Nan Maiden said, “Inspector, I don't understand what Andy's knife has to do with anything.” And then without a pause for response, “Darling, you haven't had lunch yet. May I bring you a sandwich?”
But Andy Maiden was watching Hanken open the knife and take the measure of each of its blades. Hanken could feel the former officer's eyes upon him. He could sense the intent behind the gaze that fixed itself on his fingers.
Nan Maiden said, “Andy? May I bring you … ?”
“No.”
“But you must eat something. You can't keep—”
“No.”
Hanken looked up. Maiden's replacement knife was too small for the murder weapon. But that didn't obviate the necessity for asking the question that both of them knew he would ask. He had, after all, admitted to helping his daughter pack her camping gear into her car on Tuesday. And he himself had given her the knife that he himself had later declared to be missing.
“Mr. Maiden,” he said, “where were you on Tuesday night?”
“That's a monstrous question,” Nan Maiden said quietly.
“I suppose it is,” Hanken agreed. “Mr. Maiden?”
Maiden glanced in the direction of the Hall above them, as if what he was about to say needed an accompanying corroboration that would be supplied by the Hall's existence. “I was having some eye trouble on Tuesday night. I went upstairs early because my vision kept tunneling. It gave me a scare, so I had a lie-down to see if that would help take care of it.”
Tunnel vision? Hanken wondered incredulously. That was certainly an alibi and a half.
Maiden obviously inferred Hanken's thoughts from the expression on his face. He said, “It happened during the evening meal, Inspector. One can't mix drinks or serve dinners if one's field of vision is reduced to the size of a five-pence coin.”
“It's the truth,” Nan asserted. “He went upstairs. He was resting in the bedroom.”
“What time was this?”
Maiden's wife answered for him. “The first of our guests had gone through for their starters. So Andy must have left round half past seven.”
Hanken looked at Maiden for confirmation of the time. Maiden frowned, as if he were conducting a complex inner dialogue with himself.
“How long were you up there in your bedroom, then?”
“The rest of the evening, the night,” Maiden said.
“Your vision didn't improve. Is that it?”
“That's it.”
“Have you seen a doctor? Seems to me that a problem like that could be cause for real concern.”
“Andy's had a few turns like this,” Nan Maiden said. “They pass. He's fine as long as he rests. And that's what he was doing on Tuesday night. Resting.”
“I'd expect, though, that a condition like that wants looking at. It could lead to something far worse. A stroke, perhaps? Chances are one would think of a stroke straightaway. I'd want to call an ambulance as soon as I had the first symptoms.”
“It's happened before. We know what to do,” Nan Maiden said.
“Which is what, exactly?” Hanken enquired. “Application of ice packs? Acupuncture to the temples? Full body massage? Half a dozen aspirin? What is it you do when it looks like your husband might be having a stroke?”
“It isn't a stroke.”
“So you left him alone to his bed rest, did you? From half past seven in the evening until … what time might that have been, Mrs. Maiden?”
The care the couple took not to look at each other was as obvious as would have been a sudden collapse into each other's arms. Nan Maiden said, “Of course I didn't leave Andy alone, Inspector. I looked in on him twice. Three times, perhaps. During the evening.”
“And the times?”
“I have no idea. Probably at nine. Then again round eleven.” And as Hanken looked towards Maiden, she continued by saying, “It's no use asking Andy. He'd fallen asleep, and I didn't wake him. But he was there in the bedroom. And there he stayed. All night. I hope that's all you want to ask in the matter, Inspector Hanken, because the very idea … the thought that …” Her eyes grew bright as she directed them towards her husband. He looked in the direction of the U-shaped gorge, whose south end could be glimpsed where the road curved to the north. “I hope that's all you want to ask,” she said simply, and there was a quiet dignity to her words.
Still, Hanken said, “Do you have any idea what your daughter planned to do with her life once she returned to London from her summer in Derbyshire?”
Maiden watched him steadily, though his wife looked away. “No,” he said. “I don't know.”
“I see. And you're certain of that? Nothing you want to add? Nothing you want to explain?”
“Nothing,” Maiden said, and to his wife, “You, Nancy?”
“Nothing,” she said.
Hanken gestured with the evidence bag in which the knife lay. “You know the routine, Mr. Maiden. Once we have a report with all the particulars from forensic, I'll probably need another chat with you.”
“I understand,” Andy Maiden said. “Do your job, Inspector. Do it well. That's all I ask.”
But he didn't look at his wife.
They seemed to Hanken like strangers on a railway platform, tied in some way to a departing guest that neither wanted to admit to knowing.
Nan Maiden watched the inspector drive off. Without realising that she was doing it, she began to gnaw at what was left of the fingernails of her right hand. Next to her, Andy set the bottle of Pellegrino she'd brought him into a depression that his heel had made in the soft earth round the concrete-filled hole. He hated Pellegrino. He scorned every kind of water that touted itself as offering more benefit than a full glass of the spring water from their own well. She knew that. But when she'd looked from the window of the first floor mezzanine, when through the trees she'd seen the car pull onto the verge and watched the police inspector clamber out, a bottle of water was the only excuse she could think of to get her down the hillside quickly enough to intercept him. So now she bent for the water and wiped off the grime where the earth clung like an eruption of scabies to the condensation that had formed on the bottle.
