The silence in the smoking room made it seem as dead as a tomb. Jacob’s fingers itched. He was desperate to scribble notes but he knew Rachel would never forgive him. Was this a story she didn’t want to be told? Otherwise, why wait until Oakes had left before exploding her grenade?
Nobody moved until Lady Jackson, unable to bear it any longer, gave a low moan and buried her head in her hands. Her husband looped a brawny arm around her, murmuring words of comfort.
Rachel tasted her whisky and waited for a reply.
Sir Harold said heavily, ‘How did you find out?’
‘I’m afraid your wife made a simple mistake. Easily done, even more easily overlooked, but I happened to notice.’
‘You don’t miss much, do you?’
‘What mistake?’ Lady Jackson said dully.
‘Don’t you recall?’ Rachel asked. ‘You mentioned your mother dying from cancer on your sixteenth birthday. Yet according to The Illustrated Guide to Hemlock Bay you were orphaned in infancy by a fatal car crash in San Diego.’
A stifled cry. ‘Oh God!’
Rachel continued inexorably. ‘A strange mistake to make. Inexplicable. Nobody gets so mixed up about a date that is so important to them. If Sadie lost her parents very young and was raised by her guardian, that meant you weren’t Sadie.’
The Jacksons exchanged glances. Jacob held his breath, but neither of them spoke.
‘Once I read Basil Palmer’s journal,’ Rachel said, ‘it was easy enough to fit the pieces together. Sadie was due to come into a fortune when she was twenty-five. But her health was poor and the chances of her reaching that age weren’t good. She was a shrinking violet, according to Basil. Not like Hooker Jackson, the adventurer who was prepared to cut any corner to get what he wanted.’
Sir Harold finished his drink. ‘You seem to know everything, Miss Savernake.’
‘I only wish I did. Am I right in guessing that you fell for Josie first? And did she introduce you to Sadie?’
He nodded. ‘Two bull’s eyes. Sadie’s guardian was old and ailing. Josie brought her to Europe to see the world, but they got no further than England before war broke out. I met Josie at a party and from that moment my fate was sealed.’
He looked fondly at his wife, but she seemed incapable of speech.
‘When you found out about Sadie’s frailty and her financial expectations,’ Rachel said, ‘you cooked up a plan with Josie. Her cousin had little experience of men. You’d sweep her off her feet and marry her. If she inherited the money, all well and good. Not to put too fine a point on it, she wasn’t going to live forever, and the two of you could continue your affair in the meantime.’
‘When you put it so baldly, it seems heartless. Cruel. Take it from me, Miss Savernake, the reality was different.’
‘You were doing Sadie a good turn?’
‘Mock if you wish, but it’s not so far from the truth. She’d known little happiness. In the short time we were together, I like to think she experienced some joy.’
Rachel shrugged. ‘If Sadie died before reaching the magic age, Josie would step into her shoes and become Mrs Jackson. The strong physical resemblance between the two cousins was a crucial advantage. You’d be living in England, far away from anyone in America who might be able to tell the difference between them. A dangerous game, but I suppose the prospect excited you. You’re a born risk-taker.’
‘Josie and I have that in common,’ Sir Harold muttered. ‘Both of us have a reckless streak.’
Rachel allowed herself a glimmer of a smile. ‘Like your enthusiasm for taking your clothes off in public?’
‘We’ve never cared about the conventions. Who gives a damn for respectability when you may be blown out of the sky at any moment? None of us knew what was going to happen. I flew out on so many sorties, the odds were stacked against me. It’s a miracle I made it through the whole war in one piece.’
‘Despite the fact you got married at a time of such uncertainty, you wanted to minimise the chance of being detected in future. So it was a small, hastily arranged ceremony and you chose Basil Palmer as your best man. You’d dropped him long ago and had no intention of seeing him again. He was boring. Far too much of a doormat. But even doormats have their uses.’
‘Cynical, but true.’
