Minette Walters - The Devil's Feather

None of us spoke again until Jess had connected the speaker phone from the office to the socket in the kitchen. She set the dial tone buzzing through the amplifier. “Is he at the flat?” she asked Madeleine. “OK.” She punched in a series of numbers from a piece of notepaper. “Your hour starts as soon as he picks up.”

Madeleine wasted the first five minutes by gabbling at high speed and high volume about being taken prisoner by me and Jess, forced to say and do things for blackmail and being threatened with the sale of the house. It made sense to her and us, but none at all to Nathaniel. He could hardly get a word in edgewise, and when he did her strident voice overrode him, ordering him to listen.

I was interested by Jess’s reaction. She sat impassively, staring at the monitor, apparently uninterested in the exchange until Madeleine called Nathaniel a moron. With a hiss of frustration, she picked up the receiver and spoke into it. “This is Jess. The situation is this…” She explained it succinctly in a few sentences, then put him back on loudspeaker. “Now you can talk to Madeleine again. You’ve got fifty minutes.”

There was a short hesitation. “Are you listening, Jess? Is the other woman listening?”

“Yes.”

“Are you recording this conversation?”

“We’re filming it.”

“Christ!”

“Stop being-” Madeleine began.

“Shut up!” he ordered her. “If you keep digging you’re going to be in real trouble.” Another pause. “OK, Jess, have I understood you right? You’ve got some film of Madeleine abusing your friend and some kind of admission that she also abused her mother. In return for keeping that under wraps, you want her to approve the sale of Barton House. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And if she refuses you’ll release her to say whatever she likes, then you’ll send out copies of the DVD to anyone who’s interested.”

“Yes.”

Madeleine tried again. “They won’t be able-”

“Shut up!” A longer silence. “Can I talk to the other woman? Is it Connie? What do you really want?”

“Exactly what Jess has told you. Madeleine can approve the sale or she can explain the DVD. It’s up to her. Either way she won’t be able to stay in Winterbourne Barton. She’s given too many details of how you and she terrorized Lily.”

“That’s a lie,” Madeleine called out. “I said hardly any-”

“Jesus!” Nathaniel shouted down the line, showing real anger suddenly. “Will you keep your mouth shut? I’m damned if I’ll let you drag me into this. There’s only one devil in this family…and we all know who that is.”

“Don’t you dare-”

“You say one more thing, Madeleine, and I’ll hang up. Do you understand?” He let a beat pass. “OK,” he went on more calmly, “I want to hear what you’ve got, Jess.”

“You don’t have time for it all,” she told him, “so I’ve keyed in the seven minutes that matter. You’ll hear Connie’s voice at the beginning saying: ‘You know, what really surprises me,’ then-”

Nathaniel cut across her. “How come you’ve already keyed it in?”

“I knew you’d ask for it.”

“How do I know it hasn’t been edited?”

“No time, but in any case I ran a clock on the three cameras. For the DVD, I’ll do a split screen to show the action synchronized.” She pointed to the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. “I’m showing Madeleine the digital numbers so that she can tell you if any of them are out of sequence.” She clicked her mouse. “Running now.”

Madeleine and I went through our motions again on screen, but, to me, the more I saw the clip, the less convincing it became. Madeleine won hands-down on the photogenic front. Even at her most furious, she remained elegant and pretty, and it was hard to believe that her Jasper Conran designer shoes were doing any damage at all. I just looked ridiculous. Why hadn’t I fought back instead of allowing myself to be kicked?

I don’t know if Jess was aware of my dejection, but when the clip ended she spoke before anyone else could. “The images are graphic and don’t flatter your wife, Nathaniel. She’s enjoying it too much. If I decide to run the fight in slow-motion, which I will for the DVDs, it’ll be even more obvious. No one’ll believe she didn’t do the same thing to Lily. You said she’s done it to the kid.”

“That’s a lie,” Madeleine shouted.

Jess glanced at her briefly then leaned towards the telephone speaker. “Was it, Nathaniel? You told me you can never leave her alone with Hugo…which is why he never comes to Dorset with her. Is that true or not?”

We all heard him take an audible breath through his nose. “True.”

“Liar!” Madeleine stormed. “Don’t you try and blame-”

Nathaniel cut in again. “I had nothing to do with any of this, Jess. You’ve got to believe that. My only involvement was to pass on what you told me about the power of attorney and phone Madeleine when I picked up your message about social services.”

“Connie thinks you came down the night I found Lily.”

“No. The last time I came down was when I spoke to you in November. Hugo and I didn’t see Madeleine at all for most of December and January. We thought she was looking after Lily-it’s what she said she was doing-playing the dutiful daughter in the hopes of reversing the power of attorney. If I’d guessed-” he broke off abruptly. “Lily was supposed to die of hypothermia that night, Jess. Madeleine was furious when you turned up and took her away.”

There was a short silence.

Jess stirred herself. “She was here? She was watching?”

“All the time.”

“Staying in the house?”

“Yes. She couldn’t abandon Lily completely. Anyone could have arrived out of the blue, and there’d have been hell to pay if they’d found Lily drinking from the fishpond. Madeleine switched the water on and off as it suited her…sometimes Lily had water…sometimes she didn’t…the same with the lights.”

“He’s lying,” Madeleine said. “It’s all lies.”

“She made Lily take cold baths, then locked her in her room in the dark. The only thing she couldn’t turn on and off at will was the Aga, so she booked herself into a hotel some nights to have a bath and a decent meal. That’s when Lily got out and went looking for help in the village.”

There was a horrible logic to it. “Why did no one see Madeleine?” I asked.

“Because she was only going to show herself if someone came to the door. Her story would have been that she’d just arrived and discovered Lily in extremis. It never happened.” He gave a hollow laugh. “She said it wouldn’t. She said if her mother died, the body would lie in the house for weeks until Jess went in.”

I glanced at Jess’s bent head. “Why didn’t she show herself when Jess found Lily outside?”

“Too scared. She’d parked her car in the garage at the back so that no one would see it…and she never did that normally. In any case, the house was in darkness, and she had no explanation for why she hadn’t turned on the lights to look for her mother as soon as she arrived.” He paused. “You let her off the hook by taking Lily to the farm, Jess. If you’d stayed and called an ambulance, Madeleine would have been trapped in the house.”

When Jess didn’t say anything, Nathaniel spoke again. “I can’t see her being prosecuted for it. It’s maybe what you want but”-he faltered briefly as if deciding how honest to be-“I don’t think you’d be doing this if you had any real evidence.”

“We do now,” I said. “You’ve filled in the gaps.”

“I can’t swear to any of it-I wasn’t there-and Madeleine will deny it. I’ve only said as much as I have because I’m hoping you’ll back off for Hugo’s sake.” He appealed to Jess. “You know what’ll happen if you go public, Jess. Madeleine will accuse everyone but herself-me included-and the only person who’ll suffer will be the child. I really don’t want that.”