‘No, I moved around getting cash-in-hand work wherever I could.’ There was a slight softening in his expression. ‘I spent one summer hop-picking in Kent. I would have returned the following year, but the farm had done away with cheap labour and mechanised things. It was the end of an era.’ His expression altered again, resumed its earlier hard edge. ‘I kept moving because there was always a part of me that believed one day there would be a knock on the door and I would be accused of killing Terry Sands.’
‘But you didn’t kill him,’ she said. ‘It was an accident.’
He gave her a long studied look. ‘Is that what you’ve told yourself all these years?’
She was momentarily shocked at his contemptuous tone. ‘Itwasan accident,’ she repeated, this time more resolutely. ‘And we were only children.’
‘But I planned to kill, I went to that cottage with murder in my mind.’
It was hard to hear him say those words so boldly and with such conviction. ‘But you didn’t actually do it, did you?’ she said. ‘Yes, you pushed him, but I would have done the same. Anyone would have.’
‘I wanted to leave him there to go up in flames, but you didn’t. So don’t try and tell me you would have done the same as I did. You wouldn’t have. You didn’t!’
His tone was suddenly so aggressive and made her feel disagreeably under attack. ‘That’s a futile line of argument, because we’re all capable of murder given the right circumstances.’
‘So you admit it, I did murder Terry Sands?’
‘I said no such thing!’
Once more their cheerful waitress appeared and gaily presented Venetia with her soup and Lucien his lamb shank. The juxtaposition of the girl’s eternally sunny demeanour was quite at odds with the sombre mood that had now descended on them, and oblivious to it, she expressed her hope that they would enjoy their meal. Venetia picked up her spoon with a smile, feeling she owed the girl that much at least and thanked her.
‘Whatever you think now, whatever you’ve convinced yourself of,’ Venetia said, after a lengthy pause and while they both ate, ‘you did help me drag Terry out of the burning cottage.’
‘I did it for you, Venetia. Not for me.’
She frowned. ‘It doesn’t matter what your motive was, your heart was in the right place. You knew what was the right thing to do.’
He scoffed at her. ‘You always did want to believe in the myth of good overcoming bad. It’s like believing in fairies. Or God!’
Annoyance flared within her, and Venetia suddenly found, quite uncharitably, that she didn’t much care for the man Lucien had become. He seemed so arrogant, and so sneeringly determined to be miserable. But then hadn’t he so often been that way as a boy?
Hoping to manoeuvre him back onto safer ground, she said, ‘When did you become Saul Bernice? And why that name? What’s the significance? Or maybe there isn’t any and you plucked the name out of the ether.’
He put down his knife and fork and reached for his brandy glass, draining what was left in it in one swallow. ‘You disappoint me. I would have thought you’d have worked it out by now.’
‘Worked what out?’
‘The name. It’s an anagram of Lucien Barnes.’
Mentally she tried to match up the letters and eventually said, ‘It doesn’t work.’
He smiled, scrunching up his eyes within the folds of the deep lines around them. ‘That’s why I always sign my pictures as Saul N. Bernice. I needed to use up the extra N from my real name.’ He seemed exceptionally pleased with himself.
‘When did you change your name?’
He resumed eating. ‘After my eighteenth birthday,’ he replied between mouthfuls. ‘I decided it was time to sort out the necessary paperwork that would enable me to move further afield. So I adopted a new identity. You’d be amazed how easy it is to do that, if you have the money and can find the right people.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘France, Spain, Morocco, Ireland, then back to England before finally settling in Suffolk. I went wherever the wind took me.’
‘What about marriage?’
‘I tried it once but not surprisingly it didn’t work out.’
‘Children?’
He shook his head of shaggy hair. ‘No. You?’
