“I wouldn’t say I was all that mature, but I’d lived an interesting life.”
“Did you travel?”
“For a few years.”
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P E T E R R O B I N S O N
“Where to?”
“All over. The Far East. America. South Africa. I’d get some low-paying job and support myself for a while, then move on.”
“And before that?”
“What does it matter?”
“I don’t suppose it does. Not if you don’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t.” Dr. Wallace looked at Annie. “I had a disturbing phone call from an old friend of mine at university just an hour or two ago,”
she said. “She wanted to let me know that there had been a Detective Constable Helen Baker ringing up and asking questions about me.
Is that true?”
“Quite the grapevine,” said Annie.
“Is it true?”
“Okay. Look, this is a bit delicate,” Annie said, “but Julia Ford was one of the few people who knew the true identity of the woman in Mapston Hall. Lucy Payne. Her firm made the arrangements to place her there, took care of all her affairs. As I just said, we know the two of you went to university together, that you’re neighbors and friends.
Did you know anything about this arrangement?”
Dr. Wallace turned back to her corpse. “No,” she said. “Why should I?”
Annie felt that she could sense a lie, or at least an evasion. There was something about the pitch of Dr. Wallace’s voice that wasn’t quite right. “I was just wondering if, you know, during the course of an evening, she might have let something slip, and that you might have done the same.”
Dr. Wallace paused in her sewing and turned to Annie. “Are you suggesting,” she said, “that Julia would break a professional confidence? Or that I would?”
“These things happen,” said Annie. “A couple of drinks. No big deal. Not the end of the world.”
“ ‘Not the end of the world.’ What an odd phrase to use. No, I don’t suppose it would be the end of the world.” She went back to sewing dead f lesh. Annie could feel the tension rising in the room, as if the very air itself were thinning and stretching. She also felt even more nauseated by the smell.
F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L
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“Well, did she?” she pressed on.
Dr. Wallace didn’t look up. “Did she what?”
“Tell you about the arrangements her firm had made for Lucy Payne?”
“What does it matter if she did?”
“Well,” said Annie. “It means . . . I mean . . . that someone else knew.”
“So?”
“Did she tell you?”
“She might have done.”
“And did you tell Maggie Forrest, for example? Or Dr. Susan Simms?”
Dr. Wallace seemed surprised. “No. Of course not. I vaguely know Susan Simms as a fellow professional, and from the occasional court appearance, but we’re hardly in the same field. I don’t know any Maggie Forrest.”
“She was the neighbor who befriended Lucy Payne and almost died at her hand.”
“More fool her. But wasn’t that a long time ago?”
“Six years. But Maggie’s disturbed. She had a strong motive for wanting Lucy dead, and no alibi. All we’re trying to find out now is whether she—”
“Knew that Karen Drew was Lucy Payne. Yes, I know where you’re going with this.”
“Karen Drew?”
“What?”
“You said Karen Drew. How did you know that?”
“I suppose I read it in the paper after the body was found, like everyone else.”
“Right,” said Annie. It was possible, of course. The body had been identified as Karen Drew’s, but she would have thought that subse-quent discoveries and all the publicity given to the Chameleon case and the “House of Payne” had driven that minor detail from most people’s minds. Maggie Forrest had said she didn’t recognize Karen Drew’s name, only Lucy’s. In the eyes of the world, Annie had thought, the dead woman in the wheelchair was Lucy
