‘It’s your aunt Hope,’ she said.
‘Hope? She hasn’t died has she?’
Julia shook her head and fiddled with a pair of sharp pointed scissors from the sewing box. ‘Not that I know of.’
‘So what does my aunt have to do with why you look so ... so fraught?’
Before she could get the words out, there was a knock at the door and Julia, her eyes wide with fright, jumped to her feet and dropped the scissors.
‘Let me deal with this,’ he said. ‘It’ll be Miss Casey, I asked her to bring me something to eat and drink.’
‘Don’t let her in,’ Julia whispered.
‘I won’t.’
True to his word, he opened the door just enough so that he could take the tray the housekeeper had brought up for him. She tried to step into the room, but he deftly blocked her way. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘that’ll be all.’
She stood before him seemingly as resolute to defy him as he was to repel any advance on her part. ‘It’s colder than a morgue in here,’ he said, ‘will you bring up some logs and coal for my stepmother, please?’
‘I’ll see what I can do in the morning,’ she replied stiffly.
Beginning to shut the door, he added, ‘By the way, when is my father expected home? Presumably he is returning from London to spend Christmas in the bosom of his loving family?’
‘He’s due to arrive tomorrow afternoon.’
‘I can’t wait! Don’t forget to make up my room, will you?’
Ralph decided to watch her walk away down the corridor before closing the door. When he was satisfied that she really had gone, he shut the door and placed the tray on the table. He urged Julia to stop pacing the room and sit down again. She looked a bag of nerves.
‘Now start at the beginning and tell me what it is that’s reduced you to this state of ... ’ he wanted to say paranoia, but settled on, ‘alarm.’
Her voice low, as though she feared Miss Casey was hovering outside with her ear pressed to the door, she said: ‘It was your father who ran Hope over. It was dark and raining and he swears he did no such thing, that what he hit was a deer. But I know what I saw. I was in the car with him.’
Ralph couldn’t believe his ears. His first thought was that Julia was quite mad, that his father had pushed her over the edge. But then he remembered thecold-blooded manner in which his father had informed him of Hope’s accident. He had implied Hope had brought the accident on herself by being careless.
No, thought Ralph, Julia wasn’t mad; she was speaking the truth. If anyone was mad, it was Arthur Devereux.
‘Have you told anyone?’ he asked. ‘Like the police?’
‘Yes. But not the police. I wanted to, to explain it was a terrible accident, but your father said if I so much as breathed a word of it to them, he’d say it was me driving and I’d go to prison and never see Charles again. And who would believe my word against his?’
‘So who have you told?’
‘I caught the bus in the village and went to the hospital, even though she’s still unconscious. I told Hope. If she could hear what I was saying, I wanted her to know the truth.’
‘Bloody hell, of all the people to tell! Why did you do that?’
‘I had to tell someone, the secret was too much for me to keep to myself. And there’s something else you should know; Arthur insisted a doctor from Harley Street came to see me. He claimed I was unwell, that I was suffering with a nervous disposition.’
That much was obvious, Ralph thought. But he kept quiet.
‘The pills the doctor gave me made me feel worse,’ she continued. ‘I felt so awful I couldn’t get out of bed. Which I now think was the plan. But I stopped taking them, although I’ve been pretending that I am still.’ Her words tumbled out of her in a breathless rush, as though she couldn’t contain them a second longer.
Ralph knew his father was capable of many things, but drugging his wife to keep her captive – to keep her from talking to anyone – well, that was beyond anything he might have imagined.
But what was he thinking? If his father was capable of running over his own sister and not stop to help her, drugging his wife was small potatoes!
He was mulling this over when it occurred to Ralph that perhaps the reason his father had been in London for as long as he had was because he was having the car mended.
