The Lake House (23 page)

“And?”

“The loss of a child is like a grenade in most families, statistics on parents who split up in the wake of a tragedy bear that out, but they were lovely together. He was so careful with her, gentle and protective, making sure she rested, stopping her from tearing outside to join the search. He barely let her out of his sight.” His mouth tightened as he remembered. “It really was a dreadful time. Poor woman, it has to be a mother's worst nightmare, but she handled herself with such grace. You know, for years after the family left she used to come back here.”

“To the village?”

“To the house. Just her on her own.”

This was new. Bertie's friend Louise had suggested that no one from the family had been near the place since Theo's disappearance. “You saw her?”

“Police hear things, news would filter into town that there was someone back at the Lake House. I dropped in on her a few times, just to make sure she was all right, see if there was anything I could do to help. She was always polite, said it was kind of me but she was just enjoying a little respite from London.” He smiled sadly. “I knew, though, she was hoping he'd come back.

“It wasn't over for her.”

“'Course it wasn't. Her baby was out there somewhere. She thanked me once or twice, said she appreciated the work we'd all put in, how hard we'd searched for her boy. Even made an exceptionally generous donation to the local station. Very dignified, she was. Very sad.” He frowned, lost in his memories. When he spoke again, a bitter, wistful note had crept into his voice. “I used to hope I could still find the boy for her. Didn't sit well with me, that open file. Children don't just disappear, do they? They go somewhere. There's always a path, it's just a matter of knowing where to look.” He glanced at her. “Ever had a case like that? Eats away at you.”

“Once or twice,” said Sadie, picturing Caitlyn Bailey in the hallway of that flat. Remembering the sensation of that little hand, warm and trusting in hers, the tickle of the child's messy hair when she fetched her storybook and laid her head on Sadie's shoulder.

“This was mine,” he said. “Made all the worse because we had so little to work with.”

“You must have had theories, though?”

“There were leads, some of them stronger than others. Recent staff changes, a missing bottle of sleeping tablets we thought might have been used in the kidnapping, and a family friend who died in unusual circumstances, fellow by the name of Daffyd Llewellyn—”

“The writer—”

“That's him. Quite well known in his time.”

Sadie cursed herself for having left the library dissertation with its chapter on Llewellyn unopened. She remembered the introduction to
Eleanor's Magic Doorway
and its mention of a posthumous OBE awarded in 1934. She hadn't made the connection that his death had come so soon after Theo's disappearance. “What happened?”

“A few days into the search we were down by the stream, a little way from the boathouse, and someone called out, “A body!” But it wasn't the baby, it was an old man. Suicide, as it turned out. We thought it must've been guilt, that he'd had something to do with the boy's disappearance.”

“Are you sure he hadn't?”

“We looked into it, but there was no motive. He adored the boy, and everyone we interviewed confirmed him as Eleanor's closest friend. He wrote a book about her when she was a girl, did you know?”

Sadie nodded.

“She was completely devastated—collapsed when she was told. Awful, it was.” He was shaking his head. “One of the worst things I've seen.”

Sadie considered this. A child goes missing and a close family friend kills himself in the hours or days afterwards. “The timing seems extraordinary.”

“Grant you that, but we spoke to the local doctor, who told us Llewellyn had been suffering anxiety in the weeks prior. We found a bottle of barbiturates in his pocket.”

“That's what he used?”

“The coroner confirmed an overdose. Llewellyn mixed the pills with champagne, lay down by the stream and never woke up. Extraordinary timing, as you say, given that the boy was taken the same night, but nothing suspicious in it. Certainly nothing to link him to Theo Edevane's fate. Just a coincidence.”

Sadie smiled thinly. She didn't like coincidences. In her experience they were usually just links that hadn't yet been proved. And, now, her antennae were quivering. She had a feeling there was more to this Llewellyn fellow's death than met the eye. Clive had obviously dismissed the possibility a long time ago, but Sadie made a note to look into it further later.
Llewellyn suicide—timing an accident or was he involved? Guilt?

