disappointed that Leo wanted to crawl into his lap and kiss him.
“Thanks, Jamie,” Leo said with a conciliatory smile.
James, his face red, opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.
“Should I not call you that?” Leo asked. “I just heard your cousin—”
“It’s fine,” James said quickly. “I like it.”
“Good.”
“Well, in the interest of getting this done with as soon as possible, instead of going to the library, I ought to go back to Blackthorn and see what I can turn up by way of photographs.”
Leo had one item of business to dispatch before getting a taxi to the library, so he said goodbye to James and lingered in his seat in the corner of the tea shop. He waited for Madame Fournier and her friend to settle their bill and leave, then got to his feet and headed for the door, bending once as if to pick something off the ground.
“I beg your pardon,” he told a waitress. “But the woman in the mouse-colored felt hat dropped this glove.” The glove, in fact, belonged to Wendy, who left stray gloves all over the village. The last time Leo had worn this cardigan, he had found the glove on the edge of the pigsty and rescued it, then forgot all about it. “I don’t suppose you know who she is in order to see that it’s returned to her?”
“Mrs. Mudge isn’t usually so scattered,” said the waitress. “And it’s a cold day out. She’ll be wanting that glove.”
“If you tell me where I can find Mrs. Mudge, I can return the glove to her myself and spare you the bother of keeping track of it. Besides,” he added, leaning in, “I’m in need of a good deed to do today.”
“I’ll bet you are,” she said with a wink. “Mr. Mudge is the grocer, and Mrs. Mudge will be headed over there now in order to help at the till.”
Leo thought about going directly to the grocer, but judged that he’d rather speak with Mrs. Mudge after reviewing the newspaper. He shoved his hands into his pockets and went outside to find a taxi.