Andy fetched the thick oak pole from which the new Maiden Hall sign would hang. He sank it upright into the ground and held it into position with four sturdy timbers. He shovelled the rest of the concrete round it.
When will we talk? she wondered. When will it be safe to say the worst? She tried to tell herself that thirty-seven years of marriage made conversation unnecessary between them, but she knew there was little truth to that. It was only in the halcyon days of courting, engagement, and newlywed excitement that a look, a touch, or a smile sufficed between a man and a woman. And they were decades away from those halcyon days. They were more than thirty years and one devastating death away from that time when words were secondary to the knowledge of one's partner that was as immediate and as natural as breathing.
Silently, Andy packed the concrete round the post. Carefully, he scraped the remains of the mixture from the bucket until there was nothing left. He gave his attention next to the floodlights. Nan clasped the bottle of Pellegrino to her bosom and turned away to climb back to the Hall.
“Why did you say that?” her husband asked.
She turned back to him. “What?”
“You know. Why did you tell him you looked in on me, Nancy?”
The bottle felt sticky under her palm. It felt hard against her breast. She said, “I did look in on you.”
“You didn't. We both know it.”
“Darling, I did. You were asleep. You must have dozed off. I had a quick look in the door and then went back to work. I'm not surprised you didn't hear me.”
He stood with the floodlights in his hands. She wanted to go to him, to swaddle his body with the kind of protection that would dispel the demons and drive off the despair. But she just stood there, a few feet above him on the slope, holding a bottle of Pellegrino which both of them knew he did not want and would never dri
nk.
“She was the why of it,” he said quietly. “Every journey in life reaches an end. But if you're lucky, it has another beginning inside of it. Nick was the why. Do you understand, Nancy?”
Their gazes locked on each other for a moment. His eyes—which she'd studied for thirty-seven years of love and frustration and laughter and fear and delight and anxiety—spoke a message to her that was unmistakable in its existence but incomprehensible in its meaning. Nan's body quivered with a chill of fear, with the belief that she couldn't afford to understand anything that the man she loved would tell her from this moment on.
“I've something to see to in the Hall,” she said. She began to climb the slope beneath the lime trees. She felt the cool air of the shadows as if the tree leaves were spilling it like a soft fall of rain. It touched her cheeks first, then slid to her shoulders, and the movement of the coolness against her skin was what prompted her to turn back to her husband for a final question.
“Andy,” she said. The volume of her voice was normal. “Can you hear me from here?”
He didn't respond. He didn't look up. He didn't do anything save place the first floodlight in position on the ground beneath the pole that would hold the new sign for Maiden Hall. “Oh God,” Nan whispered. She turned and continued her climb.
After the conversation she'd had with her uncle Jeremy on the previous evening, Samantha had done what she could to stay out of his way. She'd had to see him at both breakfast and lunch, but she'd avoided eye contact and conversation with him, and as soon as she'd finished eating, she'd cleared her plates from the table and cleared herself from the room.
She was out in the older courtyard, preparing to wash what looked like a good fifty years of grime from those windows that were still glazed, when she noticed her cousin. He was sitting at the desk in his office, just across the cobbles from where she was unreeling a lengthy hose pipe. She paused to observe him, admiring how the autumn light fell in the open window of the office and struck the top of his bent head so that his hair was burnished to a rusty gold. As she watched, she saw him rub the worry lines on his forehead, and that told her instantly what he was doing, although it didn't tell her why.
He was very good with figures, so he was going over the accounts, as he did every week, making an evaluation of what went for the income, assets, and investments of his family's estate. He'd be looking at everything: what came in from the sale of the harrier puppies and what went out to keep the kennel running; what amassed from the rents accrued across the estate and what bled from the profits to keep all of the farm buildings in usable condition; what income was provided by the tournaments and fetes held at Broughton Manor and what costs were accrued from the normal wear and tear that occurred when one's property was used by others; what interest came in from invested capital and how much of that capital leeched away when a month's expenditures exceeded its profits.
When he was done with that, he would go on to examine the books in which he meticulously recorded every pound that was spent on the renovation of Broughton Manor itself, and then he would refresh his memory about the debts that also comprised part of the Brit-ton Family Financial Picture. When he was finished, he would have a fair idea of how things stood, and he could lay any plans that needed to be laid for the coming week.
So Samantha wasn't surprised to see him looking over the books.
She was, however, surprised to see him at them for the second time in four days.
As she watched, she saw him plunge one hand back through his hair. He entered some figures into an antique adding machine, and from across the courtyard Samantha could hear the whir and click of the old calculator as it lumbered through its sums. When the answer was produced, Julian ripped the tape from the back of the machine and studied it for a moment. Then he crumpled the tape into a ball and threw it over his shoulder. He went back to the books again.
