A Photographic Death (10 page)

I calmed down and reread the story. The woman’s name was Priscilla Waters, age thirty-eight. She had been with the Royal Shakespeare Company for two years and had had small parts on the London stage before that. A member of the theater company told the reporter they were shocked and grieved. “Everyone loved Priss. Her Cordelia was to die for.”

To die for?

I shook my head to rid it of the travel malaise that was threatening
me
and read the rest of the story. Her death had happened at night, when poor visibility might explain how you could mistake hitting a person for a deer. Priscilla Waters had been knocked into a ditch where she lay undiscovered until the next afternoon when an older couple out walking their dogs noticed the body.

It appeared that the police had stonewalled the newspaper. They would make no comment about their investigation or the search for the driver of the car. Frustrated, the reporter, a James Wattle, had gone to the scene himself and reported on his findings the following week. In one spot he had noticed tire tracks swerving onto the narrow shoulder and back onto the road again and photographed them. Despite his persistence, the police spokesman, a Constable Sampson, would not confirm that the tracks were where the hit-and-run occurred.

“What an idiot!” I said, loud enough that several people at other tables turned around. I pressed my hand against my mouth, then whispered to Jane, “It’s like he’s trying to do the opposite of investigate. Obfuscate?”

“I know. He probably won’t let us see that file either. Don’t they have some kind of Freedom of Information Act here?”

“They do, but it would take weeks. We have to know now. Anyway, let’s get a photocopy of these stories and her picture. And see if they found out who did it.”

But there was nothing more. Though we turned to the next issue and several weeks after that, Priscilla Waters and the investigation into her death never appeared again.

Chapter Nineteen

“W
E NEED TO
go back to the police station. Now they have to listen to us!” Jane cried.

“I think we need more proof.” If DCI Sampson did not agree that the two women were the same, he could refuse to see us a third time no matter what evidence we had amassed by then. “Didn’t you want to get coffee?”

“Now? Now I’m psyched.”

Out on the sidewalk Stratford-upon-Avon was coming to life. Tourists moved slowly, staring at everything, and a knight in silver armor stood on the corner next to an Anne Hathaway look-alike and a young William Shakespeare. They weren’t statues, of course, just actors standing motionless until someone approached to take their photo. Then they would spring to life and offer to pose with them—for a price.

I jumped as a beep sounded from Jane’s pocket, indicating a text message. She pulled out her phone and looked at it and then at me. “Hannah.”

“What does she say?”

She turned the phone around so I could read it:

Why are u in Stratford?

Busted.
Colin must have told her we weren’t just in London to buy books and sightsee.

“What should I tell her?”

“That you wanted to see Shakespeare’s home?”

“Right. She knows he’s my fave.”

“Lots of people come here.”

“I think she knows what we’re doing.”

“Probably.”

It made me uneasy. I hated to have Hannah upset. And I had the irrational thought that now she knew we were in Stratford, she might come wandering down the street and see a poster of herself taped to a window.

Jane shrugged and went to work with her thumbs, then watched the screen and said, “She says we should have waited.” She flipped the phone shut. “For her to finish classes, I guess.”

“I thought about that. But then it would have run into Christmas and . . . it doesn’t seem like she wants to do this. Find Caitlin.”

Jane slipped the phone back in her pocket.

“I want to talk to Celia Banks before we go to the police,” I told her.

“Who?”

“The woman in the news story. From the park.”

“If she knew anything she’d have told them.”

“Maybe they didn’t ask the right questions. She might have known Constable Donnelly or Priscilla Waters. She may have heard what happened with the hit-and-run investigation. It could have taken months. Where’s the post office?”

Jane looked mutinous. Still jet-lagged, both of us on edge, we were on the verge of a quarrel. “They’re up to their eyeballs in it,” she muttered. “I don’t know why you won’t admit it.”

She meant the police and I didn’t agree. They were overprotective of their records certainly, reluctant to turn them over to foreigners who were demanding to revisit a twenty-year-old case, but that didn’t make them complicit in any crime. While I wouldn’t choose DCI Sampson for my prom date, I saw no reason to doubt his integrity. “That’s the point. If they are involved, we’ll need all the ammunition we can get. Otherwise they’ll just blow us off again.”

