Sins Out of School (29 page)

“Perhaps he couldn't. Perhaps something woke Miriam, and he heard her stir upstairs. I think he would have been afraid to look further, would have left in a hurry. After all, with John dead and unable to talk about the circumstances in which he found the note, it wasn't nearly as damning. We can find out if Miriam woke that night at all, if she—when she feels better.”

“Yes. Meanwhile, the whole thing is terribly nebulous, and both Blake and Vanessa Thompson will deny that any such thing ever happened, that they are any more than colleagues, that she ever dropped a note. How, by the way, do you imagine—and I use the word advisedly—that Blake found out Doyle had the note? Assuming that any of this scenario is based on reality.”

“All right, I admit I'm making an awful lot of bricks with very little straw, but all we have to go on at this point is snippets. The police do that, too, and don't try to tell me they don't. They build up a hypothesis and then go about finding the proof.”

“If you say so. So how did Blake find out? Did our righteous friend Doyle try a spot of blackmail?”

“Not of the usual sort, I think. He was a vicious man, but not a thief. He enjoyed pulling wings off flies, always with the excuse that the fly had sinned and was in need of correction, and of course rendered unable to sin anymore. The metaphor's getting out of hand, they always do, but goodness, Blake is such a large, gaudy fly! I can imagine Doyle's delight at the thought of dewinging him. I think he would have waited a day or two to think things over, and then would have called Blake and told him about the note, delivering a long sermon while he was at it.”

“And you speculate that Blake, unwilling to allow anyone to jeopardize his career with such dangerous information, would have told Doyle he was quite mistaken and that he, Blake, would come to Sherebury and explain. Is that the denouement of your hypothesis?”

“Of course. He would have come, met Doyle somewhere, and given him a large dose of Lanoxin in beer or coffee or whatever Doyle would drink. I think I remember reading in some book somewhere that it has almost no taste, even in a heavy concentration. Then he would have taken him home when he began to feel ill. Taken him home and watched him die, and then stabbed him to make it look, dear heaven, as if Amanda—Blake's daughter Amanda—was the killer.”

“How would Blake have known about the Lanoxin?”

“Oh. I don't know. Wait, yes, I do. Suppose Doyle carried the tablets with him, and Vanessa had seen him take one?”

“Thin, but I'll allow it for now. However, and I hate to do this, my dear, but there is one unanswerable flaw in your reasoning.”

“There is not! A hole here and there, maybe, but logically—”

“You have forgotten that Blake has, most unfortunately, the perfect alibi.”

I just stared at him.

“On the evening that you suppose Blake was meeting with Doyle, feeding him Lanoxin, waiting for him to become ill, and all the rest of it, he was in fact sitting in Parliament and giving a little speech outside, watched by television cameras, Big Ben, and dear only knows how many viewers across the country, including, I'll remind you, me.”

I sat back, defeated. It had all hung together so well. All I'd needed, I'd thought, was to check a few details with Amanda, maybe tomorrow if she was fully conscious by then, and then we could go to Derek with the whole story and he could set the machinery in motion, talk to people, gather evidence, build a case.

But I'd forgotten the alibi. The one small detail that knocked the whole theory into a cocked hat.

“I
wanted
it to be him,” I said, half to myself.

“I don't care much for the gentleman myself, but we can't always convict people we dislike. And there's one other objection, too, now that I think of it. Your theory offers no explanation for Gillian's accident.”

“It could have been an accident,” I muttered, not believing it. We sat in dispirited silence for the few minutes that remained before the train reached Sherebury.

It had been a long and wearying day. I put the three suitcases in the spare bedroom to await the time when their owners would need them, and then put my feet up until hunger drove me to the kitchen. Scrambled eggs made a good enough supper. “It isn't the end of the world, you know, Dorothy,” said Alan as he helped me with the dishes. “These things happen. We just have to start over.”

“Not tonight, we don't. My imagination, or deductive facility, or whatever you want to call it, has shut down for the day.”

We watched the late news. Anthony Blake, thank heaven, wasn't featured, or I think I would have thrown something through the screen. I yawned through it all but came awake for the weather, if only because someone was asleep at the switch and was still showing the map of Scotland in the background while the announcer was talking about the Channel Islands. Then Alan and I went up to bed, and I fell asleep as if I'd been hit over the head. Emotional exhaustion will do that to me.

I woke up about four, though, with a confused dream still racing through my head. It was something about islands in Scotland, and the Scottish Parliament, and Abou Ben Adhem (“May his tribe increase”). There was a sense of urgency about it, somehow, though my fuddled night mind couldn't untangle the images. But it took me a long time to get back to sleep, and then my dreams were the frustration ones, trying to run with heavy legs, trying to find my way out of an endless maze, thinking I had at last found the door only to find it the door to yet another room, yet another corridor.

It wasn't until morning, as I was sipping my third cup of coffee, that my mind suddenly focused. “Alan!” I said sharply, interrupting him as he was reading me an item about Prince Charles.

“Mmm?”

“Alan, when they do the weather, you know those maps? With the little clouds and sun and thunderbolts and all that?”

“On television, you mean?”

“Yes, of course.” I was three pages ahead of him and irrationally impatient for him to catch up. “Now the weatherman isn't really standing in front of those maps, is he? Like last night, when they had the wrong one behind him for a while?”

