A Photographic Death (12 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

J
ANE AND
I slept in again the next morning. I finally stirred in the king-sized bed and moved gingerly to look at the travel clock, then snapped my eyes shut. My neck and shoulders screamed when I moved, my throat hurt when I tried to swallow. My relief at being spared to sell books another day had been overcome by a letdown close to despair. Why couldn’t it have been Caitlin behind the mask? I had hoped for so much and learned so little. For all I knew, Will’s Boy could have seen our flyer and e-mail and simply decided to have some fun.

Some fun?
That was ludicrous. He had known who I was, why I was there, and was somehow invested in it. I tried to recreate our conversation. Something about why I had come back. There was nothing on the poster that indicated, in our search to reunite with relatives, that we had ever been in Stratford before. He had used the name Fitzhugh. I had the sense, supported by very little, that he had been angry with Caitlin. Had he known her, had she treated him badly? But he also seemed angry when I insulted Priscilla Waters.

Perhaps he was just an angry young man.

“How do you feel?” The bed jiggled as Jane sat up.

“Ugh. I won’t be walking out to anyone’s house today.”

“First thing, we’re going to the police station like Constable Bradford said. What time do you think Sampson gets there?”

“Wednesday he came in around nine.”

“So we have time for a real breakfast?”

“Bring it on.”

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on duty at the desk when we came in, polite, but without the warmth of Roderick Bradford. The lights on the desktop tree were still blinking out of sync, and I could hear laughter from an interior room. I wondered if they shut the station down for Christmas.

After several minutes DCI Sampson appeared and showed us into what must have been an interrogation room. It was plain with pale green walls, an oak table and chairs. The only wall decoration was an evacuation plan.

When we were sitting facing him, he looked at me as if I were a carton of milk left out all night. “So you had a spot of bother last night.”

I rubbed my throat. “I thought you said you only had purse snatchings here,” I croaked furiously.

“He tried to kill her!” Jane burst in, indignant, as if he were a salesman trying a bait-and-switch maneuver. “What kind of a place is this, anyway?”

His gray eyes flickered over her face, unperturbed. “One of the safest villages in England. Roddy tells me it had to do with those flyers you’ve been plastering all over.”

That’s right, blame the victim.

I shrugged and was sorry as pain rippled through my shoulders.

“Roddy said your assailant addressed you by name.”

“He called me by my husband’s name. And Caitlin’s. It wasn’t on the flyer.”

Sampson tapped his pen on the table as if he were preparing it to write. “Tell me exactly what he said.”

I tried to remember. “It was all so fast, and not what I was expecting. He was wearing that Shakespeare mask, and I had to strain to hear.” I couldn’t bear to tell Sampson of my hope that it was Caitlin herself. “He said something about being surprised that I came back. He asked me what I knew. Oh, I mentioned Priscilla Waters and he didn’t like that. Then I asked about Caitlin again and he got angry. That’s when he got behind me and started choking me. I was trying to fight him off when Jane came.”

He nodded. “Was he a large man?”

“Taller than me, but not six feet, thin but a muscular build. With the hoodie and the mask, I couldn’t even see his hair color.”

“Was he wearing gloves?”

“He must have been. It was cold.”

Sampson sighed. “Describe the mask again.” He was using the pen now, making notes on a lined pad.

“Well, it was obviously Shakespeare. It had that domed bald forehead and hair over his ears, a narrow mustache and white collar.”

“Rubber?”

“Papier-mâché. It cracked when I banged against it.” I thought of something. “It reminded me of those figures on the street who pretend to be statues. We saw one of Shakespeare yesterday. But I guess the shops sell a lot of those masks.”

“Not so many. Considered in bad taste. Not like the States.”

I thought of the masks I’d seen around Halloween, every image from Richard Nixon to Bernie Madoff, and decided not to defend my native land.

“You said the mask cracked?”

“Probably around the nose or chin. It really made him angry. Angrier. The other thing I told Constable Bradford was about his voice. It was so high-pitched, it was unusual.”

“But a man’s.”

“I think so. His body felt like a man’s. The way he attacked me, that kind of fury. Like someone outside a bar who thinks he’s been insulted. I’m not even sure it was something planned. When he e-mailed me it was more like a game.”

He jerked back, startled. “He contacted you over the Internet?”

Evidently Constable Bradford had forgotten to tell him that part.

I explained about the treasure hunt and the clues. “The man at the antique instruments seemed to know who he was.”

“You have the e-mail address he used?”

I reached in my bag and handed the address I had copied out.

For a moment DCI Sampson looked excited. Then he said, “Probably bounced it off somewhere else, making it untraceable. But we’ll check it.”

