Page 92 of Nobody's Hero

‘I can’t see you accepting that, Margaret,’ Carlyle said. She looked sad. The way people did when good friends did bad things. ‘In fact, I know you didn’t.’

‘No, I enrolled at Oxford. Studied cultural anthropology.’

Carlyle nodded.

‘Except what you know is incomplete, Elizabeth,’ Margaret said. ‘There’s a gap in my résumé.’ She picked up her cup and finished her coffee. ‘A nine-month gap.’

‘You were pregnant,’ Koenig said.

Margaret nodded. ‘If I might be permitted to use some vulgar American vernacular, my family had a stick up its ass. And that extended to our education. My brothers went to some ghastly boarding school in Scotland where sporting ability rather than academic achievement was celebrated. I was sent to the all-female equivalent. Imagine it. One hundred and fifty teenage girls all stuck in the middle of nowhere. Contact with boys was strictly forbidden. Some nights the air in the dormitory was so thick with pheromones you could barely breathe.’

‘Who was the father?’

‘A local boy. Delivered the strawberries in summer and the sprouts in winter. He never knew, and he has no bearing on this sorry tale.’

‘Your family weren’t happy?’

‘I’d never seen my father so angry. I swear, if my aunt hadn’t been there, he’d have thrown me in the moat.’

‘You had a moat?’

‘It’s an expression, dear.’

‘The nine-month gap in your résumé meant you had the child?’

‘My mother and father told their friends and acquaintances that formal education wasn’t for me, and that my needs would be best met by touring the Antipodes. My aunt would act as chaperone. She’d had a wild youth, full of indiscretion and scandal. Had had to tour the Antipodes herself at one point, she told me.’

‘Where did you really go?’

‘A sanitorium in France, one that catered for the elite of Europe and their many self-inflicted ills. I stayed there for six months, my aunt at my side the whole time. I’d thought she was there for support, to make sure I was OK. Really, she was there to do her duty. Do you know what that meant?’

Koenig didn’t hesitate. ‘She told you the baby died in childbirth.’

‘Indeed she did,’ Margaret said. ‘Something to do with the umbilical cord getting wrapped round the neck, blah blah blah. I had a day to recuperate, then it was all about showing them what the Wexmores are made of. The stiff-upper-lip, blessing-in-disguise speech.’

‘And the baby?’

She opened her arms wide.

‘What happened to the baby is everything,’ she said.

Chapter 97

‘My brother Anthony married a wretched woman,’ Margaret said. ‘A spiteful beast who saw everyone as a threat and no one as a friend. Little wonder she died alone. Not even her daughter, my niece Felicity, called upon her after Anthony finally succumbed to his gout.’

‘Gout’s not fatal,’ Draper said.

‘It is when your fingers get so swollen you can’t call the emergency services after you’ve fallen into the cesspit.’

‘Where’s Lassie when you need her?’ Koenig muttered. He was getting impatient. They’d been in the air thirty minutes, and he still had nowhere near enough information to question Nash.

‘Anyway, Felicity’s a lovely woman. Madder than a beef-fed cow, but doesn’t have a nasty bone in her body. When her mother died, the family solicitor asked Felicity to find some paperwork relating to inheritance tax. Now Felicity, God bless her stupid soul, had no idea what she was looking for, so she ended up looking everywhere. And guess what she found in a locked drawer in my mother’s old roll-top writing bureau?’

No one replied. It was clearly a rhetorical question.

Margaret continued like they’d answered her anyway. ‘Exactly, she came across paperwork detailing what had happened to my daughter,’ she said. ‘What hadreallyhappened.’

‘Which was?’ Koenig said.

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