A Proposal to Die For (21 page)

Jake lifted a hand. ‘I didn't say that I am actually accepting money. I only observed I could take it and be rich. But I am not. You do have a temper. Were you in Silas Norwhich's house the night he died? Did you argue with him and push him? Or did he just back away from your grabbing hands and fall on the hearth rim by mistake? Was it really an accident?'

The young man laughed shortly. ‘Oh, he backed away from me all right. But when I left him, he was still alive. I do not know how he died. I am not one bit sorry for it, but I do not know how, and I was certainly not responsible for it.'

Jake smiled. ‘I am glad to hear it. Now I want to know what information you do have for me. Or was your threat against me all I am going to get in exchange for my long walk out here?'

‘You sniff out people's private affairs. You deserve some hardship for it.' The young man raked back his hair. ‘I can only tell you it is better to forget about it.'

Alkmene said, ‘Others have said that too. But nobody has given us any good reason so far.' She hesitated a moment, then she said, ‘Silas Norwhich was a deluded man. He made mistakes, not just in the past when he came here to convince his brother's wife to set him free, but also when he took on Evelyn Steinbeck as his heiress. He did not know she was a fake.'

Jake stared at her as if he could not believe she was just telling this to somebody. But Alkmene continued, ‘I assume I am telling you nothing new in revealing she was a fake. That you already knew. But it might be new to you that Silas Norwhich earnestly believed her to be his heiress. The one he had sought for years, to set things right.'

‘Not even that is new to me,' the man said with a smile. ‘I heard it from his own lips, but I did not believe him. I believed he had taken her on as an extra insult to my mother.'

Jake shifted his weight. ‘Mary Sullivan?'

The young man nodded. ‘When I read in the papers about Mr Silas Norwhich appearing everywhere with the daughter of his late brother, the heir to it all… I…I know my mother would not have liked me to confront him. She raised me to forget him, to despise the sort of man he was, the class he stood for. Vain privileged people who do anything to preserve their titles and their wealth.'

Alkmene cringed under his assessment, not daring to look at Jake.

The young man said, ‘But I went anyway. I wanted to see him and see for myself how he responded when I told him who I was. I chose a public spot so it would be painful if he tried to assault me. I was not afraid of him, but I wanted the encounter to hurt him, not me. He deserved every embarrassment he could get. It turned out differently. He was indignant, as if I was doing him wrong. Apparently he didn't believe me. So I came to his house to prove it.'

‘With a birth certificate,' Alkmene said.

He nodded. ‘He wanted to keep a copy to have his lawyers verify it. I told him he could not trust his lawyers as they had lied to him all along, producing this fake heiress for him. This Steinbeck woman who was supposedly my mother's daughter born after she had left for America.'

He laughed softly. ‘Oh, they had done a clever job, choosing a girl whose mother had come from England and who was dead. A girl who even looked a little like my mother in her youth. So clever. I told him, warned him. But he did not believe me. He had such confidence in those lawyers.'

‘And then?' Jake prompted.

‘I left him sitting at his desk, with the copy he had wanted. I left him believing in his stupid lies. And the next day he was dead. I read it in the paper.'

Alkmene waited a moment. ‘Your mother? Is she still alive?'

He nodded. ‘After his death I could do no less than inform her of what I had done. How I had sought a confrontation, which she had been so anxious to avoid, for all of those years. She was angry with me of course, but foremost worried that I would be charged with murder if it ever got out who I was. I tried to reassure her that nobody would make the connection. But then you began to appear everywhere. Even here. In Cunningham, which was supposed to be a place nobody knew about, except for the lawyers engaged by the dead man himself.'

He took a deep breath. ‘There is no point in pursuing this. My father, if I can call him that, is dead. So is his brother who drove my mother into despair. I can only be accused of murder if you push this any further. Is that what you wish? Are you protecting this fake heiress by hounding me?'

Jake shook his head. ‘Far from it. We are after the killer and we now know it was not you. You left him alive. It makes sense. You wanted something of him.'

