"I don't understand," she cried out, her voice rasping against his fingers on her larynx. "What do you want?"
She saw something in his eyes that brought the fear leaping into hers. "Oh, my God. It was you who killed my mother." She opened her mouth to scream but only a thread of sound came out as the pressure on her throat tightened.
"I'm sorry if I'm being particularly slow on the uptake," said Cooper apologetically, "but I don't quite see what hold James Gillespie could have had over you that would prompt you to pay him ten thousand pounds. If you already knew about the affair from your husband-" he broke off. "It was something to do with the pregnancy, presumably. Did you not know about that?"
She compressed her lips in an effort to hold back tears. "Yes, I did. It was Paul who never knew." She drew another deep sigh. "It's so awful. I've kept it secret for so long. I wanted to tell him but there was never a good time. Rather like the lie I told your constable. At what point do you come clean, as it were?" She touched her fingers to her lips in a gesture of despair. "Being a father. It was all he ever wanted. I prayed and prayed that we would have children of our own, but of course we never did..." She tailed off into silence.
Cooper put a large, comforting hand over hers. He was completely at sea here, but was reluctant to press too hard in case she clammed up on him. "How did you know about the pregnancy if your husband didn't?"
"Mathilda told me. She rang me and asked me to go to London, said if I didn't she'd make sure the whole of Fontwell knew about her and Paul. He'd written her some letters and she said she'd make them public if I didn't do what she wanted."
"What did she want?"
It was some moments before she could speak. "She wanted me to help her murder the baby when it came."
"Good God!" said Cooper with feeling. And she must have done it, he thought, or James Gillespie would never have been able to blackmail her.
There was the sound of footsteps on the gravel outside and a ring on the doorbell. "Joanna!" called Violet's high-pitched, nervous voice. "Joanna! Are you all right. dear? I thought I heard something." When she received no answer, she called again: "Is someone with you? Do answer, please." Her voice rose even higher. "Duncan! Duncan!" she called. "There is something wrong. I know there is. You must call the police. I'm going to get help." Her footsteps skittered away as she ran towards the gate.
Jack stared down into Joanna's drawn and haunted face, then lowered her with surprising gentleness on to the nearest chair. "You don't deserve it, but you were luckier than your mother," was all he said, before walking off towards the kitchen and the back door.
Joanna Lascelles was still screaming when Duncan Orloff, in a state of complete panic, used a sledgehammer to break open the front door and confront whatever awaited him in the hall of Cedar House.
"And did you help her?" Cooper asked with a calm that belied his true feelings.
She looked wretched. "I don't know-I don't know what she did-I can only guess." She wrung her hands in distress. "She didn't say anything in so many words. She just asked me to steal some sleeping pills-barbiturates-from my father's dispensary. She said they were for her because she couldn't sleep. I hoped-I thought -she was going to kill herself-and I was glad. I hated her by that time."
"So you got her the pills?"
"Yes."
"But she didn't kill herself."
"No."
"But you said she wanted you to help her kill the baby."
"That's what I thought for ten years." The long-held-back tears oozed slowly from between her lids. "There was only Joanna, you see. The other baby might never have existed. I didn't think it had ever existed." She held a shaking hand to her face. "I thought I'd helped her kill it-and then in Hong Kong, James kept asking me how Gerald could have killed himself with barbiturates, because no doctor would have prescribed them for him, ind I realized it was Gerald she'd wanted to kill all along, and I'd given her the means to do it." She took out a handkerchief and blew her nose. "I was so shocked that James guessed what I'd done. I think he'd always known, though. In many ways, he and Mathilda were very alike."
Cooper sought desperately to break this down into manageable proportions. There were so many unanswered questions. "Why would no doctor prescribe barbiturates for Gerald Cavendish? I've checked the coroner's report. There was no question of murder, only a choice between misadventure and suicide."
"Gerald was..." Jane sought for the right word, "feeble-minded, I suppose, like the Spedes, but today they call it educationally subnormal. It's why the property was kept intact for William. Mathilda's grandfather was afraid Gerald would give it away to anyone who asked for it. But I've never really understood how Mathilda came to sleep with him. He was a very pathetic person. I've always assumed her father forced her into it to protect his legacy somehow, but James said it was all Mathilda's idea. I don't believe that. James hated her so much he'd have said anything to blacken her."
Cooper shook his head in bewilderment. How uneventful his own life had been, compared with the agonies of this grey-haired motherly soul who looked as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. "Why did you visit James Gillespie in Hong Kong if your husband had had an affair with his wife? There can't have been much love lost between the three of you in all conscience."
"We didn't or at least not like that. We had no idea James had gone to Hong Kong. Mathilda never told us-why would she?-and we moved away from here after the affair and went to live in Southampton. I became a teacher and Paul worked for a shipping company. We put it all behind us, and then Paul had to go to Hong Kong on business and took me with him for a holiday." She shook her head. "And almost the first person we met when we arrived was James. The expatriate community was so small"-she raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness-"we were bound to meet him. If we'd only known he was there, we'd never have gone. Fate is very cruel, Sergeant."
He couldn't argue with that. "Then why did you come back here to live, Mrs. Marriott, knowing that Mrs. Gillespie was in Cedar House? Weren't you tempting fate a second time?"
"Yes," she said simply, "but what could I do about it? Paul knows nothing of any of this, Sergeant, and he's dying-slowly-of emphysema. We kept our house here-it was his parents' house and he was too fond of it to sell it, so we let it out to tenants-and then five years ago, he was retired on health grounds and he begged me to let us come home." Her eyes flooded again. "He said I needn't worry about Mathilda, that the only thing he had ever felt for her was compassion, while the only woman he had ever loved was me. How could I tell him then what had really happened? I still thought his baby was dead." She held her handkerchief to her streaming eyes. "It wasn't until I went to Cedar House and asked Mathilda about James that she told me she'd put the baby up for adoption." She buried her face in her hands. "It was a boy and he's still alive somewhere."
Cooper pondered the sad ironies of life. Was it providence, God or random selection that made some women fertile and some barren? With a deep reluctance he took her back to the day Mathilda died, knowing there was little chance that what she told him could ever remain a secret.
I am pregnant again, sickeningly and disgustingly pregnant. Barely six months after giving birth to one bastard, I am carrying another. Perhaps James's drunken rages will achieve some good purpose by bringing on a miscarriage. He weeps and rants in turn, screaming insults at me like a fishwife, intent, it seems, on trumpeting my "whorishness" to the entire building. And all for what? A brief, unlovely affair with Paul Marriott whose clumsy, apologetic gropings were almost past endurance. Then, why, Mathilda?