He looked relieved. ‘Oh, thank God. I thought you might be thinking of selling up and leaving me.’
‘No, Eddie, I’m not leaving you,’ she said, instantly regretting her choice of words. She hadn’t really meant to make it sound so loaded.
She turned back to head down the stairs.
‘Actually, Eddie, I have got a bit of a telling-off for you... when I got back home last night the back door was ajar. You or one of your team must have left it open. It rather unnerved me.’ She walked into the kitchen and put her mug down.
Eddie followed her, frowning. ‘Jane, I definitely locked that back door and I guarantee every one of the guys who work for me would double check it before leaving. We are used to working in other people’s homes and security is always a priority.’
‘I’m sure it is, Eddie, but I’m just telling you the back door was open last night, and I was rather concerned.’
He shrugged. ‘I’ll check it out with the guys tomorrow. So, you’re going to Australia...’
‘Yes, it’s the case I’m working on... you know, the one with the baby? I want to question one of the women who used to live at the Stockwell property.’
‘OK... do you fancy going out for dinner tonight, then?’
‘I need to get prepared for my trip,’ Jane said. She laughed. ‘Actually, what I really need is a long soak in a bath, but that will have to wait. Besides, I’m not leaving until Thursday so... yes, I would love to go out for dinner.’
Eddie picked up his jacket. ‘I’ll pick you up in an hour. I need to scrub up first myself.’ He paused. ‘You know, if you want, you could come back with me to my place after dinner and have a bath there?’
Jane hesitated. ‘OK... give me a few minutes to grab a change of clothes.’ As Jane went into the hall, her phone rang. She heard her mother’s voice as soon as she picked it up.
‘So, Pam says you have a new boyfriend? We were just saying to each other that we hadn’t seen you properly for such a long time...’
‘I’m sorry, Mum, I’ve been really busy at work, and with all the work at the house here. I really wanted to get it all done before getting you and Dad over to show it all off.’
‘He’s a builder, Pam said.’
Jane sighed. ‘Yes, yes, Mum... he’s fitting a new bathroom and doing some redecoration.’
‘Oh, that’s nice, dear. Now, we think you should come over to dinner and introduce him to us. Are you free on Friday?’
‘Not this Friday,’ Jane said. ‘But the week after would be lovely.’
Jane closed her eyes and covered the mouthpiece. ‘Eddie, would you like to have dinner with my parents a week on Friday?’ He was bending down, examining one of the stripped boards in the hall.
‘Sure.’
‘OK, Mum, Friday it is. What time?’
‘Seven thirty — he isn’t a vegetarian or anything like that, is he?’
‘No, Mum, he’s definitely a meat eater.’
‘Ho, good. All right, bye bye... love you.’
As Jane and Eddie were about to leave for his house her phone rang again. It was Tim, passing on the message from Arnold Hadley. Jane rang Hadley straightaway, but he wasn’t picking up and after a while she gave up. Oh, well, it couldn’t have been that urgent, Jane thought.
Chapter Fifteen
They had dinner at a small Italian restaurant and after a couple of glasses of red wine, Jane began to relax. She liked the fact that Eddie did not probe for more details about what had gone on at the station that day. In fact, he spent most of the time discussing how the work in her house would progress, so she was surprised when he suddenly changed the subject and asked if the photo album that he had looked at with her had proved to be important.
‘Actually, that album caused a bit of a problem for me. I’d taken it without permission from the woman I was trying to interview. She has advanced dementia. The station received an unpleasant call from her nephew about it. He spoke to my boss, making threats, and then came round to my house to collect it. He was really suspicious, telling me sweetly that he had a very frail mother — which turned out to be a lie because I’ve checked, and his mother is in good health. And he said he’d got my address from his lawyer, but that was also a lie because I never gave it to him. But what I really can’t understand why he created such a stink about the album.’
‘There must be something in the album he didn’t want you to find. And he was so desperate to get it, he followed you home from the station.’
‘I can’t see what that could have been. Unless...’ She paused, bending down to rummage in her bag.
She held up the old envelope. ‘This had been stuck inside the back of the album and it must have fallen loose. I had it in my hand when I answered a call and must have put it on the table. Then he arrived and took the album, and I forgot I still had it.’
‘Was that what you were looking for the other morning?’ Eddie asked.
She nodded. ‘When your lads moved things around in the hall I thought I’d mislaid it.’
She opened the envelope and took out the thick folded pages. ‘It’s a family tree... do you remember when you said the girls in one of the photos reminded you of Czar Nicholas’s daughters? And I found out their father was actually a Russian count — Count Antonin Petrukhin?’
Eddie nodded. ‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Well, we’ve been checking the dates, and he married their mother when she was about fourteen years of age.’
He tutted. ‘He’d be arrested for that now.’
This was the first time Jane had really looked at the rest of the family tree.
‘This is interesting,’ she said. ‘We have Beatrice married to a...’ She paused and turned the page to show Eddie. ‘Beatrice is the middle sister, the one I am going to see in Australia. Then you see beneath her a son, Matthew, and then a second son, Jason. He’s the one who came to see me. But look at the arrow and the date of the marriage. She married John Alfred Thorpe. I think he was a bus driver or something. They ran away to be married in Australia.’
‘What’s odd about that?’
‘Well, it looks like she wasn’t married to this John Thorpe until after the birth of her children. Then, see the arrow down... he died five years after the marriage. But surely this couldn’t be what he was so desperate to keep hidden.’
‘Sounds odd, but maybe there’s money involved?’ Eddie suggested.
Jane nodded. ‘The house in Stockwell must have sold for a lot of money and the nephew, Jason, had power of attorney for his aunt Helena.’
Eddie shrugged. ‘Maybe the brothers had a falling out?’
Jane shook her head. ‘No, I remember something else. Jason said his brother was mentally challenged, so I think Jason must inherit everything.’
Eddie looked at his watch. ‘It’s getting late and if you want to have a long soak in my bath, we should get moving.’
Reluctantly, Jane carefully folded up the pages of the family tree and put them back in her bag. The secrets of the Lanark family would have to wait.
Eddie’s small flat was modern to the point of minimalist. There was one bedroom, a bathroom, and a large living room that led into an open-plan kitchen. Jane remarked how immaculate it was and Eddie laughed, saying he was a bit of an OCD cleaner. His mother couldn’t get over it, as she had spent years picking up all his discarded clothes and towels when he’d lived at home. The whole flat reminded Jane of the time she had been with Alan Dexter. In many ways, Eddie had a similar boyish quality to him; only Alan, as a bomb disposal expert, had a more dangerous edge to his personality.
Eddie ran her a bath and poured in some beautiful-smelling oils and bath salts. He gave her time to soak, and Jane lay back for at least three quarters of an hour. But her brain kept revisiting the possibility that Jason Thorpe had not been interested in the photos, but in the family tree — perhaps because, if the dates on the tree were correct, it made him illegitimate at the time of his birth.