The young man flushed painfully. ‘Is it not just,' he said through gritted teeth, ‘that he would pay something for the hurt done to my mother and me? We have lived in poverty for all of our lives. I have done all kinds of lowly jobs. She laundered for people, cleaned house, but she is getting too old for that. All I wanted was a good old age for her.'

Jake nodded. ‘You might still get it.'

The young man looked puzzled. ‘How come?'

‘Evelyn Steinbeck confessed the truth to us. She will be going back to America, without any form of inheritance. Mr Pemboldt, the lawyer, knows that she was a fake and he will not push for her to stay. You can come forward as the real heir and inherit everything that Mr Silas Norwhich ever owned.'

The young man scoffed. He raised a hand and rubbed his neck. ‘I am not even sure I want that. I have stood face to face with him and he denied my existence to me. He was exactly that vain, presumptuous man I had always believed him to be.'

‘You can think about it,' Jake said. ‘There is no need to decide upon the spot. But I think you should go and show yourself to Mr Pemboldt. He wasn't involved in the disastrous turn the deception took. He honestly wanted to help out, relieve Silas Norwhich's guilt about the past. If you can prove you are indeed Mary Sullivan's son, he will fight for you in court to let you have every penny of the estate that is rightfully yours.'

The young man gasped for air. ‘I had not thought that possible.' He raked a hand through his hair again. ‘Mother might hate me for this. She has raised me to forget about my father and never want a penny of his fortune.'

Alkmene smiled at him. ‘Or she might be grateful when you explain to her what drove you to it. Your love for her, the wish she would be cared for as she gets older. Silas Norwhich wanted to set things straight. He was sorry for the harm he had caused and he spent many years trying to do penance for it. He even died because of it. I think that does mean something.'

The young man hung his head. ‘When I first met him, I was livid with rage. I did not see him clearly and only hated him for denying it all. But when I saw him at his house that night, it was different. He was different. A broken man. He knew he had been lied to, but he still kept saying it could not be true. He was desperate, and it was pitiful to see. I could for the first time in my life believe he might have been sincere in his attempts to set it straight.'

‘See.' Jake nodded. His tone was calm and compassionate. ‘So think about contacting Mr Pemboldt. Not at his offices, for his clerks cannot be trusted. Try him at home. And be very cautious in all that you do. The killer is still at large and might come after you too, if he thinks he can still save the fortune he always wanted to have.'

Alkmene looked at Jake. ‘Fitzroy Walker?'

Jake nodded. ‘Has to be.' He checked his watch. ‘It is too late for us to return to London tonight. We need two hours to get back to the village on foot and… We will have to do it tomorrow.'

He looked at the young man again. ‘Take care.'

He nodded and stepped back. ‘Thank you for coming here. I do not show myself in the village.'

Alkmene frowned at him. ‘You do not… But…how? You were not spying on us at Wallace Thomson's house this morning, and later at the church when I was looking at the family grave of the Sullivans?'

He shook his head. ‘I never go there. I had a lad take the letter into town and leave it on the counter at the inn.'

Alkmene frowned. If he had not been spying on them, then who had?

And why?

Jake had already pulled the basket out of her hand. ‘It's still a long walk back, Lady Alkmene. Let me carry that thing. We'd better think up a plan along the way for how to smoke out Fitzroy Walker. Because I have a feeling he will be harder to get than we thought.'

Chapter Nineteen

Alkmene's feet were positively on fire when they reached the inn again. She asked the innkeeper's wife to bring her a basin with lukewarm water, large enough to put her feet into. Also some sherry and some cheese and cold cuts.

Jake hitched a brow at her. ‘Used to command?'

Alkmene was too tired to mind, or retort. She just dragged herself up the stairs and once the water had come, dipped her feet into it. It was bliss to sit and let the water play around her feet, through her toes, while the sherry warmed her from the inside out and the cheese caressed her palate.

OK, it wasn't French and refined like at home, but with an empty stomach everything tasted sweet.

