Fatal Inheritance (26 page)

‘Yes, that’s right. He’d have been furious,’ agreed Mrs Munn. ‘When he was angry, he was very angry; hot anger, not cold anger like his mum. Anything could have happened if she was still at home when he came back. But you’ll never get her to admit it even if she was. She had already left, so she says and so she’ll always say. There was no one to see or hear.’

‘Well,’ I said quietly, ‘but perhaps there was someone. Perhaps
you
were there, Mrs Munn. Perhaps you came back for something you had forgotten, and when you reached the door, you heard the two of them quarrelling, and listened for a while, not wishing to walk into the middle of a scene.’

She looked at me with surprise and a shadow of fear reflected in her face. ‘I wasn’t, though,’ she said tensely. ‘Worse luck.’

‘Hush!’ said Mr Munn. ‘The lady’s saying something – I think I see.’

‘This idea is a little risky,’ I said, ‘but here it is, for what it’s worth. I think that if you were to write a letter to Mrs Cavendish saying that you knew she was at home when her son returned, that you came back the way I said, and you heard what they were saying, she could not but react. What I am suggesting is that you do something to provoke her to react very quickly and strongly. If we once see exactly how she responds to such a letter, then, I think, we will know the truth.’

‘Why, she’d just deny it all,’ said Mrs Munn.

‘We mustn’t leave her that possibility, if what I suspect is indeed true. I suggest that you write her a letter in which you say you heard her and her son together and you know that she lied to the police. Tell her that you stayed and listened, and that you heard all they said – but don’t say what you heard. Tell her that she must bring you some money by tomorrow night. Give her the letter tomorrow evening when you leave the house, and suggest that she meet you at midnight in some lonely place near here.’

‘That’s too dangerous. I won’t have that,’ said Mr Munn. ‘That’s blackmail; it’s illegal for one thing, and too risky for another. Why, someone who kills once may kill again! What could poor Betty do in some lonely place if Mrs Cavendish decides to murder her?’

‘I will be the one to go and meet Mrs Cavendish, not Mrs Munn,’ I said. ‘I do not think my plan is really dangerous for either of you. If she is innocent, she will know that Mrs Munn must be lying, and she will say so. Think of it from her point of view. If she never saw Sebastian that night, then she will know that there was nothing to hear, and so she will know that Mrs Munn cannot really know any secrets.’

‘But the law is severe against blackmailers,’ objected Mr Munn. ‘If she really didn’t do it, we might find ourselves hauled up before the magistrate.’

‘Not to mention out of a job,’ added Mrs Munn. ‘Couldn’t you write her the letter yourself?’

‘It wouldn’t be believable coming from me,’ I said. ‘I am a complete stranger. I was acquainted with neither Sebastian nor her on the day he died; why would I have been coming to their door? She would take me for a professional blackmailer horning in on a case from the newspapers, call my bluff and deny everything. I might succeed in blackmailing her by threatening to tell her secrets to Lord Warburton, but I would never have any chance of obtaining a confession. Your situation is different. For you to have returned there for something you forgot after having left the house would be quite believable, and you would be a witness to a lie concerning the actual murder.’

‘But I didn’t even go to the flat on that day,’ she objected. ‘It was a Sunday.’

‘Oh, so it was. Oh dear. Couldn’t you say you left something there on the Saturday, and had to come back for it?’

‘When I was going back in to work the very next morning?’ she said.

‘You could say it was to take some food, knowing that she and her son would both be out,’ intervened her husband suddenly. ‘The Lord knows it wouldn’t have been a crime, and we need it sorely. If it wasn’t for the food that used to come from the house there, we’d have starved years ago. Since the boy died it’s been terrible. Betty’s whole salary practically goes just for the rent, and she’s got to have a coat and skirt to go to work in.’

‘So you think I should do it?’ said Mrs Munn, turning to her husband. ‘If she’s done nothing, I’ll lose my job without a reference. I’d have had to find another place anyway, when she gets married, but that’s to be in another six months, and she’d have given me a good letter at least.’

