The house seemed quiet. A child’s clothes – sleepsuits, dungarees and vests – had been pegged on a washing line behind the house. Somewhere in the distance a dog was barking. Vera hoped that meant Robert Falstone was out on his land. This was a conversation she’d prefer to have with his wife on her own.
She found Jill in the kitchen with Thomas. The toddler was on a rug in front of the Aga playing with plastic bricks. Vera supposed they were new. The Falstones hadn’t been given permission to go into Lorna’s house in Kirkhill. Joe had described this place as dirty, but Vera thought it was no grubbier than most farmhouse kitchens she’d known. Joe’s Sal was obsessive about housework. Vera thought she should find something better to do with her time.
Vera introduced herself. ‘Your man not about?’
Jill shook her head. ‘There’s a fence that needs fixing down by the river. He’s just gone out.’ She moved a kettle onto the hotplate. ‘Tea or coffee?’ Her eyes were red as if she’d had little sleep, but she seemed to be holding things together.
‘Tea, please.’ Vera nodded towards the child. ‘How’s it going?’
The woman smiled. ‘He’s good as gold.’
‘Keeping you awake at night?’
‘Nah, I don’t sleep much, but that’s grief. Guilt. Thinking of all the things I might have said. Might have done.’
‘Eh, pet, you have to let go of the guilt. That way lies madness.’
Jill set the pot on the table, added mugs, a milk bottle and a packet of shop-bought biscuits.
Vera felt at home. She’d never been at ease with perfect housewives, perfect families. Home-made biscuits. ‘Tell me about your fling with Crispin Stanhope.’
The woman stared at her, frozen.
‘Now, I’d normally say it was none of my business what you got up to with the lord of the manor. Unless you’d been forced into it. But this is different. Your lass was murdered and we have to look into all sorts of possibilities. Her body was found on Brockburn land, after all. You do understand?’
Jill nodded.
‘Did he force you?’
‘No!’ At last the woman did seem able to speak. ‘No, it was nothing like that.’
‘Because he did have a bit of a reputation.’
‘I think he loved me,’ she said quietly.
‘But not enough to leave Harriet for you?’
Silence again. Jill bent and built a tower with the bricks. Thomas knocked them down and chuckled.
‘It wasn’t easy for him.’ Again, the words seemed to take an age to be spoken.
‘Eh, you don’t have to make excuses for him after all these years.’
‘He felt the responsibility, not just for Harriet and Juliet, but for the estate. For his position.’
‘He always did care what folks thought of him.’ Vera was muttering under her breath and hadn’t realized Jill had heard her.
‘You knew him?’
‘He was a distant relation.’ Not that distant but there was no need to complicate things now. Vera paused for a moment. ‘Was he Lorna’s father?’
‘I’m not sure. He could have been.’ The woman looked up and gave a twisted smile. ‘I always thought Lorna looked more like Crispin than she did Robert as she got older, but that could have been my imagination.’
‘Wishful thinking?’
Jill shook her head. ‘Rob’s a good man. Crispin was a year of madness. An infatuation. I might have left Robert and this place, if he’d asked me at the time, but later I was glad he never did. I’d have hated living in the big house and Crispin would never have left it. I had a good life here.’ She paused. ‘We ended things just before I realized I was pregnant. Just as well. It might have made things more complicated.’
‘Did Robert know? About the affair?’
‘Not at the time,’ Jill said. She added, with the same twisted smile, ‘Crispin had practice in being discreet.’
‘Later?’
‘Later, Rob might have had his suspicions because the lass looked a bit like Crispin’s real daughter, Juliet. They could have been sisters. And there was gossip. This place there’s always gossip. He never said anything.’ Jill paused. ‘By that time, we were settled as a family. He’d think there was no need to rock the boat. And he did love her as if she was his own.’
Vera thought of Connie Browne’s words. She’d said the Falstones didn’t speak of anything except sheep and the farm. Had that been a bad thing? They’d rubbed along happily enough even when Lorna had been ill, and that would have caused more stress than most couples could weather.
‘What about Lorna?’ Vera asked. ‘Did she suspect that Robert wasn’t her dad?’
Jill bent once more to build the pile of bricks for her grandson. ‘Lorna might have heard things. Kids can be cruel. They might have listened in to the adults speculating and passed the rumours on as facts. She was an easy target.’
Vera nodded. ‘Do you think that might have led to the anorexia?’
‘I did wonder.’ The woman straightened. ‘Me feeling guilty again. It haunted me all the time she was ill. Impossible to get rid of.’
And you couldn’t talk about it to your husband. Because in this marriage things don’t get spoken of.
Vera thought they were an oddly matched couple. Now that Jill had started talking, she was articulate, what Vera’s hippy friend and neighbour Joanna would call emotionally intelligent. Quite different from Robert, who dealt with problems by shutting down, hiding away from them. ‘Where did you and Robert meet?’
Jill seemed surprised by the question, but she answered readily enough. ‘At the Kirkhill show. I was working for a little craft brewery based on the coast, and we had a stand. Robert was showing his animals. He kept coming back for beer. I thought he was an
