"So what are you saying?"
"I think she was trying to tell me something."
Robin shook his head. "Why? Because she was wearing it when she died? It was a symbol, that's all."
"Of what?"
"Life's illusion. We're all prisoners. Perhaps it was her final joke. My tongue is curbed forever, something like that." He shrugged. "Have you told the police?"
"No. I was so shocked when I saw her that I didn't think about it." She raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness. "And the pathologist and the policeman latched on to what I said she always called the geraniums inside the beastly thing. Her coronet weeds. It comes from the speech about Ophelia's death and, what with the bath and the nettles, I thought they were probably right. But now I'm not so sure." Her voice tailed off and she sat staring at her desk.
Robin watched her for several seconds. "Supposing she was trying to say that her tongue was curbed forever. You realize it has a double meaning?"
"Yes," said Sarah unhappily, "that someone else curbed it. But that doesn't make sense. I mean, if Mathilda knew she was going to be murdered she wouldn't have wasted time donning the scold's bridle in the hall when all she had to do was run to the front door and scream her head off. The whole village would have heard her. And the murderer would have taken it off anyway."
"Perhaps it was the murderer who was saying, 'Her tongue is curbed forever.' "
"But that doesn't make sense either. Why would a murderer advertise that it's murder when he's gone to so much trouble to make it look like suicide?" She rubbed her tired eyes. "Without the scold's bridle, it would have looked straightforward. With it, it looks anything but. And why the flowers, for God's sake? What were they supposed to tell us?"
"You'll have to talk to the police," said Robin with sudden decision, reaching for the telephone. "Dammit, Sarah, who else knew she called you her scold's bridle? Surely it's occurred to you that the message is directed at you."
"What message?"
"I don't know. A threat, perhaps. You next, Dr. Blakeney."
She gave a hollow laugh. "I see it more in terms of a signature." She traced a line on the desk with her fingertip. "Like the mark of Zorro on his victims."
"Oh, Jesus!" said Robin, putting the receiver back. "Maybe it's wiser not to say anything. Look, it was obviously suicide-you said yourself she was unhealthily obsessed with the damn thing."
"But I was fond of her."
"You're fond of everyone, Sarah. It's nothing to be proud of."
"You sound like Jack." She retrieved the telephone, dialled Learmouth Police Station and asked for Detective Sergeant Cooper.
Robin watched with gloomy resignation-she had no idea how the tongues would wag if they ever got wind of Mathilda's nickname for her-and wondered disloyally why she had chosen to tell him before anyone else. He had the strangest impression that she had been using him. As a yardstick by which to measure other people's reactions? As a confessor?
DS Cooper had already left for home and the bored voice at the other end of the wire merely agreed to pass on Sarah's request to speak to him when he arrived the next morning. There was no urgency, after all. The case was closed.
How I detest my arthritis and the cruel inactivity it imposes. I saw a ghost today but could do nothing about it. I should have struck it down and sent it back to Hell whence it came, instead I could only lash it with my tongue. Has Joanna brought him back to haunt me? It makes sense. She has been plotting something since she found that wretched letter. "Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, more hideous when thou show'st thee in a child than the sea monster."
But to use James of all people. That I shall never forgive. Or is it he who is using her? Forty years haven't changed him. What loathsome fun he must have had in Hong Kong where I've read the boys dress up as girls and give paederasts the thrill of pretended normality as they parade themselves and their disgusting perversion before a naive public. He looks ill. Well, well, what a charming solution his death would be.
I made a "most filthy bargain" there. They talk glibly about cycles of abuse these days but, oh, how much more complex those cycles are than the simple brutality visited by parent on child. Everything comes to him who mates...
*3*
Jack was working in his studio when Sarah's key finally grated in the lock at around eleven o'clock. He looked up as she passed his open door. "Where have you been?"
She was very tired. "At the Hewitts'. They gave me supper. Have you eaten?" She didn't come in, but stood in the doorway watching him.
He nodded absent-mindedly. Food was a low priority in Jack's life. He jerked his head at the canvas on the easel. "What do you think?"
How much simpler it would be, she thought, if she were obtuse, and genuinely misunderstood what he was trying to achieve in his work. How much simpler if she could just accept what one or two critics had said, that it was pretentious rubbish and bad art.
"Joanna Lascelles presumably."
But not a Joanna Lascelles that anyone would recognize, except perhaps in the black of her funeral weeds and the silver gold of her hair, for Jack used shape and colour to paint emotions, and there was an extraordinary turbulence about this painting, even in its earliest stage. He would go on now for weeks, working layer on layer, attempting through the medium of oils to build and depict the complexity of the human personality. Sarah, who understood his colour-coding almost as well as he did, could interpret much of what he had already blocked in. Grief (for her mother?), disdain (for her daughter?), and, all too predictably, sensuality (for him?).
Jack watched her face. "She's interesting," he said.
"Obviously."
His eyes narrowed angrily. "Don't start," he murmured. "I'm not in the mood."
She shrugged. "Neither am I. I'm going to bed."
"I'll work on the jacket tomorrow," he promised grudgingly. He made a living of sorts by designing book jackets, but the commissions were few and far between because he rarely met deadlines. The disciplines imposed by the profit motive infuriated him.
"I'm not your mother, Jack," she said coolly. "What you do tomorrow is your own affair."
But he was in the mood for a row, probably, thought Sarah, because Joanna had flattered him. "You just can't leave it alone, can you? No, you're not my mother, but by God you're beginning to sound like her."
"How odd," she said with heavy irony, "and I always thought you didn't get on with her because she kept telling you what to do. Now I'm tarred with the same brush, yet I've done the exact opposite, left you to work things out for yourself. You're a child, Jack. You need a woman in your life to blame for every little thing that goes wrong for you."
"Is this babies again?" he snarled. "Dammit, Sarah, you knew the score before you married me, and it was your choice to go through with it. The career was everything, remember? Nothing's changed. Not for me, anyway. It's not my fault if your bloody hormones are screaming that time's running out. We had a deal. No children."
She eyed him curiously. After all, she thought, Joanna must have been less accommodating than he had hoped. Well, well! "The deal, Jack, for what it's worth, was that I would support you until you established yourself. After that, all options were open. What we never considered, for that I blame myself because I relied on my own artistic judgement, was that you might never establish yourself. In which circumstance, I suspect, the deal is null and void. So far, I have kept you for six years, two years before marriage and four afterwards, and the choice to marry was as much yours as mine. As far as I remember we were celebrating your first major sale, your only major sale," she added. "I think that's fair, don't you? I can't recall your selling a canvas since."