‘I will help you find another job,’ I said, ‘and write you a reference myself. Would you not be happier working in a larger family? I have a lot of friends. I am sure we can find something. If you were going to be looking for a job anyway, then we might as well start right now, don’t you think?’

She looked at me gratefully, and I determined to help her find work by every means in my power, not hesitating to resort to a lie or two if necessary. With all my London acquaintances, I felt reasonably certain of success.

‘There’s still the problem of her taking Betty to the police over the blackmail,’ said Mr Munn.

‘She would never do that,’ said Mrs Munn. ‘She wouldn’t want the publicity. She’d call my bluff and put a stop to it.’

‘I believe you are right,’ I said. ‘Still, if that happens, I am quite prepared to declare that I wrote your letter myself, and that you had nothing to do with it. I do have a certain talent for forgery,’ I added modestly, ‘and I am not too much afraid of the police; I have several friends at Scotland Yard. What matters to me above all is what she says when she confronts me, expecting to see you. You must lend me a bonnet, so that from a distance she is not aware of the change. I am counting on being able to tell from her reaction whether she is innocent or not. As I said, if she is, she will not hesitate to deny everything, knowing that she is in the right, and that it is quite impossible that either you or I can know anything really significant. If she said that to my face, in that situation, I would believe her. But on the other hand, if she really did see Sebastian that night, then we must write your letter so that she thinks that you know it for a fact, and denial would be useless. The letter will be a little delicate to write, but we can do it together. Shall we begin now?’

I had prepared writing-paper and pen in my handbag, just in case, but she had some at home already, of an inferior but very authentic-looking quality. In an inversion of the natural procedure, we used mine to write a rough draft, with much discussion over each line and phrase, arriving finally at the following result.

I then dictated it to Mrs Munn for her to write it out on her own paper in her own writing. I preferred this method to her copying it, for I wished to preserve any particularities of spelling that might help the letter appear absolutely convincing.

‘You must give her this, or leave it at the house tomorrow after work,’ I told her again. ‘Just in case of any worry at all, I think it would be best if you spent the evening somewhere else, with some neighbours or friends near here.’

‘If I really thought he had taken the poison himself, I wouldn’t be doing this,’ said Mrs Munn, folding the letter and sealing it. ‘I think it would be an evil thing to do. But after all you’ve told us, I don’t believe that any more: I believe you. Your explanation makes more sense. It’s as simple as that. I think she must have given him the poison, and I don’t want to work for a murderess any more. I shall go there tomorrow, but it will feel strange. I wish I didn’t have to.’

‘Let us not judge before we know the facts,’ I said. ‘When you leave work tomorrow, Carl and I will be waiting for you outside, and we will accompany you home to make sure you arrive here safely, and help bring you and Mr Munn to some other place. The rest is up to us.’

‘You will come and see us, and tell us what happened?’

‘Of course we will, as soon as we possibly can. Leave everything to me. Thank you for trusting me,’ I added, shaking Mr Munn’s hand and that of his wife, and taking the rusty bonnet she offered for my disguise.

‘I do trust you,’ said Mrs Munn. ‘It’s important to right a wrong.’

Through the darkness of the winter night we walked, and I was not leaning on Carl’s arm so heavily uniquely for the pleasure; the pavement was slushy and slippery and both of us stumbled from time to time in the darkness. I felt the tension in his arm and his body, but also the strength, and it lent me confidence and courage.

Well before the appointed time, we were walking up the road leading onto the splendid Tower Bridge, one of the most recent engineering marvels of London. There was no discontinuity between road and bridge, and we found ourselves looking down over the thick wrought metal parapet into the chill black water below, under the stars in the black sky above, whose expanse was crossed above our heads by the giant double band of the bridge’s upper level.

