Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

I closed Peter’s door, then searched the four guest rooms and the two bathrooms, but they were all quite innocent. Which just left Elizabeth’s room. I tried the door, but as I’d feared, it was locked.

I had a choice now. So far, if I’d been found, I could righteously claim to be Lady Tredgarth’s brother who had come into an open house to wait for her, but if I broke down the door I would be committing an offence. I tested the lock by pushing on the door, but there was no play in it. It was an old-fashioned keyhole-type lock of the sort I had used to pick at Stowey, but I had no tools, nor did I know whether the skill was still with me.

I tried. I found some skewers in the kitchen, bent their tips, and tried to find the lock’s levers. After fifteen minutes I had achieved nothing other than a frayed temper. It also occurred to me that Peter might have gone no further than the local pub and could be home at any moment, so I gave up being delicate and just put my shoulder to the door. It took a half-dozen huge heaves, and one painful kick with my right foot, but finally the lockplate splintered off the jamb and the door swung open.

There was a bed, a chest of drawers, a dressing table, a vast wardrobe that had once been in my father’s room at Stowey and, to the left of her fireplace, a long table covered with papers. Above the table was a crucifix carved in ancient, hard wood, while beneath the table was a japanned tin trunk that was closed with a padlock.

I started with the papers on the table. There were letters from old schoolfriends, minutes of charity committee meetings, specimens of wallpaper, and overdue invoices from the builders who were renovating Primrose Cottage. I found the newspaper cuttings of the press conference I’d given with Jennifer, but that was the only matter relevant to my search and it neither confirmed Elizabeth’s guilt nor added to what I already knew.

I pulled open the drawers and found nothing but a tangle of underwear and stockings. I opened the wardrobe. Nothing. I looked under the high brass bed and found nothing but an old-fashioned chamber pot and a pair of furry slippers. I looked round the room for a hidden safe, but the lumpy plaster walls were covered with a fading wallpaper which clearly concealed nothing. I tested some of the floorboards, but they were nailed tight. There wasn’t a diary or a phone book and I supposed she must have taken such personal things to France. All that was left was the japanned tin trunk.

I pulled the trunk from under the table and used the brass handle of the poker as a hammer to open its padlock. It yielded to the third smart tap. I eased the shank out of the hasp and pushed back the lid. It was getting darker outside, but I dared not switch on a light, so instead I took the bundles of papers to the window.

They were letters. Packets and packets of letters held together with elastic bands. There were scores of packets holding hundreds of letters and all of them, so far as I could see, were love letters. They were addressed to Elizabeth at the riding school, and I supposed that the school’s mail came separately from that addressed to the main house. Some of the letters were ten years old, but others were very recent. I recognised none of the handwriting. Some of the packets had dried flowers trapped under their elastic bands, while others had photographs; small reminders of a stolen moment’s happiness.

I don’t know why I was so astonished. Elizabeth’s marriage was dead, yet presumably she was trapped in it by her ancestral attachment to the faith. I looked at the crucifix hanging on her wall, then back to the bundled evidence of her carnal sins and I suddenly felt sorry for her, and even guilty at having discovered the letters. Elizabeth herself appeared in some of the photographs, smiling and happy, holding on to the arm of her lover. She seemed to like tall athletic men. They were photographed on ski slopes or mounted on powerful horses. Seeing their strong confident faces made me realise how horribly unhappy Elizabeth must be.

Even the window light had now faded to a velvety gloom, so I risked turning on the small bedside lamp to look at the pictures. I was hoping to find a photograph of Garrard, but he was not there. There were only her hard-eyed, anonymous lovers. I dropped their letters back into the trunk and refastened the padlock.

I’d failed. There was nothing here for Harry Abbott, nothing at all. I sat on the bed, ran my fingers through my hair and stared up at the cold grate where spiders had made thick webs about the unburnt birch logs. Damn it, I thought. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Sir Leon would pay his ransom, he would get his picture, and I would never prove who had so nearly killed Jennifer and me.

A door creaked downstairs and, like a guilty thing, I jumped.

I should have run for it, but my ankle would not let me.

“Whoever you are,” Peter’s slurred voice shouted from the downstairs hallway, “stay there! I’ve got a gun, and I’m calling the police!”

“Don’t worry about the police, Peter.” I limped to the door, then out to the landing. “It’s me, John.”

He switched on the hall lights, then came a few suspicious feet up the stairs. He held a double-barrelled shotgun very menacingly. “It is you!” He sounded disappointed, as though he’d been looking forward to shooting an intruder. “You broke into her bedroom!”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“I thought I’d found a burglar.” He let the barrels drop. “I was driving back from the pub, you see, and saw a light in Liz’s room. That’s it, I thought, I’ll have the bugger. Left the motor at the end of the driveway and walked the rest of the way.”

“Very clever of you, Peter.”

He gave me an unfriendly look. “So what the hell are you doing here?”

“I came to see you and Elizabeth,” I said very nicely. “I thought it was time to make peace.” I was winging it, hoping that he wouldn’t use the shotgun. He was certainly well on his way to being drunk and I didn’t trust him.

“Make peace?” I’d puzzled him.

“Silly family squabbles,” I said vaguely.

I hobbled down the stairs. Peter let me pass, then followed me down to the hall. “So long as you’re here,” he said grudgingly, “you might as well have a drink.” He led me into the drawing room and poured two very stiff whiskies. “She won’t be back, not for a bit anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she phoned her bloody riding girls and told them. She wouldn’t telephone me. Cheers.” He drank that first glass of whisky as if he were a dying man coming out of the desert, then poured himself another, just as generous. “Funny thing, the telephone.”

He was drunk, morose, and lonely. I wondered how he managed to drive, but supposed the pub was nearby, the lanes empty, and the police a long way off.

“It rings sometimes,” he went on, “and I answer it, and there’s no one there! No one! Does that strike you as odd, John? I mean, you’re a man who’s knocked about the world a bit, so doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Very odd, Peter.”

“I’ll tell you something even odder! It never happens to Elizabeth.” He was peering at me with the fervent intensity of a drunken man holding on to a scrap of good sense. “It never happens to her. Do you think the telephone knows when a woman’s going to answer?”

“No, Peter, I don’t think that.”

“I don’t know,” he said. He had dropped the gun across an armchair. I wondered if it was loaded, and whether I should take it a safe distance away from him. He drank most of the second glass of whisky, then shuddered. “I can talk to you,” he said suddenly.

“Good.”

“You’re one of us, you see. I mean they’re a very nice set of fellows down the pub, all top drawer, but there’s always a bit of you know what.” I didn’t, but he explained for me anyway. “They know I’m a lord, and it makes them, what do you call it? Shy?”