“But the man at the instrument booth seemed to know him.” Why not just cut to the chase?

“Roddy interviewed George last night. Your friend was already wearing his mask.”

“Is my mom still in danger?” Jane interrupted.

“I don’t know.” DCI Sampson looked at me directly. “Make sure you stay close to other people until we figure this out. Don’t go wandering off by yourself. If he contacts you again, call me right away. Something else.”

I thought he had another safeguard in mind, but he said, “Why did you mention Priscilla Waters?”

“Oh.” Jane and I looked at each other, realizing we hadn’t yet had a chance to tell him about that connection. I reached into my bag and took out the manila envelope. Pulling out my photo and the newspaper photocopy, I laid them on the table facing him.

He read the news stories carefully. “Where did you get that photograph?”

“I took it. The day my daughter disappeared.”

“And you believe them to be the same person.”

“It is!” Jane answered before I could. “That’s the woman who told me to tell my ‘mum’ that Caitlin had fallen into the river. She put her in that stroller when I was getting the flower for her.”

“We
think
she put Caitlin in the stroller.” I hated to correct Jane, but I didn’t want him to think it was something Jane had seen.

“Did you mention that to your assailant?”

“No.” In the cold light of the interrogation room, I was embarrassed to tell him I had said that Priscilla had gotten what she deserved.

He stood up. “Thank you. We’ll take it from here.”

That was it?

Chapter Twenty-Four

F
ROM THE POLICE
station we went back to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, this time to look at playbills.

“This could be tedious,” I warned, as we sat at a table waiting for the material. “Maybe you’d like to do something else. I hear Anne Hathaway’s Cottage is worth a visit.”

Jane laughed. “Are you kidding? I’m not letting you out of my sight!”

“I don’t think anything else will happen.”

“Mom, he tried to
kill
you. If I hadn’t been trying to catch up and seen you go in, you wouldn’t be here. I’d be trying to have you—what’s the word for when they send the bodies home?”

“Repatriated. And we didn’t even buy travel insurance to cover it. Dad would be furious.”

“It’s not funny,” she protested. “Imagine if we had come over here to look for Caitlin and you’d been killed instead.”

When I saw how upset she still was, I reached over and pressed her hand. Even when she was a little girl, Jane rarely cried. She would get angry instead and stamp her foot, her cheeks flaming, eyes squinched in fury. On the occasions when crying was her only option, she would open her mouth and howl. She wasn’t near tears now, but her world had been shaken.

“It was the last thing I was expecting,” I admitted. “All those quotes from plays seemed so . . . good-natured.”

“I don’t get it. I don’t get why he’d want to attack you. It makes no sense.”

It was a question I had no answer for.

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Waters’s name listed in several productions in the early 1990s though she never had large roles. She was usually cast as a lady-in-waiting or someone’s mother. We made a long list of everyone who had acted in the plays with her. There seemed to be about forty or fifty actors in the company. I thought about listing the production staff as well, but that was Plan B. If none of the actors was still with the company, we could go back and try to find support staff.

The theater gods were with us. A number of the earlier company remained, and two of the women were in tonight’s production of
King Lear
.

“Have you ever seen it?” I asked Jane.

“Are you kidding?”

“Maybe we can still get tickets. We could talk to those actresses afterward.”

“Actors, Mom. They call themselves actors now. We don’t have to see the play to talk to them.”

“I know, but it would be fun. Think how impressed your friends will be when you tell them you saw a Shakespearean play right in Stratford-upon-Avon.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “They’ll just die.”

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say about watching a play in the same theater where it was performed four hundred years earlier? Outside, the lanterns shimmering off cobblestone streets and half-timbered houses helped to create the mood. Inside the theater the excitement was as intense as if the Bard himself were to appear for a curtain call.
King Lear
was one of my favorites, and I took it as a good omen that we could see that rather than having to sit through several hours of tomorrow night’s play,
The Merry Wives of Windsor
.

The theater was large, though not as large as the Metropolitan Opera House, with deep-red seats. It had a number of levels like the Met, the tiers protected by wooden spindles. It was not a stretch to imagine the theater looking this way several hundred years ago.

Marian Baycroft, who played Regan, was a black-haired woman with artificially rosy cheeks and a way of giving her head a sarcastic toss. She must have started early with the company, I decided; she looked no older than I was. I hoped she was as friendly as everyone else we’d met. Scratch that; everyone but Will’s Boy and DCI Sampson, although the detective wished us no harm. Maybe he was just tired of Americans.

