The outburst abruptly supplied the key Crane hadn’t stopped searching for. Her name was Julia and there was a J in Donna’s diary he and Patsy had been unable to fit a name to. Crane had assumed it could only be another man. Until now.
‘Did you ever see Donna apart from when she made deliveries, Miss Gregson?’ he said carefully.
She shook her head, began swallowing. ‘Of course not. Why should—’
‘She didn’t come back in the evening now and then? Or at the weekend?’
She shook her head again, but was now swallowing so rapidly she couldn’t speak. She burst into tears. He’d seen few women cry as she did. She cried noisily, endlessly, crouching as if in barely endurable physical pain, the tears streaming down her cheeks and dripping off the end of her chin. Few cases he’d known had involved such heartbreak. He crossed to a sideboard, poured brandy from a decanter, returned and put it carefully into her shaking hand. She gradually calmed herself, taking sips of the liquor between sobs. She sat on a shield-back chair beside one of the flower-bearing tables.
‘You must have guessed what I am,’ she said, in a thin, wavering tone.
‘You fell for her?’
‘She’d come at weekends now and then. I adored her. I begged her to be my secretary-companion. I’d take her all over the world. My father was in property. I couldn’t spend what he left me in two lifetimes. But she … she wasn’t as I am. She’d stay with me, even sleep with me, but …’ Her haggard gaze passed over the flawless precision of the formal garden. Crane guessed she’d dressed in black since the discovery of Donna’s body. ‘We both wept one night because she was, well, she was normal, couldn’t commit to …’
He looked down ruefully at her bowed head. He could have told her that the only reason Donna had wept was because she couldn’t hack it permanently with another woman, even if that woman happened to be one of the wealthiest in the West Riding.
‘Did you give her money, Julia?’
Her eyes rested on his. ‘Not for sleeping with her. Never for that. She’d not have taken it. She was too genuine, too caring. Sleeping together was simply part of our close friendship. But … yes, I did give her a little money now and then. I’m wealthy, she was poor. The family depended on what she made at the nursery. You’ll probably know her father’s too ill to work. She’d only ever take money, and so very reluctantly, to help her parents.’
Her eyes began to well with tears once more. It struck Crane then what an incredible inspirer of dreams Donna had proved to be: a companion for Julia, a star model for Fletcher, a billboard queen for Hellewell. She seemed to embody dreams like those legendary actresses who appeared so sensitive, spiritual and pure, and yet, away from the screen, always seemed to live the raciest lives.
‘How did it end?’ He spoke with deliberate bluntness.
There was a sudden brooding look in her eyes, startling in its intensity. ‘I thought it was just me,’ she said, in a low raw tone. ‘I accepted that we weren’t the same, knew she’d have to leave me one day. Some man, children, all that nonsense. All I asked, while we were together, was for it just to be me.’ She fell silent for seconds. ‘But … but she was seeing someone else. A man. A man!’ She ended on a note of near-anguish.
‘Any idea who the man was?’
Another silence, her gaze unfocused. ‘We were … she was coming to me on Saturday after work. She cancelled, said Joe wanted her to work late, they were so busy. I was very upset. Couldn’t quite believe her. I drove to Leaf and Petal and waited in a corner of the car park the staff use. She came out at the usual time, but didn’t drive her car, took a taxi. I followed it. It took her to the Raven, out towards Kirby Overblow. He was waiting for her in the car park.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘I only saw him from a distance, and only from behind. I daren’t be seen, I might never have seen Donna again.’ Her face looked crumpled in the gathering dusk, as if she’d developed age lines. ‘He was fair, well-built, tallish. I took the number of his car when they’d gone inside, then came home. I don’t know why I took the number – to challenge her with it, I suppose. I never did, of course.’ Her voice had fallen to a whisper.
‘Have you still got it?’
‘You can have it, for what it’s worth.’
It may not be worth spit now. Crane was beginning to feel very uneasy, was beginning to wonder if he’d possibly begun to get ahead of Anderson. She’d been crazy about Donna, like so many others, but it had begun to turn ugly at the point where a man had entered the equation.
‘Did you ever visit Tanglewood reservoir with Donna?’ he said flatly.
She flushed. ‘What can you be thinking?’ she said. ‘What can you be thinking?’
‘Well, did you?’
‘You can’t imagine I had anything to do with—’
‘I’m asking if you went to Tanglewood with her.’
Shaking now and agitated, she watched him again in one of her silences, bottom lip caught in teeth. ‘She … once came here by taxi,’ she muttered reluctantly. ‘Her motor wasn’t very reliable. She couldn’t stay over, it was mid-week. I drove her home. She didn’t want me to see where she lived, not that I’d have minded. We … we said our goodbyes at Tanglewood. Sitting on a bench near the lower one. Then I dropped her off on the outskirts of, what do they call it, the Willows?’ Her eyes brimmed with tears yet again.
‘Julia,’ he said, still bluntly, ‘Donna kept a diary.’
Her mouth fell open, her moist eyes suddenly wide with shock. ‘Oh, no,’ she whispered. ‘Dear God, no …!’
Crane let the silence roll. Then he said, ‘She didn’t enter names in it or how she spent her time, she just used single initials. The initial J occurs again and again. It gives the impression that up to the day she died she was here every weekend.’
Mouth still open, the pupils of her eyes rimmed in white, she cried, ‘But she didn’t! She came a lot, perhaps one weekend in three, but not every week.’
She spoke with a vehemence that threw Crane. ‘I … think you’ll find the police will put the same interpretation on the diary as me, Julia.’
She fell silent yet again, giving an impression of some kind of mental struggle. Finally, she said, ‘Wait,’ in a voice of intense reluctance. She got up, crossed to a chiffonier, opened a drawer, returned. She held an inch-thick, leather-bound book. ‘If you won’t believe me … I kept a diary too.’ She held it out, but hesitantly, as if prepared to snatch it back if he tried to take it. ‘Look at it, if you must,’ she said sighing.
He drew it slowly from her, turned to the Saturday Donna had last been seen alive. ‘Donna,’ the entry read, ‘didn’t come today …
I wanted her to, of course but mustn’t be clingy. Have to accept that she does other things, sees that bloody man, I suppose. Oh God, how I miss her. Can’t stop thinking of when she was here last and we took a picnic basket along to the Wild Garden. She does love flowers so, begs me to fill the house with them, even though she seems not to know one from another. She was wearing a little blue dress and the sun made her hair shine, and she was the loveliest creature I’d ever seen. I spent most of the day helping Norman with the borders. Then I had a solitary dinner and watched an old film. I was in bed for half-ten. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop thinking of how she looked, laughing and chatting and sipping Muscadet. And how much I loved her.
Crane said, ‘Do you mind if I look back for three months?’
‘Only … only to check out the weekends. As you can imagine, no one was ever intended to see it.’
The diary provided a complete sheet for each day. He flicked back through the pages covering each Saturday and Sunday beneath her watchful gaze, to check the weekends Donna was present. If the diary was accurate, she really had seen her only about once every two or three weeks. In which case, who was the other J Donna had recorded? Hellewell? The entry for the Saturday Donna went missing was the last. He guessed she’d have written that on the Sunday before she’d heard the news.