When we came to the south tower, Carl entered and concealed himself by the stairs inside. I, feeling strangely unlike myself in Mrs Munn’s bonnet but filled with a sense of alertness and clarity that dominated my fear, stood under the archway in the icy chill of the winter air, holding my dim little lantern, and waited. As the minutes ticked past, I reflected on what I was doing, and recalled all the evidence that had led me to my final conclusions. A hundred times I asked myself if Mrs Cavendish might be perfectly innocent of the death of the young man that she had raised as her own child. In a sense, it was easier, and more desirable, to believe so. If she did not come, or came but denied everything in the letter, I knew that my conviction of her guilt would seriously waver.

If, on the other hand, my guesses corresponded to reality, she would not, she simply could not doubt that what the letter claimed was the plain truth. She would not deny it because she
could
not deny it. It would not just be a question of her word against Mrs Munn’s in front of police, or even in the public arena. If Mrs Munn also knew the secrets of the past, she could reveal them, and they could be verified, and Mrs Munn’s word would be proven to be the true one. In that case, she would have to react swiftly: in fact now.

There was nothing to do but wait in the cold and silence. Invisible within the tower, Carl was an abstract; I knew he was there, yet could not feel his presence in my heart. I knew that his ardent feelings were straining towards me like fingers of desire, but they could not touch me in that bitter darkness. No one passed at all, the bridge was silent and empty, and I stood shivering in the night air, waiting, waiting, waiting. I heard Big Ben strike a quarter to midnight, and then, after what seemed like an hour, midnight. The chimes were so deep and strong that they shivered the air, and other chimes answered them from bell-towers near and far across all London. So loud and manifold were the echoes that I nearly missed the smaller, nearer sound of quiet footsteps approaching, yes, undoubtedly approaching along the bridge.

It was Mrs Cavendish. Tall and handsome, her upright bearing did not betray for a moment the slightest hint of disquiet, nor for that matter of anger, fear, or any other visible emotion. She had seen my bonnet glimmering in the ray of light from my lantern before I had noticed her, and was walking directly towards me with all the quiet authority of her character. I braced myself.

‘Oh!’

Even one so versed in self-mastery as Mrs Cavendish could not restrain the surprise and confusion of seeing an unfamiliar face in the place of the well-known one she had expected. The surprise had the effect I had wanted; she hesitated for a moment, her own strategy, whatever it might have been, momentarily thrown off course. Perhaps she thought, for a moment, that I was there by chance and had nothing to do with the letter she had received. I held up my lantern, she looked at me straight in the face, and her expression changed.

‘I recognise you,’ she said. ‘I saw you backstage after Sebastian’s memorial concert, with the musicians. And you were at the little boy’s scholarship ceremony as well. Have you been following me? Who are you? What are you doing here?’

‘I am here,’ I said with as much quiet poise as I could muster, but wishing that she was not quite so much taller, ‘because of the letter you received from Mrs Munn.’

‘What do you know about that letter?’ she said sharply.

‘Everything,’ I replied calmly, ‘since Mrs Munn wrote it together with me. I know that you lied to the police when you said that you had already left for Lord Warburton’s party when Sebastian came home on the night that he died. You were still there when he arrived, and he confronted you with everything that he had discovered that day: the identity of his true mother, where she was, who put her there and why, and the truth about your own mother who was also your sister; all the infamy from the past and all the lies from the present. I know everything about it.’

She stared straight at me, her eyes unnaturally large. I stared back, knowing that if she now said that my words were false,
must
be false, for she had never seen Sebastian on that day, I would believe her. I looked straight back at her, giving her the chance. But instead, she said,

‘What business is it of yours?’

‘Murder is everyone’s business,’ I replied.

‘Murder!’ she snarled with sudden antipathy. ‘What do you know about murder? That was no murder – it was suicide!’

I hesitated, startled, then pulled myself together. She had been there, or at least she was not denying it. She had been there with him.

‘It was not suicide – you killed him!’ I burst out. ‘When the police know that you lied about not being there that night, they will realise that as well as I do. And when they know the reasons for your quarrel – when Lord Warburton knows – when everyone knows – do you think they will not ask you who made the cup of coffee that Sebastian drank that night?’

