The inheritance, p.22
The Inheritance, page 22
I left my own bed, put on my dressing gown and went out on to the landing. I could hear sobbing below and Sephy’s voice. I could not make out many words and I am a little ashamed to admit that I did not go back into my own room. Instead, I walked down the stairs and stood outside their door. I did this primarily out of concern for Alex but also for my sister.
I could hear my sister’s consoling words. ‘It’s all right,’ she was telling him, ‘you’re not there. You’re here, darling. You’re here with me and the war has been over for a very long time.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he told her sharply. ‘They are in here. They are inside my head.’
‘It was just a dream,’ she explained, ‘just a very bad dream. Now lie down and try and get some sleep. We are all very tired.’
‘It wasn’t a dream,’ he answered, ‘it happened. They were on fire!’ he shouted. ‘My men were in the truck and they were burning and I couldn’t do anything about it.’ Then his tone became harsh. ‘Do you even know?’ he demanded.
‘Know what?’ She sounded stung by his tone.
‘Anything. Anything at all of any use. Do you know what a phosphorus shell can do to a man? It sticks to his clothes then his skin and burns right through to the bone. They all died screaming!’
It was as if he was a different man and he was berating someone other than Sephy. He had woken from a nightmare that had trapped him in a memory and now, in his anger and frustration, he was lashing out at her.
Sephy shouted then. ‘Alex, stop! I can’t …’ She never completed the sentence. They both fell silent for a time and I waited to see if he would snap out of it and realize he had been berating my sister, when none of this was her fault. It wasn’t his fault either, of course.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a clearer but much softer voice, then the door abruptly opened and my sister emerged in her dressing gown. The first thing she saw was me and it was obvious I had been listening. She was furious.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Lucy,’ she hissed, ‘go back to bed.’
She marched off to spend the rest of the night in another room and I sloped off back to mine, feeling I had betrayed her.
There was one more letter from Lucy and it was dated just a few days before she disappeared.
Dear Evelyn
Sometimes I think my brain will finally explode. I don’t know how much more I can take. The stress never ends and the pressure is unrelenting. Everything is falling apart. There is no hope that it will ever get any better.
I trust too easily. I realize that now, and it makes the reality of life all the harder to bear.
I know things, I’ve heard things I wish I hadn’t, but I cannot unknow them. Soon everything will come out in the open because we cannot go on like this. If we do, everything will be destroyed. Five hundred years, Evie! All of it ruined in a generation, and for what?
I’m sorry. I know I’m not making any sense but I promise to write again soon. By then I’ll know what to do. You’ll see.
What had caused Lucy to descend into this dreadful state and who had she trusted too easily? The captain? One of her siblings? If only she had named them or explained herself more fully, instead of writing to Evie in apparent despair before she had managed to organize her thoughts and decide on a plan of action. By then I’ll know what to do. Presumably that plan had led to her death, but there wasn’t enough information here to link directly to her disappearance. It was all still too much of a puzzle and it explained why Evelyn never managed to get to the truth.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
It had almost become a habit to end the day with a glass of wine together. Sarah always offered it lightly and made a point of saying he was under no obligation to drink with her. Patrick would nearly always say he had no particular plans or reason to dash off, before joining her, and there would be one less bottle to bequeath to the Conservative Party.
While they drank, she would tell him about her day and whether she had uncovered any new information about Lucy Woodfell. As she described the letters Lucy had written to her aunt she told him, ‘I keep thinking Captain Ramsay’s death and Lucy’s disappearance were linked in some way.’
‘Why do you think that?’ he asked.
‘Lucy and Captain Ramsay were close, odd as that may sound,’ and she told him about their shared love of books, the walks they had taken together and the fact that they confided in one another.
‘Do you think they were more than just friends?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘It’s possible something happened between them, but in Lucy’s letters to my aunt she categorically denied that her sister had anything to be jealous about. She seemed to think Sephy was happy for someone else to spend time with him so she didn’t have to.’
‘He’d have been distraught when Lucy went missing, then?’
‘Presumably.’
‘Unless he killed her,’ he said starkly, and Sarah could not deny the idea had entered her head. It was almost a relief for someone else to have voiced it out loud.
‘He was a troubled man who’d done some brutal things during the war,’ she said. ‘He killed a lot of enemy soldiers.’
‘Killing can scar a man.’ He didn’t say whether he knew this from personal experience. ‘He could perhaps have lost control, or maybe he thought of her as a better bet than his wife but Lucy wasn’t having that? Maybe he forced himself on her and had to kill her or she’d tell?’
‘Or perhaps they did have an affair and he was terrified she would tell her sister? I’ve thought of those possibilities.’
‘It might explain things,’ he agreed.
‘If he did kill Lucy and got away with it, being a very troubled man anyway, it could have pushed him over the edge,’ she suggested.
‘Remorse driving him to suicide?’
‘He was moving pretty quickly that day,’ she recalled, ‘but then he had a reputation for driving recklessly.’
‘Which would explain why the police were quick to dismiss it as an accident.’
‘He crashed down by the Dule tree, right?’ she asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘That bend where he hit the wall is pretty tight?’
