'It has nothing to do with belief! I saw her then. She wasn’t aborted. She’d gone full term.' She was angry now with his lack of understanding. 'I’m a nurse. I know the difference between a woman who’s given birth and one who’s lost her child or done away with it in the first few months. That child was born—dead or alive. The size of her—and she had milk, poor little thing.' She swallowed. 'How she wept for it...'
'So Campbell is lying!' Hester said, moving forward to Cleo. 'But why?'
'To hide what he did to her,' Cleo said furiously. 'He must have raped her, and when she was with child he threw her out.' She looked from Hester to Rathbone. 'Though he didn’t even notice her condition. Who looks at housemaids, especially ones who are barely more than children themselves? Perhaps he’d already got tired of her —moved on to someone else? Or if he thought she’d had it aborted, and only then realized she hadn’t, to avoid the scandal.'
'It wouldn’t be much of a scandal,' Hester said sadly. 'If she was foolish enough to say it was his, he would simply deny it. No one would be likely to believe her... or frankly, care that much even if they did. It isn’t worth murdering anyone over.'
Cleo’s face crumpled, but she refused to give in. 'What about the body?'
'Which body?' Rathbone was confused. 'The baby?'
'No—no, the woman!'
'What woman?'
'The woman Miriam saw murdered the night her baby was born. The woman on the Heath.'
Rathbone was still further confused. 'Who was she?'
Cleo shook her head. 'I don’t know. Miriam said she had been murdered. She saw it—that was what she was running away from.'
'But who was the woman?'
'I don’t know!'
'Was there ever a body found? What happened? Didn’t the police ask?'
Cleo waved her hands in denial, her eyes desperate. 'No— no body was ever found. He must have hidden it.'
It was all pointless, completely futile. Rathbone felt a sense of despair drowning him as if he could hardly struggle for breath, almost a physical suffocation.
'You said yourself that she was hysterical.' He tried to sound reasonable, not patronizing or offensive to a woman who must be facing the most bitter disillusion imaginable, and for which she would face disgrace she had not deserved, and a death he could not save her from. 'Don’t you think the loss of her baby was what she was actually thinking of? Was it a girl?'
'I don’t know. She didn’t say.' Cleo looked as if she had caught his despair. 'She seemed so—so sure it was a woman... someone she cared for... who had helped her, even loved her... I—' She stopped, too weary, too hurt, to go on.
'I’m sorry,' Rathbone said gently. 'You were right to tell me about the baby. If Campbell was lying, at least we may be able to make something of that. Even if we do no more than save Miriam’s reputation, I am sure that will matter to her.' He was making wild promises and talking nonsense. Would Miriam care about such a thing when she faced death?
He banged on the door to be released again, and as soon as they were outside he turned to Hester.
But before he could begin to say how sorry he was, she spoke.
'If this woman really was killed, then her body must still be there.'
'Hester—she was delirious, probably weak from loss of blood and in a state of acute distress from delivering a dead child.'
'Maybe. But perhaps she really did see a woman murdered,' Hester insisted. 'If the body was never found, then it is out there on the Heath.'
'For twenty-two years! On Hampstead Heath! For heaven’s sake...'
'Not in the open! Buried—hidden somewhere.'
'Well, if it’s buried no one would find it now.'
'Perhaps it’s not buried.' She refused to give up. 'Perhaps it’s hidden somehow, concealed.'
'Hester...'
'I’m going to find Sergeant Robb and see if he will help me look.'
'You can’t. After all this time there’ll be nothing...'
'I’ve got to try. What if there really was a woman murdered? What if Miriam was telling the truth all the time?'
'She isn’t!'
'But what if she was? She’s your client, Oliver! You’ve got to give her the benefit of every doubt. You must assume that what she says is true until it is completely proved it can’t be.'
'She was thirteen, she’d just given birth to a dead child, she was alone and hysterical...'
'I’m going to find Sergeant Robb. He’ll help me look, whatever he believes, for Cleo’s sake. He owes her a debt he can never repay, and he knows that.'
'And doubtless if he should forget, you will remind him.'