The post office was farther down Henley Street. We quickly found out that Worchester Cottage was not another village or inn, but the name of the Bankses’ home. I’d forgotten that so many of the English gave their houses names. Derrick and Celia Banks’s house was out on Avenue Road.

“It’s just shy of a mile,” the clerk warned. “You’ll want a cab.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” Jane assured him. “I walk for miles in Manhattan.”

He smiled at her and gave us directions.

As we were leaving, I remembered the newspaper reporter who had gone to the scene of the accident. “Do you know anything about a James Wattle?”

“Jimmy? The newsman? Oh, he’s long gone.”

Why didn’t anyone ever stay in Stratford? “Where did he move to?”

He couldn’t help the grin that spread across his cheerful, freckled face. “That great pressroom in the sky.”

“Oh.” Would they say something similar about me, I wondered, as we moved toward the exit.
She’s gone to that everlasting tag sale in the clouds?

Hopefully not for a while.

A
S WE LEFT
the center of town and the shelter of huddled buildings, the wind sprang to life. The sky was the smudged gray of ancient white tennis balls, and there was moisture in the air that heralded snow. The always-present sense that you are in another country far from home grew stronger.

“I’d forgotten it was winter,” Jane lamented, pressing her fingers against her face to warm them. “Why didn’t I bring gloves? What if we get all the way out here and she’s not even home? We’ll have to walk all the way back.”

“You have your phone, don’t you? We’ll get a cab.”

Worchester Cottage was an impressive redbrick house set back from the road, the upstairs portion clad in white stucco with dark beams. None of the homes on this street was old, but they looked expensive, and several had the same brass nameplates in the yard that the Bankses’ did. Because the house had a name, I had been expecting it to be older, with a thatched roof and clinging ivy.

The glossy black door was flanked by two urns filled with holly, a matching wreath circling the brass knocker.

“I don’t see any cars,” Jane whispered.

“There’s a double garage.”

I saw us then as the person answering the door would, two foreigners in down ski jackets, noses red from the cold, hair in windblown tangles. Would
I
let us in?

The woman who answered the door didn’t, at first. Celia Banks was in her sixties, with a snowy white bob and thick bangs. She was pleasant, but spoke to us through a door opened three inches.

“Can I help you then?”

As the older messy stranger, I spoke up. “Hi, I’m Delhi Laine and this is my daughter Jane. We’re looking for Celia Banks.”

“Do I know you?”

“Not exactly. It’s about something that happened years ago in Bancroft Gardens.”

She bit at her underlip, trying to remember. “Where are you from?”

“New York. You were at the park when my little girl went missing. When they thought she drowned.”

“Oh.” Her head jerked back; a less dignified person might have smacked her forehead. “Come in. You look frozen. A cup of tea will set you right.”

Celia Banks sat us down at her wooden kitchen table and moved around deliberately, turning the flame on under a kettle and pulling cups from a glass-fronted cabinet. The kitchen was large and modern, with stainless steel appliances and everything in its place. I marveled at how tidy it was. Amazing that some homes were always ready for unexpected company.

After a minute Mrs. Banks set a dish of Pepperidge Farm Milanos on the table between us.

We eyed the cookies greedily. We hadn’t stopped to have lunch. I could have scarfed down the plateful, but delicately took a single cookie. Jane did the same.

“Milk with your tea?”

“Oh—yes, please.” I didn’t usually take anything in tea, but milk was a food group.

When the table was arranged to Celia Banks’s satisfaction, she sat down.

Settling herself to get comfortable, she said, “I do remember that awful day, of course. I had walked down to the park to read by the river, it was so pleasant there. Everything in bloom, you know. I often did that when my boys were away at camp, and I had seen you there before.” She smiled at me. “You were such a creative mum.”

I laughed.

“Those little girls were always dressed in such interesting clothes!”

“I let them pick out what they wanted to wear.” What I remembered were the endless loads of laundry, the constantly dwindling pile that they chose their play clothes from.

