When he didn't go on, Cooper prompted him. "She was going to blackmail you into signing?"
"Of course." He placed his damp palms to his breasts. "We were in the drawing-room. She left me for a couple of minutes to fetch a book from the library, and when she came back she read extracts to me." Distress wheezed from him in quickened breaths. "It was one of her diaries-full of such terrible lies and obscenity-and not just about me-Violet, too-intimate details that Violet had told her when she was tipsy. 'Do you want me to photocopy this, Duncan, and spread it round the village?' she asked. 'Do you want the whole of Fontwell to know that Violet is still a virgin because the demands you made of her on your wedding night were so disgusting that she had to lock herself in the bathroom?' "-his voice faltered-"she was very entertained by it all-couldn't put the book down once she'd started-read me pieces about the Marriotts, the vicar, the poor Spedes-everyone." He fell silent again.
"So you went back later to read the others?" suggested Cooper.
Duncan shrugged helplessly. "I was desperate. I hoped I'd find something I could use against her, I doubted there'd be anything of value in the early ones, simply because I'd have to find independent proof to challenge her, and, bar references to Joanna's drug addiction, Ruth's stealing and her belief that Sarah Blakeney was the daughter she'd had by Paul Marriott, the later ones were simply a catalogue of her dislikes. They were the product of a diseased mind, and she used them, I think, as a channel for expunging her poison. If she hadn't been able to express herself on paper"-he shook his head-"she was quite mad, you know."
"Still," said Cooper ponderously, "murder was an extreme solution, Mr. Orloff. You could have used her daughter's and her granddaughter's problems against her. She was a proud woman. She wouldn't have wanted those made public, surely?"
The sad eyes fixed on him again. "I never planned to murder her, or not till that Saturday morning when Jane Marriott went to see her. I intended to threaten her with divulging what I knew to Dr. Blakeney. But as I told you, it was fear that killed her. A brave man would have said: 'publish and be damned.' "
He had lost Cooper. "I don't understand."
"She told Jane Marriott that things would get worse before they got better because she knew James had been reading her private papers-it never occurred to her it was me-then she went on to say that she had no intention of keeping quiet any longer." He wrung his hands. "So, of course, I went round the minute Jane left and asked her what she meant by 'she had no intention of keeping quiet any longer'?" His face was grey with fatigue. "She picked up the scold's bridle and taunted me with it. 'Mathilda Cavendish and Mathilda Gillespie did not write their diaries for fun, Duncan. They wrote them so that one day they could have their revenge. They will not be gagged. I shall see to that.'" He paused. "She really was mad," he insisted, "and she knew it. I said I'd call a doctor for her so she laughed and quoted Macbeth at me. 'More needs she the divine than the physician.' " He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. "And I thought how all of us, who would be destroyed by her diaries, needed the divine more than the physician, and I made up my mind during that terrible afternoon to play ... God."
Cooper was deeply sceptical. "But you must have planned it all in advance because you stole the sleeping pills beforehand."
He sighed. "They were for me-or Violet-or both of us."
"So what made you change your mind?"
"Sergeant, I am, as you rightly say, a coward and I realized that I could not destroy the diaries without destroying her as well. She was the poison, the diaries were only the outward manifestation. At least I have allowed all the others to keep their dignity."
Cooper thought of the ones he cared about, Jack and Sarah, Jane and Paul Marriott; Ruth above all.
"Only if you plead guilty, Mr. Orloff, otherwise this will all come out in court."
"Yes. I owe Violet that much," he said.
After all, it is easy to manipulate a man if all he wants is something as worthless as love. Love is easily given when it is the body that's invaded and not the mind. My mind can withstand anything. I am Mathilda Cavendish and what does Mathilda care when the onfy thing she feels is contempt?
Man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.
If angels weep Mathilda sees no sign of it. They do not weep for me..
.
*20*
Jane Marriott replaced the telephone receiver and held a shaking hand to her lips. She walked through to the living room where her invalid husband was dozing quietly in the bright winter sunshine which poured through the window. She sat beside him and took her hand in his. "That was Sergeant Cooper on the phone," she said. "James Gillespie was found dead in his flat this morning. A heart attack, they think."
Paul didn't say anything, only stared out across the garden.
"He says there's nothing to worry about any more, that no one need ever know. He also said"-she paused briefly-"he also said that the child was a girl. Mathilda lied about your having a son." She had told him everything after her return home from the surgery the day Sergeant Cooper had questioned her.
A tear squeezed from between his lids. "I'm so sorry."
"For James?" "
For-everything. If I'd known-" He fell silent.
"Would it have made a difference, Paul?"
"We could have shared the burden, instead of you bearing it alone."
"It would have destroyed me," she said honestly. "1 couldn't have coped with you knowing that Mathilda had had your child." She studied his face closely. "As time went by, you would have thought more of her and less of me."
"No." His marbled hand clutched at hers. "She was in every sense of the word a brief madness so, even if I'd known about the child, it wouldn't have changed anything. I have only ever loved you." His eyes grew damp. "In any case, my dear, I think your first instincts were right, and that Mathilda would have killed the baby. We can none of us put any faith in what she said. She lied more often than she told the truth."
"Except that she left her money to Sarah," said Jane in a rush, "and Sergeant Cooper said the baby was a girl. Suppose Sarah-?" She broke off and squeezed his hand encouragingly. "Nothing's ever too late, Paul. Would it do any harm, do you think, to ask a few tactful questions?"
He looked away from her eager face and, in Cooper's earlier footsteps, traced the fickleness of fate. He had lived his life believing he was childless, and now, at the age of seventy, Jane had told him he was a father. But of whom? Of a son? Of a daughter? Or had Mathilda lied about this as she had lied about so much else? For himself, it hardly mattered-he had long since come to terms with being childless-but for Jane, Mathilda would always cast a long and spiteful shadow. There were no guarantees that Sarah Blakeney was his daughter, no guarantees even that the child, if it existed at all, would welcome the intrusion of parents into its life, and he couldn't bear to see Jane's hopes dashed in this as surely as her hope in his fidelity had been dashed. In the end, wasn't it better to live with the illusion of happiness than the awful certainty of trust betrayed?