He threw me a glance of dislike. ‘Oh, use your common sense, Chapman! I’m a man of the law. A well respected one, at that,’ he couldn’t stop himself adding, his natural arrogance reasserting itself. ‘I didn’t want to be mixed up with a murder, even one that will probably never be solved. Not even by you.’
‘Especially not if you were the murderer,’ I suggested, sitting down on one of the other two stools.
His head reared up at that, his jaw jutting angrily. He half rose to his feet.
‘What exactly do you mean to imply by that?’
‘I’m not implying anything. I’m simply stating a fact. It seems that one of Isabella’s three swains killed her. It’s just a question of discovering which one.’
Richard, instead of losing his temper as I had expected, suddenly looked discomfited.
‘Until Isabella’s body was found three and a half weeks ago and all the enquiries began, I wasn’t even aware that there had been other men in her life. I really thought I was the only one. I loved her,’ he added simply, like a lost, bewildered child, so different from his usual air of self-consequence that I felt as acutely uncomfortable as if he had suddenly decided to strip naked in front of me. ‘I had absolutely no reason to kill her or to wish her dead. You must be able to see that, surely.’ His natural conceit was beginning to take hold again.
‘But there’s only your word for that,’ I pointed out. ‘Supposing you’d found out about “Melchior” or “Caspar”-’
‘Who? What in God’s name are you babbling about?’ He was looking at me as though I had lost my mind. Not, I suppose, without good reason.
‘Robert Moresby and Ralph Mynott,’ I amended hurriedly. ‘Just two nicknames I used for them before I discovered who they really were.’ He was still eyeing me somewhat askance. ‘You must see that it was difficult not knowing what they were called.’
I realized that he had forced me on to the defensive and that, if I didn’t take care, I should lose the advantage over him. Once again, I returned to the attack.
‘As I was saying, if you had suddenly found out about the existence of one, or both, of these men, you might well have killed Isabella in a rage. Particularly as you admit that you loved her and had assumed you were the only one.’
‘Well, I didn’t,’ he answered truculently. ‘Sweet Jesu!’ His anger exploded. ‘I wouldn’t have laid a finger on her, you purblind fool! The other man, perhaps. But not Isabella. She was my sun, moon, stars! She meant everything to me. I worshipped the ground she walked on.’
‘So what happened when she suddenly disappeared? What did you think? What did you do?’
Richard subsided on to his stool again, running a hand across his forehead.
‘I didn’t know what to think,’ he said, more quietly. ‘At first, I thought that terrible old father of hers had found out about our meetings and imprisoned her in the house. I went there, only to discover from the servants that she really had vanished. Run away. It didn’t come as too much of a shock. I’d been urging her to leave home for months. A year, maybe. Almost as long as I’d known her, anyway. The only surprise was why she hadn’t run to me. But then I told myself she wouldn’t have wanted to have put me at risk from her father’s anger. I had only just been enrolled in the Sheriff’s Office and had my way to make in the world. Isabella understood that, and was protecting me. A father’s rights over his children are the greatest there are. I could have found myself in serious trouble if I had been sheltering Isabella. I convinced myself that it was merely a matter of time before she got a message to me somehow or another. Then it would have been up to me whether I left Bristol and went to her or not.’
‘But you must have heard what her parents were claiming about her,’ I objected. ‘That she had run off with a man.’
Richard Manifold shrugged. ‘I knew what they were saying, of course. The whole city knew it eventually. I just didn’t believe them. I thought it was spite; lies because they wouldn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, accept that their daughter hated them enough to run away.’
‘But,’ I insisted, ‘as the weeks, months, then years went by and you still didn’t hear from Isabella, what conclusion did you come to regarding her disappearance?’
Richard slowly shook his head. ‘Eventually, gradually, as all hope died, I decided that she must have had an accident. Her horse must have thrown her, or she’d been set upon and killed by footpads somewhere in the forests. And in the end, of course, I stopped wondering. There was nothing I could have done. And she became lost to me. A dream. Other women came along: Adela, for one. I forgot her. That’s all.’
There was silence between us. Then I asked abruptly, ‘When was the last time you saw and spoke to Isabella?’
Eighteen
‘The last time I …’ He broke off, looking shocked, as though I had awakened him too abruptly from a dream world to reality; as though, for a few brief seconds, he did not know where he was. ‘The last time I spoke to Isabella?’
I nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ in confirmation. I could see at once by the look in his eyes, by the slightly shifty expression that lurked at the back of them, that he remembered the occasion quite clearly, but was reluctant to divulge it, so gave him a helping hand. ‘Was it the morning of the day she disappeared?’
‘It’s … it’s difficult to recall after all this time. Twenty years seems like an aeon ago.’ He gave a nervous laugh that rang hollow. ‘I was young, I know that. A green youth in the throes of my first great passion.’
I was unimpressed by this blatant bid for my understanding and sympathy.
‘It was a March morning of rain and wind,’ I said. ‘You met her near your usual trysting place of Westbury village. She was seen talking to someone — a man, wearing a cloak with his hood pulled forward over his face.’
‘And why should you think that man was me? It seems now that there were at least two other men whom Isabella knew and was friendly with, so why should it necessarily have been me? Has someone claimed to have recognized me?’
‘I told you, whoever it was had his hood pulled well forward, concealing his features.’
‘Then why …?’
‘Because Master Robert Moresby has a witness to the fact that, on that particular morning, he was elsewhere.’
‘And the second man? Ralph Mynott, I believe he’s called. If, that is, Jack Gload has the name aright. Can he, too, claim a witness as to his whereabouts that morning?’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘And if you asked me to produce evidence to exonerate him, I couldn’t. It’s just a feeling I have that he was not the man Isabella encountered on the downs that day.’
‘A feeling!’ Richard exclaimed scathingly. ‘Feelings don’t count, man, when you’re searching for the truth. If you ask me, Roger, these mysteries that you claim to have solved — if, indeed, you have solved them and it’s not just so much moonshine — have been more by luck than judgement.’
He was trying to goad me into losing my temper, and was very nearly succeeding. But I realized that the attempt was for a purpose and that to play his game was to hand him the advantage over me, so I suppressed my anger and answered coolly, ‘You, yourself, have been witness to some of my successes. And if you have never been guided by your feelings — what women would call intuition — then I shall own myself very much surprised. Moreover, if you claim otherwise, I shan’t believe you. I recollect an occasion when you would have pinned a murder on me for no better reason than you disliked me for being Adela’s husband. Fortunately, I had a witness to testify to my innocence.’
His eyes met mine for a moment, then dropped to study his hands, clasped on the table in front of him.
‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said quietly. He began picking at a piece of loose skin around one of his thumb nails. ‘It’s true. I’ve always resented Adela’s preference for you. Nor, I admit, have I ever understood it.’