‘I’ll be all right, my love. He had no grudge against me. I won’t antagonise the fellow.’
‘It’s a waste of time going,’ said Miss Kristal emphatically. ‘He won’t tell you a thing.’
But Charlie would not be dissuaded. He drove down to Middle Slaughter alone the following weekend.
‘Sometimes I think you really are clairvoyant,’ he told Deborah Kristal the next time they met. ‘Ruddy fellow clammed up completely. Wouldn’t say a word. And nor would anyone else in the village. His father still runs the pub, and he’s no help. Nor are his customers. I spent a fortune at the bar trying to coax something out of ’em.’
‘I did warn you.’
‘But how did you know I was wasting my time?’
‘Because they don’t want the story opened up again. It was full of holes when he made the confession.’
Charlie’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Tom didn’t kill Rufus Peel. A man as strong and as angry as he was didn’t need to lie in wait with a tractor. He could have strangled Rufus with his bare hands.’
‘But he confessed, for heaven’s sake!’
Miss Kristal shook her head and gave a smile. ‘For Alison’s sake, darling. She was the killer of Rufus Peel. Tom took the rap for her, and served eleven years. That’s the measure of true love. Everyone in that village knows it, but no one will say a thing. And nor will you, if you’ve any romance left in you at all.’
Charlie, wide-eyed, said, ‘Are you seriously telling me that an eighteen-year-old girl murdered a man by driving a tractor at him? A vicar’s daughter? How do you know she could drive a tractor at all?’
‘I went to see the school she attended. A boarding school for daughters of the clergy. They believe in self-sufficiency, a wonderful training for the good life. Every girl is taught to plough on the school farm.’
‘You checked on this?’ said Charlie. ‘You’re a dark horse, if ever I met one. But the story still takes some swallowing. Why would she have wanted to kill Rufus?’
‘Really, Charlie, if you can’t see that, you’ll never understand the way a woman thinks. Alison was outraged by what Rufus insinuated in the Harrow. He slandered her reputation in front of her future husband, her prospective father-in-law and most of the village. Instead of going home, as Tom’s confession suggested, she went to the farm and took out a tractor and took her revenge on Rufus when he came along the road. My guess is that Tom went the other way towards the vicarage and only met Alison later and heard what she had done. He must have helped her hide the body.’
‘And when it was found, he made the false confession to save her,’ said Charlie. ‘It takes an awful lot of love to make a man accept eleven years in prison. If this is true, he’s a very single-minded young man.’
‘He would be,’ said Miss Kristal. ‘When I was casting their horoscopes that night in the Harrow, I said that one was governed by the sign of Virgo, and the other Taurus. Everyone jumped to the wrong conclusion. You see, he was the virgin and she was the bull.’
The Staring Man
When she returned from the honeymoon, Donna took two rolls of film to a shop in Kensington High Street that printed them the same day. She was dying to see herself in all the exquisite clothes Jamie had bought for her in Vienna. There were traditional Austrian dirndls and a dazzling selection of designer suits and dresses from the big-name couturiers in the Graben. Thoughtfully, she had travelled light. All she had taken on the honeymoon, apart from jeans, T-shirts and underclothes, was the Sonia Rykiel gown that she had been married in, a gorgeous cerise-coloured creation. It might have been made for her. Jamie would never know it was from the Nearly New shop in Fulham Palace Road.
She collected the photos and slid them from the package as soon as she was out of the shop. The first few were taken on the steps of Kensington Registry Office. Just a handful of friends. Donna would have liked the full works: a pony and trap to the parish church, bridesmaids, Mendelssohn, and Jamie in a grey top hat. But she could never have afforded it herself, and she refused to ask her appalling mother to foot the bill. Jamie, who was certainly capable of writing a cheque, had been through a church wedding once before, and had gently pressed for a civil ceremony this time. Donna had gracefully given way. She had not been prepared to make an issue of it. She had her priorities, and number one was to land her catch.
The first of the Vienna pictures. The Figaro House where Mozart had lived. Obviously they had not found the dress shops at that stage, because she was still in blue jeans. A pity. The narrow street with its sombre greys and greens would have been a perfect backdrop for the crimson dirndl and white blouse that Jamie had bought her later that afternoon.
Absorbed, she worked her way through the prints, assessing her outfits and finding them mostly as elegant as when she had tried them on. She was slightly disappointed that Jamie had taken so many pictures of buildings, but she hardly glanced at those, except one of the front of the hotel in which she was waving from their bedroom window. It had been lunchtime, she remembered, and she was still in the pale blue silk nightie he had draped across her pillow as a surprise the previous evening. She smiled at the recollection. He was captivated by her. He had woken her every morning with a kiss and a caress. They hadn’t eaten a single breakfast in the two weeks.
She looked through the photos several times more that afternoon. It was partly self-congratulation, but there was something else. She was looking for reassurance. She had not been entirely honest with Jamie. The truth couldn’t be hidden from him much longer.
She showed him the pictures after dinner that evening. They now lived in Jamie’s beautiful Georgian riverside house at Strand-on-the-Green, near Kew Bridge. He had already asked his solicitor to make Donna the co-owner. Jamie believed marriage was a partnership in every respect. On Friday, they had an appointment with his bank manager to open a joint account.
He reached for her waist and pulled her on to his lap on the sofa in front of the real-flame gas fire. She picked the photos off the ceramic-tiled table nearby, and started going through them, holding them for Jamie to inspect. He was nibbling her ear lobe.
‘Pay attention, lover boy,’ she chided him lightly. ‘I gave up my lunch to collect these for you today. I want to show them to you.’
He touched his lips to hers. ‘Show me anything you like.’
‘Jamie!’
He pretended to take an intelligent interest in the photos, reaching to take one out of her hand. ‘That’s come out well.’
‘My Italian suit?’
‘The entire picture. The way the trees line up, giving that wedge of sky on the right. It makes an interesting composition. The park at Schönbrunn, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t remember,’ said Donna, and she might have added that she didn’t care.
‘Obviously you made a strong impression on someone.’
She perked up. ‘The cameraman?’
‘I meant the guy on the seat.’
She hadn’t noticed anyone else in the picture. She took it back to look. To the right of the gravel path, partly in shadow, was a garden seat. On it, a youngish man in a tan-coloured bomber jacket had turned in an obvious way to look at Donna as she posed.
She commented modestly, ‘He’s probably looking at the palace.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
She turned to the next pictures, a series of shots that Jamie had taken on the Fiaker tour. They had sat side by side in the carriage, and he had snapped his camera at each old building the driver had pointed out. She didn’t tell Jamie, but she thought he might just as well have bought a set of postcards.