‘As you expected, he was ready, willing, and able to do the honours. What you didn’t predict was that he’d be presumptuous enough to take a shine to Josie.’
‘She didn’t have any difficulty in brushing him off.’
‘I felt sorry for him,’ his wife muttered. ‘Such an unprepossessing creature.’
Rachel asked, ‘What happened to Sadie?’
‘She was dying of consumption,’ Harold said. ‘Her inheritance was due to go to distant relatives of her guardian. Sadie didn’t even know them. We’d bought a cottage in Epping Forest and Josie rented a room in the vicinity. When I next came home on leave, Sadie was very sick. I berated the nurse we’d engaged and sent her packing. Josie took over from her. I don’t mind telling you that I agonised, but… there was the money to think about, you see.’
‘Yes, I see that very well.’
‘Call me a liar if you wish, but one day Sadie begged me to push the pillow over her face. What could I do? Let nature take its course and see the woman suffer needlessly?’
‘So…?’
‘So I smothered my wife and buried her in the forest. Her body lies there to this day. Unfortunate, but—’
‘Extremely unfortunate,’ Rachel interrupted.
‘What choice did I have?’
‘You could have let her die a natural death and given her a Christian burial.’
‘And condemn her to prolonged pain and anguish? Miss Savernake, let us talk plainly. Was it so very wicked to put her out of her misery?’
‘We Americans have a term for it,’ his wife said quietly. ‘We call it a mercy killing.’
Rachel savoured her whisky. ‘A slippery phrase. At all events, you began your masquerade. One pretty American woman looks much like another, was that the idea?’
The other woman took a breath. ‘Looking back on it, the confusions of wartime made switching identities as easy as pie. We flitted from place to place, that’s how we stumbled across Hemlock Bay. The money came to me without any complications and by the time of the Armistice, we were ready to turn our dreams into reality. This resort is the result.’
‘Since the war, everything has gone perfectly here?’
‘Pretty much, until the Carsons came into our lives. At first they seemed like the answer to a prayer. After my operation, the outlook was uncertain and Harold and I were ready to wind down. The only question was, how best to do it.’
Her husband nodded. ‘To divest yourself of such a big business isn’t as easy as people imagine. You need to find a willing buyer with cash in the bank. I had my reservations about Carson, but nobody else was prepared to put up the money. Giving him the hotel to run was akin to putting him on probation. If he made a good job of it, I’d have sold him the rest of my stake in the company at the end of the summer.’
‘And then Basil Palmer turned up,’ Rachel said. ‘His involvement in your big day meant a lot to him. He never forgot it. Even if he didn’t see through your deception when he spotted the two of you here.’ Rachel looked at Lady Jackson. ‘Did both of you recognise him?’
She gave a weary nod. ‘He’d taken off his glasses and those small, protuberant eyes rang a bell in my mind. Harold’s too, as I soon discovered. For a few moments I couldn’t place him, but I knew I associated him with Harold’s past and with an unwelcome advance. When the truth dawned on me, I was horrified. A man who had seen me and Sadie on a memorable occasion.’
‘What terrified us,’ her husband said, ‘was that we found out that he’d come to Hemlock Bay masquerading as someone else. I established that he wasn’t staying at the hotel and when I asked my land agent, his description of the new tenant at Shepherd’s Cottage confirmed our worst fears. Basil was here, in our own back yard. Using a false name, trying – not very successfully, but that was typical of Basil – to change his appearance. But he’d slipped up by giving the name of his own accounting practice as one of his referees.’
Rachel winced. ‘So much for the best-laid plans. His naïveté is clear from everything he writes in the journal.’
‘His refusal to come to dinner seemed deeply suspicious. Had he somehow worked out that we were living a lie? Was he trying to avoid us until such time as it suited him to confront us? We couldn’t think of an innocent explanation.’
‘You’ll never believe it, in view of what the Carsons were up to,’ his wife said, ‘but we thought he’d fallen on hard times and was planning to blackmail us.’