‘It is,’ he confirmed.
‘The crash scene investigators estimated he must have been doing about sixty miles an hour, but was that suicidal or just reckless?’
‘Hard to tell.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Why don’t we go down there and take a look?’
Sarah asked Patrick to drive because she wanted his opinion on the tightness of the corner where the captain had come off the road. There was no way she would have tried to take that bend at sixty, but she reasoned it was possible that the captain, a reckless man known for driving too fast, might have viewed it differently before losing control and killing himself there accidentally. Patrick could back this idea up or instead he might consider it a suicidal act.
They drove down to the corner where the accident had occurred and pulled over. There was no wall there any more but the Dule tree still overlooked the spot from its position in the field beyond. Patrick seemed to be surveying the bend.
‘What do you think?’ she asked him.
‘Let’s see, shall we?’ and he turned the car around then started to drive back up the road again.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just conducting a little experiment.’
‘What kind of experiment?’
‘I’m going to go back down the road until we’re just beyond the last bend before the one by the Dule tree,’ he explained, ‘then I’ll drive towards it, so we can see how fast the captain could have reasonably gone before a reckless act becomes a deliberate one.’
This did not sound good. ‘How are you going to do that without killing us?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be careful.’
‘That doesn’t sound careful.’
‘Trust me, I know what I’m doing.’
‘I get a very bad feeling when men say I know what I’m doing.’
He laughed at that. ‘I promise I won’t go too fast.’
They set off down the road until they reached the bend, and Patrick turned the car around and drove back towards the crash site, accelerating steadily. Sarah was torn between implicitly believing in him and feeling nervous, as he started to reach a speed she would not have risked herself. She could only hope he did actually know what he was doing.
She instinctively gripped the door and the side of her seat to steady herself. Patrick was still not slowing down. In fact, he was making the car go faster.
‘Hadn’t you better …?’ she began, but then she winced as she realized the crash site was hurtling towards them at speed and, wall or no wall, they were running out of road ‘… shit!’ she managed just as he hit the brakes and turned the steering wheel hard.
Instead of ending upside down in a ditch, which she fully expected, Sarah experienced what appeared to be a hair-raisingly fast but controlled manoeuvre, as the front end of the car turned smoothly to the right and its back end seemed to slide towards the crash site but, before they could career off the road, Patrick expertly powered it forward again. He drove for another few yards then brought it steadily to a halt.
‘Christ,’ she said, ‘you could have warned me.’
‘I thought I did warn you?’ He regarded Sarah in her shaken state and admitted, ‘Perhaps I didn’t warn you sufficiently.’
‘You took that corner like a racing driver.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It wasn’t a compliment.’ Then she laughed. ‘Is there anything you aren’t bloody good at, Patrick?’
He took that question seriously enough to give it some thought, ‘I’m a terrible singer.’
He turned the car round then drove it slowly back to the corner and they climbed out. ‘Captain Ramsay was doing sixty when he went off the road? You thought we were moving pretty quickly but I couldn’t have navigated the bend at that speed. He could have reached that speed but only if he had no intention of stopping.’
‘So, you’re thinking suicide?’ she asked. ‘Not accident or murder? But that doesn’t explain the cut brake cable.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ he admitted.
Sarah thought about this contradiction for a moment. ‘Oh my God,’ she blurted suddenly.
‘What?’
‘I just remembered something I read about the captain. On D-Day, he parachuted behind enemy lines. He had to jump with all his men behind him but was worried he wouldn’t be able to go through with it, so he told his sergeant to give him a shove if he hesitated even for a moment. His biggest fear wasn’t dying but losing his nerve.’
‘Maybe that’s your explanation,’ he said.
‘Captain Ramsay severed his own brakes in case he tried to pull out before he hit the wall,’ she concluded. ‘That way the choice was no longer his. As soon as he pointed his car in the right direction and floored it, he knew that, no matter what, he was a dead man.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Sarah rose early the next morning, refreshed from a night’s sleep that had been better than usual. The lock Patrick had put on her door had helped, and now that he’d shown her the cause of some of the sounds she was hearing in the house, most notably the whispering, she managed to sleep through it because she could dismiss it as a harmless hiss from the vents in her bedroom wall.
Having made such an early start, she decided to write a letter to Margaret Malloy, with a request to visit the Woodfells’ former nanny in Berwick. Sarah did not wish to alarm an old lady by turning up on her doorstep unannounced, and she reasoned that Margaret might refuse to see her if she did. She decided on a partial explanation of her presence at Cragsmoor Manor, coupled with a request to hear about life there from someone who had worked for the family for so long. She was halfway through her letter when there was a loud banging on the front door. Sarah started. Who could be knocking at this hour, and why so urgently? She went quickly to the door and opened it. She was shocked to see who was standing there.
David Young’s face was staring back at her and he appeared agitated. She would have slammed the door in his face immediately, if she had not been so stunned by the presence of the convicted murderer on her doorstep.
‘I brought you something,’ he said, sounding breathless, as if he had walked all this way at some pace, ‘it’s important.’
