‘Thanks for coming.’ Now Jill was standing too and she gave Vera an awkward hug. ‘It means a lot. We’re so pleased. So pleased.’ Jill pulled out of the embrace and stood behind her husband, then put her arms around him too, stooping because he was still in his chair. She bent and kissed his hair. Vera let herself out of the house.
Her next stop was at Brockburn. She supposed they had the right to know the truth too, though she was tempted to let them stew for a bit longer, to think that Lorna’s son might have a claim on the estate. It was quicker from Broom Farm to take the drive to the front of the house, but Vera went on and turned down the back lane past the cottages. Dorothy’s car was outside their place, but Vera drove straight past. Billy’s team must have finished because there were no vehicles at the fork in the track where the path led on to Jinny’s Mill. Vera parked at the back of the big house. There was a light in the kitchen window and she knocked.
‘Who is it?’ A nervous voice. Juliet. Perhaps they were all nervous with a murderer still not caught, though the Falstones hadn’t bothered locking their door.
‘It’s me. Vera.’
There was the sound of a key turning, a bolt rattling and the door opened.
Juliet was on her own in the room. She looked as if she’d been crying.
Vera felt a stab of impatience. Of irritation. And I thought you were an adult!
Juliet took a tissue from her pocket and wiped her eyes. ‘Don’t mind me, I’m just being silly.’
‘What’s happened?’ Vera made no effort to sound sympathetic. The last thing she needed was to be dragged into the emotional entanglements of the family at Brockburn. No way was Juliet her responsibility.
‘Oh, just Mother being beastly as always and then Mark and I had a bit of a row. Nothing serious. It’s the stress. Nothing feels normal at the moment.’
‘I’ve got some news.’ Vera didn’t sit. She didn’t want to be here for very long. She was dreaming of a beer, a fire and her bed. ‘We’ve had the DNA results back. We fast-tracked them.’
And that took a chunk out of my budget.
Juliet looked at her, fragile, doe-eyed. She was wearing a loose black dress that seemed to swamp her.
‘You’re no relation to Lorna. You’re not half-sisters. Crispin wasn’t her father.’ Hoping to make it clear, all in one sentence, so there wouldn’t be questions, uncertainty. When the woman didn’t respond Vera added, ‘Thomas isn’t your nephew. He has no claim on the estate.’
‘Oh.’ Juliet’s voice expressed shock, confusion, but no real sense of relief. In fact, Vera thought, Juliet was feeling the opposite. A sadness. Perhaps Juliet too would have welcomed a connection with the child. ‘Mother will be pleased. Do you want to talk to her?’
‘No need for that.’ The last thing Vera thought she needed was an encounter with Harriet. ‘I’ll leave you to pass on the good news. I just thought you should know.’
‘Have you told the Falstones?’
‘Yes, I’ve just come from there.’ Vera paused. ‘They were pleased.’ She turned to walk out, but stopped at the door. ‘Do you know a cottage called Jinny’s Mill?’
Juliet smiled. ‘Of course. I used to play there when I was little. It was a place my father took me to. I treated it as a sort of Wendy house. In the summer, you can dam the burn and make a pool deep enough to swim. The water was straight from the hills and freezing, but I loved the wild swimming. Even Dad came in sometimes. Just paddling, his trousers rolled up to his knees. Then Dorothy and I hung out there when we were teenagers and wanted to escape the adults.’ A quick grin. The memories seemed to have cheered her. ‘It was where I first got drunk. On sherry we nicked from my father’s drinks cabinet. I’ve never been able to touch the stuff since.’
‘Did other youngsters in the area use it too?’
‘I expect so. Occasionally we’d find empty beer cans, signs that someone had lit a fire in the range. I don’t remember us bumping into anyone else there, though.’
There was a moment of silence and Juliet seemed lost in memory. ‘I took Mark there too, when he first came to Brockburn. It was the end of May, and it’s very beautiful then, with the meadow in front of the cottage full of buttercup and clover.’ There was another brief pause. ‘It was where Mark proposed to me a few months later. It was September and the leaves were starting to change colour. All very romantic.’ Now there was a sour note in her voice.
‘Have you been back there recently?’
‘No.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Not for ages.’
‘Would Mark have a reason for going there?’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so.’ Juliet’s tone was light, brittle. ‘Unless it featured somehow in his plans to turn Brockburn into a theatre and arts centre. That’s been his main preoccupation in the last six months. We don’t go walking together these days.’
Now Vera did open the door to leave. As she walked towards the Land Rover, she could hear the bolt slammed shut and the key being turned in the lock.
At the cottage, Vera locked her own door. She’d been more careful about security since the fire earlier in the year, when work had come far too close to home and the place had been wrecked. The wind rattled against the house and battered the windows. She could hear the roar
