Chapter Twenty-Three #3
But what about Mrs. Billings? I had plotted to kill her based on a misunderstanding.
What if this was the same? Yet, Mrs. B and Tarquin were very different propositions.
Mrs. B lived a simple life, doing no one any harm, always thinking the best of people.
Tarquin was trained in deception, and he was skilled at making a jury think one thing or another: The truth was something he constructed to suit his own needs.
He could not be taken at face value. After all, Bernie Madoff probably seemed nice.
People had believed him. I was sure Mr. Ponzi had seemed nice. James seemed nice, once upon a time.
I still didn’t want to do it. Amongst all the turmoil, learning that I hadn’t killed Lennie had brought a feeling of relief.
It’s hard to live for months with half your mind brooding on the fact that you’re a killer, while the other half concentrates on how you’re going to get away with it.
And I’d always known I hadn’t killed Mr. N.
Now, I was reluctant to abandon the fact of my innocence and swap it, once more, for guilt.
But it would be harder still to suffer the penalty for a crime that James had committed.
And that thought made me angry. I could do away with Tarquin, and I could live the rest of my life not caring. And when Tarquin was gone, I’d turn my attention to James once again.
Right there, in that tiny little cell, I believed I could do it. I didn’t know who the next lawyer would be, but I would have made my point: Cross me at your own peril. I was not the feeble victim they thought I was—there was more to me than wacky clothes and whodunits.
I moved on to the question of how would I do it, and at first that seemed to be a quest as futile as killing James. Yet there was one difference between Tarquin and James: Tarquin was not from the village, and he didn’t know that you should never, ever eat or drink anything I had prepared.
***
The next day was a Tuesday and I was off to the magistrate’s court for a bail hearing, as nervous as you might expect.
“Chin up, this should just be a formality,” Tarquin said as he arrived, wearing a new tie but with faded remnants of permanent marker all over his face. “Kids caught me sleeping on the job. Literally.” He smiled and the lines stretched across his face.
Bail wasn’t as easy as he made it sound.
The prosecution started by saying I was a significant flight risk: I was made of money and could go anywhere in the world.
I whispered to Tarquin, who whispered to our barrister that I didn’t have a passport, and I wasn’t made of money, I only had my allowance. That was two points to us.
Then the prosecution barrister talked about James at length, about his money and his reach in the business community. About how easy it would be for me to slip away…
I nodded dolefully as we told them that I wasn’t well liked in the village, and I had no connections outside the area. In fact, I’d hardly ever been out of the county. That drew a raised eyebrow from the magistrate and a comment about narrow horizons.
In the end, Tarquin’s children had done me proud. With a solicitor like that, the magistrate found it hard to take me seriously as a hardened criminal, which I wasn’t anyway, and let me out on bail.
He finished with a warning for Tarquin, “If you appear before me again looking like that, Mr. Noble, I shall find you in contempt of court.”
I arrived home to find that the Nevada-bought coat of arms James had had installed above the front door had fallen off and lay broken on the doorstep.
Normally the crumblings and crackings of Langley Hall left me dismayed, but the sight of that atrocity lying in shards on the ground cheered me.
I hoped it was an omen. I picked the pieces up and scattered them across the gravel of the drive.
But inside, I looked at the grand staircase, the steps that were once varnished and polished now dull and scuffed.
I made my way toward them and up and up and up to the third floor, a place I had not been to since I collected the buckets the night after the storm that had washed Lennie’s body away.
I didn’t know how seriously the situation had deteriorated since then.
There were nine bedrooms on that floor; of those nine, the ceilings of three were now collapsing in, with plaster on the floor and wooden beams visible through the gap.
In another, the ceiling was sagging. I didn’t go into that one, but as I stood looking, a tile fell from the roof, passing by the window on its way down.
My beautiful, beautiful Langley Hall—home of my ancestors, loved by generations—had been left to rot by a Ponzi fraudster.
The work needed to rescue it from this would be immense.
It wouldn’t be habitable. It might not be safe for me to be in now, but, having nowhere else to go, I made my way back down the stairs to the first-floor rooms we lived in.
That night I lay in bed, listening to the creaks and moans of the house and wondering if they were the sounds of the building coming down and if that wouldn’t be such a bad way to end it.