she got on with her grandmother like a house on fire.'
'Do you believe her?'
'There's no evidence to the contrary. The housemistress at her boarding school says Mrs. Gillespie wrote regularly and always seemed very affectionate whenever she went there. Far more affectionate and interested, apparently, than Mrs. Lascelles who puts in infrequent appearances and shows little or no interest in how her daughter's doing.'
'All that says to me is that Mathilda was a magnificent hypocrite. You can't ignore her snobbery, you know, not without distorting the picture. Southcliffe is an expensive girls' boarding school. Mathilda would never have let the side down in a place like that. She always talked about 'people of her sort' and regretted the lack of them in Fontwell.'
The Sergeant shook his head in disbelief. 'That doesn't square with what you told me before. You called her one of life's great individuals. Now you're saying she was pandering to the upper classes in order to make herself socially acceptable.'
'Hardly. She was a Cavendish and inordinately proud of the fact. They were bigwigs round here for years. Her father, Sir William Cavendish, bought his knighthood by doing a stint as the local MP. She was already socially acceptable, as you put it, and didn't need to pander to anyone.' He frowned in recollection. 'No, what made her extraordinary, despite all the trappings of class and respectability which she played up to and tossed about in public to keep the proles in their place, was that privately she seethed with contradictions. Perhaps her uncle's sexual abuse had something to do with it, but I think the truth is she was born into the wrong generation and lived the wrong life. She had the intellectual capacity to do anything she wanted, but her social conditioning was such that she allowed herself to be confined in the one role she wasn't suited for, namely marriage and motherhood. It's tragic really. She spent most of her life at war with herself and crippled her daughter and granddaughter in the process. She couldn't bear to see their rebellions succeed where hers hadn't.'
'Did she tell you all this?'
'Not in so many words. I gleaned it from things she said and then put it into the portrait. But it's all true. She wanted a complete explanation of that painting, down to the last colour nuance and the last brush stroke, so'-he shrugged-'I gave her one, much along the lines of what I've just told you, and at the end she said there was only one thing wrong, and it was wrong because it was missing. But she wouldn't tell me what it was.' He paused in reflection. 'Presumably it had something to do with her uncle's abuse of her. I didn't know about that. I only knew of her father's abuse with the scold's bridle.'
But Cooper was more interested in something he had said before. 'You can't call Mrs. Lascelle's rebellion a success. She lumbered herself with a worthless heroin addict who then died and left her penniless.' His gaze lingered on the portrait.
Jack's dark face split into another grin. 'You've led a very sheltered life if you think rebellion is about achieving happiness. It's about anger and resistance and inflicting maximum damage on a hated authority.' He lifted a sardonic eyebrow. 'On that basis, I'd say Joanna scored a spectacular success. If you're calling her husband worthless now, what on earth do you imagine Mathilda's peers said about him at the time? Don't forget she was a very proud woman.'
Cooper drew heavily on his cigarette and looked up towards the house. 'Your wife's just been to see Mrs. Lascelles. Did you know?'
Jack shook his head.
'I met her as she was leaving. She told me she's convinced Mrs. Lascelles didn't kill her mother. Would you agree with that?'
'Probably.'
'Yet you just told me that Mrs. Lascelles's rebellion was to inflict maximum damage on the object of her hatred. Isn't death the ultimate damage?'
'I was talking about twenty-odd years ago. You're talking about now. Rebellion belongs to the young, Sergeant, not to the middle-aged. It's the middle-aged who're rebelled against because they're the ones who compromise their principles.'
'So how is Ruth rebelling?'
Jack studied him lazily from beneath his hooded eyelids. 'Why don't you ask her?'
'Because she's not here,' said Cooper reasonably, 'and you are.'
'Ask her mother then. You're being paid to meddle,' he cocked his irritating eyebrow again, 'and I'm not.'
Cooper beamed at him. 'I like you, Mr. Blakeney, though God alone knows why. I like your wife, too, if it's of any interest. You're straightforward types who look me in the eye when you talk to me and, believe it or not, that warms my heart because I'm trying to do a job that the people have asked me to do but for which, most of the time, I get called a pig. Now, for all I know, one or other, or both of you together, killed that poor old woman up there, and if I have to arrest you I'll do it, and I shan't let my liking get in the way because I'm an old-fashioned sod who believes that society only works if it's bolstered by rules and regulations which give more freedom than they take away. By the same token, I don't like Mrs. Lascelles or her daughter, and if I was the sort to arrest people I didn't like, I'd have banged them up a couple of weeks ago. They're equally malicious. The one directs her malice against your wife, the other directs hers against her mother, but neither of them has said anything worth listening to. Their accusations are vague and without substance. Ruth says her mother's a whore without principles, and Mrs. Lascelles says your wife's a murderess but when I ask them to prove it, they can't' He tossed his dog-end on to the grass. 'The odd thing is that you and Dr. Blakeney, between you, appear to know more about these two women and their relationship with Mrs. Gillespie than they do themselves, but out of some kind of misguided altruism you don't want to talk about it. Perhaps it's not politically correct amongst gilded intellectuals to dabble their fingers in the seamy side of life, but make no mistake, without something more to go on, Mrs. Gillespie's death will remain an unsolved mystery and the only person who will suffer will be Dr. Blakeney because she is the only person who had a known motive. If she is innocent of the murder of her patient, her innocence can only be proved if someone else is charged. Now, tell me honestly, do you think so little of your wife that you'd let her reputation be trampled in the mud for the sake of not wanting to assist the police?'
'My God!' said Jack with genuine enthusiasm. 'You're going to have to let me do this portrait of you. Two thousand. Is that what we agreed?'
'You haven't answered my question,' said the policeman patiently.
Jack reached for his sketchpad and flicked through to a clean page. 'Just stand there for a moment,' he