My words were hard, yet once again they contained a challenge as well as an accusation. If she had not done it, let her defend herself! Her eyes were locked into mine and mine gave her another chance, and yet another.
Say it – say that he took the poison after you left, and I will believe you. Tell me that he was destroyed by your words, by your acts, but not by your hand; that you destroyed him unintentionally; that your heart is filled with regret and despair, and I will believe you.

But it did not happen that way. Instead, my words freed Tanis Cavendish of the need to lie, for her lie had served only the single purpose of silence, and mine indicated that that precious silence was to be necessarily and inexorably shattered and lost for ever.

‘It was suicide,’ she said passionately. ‘I tell you that it was, for Sebastian could very well have chosen to live! I gave him the chance, and he took it and flung it to the winds. I told him what I would do to satisfy his miserable romantic fantasies about his victimised long-lost mother. I would have had her taken from Holloway if the place shocked the poor dear boy so badly. I would have set her up in some house somewhere where she would have been well looked after. What did I care, as long as she was kept where she couldn’t cause any more harm than she had already done! That selfish vixen, set from a child on destroying everything I was trying to make of my life, hell-bent on pouring out on paper things that should be hidden from every decent God-fearing person until they are erased from human memory! She wouldn’t stop! She wouldn’t stop! She wouldn’t let them cure her – she liked playing with them, toying, showing her sick little secret, and enjoying the feeling that they still couldn’t guess what it was. “Oh, what have I written?” she would say in that mincing voice of hers. Was she really too stupid to read her own words, or was she just pretending? I knew what she was writing – knew it from the very beginning. Who did she think she was fooling with all those half-hidden mixed-up fathers and children and abominations? I saw my father reaching for her, touching her; I may have been only two years old but the memory is burnt into my brain, how he reached for her and pulled her onto him and she screamed and struggled and my mother screamed and struggled and my father railed and hit and swore and then my mother put the white powder into his drink and he died. I saw it all but I could grow up and never speak a word, not to Lydia or to anyone else, not a single word in my entire life, because that was the only way to make it go away and everything become right! Oh, how I hated Lydia, that blabbermouth Lydia, trying to wreck everything with her sick little games, filth leaking from her pen while she went singing about the house like an angel. Oh, how I hated music, and talent – that damned, hateful talent that would not shut its devil’s mouth but must yowl, yowl my secret out in music from generation to generation!’

She paused for breath, and I reached out my hand and grasped hers, for however horrible her deed, the pain in her words and the horror she described was beyond any that my life had given me to witness before. But she ripped it out of mine with enmity.

‘For the first few years of my marriage, I thought I had won,’ she said, her jaw strained with the effort of controlling her white-hot anger sufficiently to speak. ‘The doctor couldn’t cure Lydia, but he was such a dunce that he seemed to have no idea what she was ranting about either, and anyway, she was far away. After four years I hadn’t conceived a child and the doctors said I never would, and I knew it was for the best: no more fruit from the rotten tree. Then I thought I’d mended the cracks once and for all and locked away the wrong and could go on living in the sunshine of the right and the good. It was the only time I ever knew happiness. All could have been well, all was well. And then what had to happen? Lydia, the angel Lydia, comes home from Basel pregnant – like a common whore, a mad whore, back she comes to London and it all starts again; the shame and the disgust and the loathsomeness and the filth of it all, everything I thought I had finally escaped. Thank God that Edward agreed with me about what was best to be done with her. He didn’t understand, of course; he saw nothing of her perverse tricks, he simply thought she was loose and quite mad, and I was glad that he did, and grateful to him because even though I was her sister, he never thought that I might also be mad. I rue the day that we decided to adopt her brat. I wish he had died at birth, and his mother with him! I should have known that nothing good could come of our stock. I fell for those blue eyes, that open little face of his that looked so good and so healthy, and I let myself be dragged into giving our family’s rotten blood one more chance – more fool me! Nature had stopped the trail of horror with me. Why did I force it back into existence again? Idiot that I was – twenty-five years of seeing him grow up into
her
– hearing him play the violin like
him
– the devil’s fingerprints all over the boy no matter what I tried to do!