Competing thoughts raced through Sarah’s mind all at once.
What is he doing here?
Is he crazy?
Does he want to kill me?
He reached inside a carrier bag and pulled out a bulging file and thrust it towards her. ‘Read it,’ he urged her.
‘What is it?’ She was stalling until she could work out how to get rid of him.
‘Reports,’ he said. ‘From newspapers, magazines and the internet.’ Then he clarified, ‘About Lucy Woodfell,’ and if this wasn’t alarming enough, he added, ‘I’ve been collecting them for years.’
‘Why have you got articles about Lucy?’ she asked him. Was he obsessed with his victim?
The look on his face betrayed his anger and Sarah grew more alarmed. ‘You see, this is why I didn’t mention it when you came to see me. I knew you’d think the worst! It’s so I know everything there is to know about her. So that I can clear my name.’
‘But you were never charged with anything involving Lucy.’ She tried to say this gently, in order to calm him. ‘So you don’t have to clear your name.’
‘Didn’t stop you coming to my door, did it?’ his voice grew louder as his frustration increased. ‘You, the police, the psychiatrists and all the reporters. Do you know how many times I’ve been asked about her? I never met her! I don’t go after women. I don’t!’ he said firmly. ‘With Megan, it was different. I lost my temper because I couldn’t handle rejection.’ Then he quickly added, ‘Back then.’ If he thought Sarah would be calmed by that, he was mistaken. He was clearly trying to contain himself and looked like he might be about to burst. It was time to take back control of the situation.
‘I have to go now,’ she told him firmly.
He moved forward to hand Sarah the folder, bringing him even closer to her door, which made her automatically step backwards to keep the same distance between them. He shook his head in frustration. ‘I make you feel uncomfortable, don’t I?’
How the hell could she answer that without making the situation worse? By being honest and admitting he freaked her out, or by lying and inviting him in for a cup of tea, which was an incredibly dangerous idea.
‘All uninvited guests make me feel uncomfortable.’
‘I see,’ he said in a tone that made it clear he did not. ‘I have changed. I’m just sorry you can’t see that.’
‘I’m sure you have, but …’
‘Then take it,’ he pleaded and he thrust the file full of newspaper cuttings towards her. Reluctantly, she took them, hoping to pacify him, quickly tucking the file under one arm so she could place her free hand back on the door.
‘Now can I come in?’
‘No.’ Her voice sounded weaker than she wanted it to.
‘I just want to talk about her,’ he said, but Sarah was far from sure that was all he wanted to do.
‘I can’t,’ she told him, seizing the initiative and moving to close the door. Just as she had feared, he put a firm hand out to prevent this.
‘Please!’ he begged. ‘They’ll lock me up again. Please!’
Sarah’s alarm was rising as David became more agitated. She was trapped with the door open and no way to close it, now that he had moved to prevent her. She didn’t know what to do.
Then she heard Mrs Jenkins’ voice behind him. It was calm but very firm and she was addressing the man blocking the doorway.
‘I’ve seen you on the telly,’ she told him. ‘You’re that murderer.’ He turned to stare at her and when she reached him, he was still holding on to the door and barring her way. Mrs Jenkins used the same unperturbed tone as if he was the local weatherman or some other minor celebrity she’d seen on the TV. ‘Are you going to kill us both, dear?’ she asked him brightly then her voice hardened. ‘If not, then buzz off. I’ve got chores to do.’
To Sarah’s astonishment, he let go of the door and stepped to one side to let Mrs Jenkins in. She walked past David without another word and calmly closed the door on him. Sarah quickly bolted it.
‘Thank you,’ said Sarah when they were both inside. She experienced a huge wave of relief now that they had put a solid door between themselves and the murderer. ‘You recognized him but you weren’t even scared?’
‘Oh, I was,’ said Mrs Jenkins. ‘Very.’
‘You didn’t look it.’
‘I thought that was probably for the best,’ she explained.
‘That was amazing, Mrs J.’ Sarah was aware that Mrs Jenkins could have turned around and walked away as soon as she saw David Young standing by the door, but instead she had chosen to walk up and challenge him, saving Sarah in the process.
As usual, the woman showed no emotion. ‘Cup of tea?’ she offered. ‘I think we’ve earned one.’ Then she added, ‘Oh, and we’d better check the back door, hadn’t we? In case he still hasn’t got the message.’
Sarah ran to the back door, half expecting to find David standing in the kitchen. She checked that it was definitely locked and bolted then came back to the front of the house and peered through the window, but he was gone.
Sarah realized she had triggered David in some way. The stress on his face when he pleaded with her not to implicate him in Lucy’s disappearance was obvious, as well as his anger, which seemed like a sign that he was about to lose control. Did that mean he was responsible for Lucy’s fate or merely panicked at the thought of spending the rest of his life in prison for a crime he did not commit, believing that Sarah could cause that to happen? Either way, he must have been thinking about Sarah ever since she had questioned him about Lucy. He was sufficiently motivated to come here and present his case to her in person, or perhaps that had been a ruse to gain entry to the house and silence Sarah for good.