‘Whatever his motives,’ Sir Harold said, ‘he represented a serious threat. Suppose he was here for some other reason – as now turns out to be the case. He’d taken a tenancy for the summer and had run across us within his first few days in the town. We could hardly go into hiding. If he bumped into us again, there was every chance he’d realise that Josie was pretending to be my wife. And then the balloon would go up. We’d be ruined.’
‘Everything we’d created here was in jeopardy,’ his wife said. ‘The resort. The house. Harold’s knighthood. Our children’s happiness. We didn’t have a clue about what the Carsons were up to. As far as we were concerned, Basil Palmer was the serpent in our Eden. Even if he swore to keep the secret, how could we trust him to keep his word?’
‘So you decided to kill him,’ Rachel said pleasantly.
‘No! For heaven’s sake, you make it sound like a cold-blooded plan.’
‘I don’t believe his murder was entirely unpremeditated.’
The other woman bit her lip. ‘The truth is, we didn’t know what to do. We were beside ourselves with worry, but we had to maintain a façade. Business as usual, you know?’
Rachel nodded. ‘The murder of Gareth Bellamy gave you an idea, didn’t it? That crime seemed like the work of a maniac. Who else would batter a harmless fortune teller to death? If a madman was on the loose, perhaps he might choose Basil Palmer as his next victim.’
Sir Harold groaned. ‘Inspector Young thought Winnie Lescott was responsible. I doubted he was right. But if she was guilty, Bellamy’s murder made it no easier to… remove Basil Palmer.’
He turned to Jacob. ‘The moment you revealed that Winnie was innocent, I saw my chance. I didn’t have time to think it out in detail, but I’ve always believed in acting on my instincts.’
‘Your preparation was more extensive than you admit,’ Rachel said. ‘Basil Palmer’s supposed suicide note, for instance.’
Sir Harold sighed and shook his head, like a defeated chess player acknowledging the superior skills of a grand master.
‘Palmer mentions in his journal that you once forged a cheque,’ she said. ‘Old habits die hard, and the odd phrasing of the note intrigued me. Am I right in guessing that you copied certain words from his correspondence with your land agent, when taking the tenancy of Shepherd’s Cottage?’
‘You’re exceptionally shrewd, Miss Savernake. As formidable a young woman as I’ve ever met.’ He coughed. ‘Except for my beloved… I’ll call her by the name she was born with, given that you seem to have penetrated all our secrets… my beloved Josephine.’
‘You are familiar with the smugglers’ tunnels,’ Rachel said. ‘Let me explain what I think you did. After dropping off Virginia and myself, you parked your car at the Fisherman’s Arms, then hurried back to End Terrace. You were always careful to keep on good terms with the local people who were living here when you and your wife arrived. Mrs Stones thinks the sun shines out of you, and she’s not alone. You’d learned that what looks like a well in her garden actually leads to the tunnels. It goes by way of Shepherd’s Cottage to the caves by the sea.’
‘I did a lot of exploring in my early days here. The tunnel from Palmer’s house to the cliffs is blocked, but the section leading back inland is in a surprisingly good state. I’m not quite as fit as I was, but it didn’t take me long to get to Shepherd’s Cottage.’
‘Unfortunately, you were seen.’
His expression was derisive. ‘No need to try to trick me, Miss Savernake.’
‘There is a witness, I can assure you. Not Virginia Penrhos, because you’d done the deed before she went up to the lantern room, but a colleague of Jacob’s called Harley who is masquerading as Clarion Charlie. He caught sight of you hauling yourself down into the well. But he didn’t raise the alarm. Clarion Charlie is meant to be elusive and he didn’t want to draw attention to himself.’
Jacob felt a prickle of irritation. If Bob Harley had spotted something untoward, it wouldn’t have hurt him to alert his colleague, the chief crime correspondent. But Bob only cared about his own position. Besides, he blamed Jacob for the fact he’d been hauled up north in the first place.