Jane settled in the velvet seat beside me and watched the play thoughtfully. When she was growing up, Colin and I despaired of her resistance to anything not factual. On one dig, when Colin tried to entertain us by reading C.S. Lewis aloud in the evenings, Jane had refused to be engaged. “They can’t go through a closet to another country,” she declared. “What about customs? Why do they have to go to Narnia anyway? Why can’t they stay home and do stuff?”

Colin tried to explain the concept of fantasy, but Jane would have none of it. Being Colin, he kept on reading over her protests until she was drawn into the story.

Thinking about it now, I wondered if it had been related to her own protests against having to travel to so many unfamiliar places while her friends stayed home and built sturdy lives.

My other children had never taken to reading either, not with my passion for books. Hannah loved stories about animals, and was interested in the Sweet Valley High series when it was passed around her classroom. Jason, close to dyslexia, had avoided books altogether. He loved action movies, as violent as possible, and computer games. Would Caitlin have been the child who loved literature, the one to whom I could have introduced the “Shoe” books of Noel Streatfeild and the fantasies of Ray Bradbury? Would
she
have been the one always curled up with a book?

Dangerous thinking.
I could not allow myself to give in to imagining a child who filled the gaps left by the others. It was what Hannah had been frightened would happen. My children were my children and I loved them for exactly who they were. Not perfect, but I had never tried to change them into something else.

I shook off my fantasies about Caitlin and watched Jane. The story was intense and her eyes widened in all the right places. No princesses or talking lions here.

I was the restless one. I could not get my sore body comfortable in the seat, and watching the play seemed unbearable. All I could think was,
This is going to end badly
, without distinguishing between the tragedy that would overtake Lear and what would happen to us. Only last night I had been coaxed into an alley and unexpectedly attacked. He had stopped only when Jane appeared and forced him to run off. Was he somewhere nearby waiting to finish what he had started? Did he think I knew a secret he didn’t want anyone else to find out? Perhaps he might even attack Jane to get back at me.

Unable to relax in my seat, tense and jumpy at every movement in the aisle, I fantasized that we were safely on a plane home.

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I been dozing?—as the overhead lights flashed on and the applause died away.
Intermission.
People around us were rising from their seats and clogging the aisles.

“Let’s go,” Jane urged.

“Where?”

“We can get something to drink.”

Was it safe? But maybe it wasn’t safe sitting alone in our seats either. I got up and followed Jane. Surely in this crush of bodies nothing could happen.

Over a glass of Pinot Grigio, I asked, “Did you tell Dad about the attack on me?”

Jane looked at me for a minute. “No.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Thank you.”

“Why? Why wouldn’t you want him to know?”

Why wouldn’t I? I decided it was because he would either be too worried, especially about Jane, or his attitude would be,
What do you expect? Kick a hornet’s nest and you’ll get stung
. But there was more to it. What to do about Caitlin had put us on opposing teams. He might see the attack as an advantage for his side. And if I had died? I saw him in a dark suit, hugging the children to comfort them, feeling as if life had dealt him one more blow.

He would also hate being identified as the man whose wife had been murdered in Shakespeare’s picturesque town. I knew he would mourn my dying so young, perhaps agonize over what might have been in our future. But I was a book he had already read. I couldn’t make him break down and throw himself on the flames.

I had to be careful not to demonize Colin though. He and Hannah had a right to their reservations.

“How are we going to approach this actress?” Jane said. “Just walk up to her?”

“I don’t know. Go backstage and see if she’ll talk to us, I guess. Why wouldn’t she?”

“Maybe we could send her a note asking to have a drink with us. Say that we’re New York theater lovers. Invite her back to the hotel.”

“You think she’d come?”

“For a free drink and admiration? You don’t know theater people, Mom.”

Shrugging, I pulled out the notebook I always carried to keep book information in, removed a page, and waited for Jane to dictate.

She thought. “Okay. ‘Dear Ms. Baycroft.’ ” She paused. “Uh— ‘We’re visiting from New York and a friend suggested we get in touch with you. We’d be pleased if you would join us for a drink at the White Swan after the performance, where we are staying. Sincerely, Jane Fitzhugh and Delhi Laine.’ She’ll be impressed that we’re staying there. Celia Banks was.”

“
I’m
impressed that we’re staying there. But—‘a friend’?”

“Well . . . we don’t want to frighten her.”

“Fine. You handle it.”

“Lighten up, Mom. It’s going to be fine.” Jane took the paper, folded it, and approached an usher with a smile that could charm the stripes off his dress pants.

“He’s going to take it to her right now,” she reported.

“Let’s hope she shows.” I still thought that ambushing her at the stage door was the better plan.