Sitting with her bed pillow behind her back, she closed her eyes and enjoyed the sense of elation that they were so close to the solution. They had their killer identified and only needed a strategy to smoke him out.

Only, hmmm?

Jake had been right that it might be harder than they thought. After all, they had no proof that Fitzroy Walker had been at the house that night, face to face with Silas Norwhich.

As long as they could not place him there, they had nothing to offer to the police. All the pieces they did have formed an intriguing picture, a motive certainly, but they also needed opportunity.

Maybe Fitzroy Walker had already cleverly bought an alibi for the night, convincing some friends or men from a bar to lie for him that he had been with them.

Maybe he would snub them to their faces, proving them wrong in their assumption it had to have been him. But who else?

Somebody knocked on her door.

‘Yes?' she called, too tired to get up.

Jake came in, carrying her scarf in his hand. ‘This was still in my pocket. I should have returned it to you when we came in.'

She smiled at him a moment. ‘Thank you. Put it on the bed, will you? Thanks also for retrieving it and keeping it safe. It was a present from my father, and he is fussy when I lose things.' She yawned. ‘I feel bushed. I need sleep more than anything else. You have dinner alone, if you want to. I am turning in just as soon as my poor feet have cooled down.'

Jake laughed. ‘You do know that if you stay too long in that water, your pretty little feet will get all wrinkled?'

‘Like that lasts for ever.' She stretched her arms over her head. ‘You can't rile me tonight, Jake. I feel glorious.'

Jake stood, tall, imposing. ‘Strange. You met a man who was done a grave injustice and you feel glorious?'

‘Well, he is about to inherit all of Silas Norwhich's estate. That should make up for something. I suppose if Mary Sullivan still loves pretty things, she will have some now.'

Jake huffed. ‘That is so typical for your kind of people. Thinking money can buy off anything. As if injustice can simply be settled by paying a price into an account.'

He turned to the door. ‘I am glad we are not eating together tonight. I couldn't swallow a bite.'

He slammed the door shut. The bang reverberated through the floor and creaked in the beams overhead.

Alkmene sat stiffly, suddenly sensing the water was getting too cold, her poor feet were freezing and her stomach was warm from sherry but could perhaps have used some more substantial sustenance.

But after what Jake had just yelled at her, she was not going down. She didn't want to see his arrogant face.

Not tonight, maybe not tomorrow either. He was dead set on misconstruing everything she said. Blaming her for the bad feeling that he had over his mother's ordeal. But she had nothing to do with his mother, his father, his past. He should stop making her pay for an injustice that was not her fault.

Despite Alkmene's recent assertion he could not rile her, her happy feeling had vanished completely now, and she felt so tired she could just cry. Whatever they accomplished together, it did not change Jake's views of her. He wanted to hold on to his prejudice.

Perhaps she had to distance herself from him to maintain her dignity. Just look at her – almost shedding tears because he was so unreasonable.

First thing in the morning she had to arrange for a car here in the village, to get back to London on her own.

What on earth did she need Jake Dubois for anyway?

He was just an insufferable cad!

Alkmene awoke with a slight tightness behind her eyes. Usually it was only there if she had stayed out too late partying with Freddie and his friends, drinking too much sherry and playing cards for a pound a point. Losing always made her wake up sour.

But this was not her bedroom, was it?

Opening her eyes, she realized it was the inn where she had spent the night before as well.

It was still dark outside. Sleep had not lasted as long as she would have liked. Reality fell upon her: Jake's harsh assessment of her that had spoiled her happy mood about the day. Her decision to travel back to London alone.

It didn't give her any satisfaction. Their trip here had been such a huge success, they should have congratulated each other on their achievement. Instead Jake had ruined it all with those words. He had some axe to grind about the past, but she refused to be the object of it, all the time.

She sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. It was so quiet still. In London there always seemed to be some kind of bustle, liveliness. Here nothing stirred.

She slipped out of bed and looked out into the village square. The dead oak stood like a silent sentry, its naked branches clawing at the skies.