Chapter 73
SEVENTY-THREE
Easter was late that year. The children still hadn’t finished their spring term, but the first bluebells were already shimmering in the wood when Kate and Rosemary went down to look for wild garlic.
She caught the heady, pheromonal reek of it as soon as they reached the trees.
Just follow your nose, Rosemary had said to her, almost a year ago, but really, it was difficult to tell what direction it was coming from, so all-pervasive was the smell.
‘This way.’ Rosemary parted low branches with the agility of someone twenty years younger. You’d never have guessed she’d just turned eighty-four, Kate reflected as she followed.
They emerged into a small clearing. She recognised it as the same one Rosemary had brought her to when Kate came to measure for curtains, all those months ago.
Back then, it had been bare earth, dusted with the skeletons of beech and hazel leaves.
Now, it was a sea of vibrant green spear blades, with a few spiky white buds already thrusting up between them.
This close, the garlicky smell was almost intoxicating.
Deliberately, she inhaled, getting it deep into her lungs.
Copying Rosemary, she checked each leaf carefully before she added it to her trug, looking for blemishes or dirt. From deeper in the trees, a demonic head watched them warily. Then, unbothered, the muntjac pattered away, followed by its female and a tiny faun.
‘This reminds me so much . . .’ Rosemary looked around. ‘I used to do this with Tess.’
‘Yes, she mentioned it.’ Kate glanced at her. ‘She’s very happy in Wales, I think. With her goats.’
‘I know.’
There had been talk, in the weeks after Jamie’s death, of Tessa coming back, to take care of her mother as she got older.
But Rosemary would have none of it, and Kate had persuaded Tessa she was more than happy to keep a neighbourly eye out – and, indeed, to do more than that, when it eventually became necessary.
There was a companionable silence for a few minutes as they picked. Then Rosemary said, ‘Did he really say that before he died? Jamie, I mean. In so many words?’
Something about the way she said it made Kate aware that this, rather than helping to pick wild garlic – which, in any case, scarcely required two people; their trugs were already almost full – might be the real reason they were here today, in this quiet, secretive spot.
‘No,’ she admitted. She’d told the police that Jamie had confessed to killing Martina, just before he clambered up the scaffolding.
It had been one of several small fictions in the account she’d given them.
Since she’d been lucky enough to land in a shrub, while he’d fallen on the lightwell to the cellar, breaking his back and dying almost instantly, she hadn’t seen any reason to tell them she’d been outside too, let alone that she’d had a hand in the scaffolding’s collapse.
But she didn’t want Rosemary thinking Jamie had made some heroic, self-sacrificing false confession. He didn’t deserve that.
‘I only said that so they’d close their investigation,’ she added. ‘After all, if they’d decided it wasn’t Jamie, and it couldn’t have been Paul, because he didn’t know exactly where Martina’s body was hidden . . .’
‘Yes,’ Rosemary said, sighing. ‘When you take away Paul and Jamie, there aren’t many candidates left, are there?’
Kate didn’t reply. Rosemary would tell her in her own time, or not at all.
After a few moments, the older woman said quietly, ‘We would have had to sell Tray, you see. The shame – I think I could have weathered that. But she wanted so much money – enough for a nice house, and private school: all the things his other children had had, she said, or it wasn’t fair.
Paul refused to deal with it – he just blanked her, as if it wasn’t happening.
But she would have got a paternity test the moment it was born, and then everything would have come out. ’
Rosemary gazed at the garlic with unseeing eyes.
‘She came to the house one day, when she knew Paul wouldn’t be there.
She wanted to talk, she said, but really she wanted to crow.
She hated Jamie by then, and I think she despised Paul, too.
I met her outside, by the pond – I didn’t want her in the house.
I tried to reason with her – I even said we’d have the baby ourselves, that I’d bring it up at Tray as if it was our own.
But of course that wasn’t what she wanted.
And then she said something derogatory about Trade Cottage, too – how it was an ugly old house anyway, and we’d be lucky to be shot of it – and I suppose I saw red.
She turned her back on me at just the wrong moment and I .
. . I hit her over the head with a stone. ’
She paused. ‘I never told Paul. Not in so many words. It was such an awful, monstrous thing to have done – I couldn’t bear to tell him. He must have realised, when she just disappeared like that. But somehow it was easier never to speak of it.’
She looked at Kate. ‘You’re the only person I could ever say this to, but I really believe that, in some way, the house made me do it. Or is that completely mad of me?’
Kate shook her head. ‘I’ve felt it too. Who knows? Maybe it’s the bloodthirsty sea captain. Or maybe it’s just because the house is so bloody lovely.’
‘Perhaps.’ Rosemary indicated the trugs. ‘Shall we take these back up?’