Mark ran through his very limited psychological vocabulary, acquired through briefing barristers on defendants' psychiatric report. Transference… compensation… displacement… depersonalization… He took it a step at a time. "Okay, let's start with this relationship you mentioned-are we talking fact or guesswork?"
"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Becky said angrily. "I told you to watch what you say. You're so damn thoughtless, Mark. As long as you're all right, you couldn't give a shit about anybody else."
That sounded more like the Becky he knew. "You're doing all the talking… darling," he said coolly. "Anything I say is purely incidental. Fact or guesswork?"
"Guesswork," she admitted. "She was always sitting on his lap. I never actually saw anything but I'm sure it happened. I was at work all day, don't forget, earning the bloody mon-" She checked herself again. "They could have been doing anything. Elizabeth definitely wanted it. She used to trail after Leo as if he were God."
Mark glanced at James and saw that his eyes were closed. But he knew he was listening. "Leo's an attractive man," he murmured. "A lot of people gravitate toward him. You thought he was God for a while… or have you forgotten?"
"Oh, please don't do that," she begged. "What will the Colonel think?"
"More or less what he thinks now, I should imagine. Why does it matter? You're never likely to meet him."
She didn't say anything.
"You were the one with illusions," he went on, wondering if she still had hopes of Leo. "For everyone else the charm had run a bit thin."
"Yes, and I found that out the hard way," she said harshly. "I've been trying to tell you for ages, but you wouldn't listen. It's just an act. He uses people then throws them aside."
Mark decided it would be counterproductive to say: I told you so. "How did he use you?"
She didn't answer.
"Was the alibi a lie?"
There was a long hesitation as if she were considering her options. "No," she said firmly.
"Are you sure?"
There was the sound of a stifled sob. "He's such a bastard, Mark. He took all my money and then got me to borrow off my parents and my sisters. They're all so angry with me… and I don't know what to do. They've told me to get it back, but I'm so scared of him. I was hoping you'd… being his father's solicitor and everything… I thought he might…" She petered into silence.
Mark took a deep breath to hide his irritation. "What?"
"You know…"
"Reimburse you?"
Her relief was so strong he could feel it through the phone. "Will he?"
"I shouldn't think so… but I'll discuss it with him if you give me some honest answers. Did you go through my briefcase? Did you tell Leo the Colonel was looking for his grandchild?"
"Only once," she said. "I saw a draft of a will that mentioned a granddaughter. That's all I told him. There was no name or anything. I didn't mean any harm, honestly I didn't… the only thing he was interested in was how much he and Lizzie were going to get."
A car approached down the narrow lane, blinding him with its headlights. It was traveling too fast and the rush of wind as it passed the Lexus buffeted against the sides. It was too close for comfort and it set Mark's nerves jangling. "Christ!" he swore, switching on his headlights.
"Don't be cross with me," Becky pleaded at the other end. "I know I shouldn't have done it… but I was so frightened. He's really horrible when he doesn't get his own way."
"What does he do?"
But she wouldn't or couldn't say. Whatever terrors Leo held for her-real or imagined-she was not about to share them with Mark. Instead she became coy in an attempt to discover if her "terrors" would persuade Mark to recover her parents' money.
He rang off, saying his battery was on the blink.
A year ago he would have trusted her implicitly…
… now he didn't believe a word she said.
21
Prue's sense of isolation was becoming unbearable. She was too ashamed to phone any of her friends, and there was no answer from her daughter. Loneliness led her to imagine that Jenny, too, had gone to Jack and Belinda's house, and her resentment against Eleanor grew. She pictured her at home with Julian, using her wiles to bind him to her, while Prue stared into an abyss of rejection and divorce.
The focus of her dislike was her so-called friend. Darth Vader existed only on the periphery of her thinking. Her mind was too trammeled in misery to give any thought to who he was or what sort of relationship he had with her friend. It was with a thrill of terror, then, that she looked up to see a man's face at the window. It was a momentary glimpse, a flash of white skin and dark eye sockets, but a scream rocketed from her mouth.
This time she did call the police. She was incoherent with fear, but managed to give her address. The police had been expecting trouble since the arrival of the travelers, and a car was dispatched immediately to investigate. Meanwhile, the female officer at the center kept Prue on the line to calm her. Could Mrs. Weldon give a description of this man? Had she recognized him? Prue delivered what sounded like a stereotypical description of a burglar or a mugger. "White face… staring eyes…" It wasn't James Lockyer-Fox or Mark Ankerton, she kept repeating.
The policewoman asked her why Colonel Lockyer-Fox and Mr. Ankerton should even be considered, and was rewarded with a garbled account of forced entry, intimidation, incest, nuisance calls, tape recordings, Darth Vader, the murder of a dog, and Prue's innocence of any wrongdoing. "It's Eleanor Bartlett at Shenstead House you should be talking to," Prue insisted, as if the police had called her and not the other way around. "She's the one who started all this."
The woman relayed the information to a colleague who had worked on the Ailsa Lockyer-Fox investigation. This might interest him, she said. A Mrs. Weldon was suggesting some bizarre skeletons in the Lockyer-Fox closet.
It was self-pity that persuaded Prue to talk so freely. She had been starved of kindness all day and the calming voice on the end of the phone, followed by the arrival of two solid-looking uniformed men to search the house and yard for an intruder, won her allegiance in a way that badgering never could. Tears bloomed in her eyes as one of the constables pressed a cup of tea into her hand and told her there was nothing to worry about. Whoever the Peeping Tom was, he was no longer there.
By the time Detective Sergeant Monroe arrived half an hour later she was falling over herself to assist the police in any way she could. Better informed since James and Mark's visit, she gave a rambling exposition of events, finishing with a description of the nuisance caller who used a voice distorter, the "murder" of James's dog, and Mark's mention of a burglary at the Manor.
Monroe frowned. "Who is this caller? Do you know?"
"No, but I'm sure Eleanor Bartlett does," she said eagerly. "I thought the information came from Elizabeth… that's what Eleanor told me, anyway… but Mr. Ankerton said Eleanor was reading from a script, and I think he's right. When you listen to both of them-her and the man-you notice how many repetitions there are."
"Meaning what exactly? That this man wrote the script?"
"Well, yes, I suppose so."
"So you're saying that Mrs. Bartlett's conspiring with him to blackmail Colonel Lockyer-Fox?"
Such an idea had never occurred to Prue. "Oh, no… it was to shame James into confessing."