Chapter 64
SIXTY-FOUR
She drove back to Hampshire feeling dispirited.
Not because of Tessa, who she’d liked. She’d gone to Wales expecting to find some vague, unworldly hippy, only to meet a down-to-earth, slightly acerbic cheesemaker, who – it transpired, when she introduced Kate to her herd – knew every one of her goats by name.
The irony was, Kate reflected, that Tessa had found herself somewhere genuinely idyllic in the end, quite unlike the poisoned paradise that Trade Cottage had turned out to be.
Perhaps those nights spent lambing as a child with Gordon had been more formative than anyone realised.
No – her low mood was more because of what Tessa had told her.
Of course, she’d been talking about a time over thirty years ago, long before MeToo, but Kate knew that the culture she’d described – teenage boys belittling the same girls they so desperately wanted to have sex with; girls going along with it purely to get the boys’ approval – was still just as pervasive.
It was one of the reasons she’d wanted to leave London – the very worst stories on Everyone’s Invited seemed to be about London schools – but she realised in hindsight that had been naive of her. The problem was people, not places.
She was going to have to start talking to Will about things like porn, consent and respect soon, she reflected.
He wasn’t yet twelve, and she still thought of him as a child, but those conversations were probably best begun before the hormonal conflagration of puberty started raging through his brain.
Tilly, too – she had to know she could always call out unacceptable behaviour.
There was another reason for feeling crestfallen.
On the face of it, her trip to Pembrokeshire had been a waste of time – Tessa had told her nothing worth passing on to the police.
The possibility that Martina might have had a threesome with Guy and Jamie was only that, a possibility.
Even if true, it hardly provided a motive for murdering her—
A sudden thought flashed into her brain. There was one motive so massive, it would surely be worth killing for.
Pelham Park.
What if the baby wasn’t Jamie’s, after all?
What if Guy Pelham was the father? It would have been difficult to know for sure before it was born, of course, particularly if the circumstances of its conception were as grim as Tessa had suggested.
But even the possibility that the future heir to Pelham Park would be born to a Croatian au pair would provide a credible reason for killing her.
She examined the idea from different angles.
What was the legal situation with aristocrats’ illegitimate offspring, these days?
She dimly recalled an Act of Parliament in the 1980s granting them the same rights as legitimate children.
It would still have had to be a boy to inherit – when they abolished male primogeniture for the royal family, they’d specifically excluded the aristocracy, she knew.
But the point was, there would have been a risk.
Tessa had called Jamie and Guy ‘a toxic twosome’. In a situation like that, would Jamie help his friend by offering somewhere to hide the body? Might they even have killed Martina together, and together rolled her weighted body into the pond?
She was almost home now. On a sudden impulse, she decided to go and see Pelham House for herself. She’d often passed the grand stone gatehouse that guarded the park’s entrance, but even though events were often held there – shows, country fairs and the like – she’d never gone through it.
She did so now. Ahead of her, the drive curved away through some woods, the house not immediately in view. It was several hundred yards before an artfully constructed gap in the trees framed a lake, with the house on a rise behind it, floodlit.
And what a house. It was Alconleigh, it was Pemberley, it was Brideshead, Manderley .
. . She remembered the description of Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice: ‘a large handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground.’ It was so like Austen to use the word ‘handsome’ of a house.
But, looking at Pelham House now, it seemed apt.
She thought of her own, possessive love for Trade Cottage.
Yet, compared with Pelham House, Trade Cottage was almost insignificant – a mere “cottage”, indeed.
If she was prepared to fight tooth and nail for her own menial little hearth, she could only imagine how fiercely the owners of Pelham House would defend it from all comers.
She’d pulled up to look. There was a Land Rover parked nearby, but she’d already seen there was no one in it. She was just about to turn her own car round when Guy Pelham emerged from the trees, followed by two black Labradors.
‘Park’s closed,’ he shouted, clearly annoyed. Then he saw who it was.
‘What do you want?’ he said, approaching.
She got out. ‘I’ve been talking to Jamie’s sister,’ she said defiantly.
He frowned. ‘Ten-ton Tessa? Why?’
‘I suspected Jamie’d had sex with Martina, but I hadn’t realised it was both of you. Or how badly you both treated her.’
He grunted. ‘She got what she wanted out of it.’
Kate shook her head. ‘Not what she really wanted. As you very well know. She might have been a couple of years older than you, but she was desperate and naive, and you took advantage.’ She decided to take a long shot. ‘Tessa told me about the threesome, too.’
Just for a moment, Guy Pelham couldn’t help smirking. ‘Yes, that was quite a night.’
‘A night that could have had big consequences.’ She turned her gaze towards Pelham House.
‘What d’you mean?’ he said, frowning. He seemed genuinely puzzled.
‘I’m going to tell the police everything I know. If you haven’t already had your DNA screened, you need to.’
‘What? You are one mad bitch,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘As for the screening programme, haven’t you heard? It’s been called off. They’ve found a match.’
It was her turn to be puzzled. ‘Already? Why? Did Jamie come forward?’
‘Jamie? Christ, no. It turned out to be someone they already had on file.’
She was stunned. ‘But – who?’
He shrugged. ‘They haven’t said. But she slept with dozens of people round here. There won’t be any shortage of contenders.’