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‘Oh, we know where Robin Durrant is, don’t you worry. He’s safely in custody, and guarded by three men.’

‘What do you mean? Why is he guarded?’

‘Perhaps you’d like to sit down, Mrs Canning? I can see this is all coming as a terrible shock, to the whole household…’ From downstairs, a fresh storm of pitiful crying erupts from Sophie Bell.

‘I do not want to sit down! Why is Robin Durrant guarded by three men?’

‘Well, Mrs Canning, it was Robin Durrant that committed the murder. He was seen by two men just after he did it, trying to dispose of the girl’s body in the canal. He didn’t even try to run away, and he was most dreadfully stained with her blood. Now he’s sitting in silence and won’t say a word to anybody, not even to deny it. Never a surer sign of guilt, in my experience. It’s a terrible business, truly terrible.’ The policeman shakes his head. Hester’s head fills with a muffled, uneven thumping. Grey shadows swell at the edges of her vision.

‘There must be some mistake,’ she whispers, leaning against the wall to steady herself.

‘Let me help you, madam. Do be seated. I shall find somebody to fetch you a glass of water…’

‘No, no, do not trouble Sophie. She’s too upset,’ Hester says, but so quietly that the man doesn’t seem to hear her.

‘Constable Pearce! Please bring up a glass of water for Mrs Canning!’ he bellows down the stairs, the noise crashing through Hester’s skull like storm waves. ‘Please – can you tell me where I can find the vicar, Mrs Canning? We really must speak with him.’ The policeman bends forwards over Hester in a way that makes her dizzy. She doesn’t know what to say.

‘Church. Try the church,’ she manages at last.

‘Of course. Foolish of me.’ And the man is gone.

Hester has no idea how long she stays sitting on the hard wooden chair in the hallway with a drink of water next to her, untouched. Her throat is parched and aching, but she doesn’t dare open her hand to reach for the glass. She knows what she will see, what is on her hands. With a surge of panic she looks at the wall where she’d leant a short while ago, but the paint is clean. The blood had dried sufficiently. She stares at the surface of the water in the glass, so clear and pure, shining with the daylight from the front door, which still sits open, abandoned, creaking occasionally in the breeze. But the library door, at the end of the hall, keeps drawing her eye. It is terrifying; dark, and secretive, and watchful. Hester is sorely tempted to get up, to run out into the sunshine and never come back. He was most dreadfully stained with her blood… The words echo through her thoughts. Oh, Cat! With a gasp Hester is on her feet, and rushing back through the library door before she can lose her nerve. In the light from the crack in the curtains she’d made earlier, she searches the floor. She finds Albert’s binoculars, stuffed hastily into their case but not closed. She looks at them carefully, sees some glistening dark mess all over them. Cautiously, her hands shaking uncontrollably, she draws them out and turns them to the light. The lenses are smashed and fragments of glass are stuck to the metal in a slick of clotted stuff. Glass, and fine black hairs. Hester stares at them with awful, grim recognition. Something falls from inside one of the cylinders, landing with a small sound on the rug. Numbly, Hester bends and picks it up. It is hard between her fingers, both smooth and angular, like a chip of stone, all covered in blood. Hester frowns, rolls it between her fingers to clean it off a little. She studies it again, and then knows it for what it is. A tooth. A human tooth, broken off sharply at its upper end. Hester screams. She drops the binoculars and they land with a thump that shakes the floor.

Her breath comes in ragged gasps, fast and uneven. She waits for the police to come and find her, to burst into the library in search of the source of the scream and the racket she has made; to find her all bloody and wild. In desperation, she again considers fleeing; climbing out through the window and running away as fast as her weak legs will carry her, though she has no idea where she would go. But she knows that if she moves she will faint. It takes long minutes for the panic to loosen its grip on her but after a while it seems that nobody has noticed her cry out. No footsteps approach the library. She shuts her eyes until the tightness in her chest eases and her head is clear enough to allow her to think. Crouching down, Hester lifts the cover of Robin’s bag and pulls out a silvery blond wig, a diaphanous white dress. All bloodied and ruined. She knows them at once, having spent enough time studying Robin’s pictures to recognise what they are. In that instant she realises: Cat was the elemental. Oh God, oh God, oh God… Hester has no idea if she has spoken aloud or merely thought this short and desperate prayer. Because if Robin has been arrested, with Cat’s body and coming straight from the scene of her killing, then only one other person could have brought these items back to the house. Could have washed their hands in the kitchen sink, and left a stained dish towel behind. My darling Bertie. What has happened here?

