Leo supposed he could leave well enough alone. The mystery he had determined to solve for James’s sake was now answered. There were loose ends, but they were of no importance to him, and likely hadn’t even occurred to James, and so Leo ought to leave them be.
But Leo wasn’t very good at leaving things be.
He thought about the cup of tea in Rupert Bellamy’s room, the comfortable chair by his bed. He thought, too, of the way Martha said “Aunt Charlotte” but simply “Rupert.”
And he realized what he should have understood as soon as he set foot in the house: Martha Dauntsey was grieving. Not two weeks earlier, she had lost the man with whom she had lived her entire adult life, and twenty of those years had been spent effectively alone with him. Leo didn’t know if what had existed between them was friendship or something different, and he didn’t think it mattered.
So when Lilah and James were closeted in the drawing room, Leo followed Martha into the kitchen. “I wonder if I can speak to you for a moment,” he said as gently as he could.
She sat at the kitchen table, weariness in her every limb. “Do your worst, Mr. Page.”
“Before I came here,” Leo said, putting the kettle on the hob and taking a clean cup off the drying rack, “two women of Rupert Bellamy’s generation said that he was too stolid a personality to go in for anything as theatrical as assembling his family for a reading of the will. And if they were correct, he certainly wouldn’t have countenanced anything like the scavenger hunt we participated in this weekend.”
“People change,” said Martha unconvincingly.
“Perhaps,” said Leo. “But I’m going to suggest another explanation. Perhaps someone else—an interested party, let’s say—decided that they needed to know what happened twenty years ago. Perhaps they blamed themselves for what happened and, now that they were alone, weren’t certain that they could face the rest of their own life without having that mystery put to rest. In that case, perhaps they took the liberty of rewriting certain portions of Rupert Bellamy’s will and substituting a challenge that would encourage the truth to come out.”
“That would be grievously unethical,” said Martha.
“I’m no expert on ethics,” said Leo. “I’m not interested in it in the least. What I do know is that a good number of things went wrong that summer twenty years ago, and if I were in the shoes of this interested party, I might want to know the extent to which my hands were dirty.”
“She ran away.”
“It might be better to think of it as starting a new life. A better life.”
“You make it sound like a good thing. Like something brave.”
“Yes. Definitely that.” He wouldn’t tell this woman that it wasn’t her fault. But he could maybe give her peace that this story had a happy ending.
“How did you know about the will?”
“I found the will from which you borrowed the signature page. But moreover, the fake will did you harm. All the previous wills left you something substantial. It seemed impossible that in his dying days, Rupert Bellamy decided to do you out of a living.”
“I wanted to know more than I wanted the house.” Unspoken was that now she didn’t know, nor did she have the house. “I daresay Lilah will let me stay on here.”
“Lilah will insist, and we both know it. I don’t think she would have said anything to Mr. Trevelyan if the house hadn’t been at stake. Are you going to tell her? I’m afraid that if you don’t, she’s going to think that Gladys Button is her mother.”
Martha looked up sharply at him. “Why on earth would she think that?”
“She was looking very closely at some pictures in the newspaper, and Gladys was small and fair. That’s why she came here this weekend, I think. It was only natural to suppose that there might be some revelation in her grandfather’s will, especially since he insisted on the beneficiaries gathering together. She was disappointed.”
“Camilla and I will need to talk.” There was a dread underlying her words, and Leo realized that for all that had happened in the past two days, Camilla and Martha would still rather do anything than discuss the unpleasant.
“I have one other question and then I’ll let you be. Why did you leave James that photograph of his father?”
“I had to make sure the will left him something or it would have looked odd.”
Leo wanted there to be a reason for James to have been brought back into the reach of these people and this house. He wanted to hear that Martha meant to atone for years of ignoring her cousin, or even that she had intended the gesture to be cruel. He would have been satisfied to know that she simply thought James would have wanted the photograph.
Leo didn’t get angry terribly often; it was dangerous, in his business, to have a short fuse. But the idea that there hadn’t been any reason at all made him close to furious. He couldn’t stand that James had been used, that his feelings had been treated as unimportant now as they had been twenty years earlier.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway leading to the kitchen, and Leo turned to see James.
“How long will it take to get back to Wychcomb St. Mary?” James asked after they had taken their leave of Martha.
“The way I mean to drive? Three hours. There’s only one thing left for me to do. I’m going to pretend I left something upstairs. But I’m going to sneak into your uncle’s room and commit a tiny little felony.”
“If you’re going back to steal the picture of me as a gangly twelve-year-old, you needn’t go to the trouble. I already took it.” He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a photograph.
Leo stared at him. “Am I that obvious? How lowering.”
“Every time you come across a photograph of me in one of Cora’s books, you ask her for it. If you were trying to be subtle, you should work on your impressions.”
Leo took the photograph, gave it another glance, and carefully placed it in his jacket pocket. “I like tangible evidence that I didn’t conjure you up,” he said. “Now let’s go home.”