Page 56 of The Missing Page
“I’m sure I’ll send Christmas cards,” James said, with more asperity in his voice than Leo was used to hearing there. “I’m glad I saw them, but I’m afraid I don’t feel very kindly about them having, well, abandoned me, not to put too fine a point on it. I already have a family and it’s not them.” Then he frowned. “Leo, do I hear chickens in the garden?”
After they sat down to eat some scrambled eggs, Leo unwrapped the canvas he had bought from Mrs. Carrow. It was an oil painting of a rocky stretch of coastline, a lighthouse barely visible in the distance. It was not one of the pretty watercolors that she sold to tourists, but was instead bleak and unforgiving. It was also, she had told him, a part of the coast that she saw every day when she took a walk.
James stood by Leo’s side and studied the painting. “Why this one?” he finally asked.
Leo swallowed, hoping he could find the words to explain. “She has a way of painting that shows the unvarnished truth. You can see that she knows this place—every craggy rock, every straggly weed. She sees it for what it is, and she doesn’t need to dress it up.” Leo was sure he was making a hash of this, but then James nodded.
“The scales have dropped from her eyes, but in a way that doesn’t stop her from loving what she sees,” James said.
“Yes,” Leo said in relief. “Exactly that.” And when he reached out, James’s hand was already there, waiting for him.
That afternoon they stopped by Little Gables and presented the two ladies with the bare facts of the case.
“What bothers me,” said Cora, idly winding a ball of wool, “is why Gladys ran away.”
“Because the police arrived, of course,” said Edith. “She would have been worried that with her past, she would be blamed for whatever had happened to Rose.”
“I meant why did she run off on Saturday night? That morning she told someone on the telephone that she had ‘given him until tonight’ or something to that effect.” She looked at Leo. “You see that your Mrs. Mudge was quite right that she had precisely the sort of head that one can fill with bad ideas. I’d wager she never thought of blackmailing anyone until she fell in with that man.”
“What man?” James asked.
“The man on the phone, of course,” Cora said. “Possibly a woman, but most likely a man.”
“It so often is,” agreed Edith.
“Too right. In any event, from that telephone call, I can only suppose that Gladys had given Marchand a deadline for paying her. Why run off before she got her money?”
“Perhaps he told her he wasn’t paying,” suggested James.
“I’d have hardly thought Sir Anthony Marchand was the ‘publish and be damned’ sort,” said Edith. “For goodness’ sake, give me that yarn before you tangle it all up, Cora.” Edith snatched the wool away.
“Camilla recognized her at dinner,” said Leo. “She put on her spectacles to examine a photograph James showed her, and she glanced around the table. A few minutes later, when they were discussing the former servants, she said ‘Gladys Button!’ and looked directly at her.” Leo saw that James was giving him a highly reproachful look. “We had other things to think about! It didn’t seem important.”
“Ah. The poor girl thought it was a threat,” said Cora.
“The poor girl was nearly forty,” pointed out Edith.
“And then there was the business with the wine glasses,” said Cora. “If you, James, wondered whether the spill had been engineered to slip something into Gladys’s drink, then you can be sure that Gladys had the same idea.”
The implication, Leo realized, was that James was as unsuspecting as a baby. He smiled into his tea.
“Between Camilla recognizing her and Sir Anthony evidently trying to poison her,” Cora went on, “Gladys must have decided that Anthony Marchand’s money was more trouble than it was worth.”
“I rang the Cornwall constabulary this morning,” said Leo. “There was nothing in those glasses. And nothing in Marchand’s system, either, except for a very small amount of Seconal, consistent with a standard dose.”
“You just rang them up,” James said, looking long-suffering. “And demanded a toxicology report.”
“I may have called in a few favors.” He was going to have to send a lavish flower arrangement to Mrs. Patel. Or possibly a set of throwing knives.
“So he died of a simple heart attack,” James said. “That’s a relief. But then what happened to Camilla’s medicine?” Leo watched as the penny dropped. “Sir Anthony took it himself?”
“He was anxious about being blackmailed,” Leo said. “Anyone would be.”
“But he didn’t tell his wife because he was a giant hypocrite,” James grumbled.
“I daresay he was in quite a state after receiving that blackmail letter,” Edith said. “And then his blackmailer disappears before he can pay up. No wonder he had a heart attack when he heard Gladys had left.”
“I wonder if the henna will wash out of her hair,” mused Cora. “I had to henna my hair once”—she turned to Leo and James—“I needed a quick change of appearance after a job went wrong.”
