"But she would," the girl cried. "She said in her letter that if anything happened to her I was to talk to you. She said you would know what to do for the best."
"Surely not? Your grandmother didn't confide in me. All I know about your family is what you've told me today."
A thin hand reached out and gripped hers. It was icy cold. "The letter was from Granny's uncle, Gerald Cavendish, to his solicitor. It was a will, saying he wanted everything he had to go to his daughter."
Sarah could feel the hand on hers trembling, but whether from cold or nerves she didn't know. "Go on," she prompted.
"This house and all the money was his. He was the elder brother."
Sarah frowned again. "So what are you saying? That Mathilda never had any rights to it? Well, I'm sorry, Ruth, but this is way beyond me. You really must find a solicitor and talk it through with him. I haven't a clue what your legal position is, truly I haven't." Her subconscious caught up with her. "Still, it's very odd, isn't it? If his daughter was his heir, shouldn't she have inherited automatically?"
"No one knew she was his daughter," said Ruth bleakly, "except Granny, and she told everyone James Gillespie was the father. It's my mother, Dr. Blakeney. Granny was being fucked by her uncle. It's really sick, isn't it?"
Joanna came to visit me today. She fixed me with that peculiarly unpleasant stare of hers through most of lunch-I was reminded of a terrier Father once had which turned vicious after a beating and had to be put down; there was the same malicious gleam in his eyes just before he sank his teeth into Father's palm and ripped the flesh from the bone-then spent most of the afternoon searching about in the library. She said she was looking for my mother's book on flower arranging, but she was lying, of course. I remember giving that to her when she moved back to London. I did not interfere.
She looked very tarty, I thought-far too much make-up for a trip to the country and in a ridiculously short skirt for a woman of her age. I suspect some man brought her down and was abandoned to forage for himself at the pub. Sex, to Joanna, is a currency to be used quite shamelessly in return for services rendered.
Oh, Mathilda, Mathilda! Such hypocrisy!
Do these men realize, I wonder, how little she cares for and about them? Not through contempt, I think, but through sheer indifference to anyone's feelings but her own. I should have taken Hugh Hendry's advice and insisted on a psychiatrist. She's quite mad, but then, so, of course, was Gerald. "The wheel is come full circle."
She came out of the library with his idiotic will held in front of her like some holy relic and cursed me in the most childish and absurd way for stealing her inheritance. I wonder who told her about it.
*4*
When Sarah arrived home that evening, she made a bee-line for Jack's studio. To her relief, nothing had been moved. She passed the canvas on the easel without so much as a glance, and started rummaging feverishly through the portraits stacked against the far wall. Those she recognized, she left; those she didn't, she lined up side by side, facing into the room. In all, there were three paintings she had no recollection of ever having seen before. She stood back and gazed at them, trying to decipher who they were. More accurately, she was trying to isolate one that might strike a chord.
She hoped quite earnestly that she wouldn't find it. But she did, of course. It screamed at her, a violent and vivid portrayal of bitterness, savage wit and repression, and the whole personality was encaged in a rusted iron framework that was all too clearly the scold's bridle. Sarah's shock was enormous, driving the breath from her body in a surge of panic. She collapsed on to Jack's painting stool and closed her eyes against the jeering anger of Mathilda's image. What had he done?
The doorbell rang, jerking her to her feet like a marionette. She stood for a moment, wide-eyed with shock, then, without consciously rationalizing why she was doing it, she seized the picture, turned it round and thrust it amongst the others against the wall.
It crossed DS Cooper's mind that Dr. Blakeney wasn't well. She looked very pale when she opened the door, but she smiled a welcome and stepped back to let him in, and by the time they were settled on chairs in the kitchen some of the colour had returned to her cheeks. "You telephoned last night," he reminded her, "left a message saying you had more information about Mrs. Gillespie."
"Yes." Her mind raced. She said you would know what to do for the best. But I don't! I DON'T! "I've been worrying about why she wore the bridle," she said slowly. "I've come to the conclusion that she was trying to tell me something, although I must emphasize that I don't know what that something could have been." As clearly as she could, she repeated what she had told Robin Hewitt the night before about Mathilda's nickname for her. "It's probably just me being fanciful," she finished lamely.
The Sergeant frowned deeply. "She must have known you'd make a connection. Could she have been accusing you, perhaps?"
Sarah showed an unexpected relief. "I hadn't thought of that," she admitted. "You mean a slap over the knuckles to bring me down a peg or two. Doctors can't cure unhappiness, Sarah. Something along those lines?"
He found her relief puzzling. "It's possible," he agreed. "Who else knew that she called you her scold's bridle, Dr. Blakeney?"
She folded her hands in her lap. "I don't know. Whoever she mentioned it to, presumably."
"You didn't tell anyone?"
She shook her head. "No."
"No one at all? Not even your partners or your husband?"
"No." She forced a light chuckle. "I wasn't altogether sure that she meant it as a compliment. I always took it as such because it would have strained our relationship if I hadn't, but she might have been implying that I was as repressive and tormenting as the instrument itself."
He nodded thoughtfully. "If she killed herself, then you and I will be puzzling over the significance of this for the rest of our lives." His eyes watched Sarah's face. ''If, however, somebody else killed her, and that person knew she called you her scold's bridle, then it does seem to me that the message is very direct. Namely, I have done this for you, Dr. Blakeney, or because of you. Would you agree with that?"
"No," she said with a spark of anger. "Of course I wouldn't. You can't possibly make assumptions like that. In any case I was under the impression that the inquest verdict was a foregone conclusion. The only reason I felt I should tell you all this was because it's been worrying me, but at the end of the day I'm probably reading far more into it than Mathilda intended. I suspect the pathologist was right, and that she simply wanted to deck herself out like Ophelia."
He smiled pleasantly. "And, of course, you may not have been the only person she used the nickname on."
"Well, exactly." She plucked a hair from the front of her jacket. "May I ask you something?"
"By all means."
"Does the pathologist's report come down firmly in favour of suicide or is there any room for doubt?"
"Not much," the policeman admitted. "He's unhappy about the absence of a letter of explanation, particularly in view of the rather dramatic way she killed herself, and he's unhappy about the flower arrangement."
"Because the nettles stung her?"
"No. If she was set on killing herself the way she did, a few nettle stings wouldn't have worried her." He tapped his pencil on the table top. "I persuaded him to do some experiments. He's been unable to reproduce the arrangement she came up with without assistance." He drew a quick diagram in his notebook. "If you remember, the Michaelmas daisies were set upright in the forehead band, which incidentally is so rusted it can't be tightened, and the nettles hung down like a veil over her hair and cheeks. The stems were alternate, a nettle down, a daisy up, completely symmetrical all the way round. Now that is impossible to achieve without help. You can hold half the arrangement in place with one hand but the minute you get beyond the stretch of the fingers, the flowers start to drop out. It's only when three-quarters of the arrangement is in place that the gap between the frame and the head has reduced enough to retain the other quarter without dropping them, assuming the same circumference head as Mrs. Gillespie. Do you follow?"