“And you’ve grown up to be so pretty,” she told Jane. Then she added to me, “I did wonder how you managed so well with all those little ones and you being in the family way again. I couldn’t have done it.”

“It was a struggle,” I admitted. “We came to ask about something you might have seen that afternoon. I know it was years ago, but did you notice a nanny with a plaid stroller?”

“A nanny.” She closed her eyes as if trying to carry herself back. “You know, I might have. But I don’t remember anything about her. The police never asked me about the other people in the park. When it happened there was so much confusion, they took our names and said they would get back to us later. I was surprised when they did.”

“You were interviewed by Constable Donnelly?”

“Yes, he was the one. A nice boy. Grew up right around here.”

“He was a
boy
?” Jane blurted.

“Oh, just a lad then. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen. He went off to university soon after, somewhere near London. I was glad to see him making something of himself.”

“So he wasn’t married?”

“Oh, my goodness, no.”

The image of Constable Donnelly and his wife, desperate for a child and dressing her up like a nanny to kidnap one, faded into the cabinetry.

It was time to tell Jane’s story.

Chapter Twenty

W
HEN
J
ANE FINISHED
explaining what she had remembered in Dr. Lundy’s office, Celia Banks sat back and looked at us. “That’s quite a tale.”

It was okay if she didn’t believe it—Colin, Patience, and DCI Sampson didn’t either—but I said, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think. It would certainly turn everything on its ear.”

And that was all she could say. She had nothing to add to the story about Priscilla Waters either; she had never known her personally. “We didn’t see many plays in those days with the children so active. I don’t think they ever found the car responsible for the hit-and-run. If the police knew why she was out walking in the countryside at night, they didn’t say.”

“What do you think of DCI Sampson?”

“Gabe Sampson? What should I think? Dedicated to his job, I know. He never married. He lived with his mother until she passed.” She lifted her eyes as if consulting an old newspaper. “That was almost four years ago.”

“I guess he’s been here a long time.”

“Came up through the ranks,” she agreed.

I pushed back from the table. “We’ve taken a lot of your time.”
And your cookies.
The plate looked pathetic with only one Milano left.

“Where are you staying?”

“The White Swan.”

“Brilliant! Did you drive here?”

“No, we walked. It was fine.”

Jane looked at me.

“It must have been dreadfully cold, hardly a comfortable day. I have to call in at the chemist’s; I’m going right down Rother Street. I’ll drop you.”

“That would be wonderful.” At the memory of the cutting wind, I was beyond protestations.

Driving into town, Celia Banks told us that her husband was a solicitor in Birmingham and her two sons were long-grown, but living nearby. She wished us good luck with our search, then added, “Have you been to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage?”

We assured her we would go soon.

“Let’s get something to eat,” I said as we entered the lobby.

Jane nodded. “Cookies only go so far.”

We stopped in the room to leave our coats and wash up. While Jane was using the bathroom, I turned on my iPad and connected with my e-mail. Comments from BookEm.com, my online dealers’ group, two book orders, and one odd note.

Signed “Will’s Boy,” it read:
Neither a borrower nor a meddler be.

Was this some kind of local advertising? The Internet knew exactly where you were and what you might need. Or had someone noticed our poster? The change of the word “lender” to “meddler” seemed too intrusive for an ad.

W
HEN
J
A
N
E
C
A
M
E
out again, patting down her hair, I showed her the message.

“Did you write back?”

“Not yet.” I was trying to think of another quote from
Hamlet
with which to respond, but my memory was failing me.

“Just ask him what he knows.”

“Okay.” Quickly I typed in,
Do you have information for us?

The reply was instantaneous.
When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.

“What’s he talking about?” Jane demanded. She had no patience for the whimsical.

“It’s what the witches say at the opening of
Macbeth
. I don’t like that he knows there are two of us though. It’s as if we’re being watched.”

“Maybe he saw us putting up a poster.”

“We did those separately.”

“Oh—right. What are you going to answer?”

“Nothing.”

“
Nothing?
I thought we wanted to find out what he knows!”

“We do, but he’s playing with us. Let’s see what he suggests.”

We waited for several minutes, then were overcome with hunger and went downstairs to the dining room. By now it would serve as an early dinner.