Hester’s mind empties of all thoughts except one – to protect Albert. Carefully, she puts the costume back into Robin’s bag, on top of a selection of his correspondence which is soon stained and illegible. The dress fabric feels fine and soft beneath her fingertips. The wig is slippery, alive. Hester shudders, gagging slightly, as if this is Cat’s hair, as if it is part of the girl’s murdered body. She clenches her teeth, struggles to keep herself steady. Then she puts the binoculars in with the costume, crying now, catching the smell of congealed blood coming from the case. A cloying, feral, butcher’s shop smell. Glancing up, she remembers Albert’s journal, obviously recently used, and left on the desk. Hester doesn’t open it, or read any of the entries. She has no wish to learn anything, to know anything more. She wishes she knew less; far less. She puts the journal into the leather satchel last of all, closes the buckles on this ghastly, incriminating hoard, and stashes it in the footwell of the desk, far out of sight to anyone but a person actively searching. She does all this without soiling her dress, but her hands are red and brown. Cat’s blood. Cat is dead. Hester’s stomach churns. She staggers out of the library and shuts the door, and just makes it to the cloakroom before she is sick.

*

Later, she goes down to the kitchen to see Sophie Bell. The housekeeper is inconsolable, sitting vast and trembling at the table with the tea leaves turned to bitter mush in the pot, and flies settling unnoticed on the rim of the milk jug.

‘Why would anyone kill her? Why would anyone do that to our Cat? And her just a slip of a thing, no real trouble to anybody…’ she mumbles on and on, hardly seeming to notice Hester, who stands at her shoulder for a while, awkward and silent. When she turns to go she notices the bucket of water in the corner, with the stained cloth still soaking in it. Her stomach gives a nasty jerk, filling her throat with bile again. Without a thought she kneels down, wrings the cloth out and flings it into the stove. The iron door clatters shut behind it, and Hester rises, half afraid to turn back to Mrs Bell. But Sophie still stares straight ahead and has noticed nothing. Hester washes her own hands again and again, but like Lady Macbeth, she is sure a taint is left. For days, the smell of blood clings to the inside of her nose.

The chief constable’s own bloodhounds, Puncher and Hodd, soon find the scene of the murder. A place near a stream where the grass has been crushed by footsteps and the dry summer flowers have shed feathery seeds onto a patch of spilt blood where insects circle and settle to feast. There sits Cat’s bag, with all her meagre possessions inside, and her day dress, tucked to one side of it. All this Hester learns at the inquest, which is opened at the parish council house in Thatcham by the coroner for western Berkshire, Mr James Angus Sedgecroft. Mrs Bell sits beside her, eyes shining in a face ablaze with hatred, trained constantly on Robin Durrant. The murder weapon isn’t found, but the nearby stream contains many large and jagged flints, and it is assumed that one of these was used to beat the girl’s skull in, and was then cast back into the stream to conceal the evidence. Only Professor Palmer, a special medical advisor to the Home Office sent down by Scotland Yard to examine the body and assist Superintendent Holt with the case, remains unconvinced by this explanation. He makes special note of the fury of the attack, and the way it focused on the girl’s face, as if to wipe out her very existence. He found fragments of glass in some of Cat Morley’s deep wounds, for which no explanation could be found. When Hester hears this she turns as cold as ice, right through to her core. She thinks of the smashed binoculars, and once she has thought of them, she cannot stop thinking of them. Albert’s binoculars. The ones he was never without.