Page 145 of Marble Hall Murders

‘Why do you want to know that?’

‘Please answer the question, sir,’ Blakeney cut in.

‘I’m left-handed,’ Frederick admitted.

‘I already know that,’ I said. ‘When you were at the party, you were holding a champagne glass in your left hand. Your right hand was in your pocket.’

‘My mother was left-handed.’ It was Jonathan who had spoken and it was the first useful thing he’d said.

‘I know that too,’ I went on. ‘When I was doing the tour of this house, I went into her office and saw her collection of twenty-three left-handed pens. She was also colour-blind. After Eliot went onFront Row, a journalist called Kate Greene wrote an article in theDaily Mailin which she mentioned that Karim and Njinga were both colour-blind,like their creator, Miriam Crace. You all know that being colour-blind and being left-handed are major genetic traits. Eliot told me that Frederick changed after his accident. He became angry and more distant. I think that was because he’d realised the truth.’ I paused. After everything I had been through, I wanted to enjoy the moment. ‘Miriam Crace was his mother.’

Both Jonathan and Roland Crace looked shocked. Julia was simply intrigued. Frederick had lowered his head, trying to hide his expression.

‘Frederick told me that he came to Marble Hall in 1961, when he was almost six years old,’ I said. ‘That means the year of his birth was 1955. He had spent the first five years of his life in the St Ambrose Orphanage and Children’s Home in Salisbury, which had Miriam Crace as its patron. He believed that his mother was a Traveller called Mary Turner and that his father was an itinerant worker – which would explain his mixed heritage. I imagine you’ve already checked that out, Frederick. You know it’s not true.’

Frederick didn’t reply.

‘The year 1955 was also an important one in Miriam’s life. That was when she came back from a six-month stay at a clinic in Lausanne, following a nervous breakdown caused by overwork. I think we’ve all guessed that there was no breakdown. There was an unofficial biography of Miriamwritten by a man called Sam Rees-Williams but never published. He claimed that she was promiscuous, that she had sexual affairs with both men and women and that this put her marriage under strain. He wrote that her visit to Lausanne was a trial separation from her husband, Kenneth, but he got that bit wrong. I think she was pregnant. Just like Alice Carling in Eliot’s book, she had a Roman Catholic background. She couldn’t have an abortion. It would have been unthinkable to have a child out of wedlock. So she gave birth to the child abroad and when she got home, she put him in her own orphanage and left him there for five years.’

‘Who was the father?’ Blakeney asked, but I think he already knew.

‘That’s a very good question,’ I said. ‘All along, I’ve been puzzled as to why Miriam, who seems to have been a world-class racist, adopted a mixed-race child at a time when attitudes were much more conservative than they are now. I asked Leylah about this. After all, Leylah had been the subject of racist abuse herself and there was that business with those two new characters in the books – Karim and Njinga. It was Leylah who told me about Miriam’s chauffeur, a Black man called Bruno. According to Leylah, Miriam adored him. She told me there was even a photograph of him on the piano – and the moment she said that, I should have twigged. I mean, he was her driver. Not her husband!

‘Unless, of course, he was also one of her lovers. This was 1955, let’s not forget. Miriam’s career was exploding. She was a married woman. When she gave birth to a mixed-race child, she must have believed that catastrophe was staring her in the face, that if she was found out, her rise to fame andfortune might be over. Why did Bruno leave? That’s what Eliot asked in the notes to his manuscript, and the answer is that Miriam couldn’t risk having him anywhere near her. She fired him or persuaded him to take a job elsewhere and then, once she’d got rid of him, she adopted their son and brought him to live in Marble Hall.

‘It’s a sad story. We have to look at it from Frederick’s point of view. His whole life has been an enigma. He’s never met his real father. He was adopted by this wonderful, famous author, but she never treated him like the rest of the family. He was given a room up in the attic and sent to the local state school. Miriam was his adoptive mother, but he wasn’t even allowed to call her that. Later on, he was packed off to accountancy school to become the family’s bookkeeper, and when that didn’t work out, he was sent back to Marble Hall to be a glorified tour guide. Eliot called him a second-class citizen and that’s exactly what he’s always been.

‘Do you think Frederick never wondered why he was being treated like that? Do you think he never asked himself why he was so different? Well, the answer came after his car accident. He already knew he was left-handed. Now he realised he was colour-blind.

‘Just like Miriam.’

Frederick looked up. He’d had enough. I saw that at once. He just wanted this to be over.

‘It was after the accident that I started asking questions,’ he said. ‘And you’re right, Susan. It was easy to discover that Mary Turner had never existed and that my documents at the orphanage had been falsified. Then I made the connection with Lausanne. It was a prenatal clinic – nothing to do withstress or mental health. But, you know, I didn’t need proof. I think, in my heart, I’d always known. A son will always recognise his mother even when that mother has lied to him every single day of his life.’

He drew a hand over his one good eye, fighting for control.

‘My first thought was to tell the world what I’d found out, what a devil she was, what a monster. I knew all about the sex scandals too. Kenneth Rivers told me. He was my one friend in that house and I think he half suspected the truth about me. Maybe he saw something of her in me. I could have brought her down that way too – but what good would that have done me? I’d have lost everything. The family would have rejected me. And if I destroyed her reputation, we’d lose the money too … the books, the Little People! What would you have done if you’d been me? She sent my father away! She made sure I never met him and he never found out I existed. I finally managed to track him down, but I was too late. He was dead. He died on his own, in poverty. She ruined his life the same way she ruined mine.

‘I knew I had to kill her. She was dying anyway, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t pay her back. A mother … doing what she did to her own flesh and blood? I’d have loved to have strangled her. I’d have loved to have cut her throat. I thought about smothering her in her bed. But when I heard about the grandchildren and Eliot stealing medicine from Dr Lambert, that was when I knew it had to be poison. At the end of the day, I didn’t care how she died so long as it was by my hand.

‘So … you’re right. I used arsenic that I scratched out of the feathers of one of the birds that Kenneth had bought aspart of his collection. It was a kingfisher in a glass case. We’d always been told that we must never touch it and once I’d cut it open, I soon found out why. Of course, I couldn’t be sure if it would work, but if it didn’t, I’d try again.

‘I didn’t need to worry. It worked first time. You know, I think it was the only time in all the years I spent at Marble Hall that I felt complete. I had to laugh when Jonathan bribed Dr Lambert to issue a false death certificate. Natural causes! He was so scared that the truth about that bitch would come out that he helped cover up her murder.’

‘You also killed Eliot Crace,’ Blakeney said.

Frederick nodded. ‘I was sorry about that. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. But I had no choice.’

‘You made a mistake,’ I said. ‘At the party, Eliot shouted to everyone that he knew who had killed his grandmother and that he had seen them go into her bedroom. He said he could see them right there, at the party. But he wasn’t talking about you, Frederick. He was talking about his brother, Roland. Still you followed him out. You had a car. You ran him down.’

‘It was his own fault. He shouldn’t have boasted like that.’

‘He wasn’t boasting, Frederick. He was in pain. Like you.’

Frederick shrugged. ‘I had to stop him talking. What else was I meant to do?’

Jonathan, Roland and Julia were frozen, unable to take in what had just occurred. In their different ways, all three of them had played a part in the events that had led to Eliot’s death. Blakeney and Wardlaw got up and closed in on Frederick.

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