“Or more than she’s willing to tell us.” Tom began reassembling the photograph in the frame. “I’ll take this to the lab in the morning.” He pulled an evidence bag out of his inside jacket pocket. “Maybe they can learn something in spite of our fingerprints.”
Images hung like mist in my head, but I couldn’t persuade any of them to settle. “Lucy said her father really liked Colin Wardle. Why not as a son-in-law?”
“Class distinction?” Tom asked.
“It can’t be that,” I said. “Wallace Villiers was from a working-class family too.”
“You know what they say—no snob like a new snob.”
“What did Lucy say her mother’s maiden name was?” Vivian asked.
“Shipton.” Tom gathered up his jacket and umbrella.
“Will you mention this to Eacles?” I asked him.
“Not if I can help it.” Tom hunched into his jacket and slid the evidence bag into an inside pocket. “If I bring him an old photograph and the name of a cottage that probably doesn’t exist anymore, he’ll send me on a mental health course. Now, the intruder he’d like—something he can get his brain around. Kate, talk to Sheila Parker tomorrow. Cliffe will be interviewing people in Little Gosling. Someone has to know something.”
He thanked Vivian for the tea and kissed me goodbye.
The lights of his car swung an arc as he backed up and pulled toward the road.
I watched him drive off into the darkness. Tomorrow I’d tackle Sheila Parker and Professor Markham—two birds with one stone.
That night the rains began in earnest.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Monday, May 20
I stood outside 20 Bedwell Court in the pouring rain for so long I was afraid Professor Markham’s neighbors would call the police.
When the professor finally answered, he was less than thrilled to see me. “Yes—what is it?” he scowled at me through a pair of spectacles with one lens cracked. A blob of what looked like congealed strawberry jam clung to the front of the same baggy gray cardigan he’d worn the day I’d met him.
“I’m Kate Hamilton,” I said, trying to keep my teeth from chattering. “I believe you were expecting me at nine.”
Professor Markham consulted his wristwatch. “Oh, very well,” he said grudgingly. “I suppose you’d better come in.”
I furled my umbrella and left it on the doorstep. Inside, I hung my raincoat on a Victorian coatrack and dried my feet on what looked like a large, hand-knitted tea cozy.
The interior of the professor’s house was an expanded version of the man himself—shabby, cheerless, untidy, and smelling of unwashed hair. He’d never been married—I’d found that out by Googling him the night before. His furniture, mismatched and grimy, had been repurposed as repositories for piles of scholarly journals and magazines. A sixties-style pole lamp with exposed wiring was trained on a row of pine shelves, sagging under the weight of books. More books were stacked in tottering mounds on the stained mauve carpet. The only relatively tidy area of the room was a wooden desk, on which stacks of books and papers appeared to have been recently reorganized.
“I suppose you want tea.” He glared at me.
“No, no—please don’t bother.”
He seemed not to hear me and filled a cracked mug with a suspiciously dark liquid. “Milk’s off. Take a seat,” he said, shooing a gray cat from a ladder-back chair near the desk. The cat hissed, springing testily off the fur-covered cushion.
The professor handed me the mug, and I searched for a spot to set it down.
“What is it? I don’t have all day.” He threw himself into his desk chair.
I opened my handbag and pulled out the Essex book. “Are you familiar with Arthur Cockrill’s work?”
“Cockrill? Of course. There’s a copy around here somewhere.” He waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the bookshelves.
“Then you know about Cockrill’s assertion that the green maiden married a wealthy Anglo-Saxon landowner and bore him a son.”
“Yes, yes.” He rolled his hand impatiently. “Common knowledge.”
I swallowed hard and kept talking. “According to Cockrill, certain villagers in Dunmow Parva insisted the son’s descendants still lived in the area, and some of them, including a boy born in February of 1671, inherited the green skin of his famous forbear.”
“What are you talking about?” He narrowed his eyes.
“I’m talking about the archives of the Church of the Blessed Virgin in Dunmow Parva. Cockrill discovered a record of the boy’s birth, along with his parents’ offering of thanks when the color of his skin faded.” This wasn’t strictly true—there’d been no mention of green skin—but sometimes you have to read between the lines.
“Those records don’t exist. They were destroyed in the flood of 1937.”
“Check it out for yourself.” I handed him Ivor’s copy of Cockrill’s book. “The final chapter.”
He snatched the book out of my hand and began riffling through the pages.
“This isn’t the same book.” He glared at me accusingly. “Cockrill must have issued a second printing with new information.” He turned to the title page and stabbed a yellow fingernail at it. “See—I was right ‘Second edition, enlarged.’”
He grabbed a stenographer’s notebook and began scribbling furiously.
“Were there Grenfels living in Essex in the eleventh or twelfth centuries?”
“Grenfels?” He plucked a circular card file off the windowsill and began thumbing through the cards. “Ellis, Forsdyke, Frostich, Gildersleeve, Goslan, Grimwood—”
Golly—an eleventh-century Rolodex.
His head jerked up. “Where was this cottage?”
“Cockrill doesn’t say, but I may have a clue.” In for a penny, in for a pound. “They named it River’s Edge—a small cottage along the River Stour. It’s probably gone now, but it still existed in 1912.”
“That’s not very helpful, is it?” He raised a finger and leaped out of his chair. “Aha! Kelly’s.”
“What’s Kelly’s?”
“Victorian postal directory,” he said, weaving his way through the stacks of books. “Nineteen twelve, you say?” He climbed a step ladder, balancing precariously.
“Professor Markham, do you think that’s wise?”
His head swiveled toward me. “Wise? It’s essential. If I can prove—” He probably completed his thought, but he’d ceased verbal transmission. He pawed through a row of books bound in