It wasn’t until we were halfway through our shepherd’s pie that I thought of something else we needed to do and looked at my watch. “Damn! I wanted to get back to the archives, but they closed at four-thirty.”

“The place where we were?”

“Same building. We need to look at the playbills from twenty years ago and compare them with current ones. See if there’s anyone still with the company who was there when Priscilla Waters was. Someone who can tell us more about her.”

If we showed them my photograph could they identify her—or not—all these years later?

“Great idea. Maybe they’ll know what really happened to her.”

“And maybe what happened to Caitlin afterward.” That worry had never left me. Another thought then, so horrifying that the fork slipped out of my fingers. “What if Cate was with her when she was run down? What if they hit her too?” My voice veered into the danger zone. “She was so
little
.”

“Easy, Mom. They didn’t find her there. They would have said.”

“Would they? They don’t seem to tell anybody anything.”

“Newspapers have other ways of finding things out.”

“I guess.”

“Now
you’re
into the conspiracy theory?”

“No. But if she wasn’t with Priscilla, she had to be somewhere.”

“Maybe she was with the husband.”

“The paper didn’t say she was married.”

“It didn’t say she wasn’t.”

“That’s why we have to find someone who knew her,” I said.

“First thing tomorrow morning.”

But I hated to wait until then. I thought about going to the stage door and accosting actors as they left after the performance though I knew that was not the right way to do it. And what about Will’s Boy? All we’d put on the poster was that we were looking to reunite with family members. Yet he characterized it as “meddling.” Didn’t that mean he knew something?

“Time here is too precious to waste,” I complained.

“Well, the Christmas Market’s open late tonight and it’s only a couple blocks away. We could do our shopping.”

I wasn’t sure if she was trying to distract me or was anxious to see the market herself. The idea of wandering around and looking at stalls filled with things I cared nothing about had zero appeal for me. “You go. I want to read.”

“Maybe I will later.”

W
E
H
A
D
B
EEN
back in our room, a fire in the grate, for about an hour. I’d been sitting in one of the comfortable chairs reading
The Cairo Trilogy
and Jane had been lying on the bed, dozing. Now she was in the bathroom getting ready to go out when her phone on the night table beeped with a message.

Was it from Hannah? No reason to think that, except that Jane hadn’t mentioned hearing from Hannah since this morning. I knew that looking at someone else’s texts was uncomfortably close to reading a diary, but I moved out of my chair, picked up the phone on the bed, and looked down at the screen.

It was from Colin.

U go back to the police yet?

I pressed the suddenly red-hot device back onto the nightstand and was in my chair when Jane returned.

I glanced at her, then back at the book. Naguib Mahfouz’s words became unreadable. Jane was reporting everything we found out to Colin. No wonder she kept wanting to go back to the police station, he was pushing her to do so. I tried to rationalize away my feeling of betrayal, but couldn’t. Even if I placed her communication in the best possible light, that he was, after all, her father, that maybe she thought by keeping him involved he would come around, I still couldn’t stop feeling betrayed.

This was
our
quest.

I put the book facedown in my lap and watched Jane pull on her powder blue jacket.

She caught my gaze and smiled. “Sure you don’t want to come? Bet you haven’t finished your shopping.”

I couldn’t say anything.

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

“You had a new message.”

“Oh.” She moved over and picked up her phone, glanced at it, and snapped it shut.

I was beyond coyness. “You’re texting Dad everything we’re finding out.”

She didn’t bother with
How dare you look at my phone
. She wasn’t even defensive. “So? He wants to know.”

“You know he’ll block us any way he can.”

“Why do you think that? He’s just being careful.”

“He’s afraid it will disrupt his life.”

She finished zipping her jacket. “Hers too. But it’s not that he’s working against us.” A stern look. “That’s really paranoid—you know?”

I shrugged and turned my book back over, too embarrassed to explain the rest of what I was feeling. Jane had always seemed closer to Colin, partly by temperament and partly because he made it so. This trip to England was the first time she and I had done something alone and I had been relishing our intimacy. But Colin had even managed to be here.

“I won’t be long.”

“Have fun.”