Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

Serena said at once, ‘If it was night how could you know his identity?’

‘Who else would it be? He lived here, in the manor – I saw him come back inside.’

‘That proves nothing,’ said Serena after a moment.

‘It was him all right,’ said the girl. ‘Your precious family isn’t going to wriggle out of the responsibility for this.’

‘How dare you speak to me like that?’

‘Oh, come out of the Dark Ages, Lady Cadence,’ said Ford. ‘I can speak how I want. Your sort don’t own the world any longer. We’re equals nowadays, or hadn’t you noticed? Did the Second World War pass you by, like the First did?’

The First World War… Crispian going so courageously into the grey mud of the battlefields, and never returning…

Anger rose in Serena because this girl knew nothing, nothing . But she said icily, ‘I think you’re here purely to get money. This is all lies.’ She stood up, indicating the interview was at an end, and saw the girl hesitate.

But she stood her ground. She said, ‘I’m telling the truth. And if you don’t agree to help me, I’ll tell everyone what Saul did to me.’

Saul… The casual familiar use of Saul’s name stung Serena but it also set off a small alarm in her mind. Supposing there was some truth in this?

She said, ‘I will consider what you have said. But I make no promises.’ She thought for a moment. Dr Martlet would be here at the weekend; he, along with Jamie and Colm, would deal with this. ‘Return here on Saturday,’ said Serena. ‘There will be a doctor here who will verify your condition.’

‘I’m agreeable to that,’ said Ford.

‘In the meantime, I shall discuss this with my family, and let you have a decision then.’

After the girl had left, Serena sat for a long time, staring straight ahead of her, the tea forgotten. She would talk to Dr Martlet when he arrived, but before that she would, of course, talk to Jamie. She could not imagine what she would do without Jamie.

Jamie Cadence’s Journal

That business with Brenda Ford could so easily have gone disastrously wrong. Quite apart from anything else, Saul, confronted with the problem, would certainly have denied it, even in his increasingly torpid state. The Ford girl herself, faced with Saul, might have withdrawn her charge. Worse than that, she might have identified me.

The charge she made of rape I found interesting. I had most certainly not raped her that night; she had been willing and eager. Avid, almost. ‘Good night, silent mystery man,’ she had said. ‘I hope we meet again.’ Would a girl say that to her rapist? So unless there had been a second encounter after the one with me – unlikely, although not impossible – Miss Ford must have concocted the rape story to save her reputation and apply more pressure to the family.

It might be vanity that prompts me to say I handled things with subtlety and skill (they say all murderers are vain), but I do think I dealt with that business well.

The first concern was Saul. He had grown docile and biddable over the years. That was in large part due to the constant sedatives – and to the fact that I doubled and tripled the dose Martlet prescribed – but I think it was also because he lived such a retired life. When you don’t see people or talk to them, there’s no mental stimulation. Saul had never been mentally stimulated and he had hardly been beyond the confines of the manor. The expression ‘cottage mentality’ perhaps applied to him.

It was to this cottage mentality that I made my approach. I wrote a careful account for him – not too complex, which would have bewildered him – explaining a silly village girl had accused him of attacking her. I didn’t use the word rape: he knew, in theory, about sex, but unless he was fooling me to an extraordinary degree, he had no experience of it.

I wrote that there were greedy and wicked people in the world, and the girl who had made the accusation was both those things. Watching him read that, a frown creased his brow, and he looked up, seeking reassurance. A thin shaft of sunlight fell across his face and I saw that the radiating lesions around his mouth and eyes were cruelly clear.

I reached for the slate.

‘You don’t need to worry about any of it,’ I wrote. ‘I know you didn’t do it.’ There was a twinge of irony in writing that. ‘And I’ll make sure you aren’t punished.’

‘Thank you, Jamie,’ he said, and went back to reading the rest of what I had written. In essence, it was that I would look after him and that he need do nothing at all.

‘You’ll keep the bad people away?’ he said.

I nodded, and took his hand and squeezed it. There was sometimes a curious affinity between us. I could often sense his thoughts, although it’s as well that he never sensed mine.

I know all this portrays me as the worst kind of cheating conniving blackguard and villain, but it’s what I am. It’s what I’ve always been.

The thing that worked in my favour over the Brenda Ford business was that the ground was already prepared. Colm had seen me that night, and he thought I had rescued that long-ago girl from Saul’s brutality. So, for once he came out of his scholarly seclusion, and seated himself at the dining table with Serena, old Martlet, and me. That dining room and that long oak table had seen some assemblies in its time, but I’d lay good money it had never played host to four people, one of whom was a murderer and a rapist, discussing how best to pay off a blackmailing village girl. For Brenda Ford was blackmailing us, of course. We all knew it, but none of us could see how to sidestep it. Even I couldn’t. But none of us, for different reasons, was going to tell her to speak out and be damned: Serena, because she wanted to protect Saul and also her own fragile seclusion; Martlet because he wanted to protect Serena; and Colm, because he could not bear to think the world might intrude into his ivory tower. As for me, well, I had any number of reasons for not wanting too close scrutiny on the origins of Brenda Ford’s unborn child.

Martlet had examined Miss Ford and confirmed her condition, giving it as his opinion that the pregnancy was about three months advanced.

Colm then told the story of how, some time earlier, Saul had apparently attacked a local girl. ‘It was only Jamie’s intervention that saved her,’ he said. ‘You remember that night, Jamie? We met unexpectedly and you told me what had happened.’

I nodded reluctantly.

‘He tried to protect Saul,’ said Colm, and Martlet nodded, as if this was the behaviour he would expect of me.

‘So you see,’ said Colm, ‘in the light of that, it seems likely that Miss Ford is telling the truth.’

‘I agree,’ said Martlet. ‘And all she wants is to bring the child up decently. She wants a degree of financial security.’

‘I don’t trust her,’ said Serena.

‘She’s fighting to get help for the child,’ said Colm, mildly. ‘That’s understandable. Even admirable.’

I wrote, ‘Martlet, what did you make of her?’

‘It’d be my guess she’s been something of a flirt,’ he said. ‘But I think she’s genuine enough about this.’

‘She’s a hard-faced little liar, who’s out to get money from us at any price,’ said Serena tartly. ‘You’re all far too ready to give in to her.’

‘Lady Cadence, if we don’t make her an allowance, she will undoubtedly tell people she was raped by Saul and that the family refused to help her.’

‘How do we know she won’t do that anyway? I don’t care for being blackmailed by the likes of Ford ,’ said Serena in her iciest voice.

I wrote, ‘I think I have an idea for blocking that.’

‘None of us can be sure she won’t spread the story anyway,’ said Colm. ‘But, Serena, are you prepared to risk the secrets of this family being bruited around Bramley and all the villages? I’m certainly not.’ He paused, then said, very gently, ‘And there are too many secrets, Serena. Julius and Saul. Even Jamie…’