Page 23 of The Missing Page
“Almost certainly not.”
“Either she was killed and”—James swallowed—“disposed of elsewhere, or she didn’t die.”
The complete picture was a bit more complicated than that, but James had the basic lay of the land and Leo didn’t want to muddle things. “Yes. Let’s dispense with the low-lying fruit. One, who would have had a motive to kill your cousin? Two, would she have had a reason to run off and let people think she had died? Three, did she seem distressed or disturbed? Afraid? Angry?”
“I don’t know,” said James, frustrated.
“I know. I know,” said Leo, backtracking. “I don’t expect you to. Those are just the questions we need to keep in mind as we look for answers.” Under the table he pressed his foot against James’s. “So,” he went on, keeping his voice light and conversational to avoid the impression of interrogating James. “Who was at Blackthorn the day Rose disappeared?”
“Like I said, Martha told me—”
“I know what Martha said. I want to know what you remember. If you remember anything. And if you don’t, that’s fine too.”
James hummed thoughtfully. “Sir Anthony must have been there when Rose vanished, because I remember him telling me to stay in my room while the police were around. And Camilla brought me tea and biscuits while the police were there. Uncle Rupert and Martha must have been around as well, but I don’t remember talking to them. They probably had their hands full with the police.”
“Do you remember there being guests?”
“I remember that I got one of the rooms in the guest wing—the room we’re staying in now—instead of bunking in one of the tiny attic rooms where children and unattached gentlemen usually stayed. I think Martha was telling the truth about the house being relatively empty that summer.”
“How do you know it was that summer in particular that you got that room?”
“Because it looks out onto the tennis courts, and I remember watching the policemen traipse across the court, ruining the lines.”
Interesting. Leo would check either the police reports or the newspaper accounts to see if other guests were mentioned.
“Why do you think that the house was empty that summer, when it was usually filled with guests?”
“Well, Camilla had just married Sir Anthony that spring. Maybe there was no point in having all these parties if she had already found a husband.”
Leo’s eyebrows shot up. “That same year? You’re quite certain?”
“I remember because I had to come down from school for the party and missed a cricket match. It was my first year on the team and I was none too pleased about it.”
“A cricket match would be when—April at the earliest, right? Lilah was born in August of that year.”
James raised his eyebrows. “How can you know that?”
“I went through Miss Marchand’s luggage and found her passport.”
“Why would Lilah have her passport with her?” James asked.
Leo smiled at the fact that this, not his invasion of Lilah’s privacy, was what James asked about. “She also had some French coins in there, so I’d wager she recently returned from a trip. Furthermore, she had about five tubes of lipstick, keys to a car that certainly isn’t in the garage at Blackthorn, and about half a pound of hair pins. She does not strike me as a woman of tidy habits. More interestingly, if she was born in August, then her mother was several months into her pregnancy on her wedding day.”
“That’s hardly unusual.”
“It is when you have the sort of grand party that necessitates people coming down from school for the event. That doesn’t sound like a rushed wedding. And she must have been very pregnant indeed that summer.”
James hummed his agreement. “It just goes to show how unobservant a twelve-year-old boy can be.”
Leo thought it suggested something quite different, but he wasn’t going to say so. “Well, I daresay there are wedding photographs somewhere in the house. What about Rose? Did Rose have any boyfriends? Or any lovers at all?”
“I was twelve years old, Leo, and I guarantee that I wouldn’t have noticed one way or the other.”
“You said that Rose taught you to swim and play tennis. What else did she do? Who else did she play tennis with? Camilla? Martha?”
James furrowed his brow. “I don’t remember names. I remember a few faces. A young blond man who made everybody laugh, for example.”
“We need to find the picture albums. They have to be around somewhere, because that photograph your uncle left you had paste on the back. It must have been in an album at some point. Speaking of that picture, how close were Camilla and Rose? It looks like they were nearly the same age.”