Seeing this, Samantha felt her heart tugged. She wondered if there had ever been a man as responsible as Julian. A child less mindful of his family's history and his personal duty would have decamped from this nightmare of an ancestral home long ago. A child less loving would have left his father to swill his way to delirium tremens, cirrhosis of the liver, and an early grave. But her cousin Julian wasn't that sort of child. He felt the ties of blood and the obligations of heritage. Both were burdens. But he bore them with dignity. Had he approached them any other way, Samantha wouldn't have come to care for him so deeply. In his struggle, she'd learned to see a strength of purpose which was closely attuned to her own way of living.
They were right for each other, she and her cousin. No matter that the blood relationship was a close one, cousins had formed alliances before and in the process had enriched the family from which they both sprang.
Formed an alliance. What a way to label it, Samantha thought wryly. And yet hadn't things been so much more sensible during that period when marriages came about for just that reason? There was no talk of true love in the days of political and financial matchmaking, no aching, longing, and pining until one's true love happened to come along. What there was, instead, was a steadiness and devotion that grew from an understanding of what was expected of one. No illusions, no fantasy. Just an agreement to bind one's life to another in a situation in which both parties had much to gain: money, position, property, authority, protection, and authentication. Perhaps that last, most of all. One wasn't complete until one married; one wasn't married until the match was consolidated through coition and legitimised through reproduction. Simple, it was. There were no expectations of romance, passion, and exquisite surrender. There was just the steady lifelong assurance that one's mate was actually that which the agreeing parties had earlier defined him to be.
Sensible, Samantha decided. And in a world in which men and women were partnered to each other in that fashion, she knew that agents of herself and Julian would long ago have reached an understanding.
But they didn't live in that world. And the world they did live in was one suggesting that a permanent soul mate was one little strip of celluloid away: boy meets girl, they fall in love, they have their troubles which are resolved by Act III, fade to black, and the credits roll. That world was maddening because Samantha knew if her cousin adhered to a belief in that sort of love, she was doomed to failure. I'm here, she found herself wanting to shout, hose pipe in hand. I have what you need. Look at me. Look at me.
As if he'd heard her silent cry, Julian glanced up at just that moment and caught her watching him. He leaned forward and swung the casement window fully open. Samantha crossed the courtyard to join him.
“You're looking grim. I couldn't help noticing. You caught me trying to design a cure for what ails you.”
“D'you think I have a future in counterfeiting?” he asked. The sun was shining directly on his face and he squinted into it. “That may be the only answer.”
“Do you think so?” she asked lightly. “No rich young thing waiting for seduction on your horizon?”
“It doesn't look like it.” He saw her observing the mass of documents and account books that were spread on his desk, certainly a far greater number than he usually went through when doing his sums for the coming week. “Trying to see where we stand,” he explained. “I was hoping to wring about ten thousand pounds out of … well, out of nothing, I'm afraid.”
“Why?” She noted the downhearted cast of his face and hastened to add, “Julie, is there an emergency of some sort? Is something wrong?”
“That's just the hell of it. Something's right. Or something could be made right. But there's not enough liquid cash to do much more than see us through to the end of the month.”
“I hope you know that you can always ask me—” She hesitated, not wanting to offend him, knowing that he was as proud a man as he was responsible. She put it another way. “We're family, Julie. If something's come up and you'd like some money … it wouldn't even be a loan. You're my cousin. You can have it.”
He looked horrifi
ed. “I didn't mean you to think—”
“Stop it. I'm not thinking anything.”
“Good. Because I couldn't. Not ever.”
“Fine. We won't discuss it. But please tell me what's happened. You look really cut up.”
He blew out a breath. He said, “Oh bugger it,” and in a quick movement he climbed onto the desk and out of the window to join her in the courtyard. “What're you up to? Ah. Windows. I see. Have you any idea how long it's been since they've had a wash, Sam?”
“When Edward chucked it all in for Wallis? Fool that he was.”
“That's a fair bet.”
“Which part of it? The guess itself? Or chucking it all in for her?”
He smiled resignedly. “I'm not sure at this point.”
Samantha didn't say what came first to her mind: that he wouldn't have answered in such a way a week ago. She merely gave a few moments’ consideration to what such an answer implied.
Companionably, they went at the windows. The old glazing was set into lead in far too fragile a fashion to blast away at it with the hose pipe, so they were reduced to a painstaking process of soaking away the grime with rags, one single pane at a time.
“This'll take till our dotage,” Julian noted grimly after ten minutes of silent cleaning.
“I dare say,” Samantha replied. She wanted to ask him if he was prepared for her to stay round that long, but she let the thought go. Something serious was on his mind, and she had to get to it, if only to prove to him her abiding concern for all aspects of his life. She sought a way in, saying quietly, “Julie, I'm sorry about your worries. On top of everything else. I can't do anything about … well …” She found that she couldn't even say Nicola Maiden's name. Not here and now. Not to Julian. “About what's happened in the last few days” was what she settled on. “But if there's ever anything else that I can do …”
“I'm sorry,” he replied.
“Of course you are. How could you be anything else but sorry?”