‘Through all the years I kept on working to make everything right and decent and true and straight. I never gave up, not for one moment. My dear husband died and I was going to marry again – a man of honour, a man of standing, a man who knew about my sister’s state and accepted the situation with tolerance and generosity and compassion. Everything was under control – and then it all has to start again, like a nightmare, with that idiot Sebastian digging up these things that he was never meant to know, and trying to smash all my life to pieces again! I always knew he would do it sooner or later, child of sin and monstrosity that he was, even if I was the only person to know it! He came back that night and demanded that his dear sweet mother come to live with us; yes, with us, nothing less than that, knowing that everything was certain to come out in the end if that madwoman started her writing tricks in public, with all the craze there is these days about automatic writing and trances and such rubbish. I spit on it all, and all the filth it pretends to hide, and the people rushing to peek at the filth just as they rush to the public dissections of the naked corpses in the hospitals, pretending it’s all for the sake of scientific knowledge – the prurient liars!

‘I tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen to reason; oh no, he wouldn’t listen to reason. He was going to talk to Lord Warburton. Everything was my fault; his mother was sweet Rapunzel and I was the evil witch that had locked her away in a tower and stolen her child away from her! Little could he understand that evil is what I’ve struggled to fight off all my life while it’s dogged my steps and stood whispering over my shoulder that I’d never be rid of it as long as a drop of my father’s blood still ran on the face of the earth! Fool, idiot, imbecile that he was, thinking that I’d let him run about with his heart on his sleeve, gasping out my secrets to the world at large! Oh, I was right to do what I did; it’s no use your standing there with your narrow little morals thinking how good you are and how bad I am. I know that he’d have let everything out. Why, when I came home that night, I found the letter he’d written to that silly fool of a Claire, telling her he couldn’t marry her because he’d discovered incest in his background –
incest
. Yes, he wrote down the very word that I spent fifty years refusing ever to hear, think or speak; and madness, too; madness and incest, all so terrible, and dear, darling Claire would understand, of course, that he couldn’t marry her now because he felt tainted, the poor dear, and one never knew what dreadful things one might pass on to one’s children and he couldn’t take the risk. Such a load of rubbish it all was, nothing to do with whether they should go on with their silly marriage or not – all he really wanted was to
tell, tell, tell
– all anyone has ever wanted to do is
tell, tell, tell
– no one knows how to keep a secret, not even the ones you’d think would most want it kept! Filth! Corruption and filth and defilement! Pursuing me everywhere while I struggle to keep clean from it, and you come here accusing me with your nasty little mind and probably thinking how wonderful and how righteous you are, when you understand nothing about it, nothing at all! How dare you!’

Her hands shot out with a speed that took me by surprise and with tremendous strength she dragged me towards the wrought iron railing at the edge of the bridge. I felt her trying to lift me and push me over. The barrier was very thick and hard to grasp and not particularly high. I clung to the railings with my arms, not finding a purchase for my fingers, afraid to let go of it to struggle with her, and screamed for Carl. If he had not been there, I could have screamed myself blue without being heard by a soul on that miserable night, but, thank God, he had been watching everything from the shadows of the tower, and the moment I cried out, he leapt forward and, seizing me by the arm, pulled me strongly towards him and enfolded me tightly. He might have done better to snatch at Mrs Cavendish instead of me, for seeing that her victim was lost to her grasp, she disappeared with such suddenness that at first we could not comprehend where she had gone. But a moment later, when the beating of our own hearts slowed down, we heard the faint echo of her feet running upwards – yes, undoubtedly, she was running up the tower stairs and the sound of her steps echoed down to us through the night.