‘But that wasn’t really why she was there?’
He looked up from his work. ‘Jill was taken in, but I wasn’t.’
‘What do you think was going on?’
‘She was telling us that Lorna was struggling. I think she’s got into a relationship and is a bit out of her depth. Something like that. Nothing useful. Nothing that would help us sort things out for Lorna. Just stirring. Making herself feel good by doing something. Shifting the load onto us.’ He started packing away his tools. ‘I know that Jill was visiting Lorna. Every Friday, regular as clockwork. Until this last week when the weather was so bad. She’d have seen if anything was seriously amiss.’
‘Jill told my sergeant those visits were secret.’
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘She might have thought that I didn’t know what was happening, but I was glad for her to go. I just couldn’t face the lass myself. I wouldn’t know what to say to her. It’s gone on this long.’ He hoisted his tools into the back of his jeep. ‘You’ll have heard the rumours about Jill and old man Stanhope if you’ve been asking around about us all.’
Vera nodded.
‘It hurt,’ he said. ‘I knew I was punching above my weight with Jill. She was such a beauty when she was younger. Lorna got all her looks from her mother. But I thought I was giving her what she wanted. What she needed. A bit of stability. Respect. It was a kind of bargain and I believed I was getting loyalty in return. Then along came old Stanhope, slimy as a toad, with his money and his fancy talk. I knew the affair wouldn’t last. He’d had most eligible women in the valley at one time or another. I’d thought Jill would have more sense than to fall for him.’ He looked up. ‘I suppose it was my pride that was most hurt.’
‘It can’t have been easy,’ Vera said. ‘All that gossip again.’
‘It was hard.’ He fell silent for a moment. A skein of geese flew overhead, honking. ‘I heard folk talking about how Lorna looked so like him. Like his daughter Juliet, at least. It hadn’t occurred to me before then, but once it was in my mind, I couldn’t shift the thought. I was reminded every time I looked at her.’
‘You and Jill must have talked about it. She must have known you were hurt.’
He looked up at her. ‘Of course she knew and she hated what she’d done to me. I knew she was sorry. What was the point of talking? It was over.’
‘Except that Lorna reminded you.’
He started walking towards his vehicle, but turned back to face her. ‘She was my daughter, and I loved the bones of her. I was a better father to her than that man would ever have been.’
‘Crispin paid for her treatment in the clinic when she was ill.’
‘He could afford to! It was the least he could do. He did bugger all else for her.’ Falstone paused again. ‘Except leave her alone.’
‘He never tried to get in touch when she was growing up?’ Vera wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but she wanted to keep Falstone talking.
The man shook his head. ‘I saw him watching her, though, when he thought nobody was looking.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She was mad about horses when she was growing up.’
‘Aye, your wife said she was a canny little rider.’
‘Sometimes, at the local shows, when Lorna was competing on her pony, I’d catch Stanhope staring at her,’ Falstone said. ‘Looking kind of proud but sad. Usually he was there to open the event, give out the prizes, and if Lorna won, he’d be handing the rosette to her. But it was us she ran back to as soon as the ceremony was over. We were the people she wanted to congratulate her. Those times, I just felt sorry for him.’
‘Lorna never suspected Crispin might be her dad?’ Vera wondered what that might be like. It had been bad enough being Hector’s daughter. Hector, the black sheep, despised by his family and his respectable neighbours. Vera had been the object of pity and suspicion. But at least there’d been no denying her parentage. She might not have liked Hector, but she’d known where she’d come from.
‘Not until she was a teenager. She heard stuff from the other kids when she got to the high school. They were a cruel bunch. I saw them sometimes when I was dropping her off for the bus. All pointing and whispering. No wonder it made her ill.’ He paused. ‘We should have taken her away, sent her to a different school.’
‘Was there anyone specific making fun of her? The Heslop kids?’
Falstone shook his head. ‘I think they were all as bad as each other.’
‘Did she talk to you about it?’ Vera asked.
‘Do you mean, did she ask if I was her real dad?’ He stood looking out at the river, brown and swollen with melted snow. ‘No. We weren’t that sort of family. We just got on with things.’
‘And she’d not have wanted to hurt you,’ Vera said. ‘You’d always cared for her.’
‘But I couldn’t save her, could I? She still got ill. And she still got killed.’ Falstone climbed into his vehicle, revved the engine and drove away. Vera walked back through the fields towards the house.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
JULIET WAS IN THE BEDROOM WRAPPING Christmas presents when Vera arrived. There was still no heating upstairs and she was wearing a thermal vest, two jumpers and a down jacket. No wonder, she thought, that she and Mark had few romantic moments at this time of the year; spontaneity was tricky when it took half an hour to undress. Dorothy had lit a fire for Harriet in the small drawing room, and now the housekeeper was back in the kitchen clearing up after lunch. As Dorothy and Harriet would be recipients of some of the Christmas
