It turned out that they couldn’t talk to Gladys right away because when they walked through the door, Martha intercepted them.
“You’ll need to stay for dinner, if you please, Mr. Page,” she said briskly. “The table is already set for eight. Odd numbers are so unpleasant, don’t you think, with the people on one side always more squashed than the other?”
“Good heavens,” James said after Martha disappeared around a corner in the direction of the kitchen. “That’s the Cousin Martha I remember. Rather like being visited by a ghost.”
Leo was all too aware that he hadn’t yet told James his suspicions about Martha’s particular reasons for being secretive about the events of summer 1927. But James was presently looking warm and pleased, his hair rumpled from the wind and Leo’s fingers, and Leo just didn’t have it in him to pierce his air of cheerful well-being.
“Who was she going to have occupy the eighth chair if I hadn’t come in just then?” Leo asked, hanging his coat and hat and then James’s.
“Hostesses have a list of single gentlemen they can call upon at the last minute to make up their numbers,” James said.
“Do they really? I mean, in 1948 and not an Anthony Trollope novel?”
“Some still do. I can rely on one good dinner a month from such an emergency,” he added, grinning sheepishly. “Things are much more casual now than they used to be, and nobody worries too much about seating two women next to one another, but old-fashioned ladies do worry about it if they fancy themselves good hostesses.”
“And is your cousin a good hostess?” Leo asked, genuinely curious. From what he had seen, Martha Dauntsey was vague, scatter-brained, and distracted. If she had once cared about hospitality, something must have happened to change that. Could the loss of her cousin be enough to explain such a shift?
“She certainly was,” James said. “And before you say that a child isn’t likely to notice how well a house is kept, I’ll remind you that a growing boy certainly notices when there isn’t enough food or when dinner is late. And I remember nothing of the sort. There’s an entire third story of guest rooms that must be quite uninhabitable in winter but which used to be filled with guests every summer. She kept everything going. Picnics and garden parties and both girls’ debuts.” He paused at the base of the stairs. “I’m going to put our coats upstairs and get changed,” he said, reaching out his hand for Leo’s coat.
Before James disappeared up the stairs, he paused for a moment, looking at Leo. He often did this before taking his leave, in that fleeting space of time when a man might kiss a girlfriend or his wife. Leo had grown to look forward to those tiny moments, when somehow James managed to convey in a single glance the easy affection that a kiss on the cheek might do. Nothing passed between them except eye contact—not a touch, not so much as a move to bridge the gap between them. But Leo still felt held close. He felt—God help him—dear and precious, sensations that were so new after only a few months that they felt peculiar, as if he were wearing a new style of hat and wasn’t quite sure it suited him.
That was a lie. He didn’t care if it suited him. He didn’t care how misled James Sommers was to think that Leo could ever be a person who deserved soft, lingering glances or outrageously chaste moments of fondness. He didn’t care at all, because he was greedy and grasping and he would just go ahead and add that to his list of sins.
After getting some goddamned control of himself, Leo poked his head into the library and discovered the elderly solicitor shuffling some papers on a large desk.
“Mr. Trevelyan, isn’t it? Leo Page.”
“Dr. Sommers’s friend,” the older man said, nodding.
“I was hoping you could help with something that’s been troubling me. I’m trying to help Dr. Sommers with this mystery. Can you tell me whether Rose had a will?”
“She did,” said Mr. Trevelyan, after only a brief hesitation. “She left everything to Camilla. Their mother left twenty thousand pounds to each of her daughters, held in trust until they turned twenty-one. So when Rose died, Camilla would have inherited Rose’s share even though she herself hadn’t yet turned twenty-one.”
So, Camilla—and by extension Sir Anthony Marchand—were the direct beneficiaries of Rose’s death. Leo wondered whether Marchand had been in desperate need of funds in the summer of 1927. Leo would have thought that a man with a father-in-law as wealthy as Rupert Bellamy and twenty thousand pounds coming his way in a year’s time had easier ways to acquire money than murdering his sister-in-law, but one never knew.
But Camilla never had inherited Rose’s money, because Rose was never declared dead. “Why was Rose never declared dead? Surely, enough time had passed.”