In the meantime . . . she tapped her pen against the pad thoughtfully, circling the word
accident
. Because of course there was a third possibility in the case of Theo Edevane, perhaps most chilling of all: that the child had never left the house—at least, not alive. Sadie had seen cases where children had been injured or killed—accidentally or otherwise—and then the crime covered up. Those responsible invariably sought to make it look like a case of running away or kidnap because it focused attention away from the scene of the crime.

A series of
clicks
broke her train of thought and she noticed for the first time a large digital clock on the bench behind Clive. It was the sort with flip cards made from plastic and three had just turned at once to show the time as eleven o'clock. Sadie was suddenly aware that it was getting closer to midday, when Clive's daughter would arrive and bring their meeting to an end.

“What about the sisters?” she said, with renewed urgency. “You spoke to them?”

“More than once.”

“Anything useful?”

“More of the same. The boy was loved, they'd seen nothing unusual, they promised to tell us if they thought of anything helpful. They all had alibis for the evening.”

“You're frowning.”

“Am I?” Clive blinked at her, light blue eyes large behind his glasses. He ran a hand over the top of his white hair and then lifted a shoulder. “I suppose I just always felt there was something the youngest one wasn't telling us. It was only a hunch, something to do with the awkward way she carried herself. She went red in the face when we were questioning her, crossed her arms and refused to look us in the eye. But she insisted she had no idea what could have happened to him, that nothing unusual had occurred in the household in the preceding weeks, and there wasn't a shred of real evidence to suggest she'd been involved.”

Sadie allowed herself to consider motive. Envy was the obvious one. A girl who'd been the baby of the family for almost twelve years until a little brother, a much-loved son, arrived to take her place. The party would have been the perfect time to do away with an obstacle, the noise and activity making it easy to slip beneath the radar.

Or else . . . (and surely more likely than Clementine Edevane being a sociopathic little girl with murderous intent?) . . . Sadie remembered Pickering's account of the girl's habit of taking Theo out with her in the mornings, her insistence that the door to the nursery had been closed when she went past, that she hadn't gone inside to fetch her little brother as she sometimes did. But what if she had, and something awful had happened to him, an accident, and she'd been too frightened, too ashamed, to tell anyone?

“There was a clean-up team in the grounds,” Clive said, anticipating her line of thinking. “From the moment the last guest left, right through sunrise, contractors restoring the place to rights. No one saw anything.”

But what if, as Sadie suspected, there was another way to leave the house unseen? She wrote the word
Clementine
on her notepad and circled it. “What was she like? Clementine Edevane.”

“A tomboy, I suppose you'd have to say, but fey with it. They were all a bit different, the Edevanes. Charming, charismatic. I suppose I was rather taken with them. Awed. I was only seventeen, remember, and green as a bean. I'd never met people like them. It was the romance, I suppose—the big house, the garden, the way they spoke, the things they talked about, their fine manners and the sense of unspoken rules they followed. They were bewitching.” He looked at her. “Would you like to see a photo?”

“You have one?”

The offer had been made openly, even eagerly, but now he hesitated. “I'm not sure . . . well, it's a little awkward, you being a current member of the force . . .

“Barely,” said Sadie, before she could help herself.

“Barely?”

She sighed in defeat. “There was this case,” she began, and then, maybe it was the calm of that kitchen, its distance from London and her real world, the professional connection she felt with Clive, or the relief at finally being able to tell someone the secret she'd been keeping so diligently from Bertie, but Sadie found herself giving him a potted summary of the Bailey case, the way she'd refused to let it go, convinced herself and tried to persuade all and sundry that there was more to it than met the eye, that she was here in Cornwall not on holiday but on enforced leave.

Clive listened without interrupting, and when she finished, he didn't frown, or start a lecture, or ask her to leave. He said simply, “I saw it in the paper. Terrible business.”

“I should never have spoken to that journalist.”

“You thought you were right.”

