Scold's Bridle

was such a shock. I thought he was in Hong Kong.' She fell silent.

'Tell me about it,' Cooper prompted gently.

'You wouldn't understand,' said Jane with conviction. 'You didn't know Mathilda.'

Jack was in a very bad mood by the time he reached Cedar House. He hadn't ridden a bicycle in years, and four miles along rutted country lanes on something that should have been condemned to the scrap heap years ago had given him sore balls and the sort of trembling thighs that would have disgraced a nonagenarian. He abandoned the bicycle against a tree in the Cedar Housing Estate, vaulted the fence and ran lightly across the grass to the kitchen window. For reasons of his own, he had no intention of announcing his presence by approaching across the gravel or using the front doorbell.

He tapped lightly but persistently on the window pane, and after a minute or two, Joanna appeared in the doorway that led from the kitchen into the hall. 'What do you want?'

He read her lips, rather than heard the words, and gestured towards the back door. 'Let me in,' he mouthed, his voice barely above a whisper.

Jane's eyes narrowed as she looked back down the corridors of time. 'You see, you can't assess Mathilda on what people tell you now. They've forgotten how beautiful she was as a young woman, how witty she was and how many men desired her. She was the most eligible girl around-her father was the MP, her uncle was a wealthy bachelor-' she shrugged '-she could have married anybody.'

'Then why didn't she?'

'At the time everyone assumed she was hanging on for something better, a title perhaps, or a stately home with acres, but I always thought there was more to it than that. I used to watch her at parties and it was very clear to me that, while she enjoyed flirting and being the centre of attention, she couldn't bear men touching her.' She fell silent.

'Go on,' Cooper prompted after a moment or two.

'It wasn't until ten years later when my husband and I met James in Hong Kong and he told us the truth about Joanna's parentage that it made sense.' She sighed. 'Not that I've ever really understood exactly what happened because, of course, child abuse and incest were kept under wraps in those days. James believed she encouraged Gerald, but I never did. It's the one area where I always felt sorry for her. She was emotionally crippled by it, I think.'

'So you've known for a long time that Mrs. Lascelles wasn't James Gillespie's daughter?'

'Yes.'

'Did Mrs. Gillespie know you knew?'

'Oh, yes.'

'Didn't that worry her?'

'She knew I wouldn't tell anyone.'

'How could she know?'

'She just did,' said Jane flatly.

What was it James Gillespie had called it? Mutual insurance.

Without warning, as the back door closed behind him, Jack's huge hand circled Joanna's throat and drove her through the kitchen and into the hall. 'Didn't what happened to Mathilda teach you anything, you silly bitch?' he said in a savage undertone.

Cooper took out a cigarette, remembered where he was and put it back again. 'Was it you who was friendly with Mr. Gillespie, or your husband?' he asked Jane.

'Paul and he went through the war together, but I'd known him a long time as well.'

'Why did it shock you so much to see him coming out of Cedar House that day?'

'I'd always hoped he was dead.' She sighed. 'I know you've seen him. Sarah told me. Did he tell you anything?'

'About what, Mrs. Marriott?'

She gave a tired smile. 'You'd know if he'd told you, Sergeant.'

'Then I don't think he can have done,' he said honestly. 'But you're obviously afraid he will, so wouldn't it be better coming from you? I presume it's something that only you, he and Mathilda were privy to. You were confident she wouldn't say anything because you could reveal the truth about Joanna's father, but he's a different matter. You have no hold over him, which is why you were so shocked to see him back in England and why you went to see Mathilda, to find out if he was going to spill the beans. Am I right?'

Joanna showed only the slightest flicker of alarm before she relaxed against the wall and stared into his eyes with a look of triumph. 'I knew you'd come back.'

He didn't say anything, just searched her beautiful face and marvelled again at its absolute perfection. It was the face of the Madonna in Michelangelo's Pieta, the face of a mother gazing down in quiet contemplation on the body of her adored son, a study of such simple purity that it had brought tears to his eyes when he first saw it. For years, he had wondered about the woman behind the Madonna. Was she real? Or was she something fabulous that Michelangelo had conjured from his own imagination? Until Joanna, he had believed she must have existed in the eye of her creator because only an artist could have made a thing of such immeasurable beauty. Now he held it beneath his hand and knew that its conception had been as random and as accidental as his own. He closed his eyes to stem the tears that threatened to well again.

Jane nodded unhappily. 'James blackmailed me for five years after we returned home from Hong Kong. In the end, I paid him over ten thousand pounds, which was all the money my mother left me.' Her voice shook. 'He stopped when I sent him copies of my bank statement which showed I had nothing more to give him, but he warned me he'd come back.' She was silent for a moment, striving for control. 'I never saw or heard from him again until that awful day when he came out of Cedar House.'

Cooper studied her bent head with compassion. He could only assume she'd had an affair that James and Mathilda Gillespie had found out about, but why was it so hard to confess to all these years on? 'Everyone has skeletons somewhere in their closet, Mrs. Marriott. Mine still bring a blush to my cheeks when I think about them. But do you really think your husband would hold yours against you after thirty-odd years?'

'Oh, yes,' she said honestly. 'Paul always wanted children, you see, and I could never give him any.'