“It was unnecessary,” the old man said carefully. “It turned out that she had no assets.”
“She was still twenty-one when she disappeared. Which means she went through twenty thousand pounds in less than a year? She must have had expensive tastes.”
Mr. Trevelyan gave a wry smile. “Not as far as I recall. She might have bought a few horses or automobiles, but that wouldn’t even come close to using up her inheritance.”
Leo almost laughed at the idea of a horse or car being a trivial expense, but for these people it was, and the lawyer was right that neither expense even came close to explaining what had happened to all that money. Gambling, perhaps, although that would amount to quite a losing spree. Or maybe she paid the money to someone else. There was at least one blackmailer involved in this case, if Sir Anthony Marchand’s letter was evidence of anything. Maybe Rose was being blackmailed.
There was also one known thief involved in this case. Maybe Rose withdrew money from the bank and Gladys had helped herself to some of it. Maybe that was why she ran away.
In any event, twenty thousand pounds was a hell of a motive to murder someone. Camilla or Marchand could have done it without realizing that there wasn’t any money to be inherited.
He thanked Trevelyan and went upstairs in search of James. The bedroom door was shut, so he knocked, more for the idea of keeping up appearances than anything else.
A moment later James opened the door, looking perplexed. His shirt was half buttoned and his hair askew, as if he had pulled his jumper off over his head and not got around to finding his comb.
“The oddest thing just happened,” James said. “I was looking out the window and you knocked on the door and I remembered something.”
“Oh?” Leo shut the door and began doing up the rest of James’s buttons.
“That morning, Rose didn’t knock on my door. I had been having trouble sleeping that summer. I suppose I was a bit unsettled. In any event, I often woke before dawn and wasn’t able to go back to sleep.”
Leo knew that James’s father had died a few months before Rose disappeared; his mother was evidently already out of the picture if James was spending the summers at Blackthorn without her. It was no wonder he had nightmares.
Leo did up the top button of James’s shirt and slid his hands to James’s shoulders, unwilling to stop touching him.
“Rose knew I wasn’t sleeping well,” James went on, “and she always knocked on my door as soon as she was out of bed so I’d know I could get up and join her. But she didn’t knock on my door that morning.”
“What do you mean by join her?”
“If she went for a swim, I’d poke around the beach looking for shells or sea glass. If she was going for a ride, I’d tag along on Camilla’s horse. If she was tinkering with one of the car engines, I’d hang well back because they terrified me. Anyway, that day she didn’t knock on my door. So she mustn’t have gone swimming, and therefore can’t have died in a swimming accident. Which we already knew. But the thing is, I told Camilla.”
“Oh?”
“When everyone first realized that Rose wasn’t anywhere to be found, I told Camilla that Rose mustn’t have gone swimming because she hadn’t knocked on my door.”
“And Camilla knew that Rose was in the habit of taking you with her every morning?”
“Yes. Then, later on, when Camilla brought me my tea, she knocked on my door—”
“Why were you taking tea in your bedroom?”
“So I wouldn’t get underfoot of the police, I suppose. Anyway, I asked if she told the police about what I said, and she told me that she had.”
“Which is doubtful, because if she had, the police would have wanted to speak with you.”
So, Camilla either lied to the police or lied by omission in order to make them think that Rose had a swimming accident. Or, what was equally likely to Leo’s thinking, she and Marchand, and maybe Rupert too, had decided to tell the police a simplified version of the truth. People were forever feeding white lies and half-truths to the police, and Leo could hardly blame them; this was the first relatable thing Leo had heard of Camilla and Marchand doing.
James raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t even think of that. Anyway, Camilla and probably Anthony must have known all along that Rose didn’t die while out on a swim.”
Leo thought about how to phrase this as gently as possible. He brushed a strand of hair off James’s forehead. “Unless Rose planned to end her life and didn’t want you around to witness it, darling.” He didn’t know where that darling came from. He had never said that word before and felt like a pillock saying it now, but he needed James to know that he was cared for in a way that his younger self hadn’t been, even if it was by someone like Leo.