“I didn't give it enough thought, that's the problem.” Her voice curdled with self-disgust. “I had a
feeling
.”

“Well, no shame in that. Sometimes ‘feelings' aren't as airy-fairy as they seem. Sometimes they're just the product of observations we haven't realised we've been making.”

He was being kind. Sadie had an instinctive antipathy towards kindness. Policing might have changed in the years since Clive retired, but Sadie was pretty sure breaking rank to go public on a hunch had never been considered acceptable practice. She managed a weak smile. “You said there was a photo?”

He took the hint; didn't press further on the Bailey case. He seemed to consider for a moment before nodding. “Back in a minute.”

He shuffled down the hallway and Sadie could hear him rummaging and cursing in a room at the back of the house. The cat was watching her, green eyes wide, tail pulsing in slow critical flecks.
Well, well, well
, that tail seemed to be saying.

“What do you want from me?” Sadie grumbled beneath her breath. “I've already said it was my fault.”

She played idly with the tablecloth tag and tried not to think of Nancy Bailey.
Don't even think of making contact with the grandmother
. Tried to ignore the sensation of that warm little hand in hers. She glanced at the clock and wondered whether it was possible Clive was back there right now on the phone to the Met.

Another two numerals quivered and flipped, and finally, after what seemed a slow-motion age, Clive returned, looking, Sadie fancied, as nervous as she felt. There was an inexplicable animation to his expression and she decided that unless he was a sadist, and there'd been no indication of that so far, he was not returning from reporting her to Ashford. She noticed that he wasn't carrying a photograph either; rather he had a thick folder under one arm. It was of a familiar type. “I was waiting to see what I thought of you,” Clive said as he reached the table. “Only, when I retired, I didn't think anyone would notice, let alone mind, so I took—”

“The file!” Sadie's eyes widened.

A short nod.

“You took the Edevane case file.”

“Borrowed. I'm going to put it back once the case is closed.”

“
You
 . . .
!
” Admiration warmed her face as she considered the folder, now on the table between them, brimming with interview transcripts, illustrations, names, numbers, theories. “You
devil
! You
wonderful
devil.”

He jutted his chin. “Wasn't doing any good in archives, was it? There was no one there who'd miss it. Most of the others, their parents weren't even born when it happened.” His bottom lip trembled slightly. “It's
my
case.
My
unfinished business.”

He handed her a large black-and-white photograph from the top of the file: a good-looking, well-heeled family whose hairstyles, dresses, suits and hats marked them as belonging to the 1930s. It had been taken outside during a picnic and they were lounging on a plaid blanket spread with plates and teacups; there was a stone wall behind them that Sadie recognised as belonging to the bottom garden near the stream. Eleanor and her husband Anthony were in the centre of the group. Sadie knew them from the newspaper photo, though they looked happy here, and therefore younger. An older woman, who must be Constance deShiel, was sitting in a wicker chair to the left of her daughter, and three girls, teenagers or thereabouts, were gathered together on the other side, legs outstretched, ankles crossed in the sun. Deborah, the eldest and most conventionally beautiful, was sitting closest to her father, a scarf tied over her hair; Alice was next, her arresting gaze familiar from her author photo; and on the end, a girl who was tall and rangy but obviously younger than the others, who must be Clementine. Her light-brown hair, wavy and side-parted, sat just above her shoulders, but her face was difficult to make out. She wasn't looking at the photographer, but rather was smiling at the little boy sitting by his mother's feet. Baby Theo, an arm outstretched towards his sister, a soft toy in his fist.

Despite herself, Sadie was moved by the photo. The tufty grass, the spill of shadows on a long-ago summer's day, the small white flecks of daisies in the picture's foreground. It was a brief, single moment in the life of a happy family, caught before everything changed. Clive had said the Edevanes were unlike anyone he'd met before, but it was the ordinariness of these people, this scene, that struck Sadie more. Anthony's jacket, tossed casually behind him, the piece of half-eaten cake in Deborah's hand, the glossy labrador sitting to attention, eyeing the prize.