‘You have an answer for everything,’ Sadie – as Jacob still thought of her – murmured.
‘You must have given Basil Palmer a shock,’ Rachel said. ‘Suddenly appearing in his house like that. How did you get the window seat open?’
‘There’s a tiny slit in the wood beneath the seat. With a pocket knife, it’s easy to flick open the catch and lift the lid.’
‘Your idea was to concoct a fake suicide and suggest that Palmer killed Bellamy and then took his own life in a fit of remorse. The note was worded ambiguously, in case the real murderer was caught and Palmer’s innocence was proven. A wholly explicit confession would have caused the police to become suspicious of the note.’
Sir Harold nodded. ‘Right again. I almost managed to kill Basil by giving him a heart attack. Once he’d recovered from his fright, he was thrilled to see me, the poor old soul. I soon realised that he hadn’t come to Hemlock Bay to cause trouble for me. But the die was cast.’
‘It’s clear from his journal that he didn’t know you’d changed wives.’
‘No, I gathered that. But I simply couldn’t risk allowing him to live. We had a drink in the parlour and I managed to slip some of Sadie’s Veronal in his whisky when he wasn’t looking. He’d just mentioned Carson’s name when he dozed off. And so…’
‘You killed him?’
‘You make it sound very brutal, but I don’t believe he experienced any pain. It was surprisingly easy to drag him to the gas oven and turn on the taps. I dropped the note on the floor and locked the kitchen door on the inside before going back the way I came. Never did I imagine… that committing murder can be so straightforward.’
‘Yes,’ Rachel said softly, ‘it can.’
‘And I very nearly got away with it.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘So, Miss Savernake. You hold the cards. How do you intend to play them?’
*
Jacob held his breath for what felt like an eternity as Rachel swirled the remains of her whisky around in the tumbler.
‘People prate about justice,’ she said, ‘but it’s an unruly beast. Like morality. Each of us sees these things from our personal point of view. Hemlock Bay was built on murder and deceit, but the woman you smothered was dying anyway, and the relatives tricked out of their inheritance had done nothing to earn it.’
Lady Jackson said eagerly, ‘You’re right!’
‘Bellamy was a rogue and so was McAtee. I’ll shed no tears if the Carsons go to the gallows. Ffion Morris was doomed to eternal unhappiness long before she committed murder.’
‘Exactly!’
Rachel shook her head. ‘However. Basil Palmer was different.’
‘He was a weakling,’ Sir Harold said. ‘He’d never have got up the nerve to kill Carson.’
‘I agree,’ Rachel said. ‘His journal makes his failings all too plain. He made mistake after mistake. Trusting his wife. Trusting McAtee. Trusting you.’
‘I only did what I had to do.’
‘Actually, if you’d trusted him to keep his mouth shut, he’d have kept your secret until his dying day. You were his hero.’
Sir Harold shrugged. ‘Easy for you to say that now.’
‘Whatever his faults, Palmer didn’t deserve to die,’ Rachel said. ‘That is what matters.’
‘Don’t forget, he was contemplating murder.’
‘Who can blame him?’
He stared at her. ‘So what do you propose?’
Rachel looked at her watch. ‘I’m not in a tearing hurry. At ten o’clock in the morning, the day after tomorrow, I’ll call Inspector Oakes and explain what I believe happened at Shepherd’s Cottage.’
His gaze was intense. ‘Unless?’
‘Unless no purpose will be served by my doing so. You have young children and a dying wife. I have no wish to cause them any unnecessary distress. They have endured enough. But you must disclose where Sadie’s body is buried, even if you inform the police anonymously.’
‘A little over twenty-four hours?’ He shook his head. ‘Not much time to set my affairs in order.’
Rachel gave him a wintry smile. ‘You’re an astute businessman, but let me make one thing clear. I’m answering your question about how I’ll play my cards. Not entering into a negotiation.’