“No, as I understand it he's in front of a blank blue wall, and something called chroma key can combine his image with an image of the map. It's all done electronically. He can point to the right places on the wall because he's looking at a monitor that's out of camera range.”

“Right. Now, back home, they used to show reporters standing in front of the White House when they were reporting on a story about the president. Only everyone knew that they probably weren't really in front of the White House. It was done the same way, two images combined electronically. Sometimes they'd get the point of view a little bit wrong, too, so it looked like the reporter was standing too high, or too low, or just somehow not quite right.”

“Yes,” he said patiently.

“So how do we know, when Anthony Blake was shown on TV standing in front of the clock tower, that he was really in front of the clock tower? Couldn't he have been someplace else entirely?”

“I suppose so, but I remember that the time on the clock was about right. And if he was making a speech
anywhere
at that time, a little after eleven, he wasn't in Sherebury killing John Doyle.”

“He could have been if the speech was on tape.”

“How would that work?”

“Frankly, I haven't the slightest idea, but I know someone who might.”

“Gillian?”

“Gillian. And wait a minute! We know something is odd about one of those broadcasts, because we saw Blake on TV Tuesday night, apparently in London, when Vanessa said he was in Edinburgh. Now how do you explain that?”

“To tell the truth, I can't. But why wouldn't the TV chaps be there when Blake was making a speech? They'd know, surely, wouldn't they?”

I sighed and looked out the window. The weather had deteriorated even further. It was one of those days when the forecast might include everything: rain, sleet, freezing rain, snow, wind … every sort of nastiness that winter can dole out. A trip back to London was the last thing I wanted, but I had to talk to Gillian. I was quite sure she would provide the answers we needed.

Alan wasn't enthusiastic. “Dorothy, my love, this is all the purest speculation. You have no proof—”

“And I never will have, will I, until I can work out a way it could have been done. Anyway, it isn't entirely speculation. There's the note. It's real enough, and it has to be explained somehow.”

“There must be a dozen ways to explain that note.”

“Give me one, just one that hangs together as well as mine.”

“I haven't thought it out thoroughly, but the simplest explanation is often the best. Amanda had that note. Very well, the person who wrote it sent it to her.”

“Right. If you can make that idea square with the handwriting on that note, and its content, and Amanda's relationship with her family, I'll buy it. Meanwhile, I'm going to London to talk to Gillian.”

Alan grinned and threw up his hands. “There's no arguing with a stubborn woman. Go with my blessing. If you don't mind, I intend to sit at home in front of a nice warm computer. Just try not to get into trouble.”

“
Moi
?” I said, tossing an imaginary mane of golden curls to one side.

I wasn't in such a bright and breezy mood when I got to the hospital. I had been struck by a fit of economy and had taken the Underground most of the way, hoping to catch a taxi for the short ride from the station to the hospital.

The only trouble was, there weren't any taxis. I have been told that, the minute it starts to rain in New York, all the cabs disappear, as if the pavement has swallowed them up. Now if that happened in London, given the English climate, the cab companies would go out of business. But either that particular neighborhood was just short of taxis that day, or the drivers decided that freezing rain was just too much, or
something
, because there wasn't a taxi in sight and I had to walk. I had thought it a short distance. Not on foot, it wasn't.

I reached the hospital wet and cold. The wind had blown me along for the last block or two, and my umbrella, which had been almost useless anyway, had finally blown inside out. My shoes squished. The first thing I did was to find a ladies' room and try to dry myself off. I think I got more shreds of paper towel on me than water off, but my feet and shoes benefited a little. I didn't squish quite so badly as I marched down a corridor to Gillian's ward.

Then I thanked my lucky stars for that wind that had blown me along, for Gillian was in a wheelchair, getting ready to leave. Another minute or two and I might have been too late.

“You must be feeling better,” was my greeting. “I can't believe they're letting you go home so soon.”

“The damage has worked out to an arm broken in two places, a broken ankle, and assorted cuts and bruises. I feel bloody awful, but I'm well enough to get out of this place,” she said sourly.

“How are Amanda and Miriam?”

“Mandy's conscious and making sense most of the time. I saw her this morning. God, I felt guilty! She looks like hell and it's my fault, it must be my fault, I drive like a bat out of hell … anyway. No point in rehashing all that. Miriam's beginning to open her eyes and babble a bit. Not what you could call conscious, but they think perhaps she's going to be all right, given time.”

I let out my breath, just realizing I'd been holding it. “That's a mercy.”

“I suppose. That poor kid …”

“Gillian, I don't think any of this is your fault, so stop beating yourself. Now, are you going to be able to manage? You're going home, I presume?”

“Not much point in going anywhere else now the whole world knows where I am, is there? I'll be okay. My flat's only up one flight, and the visiting nurse will come for a while. I can walk on crutches; they're only taking me down in the chair because of hospital rules.”

“You're going home with friends?”

“Taxi. I had to prove to these cretins that I could get home under my own steam, or they wouldn't let me leave.”

“Then let me go with you. I want to talk to you anyway, and the cab's on me. I just hope they've sent for a radio-dispatched one. There aren't any out on the streets, believe me.”

She looked at me, drenched and disheveled, and said, “I believe you.”

“Right. Then I'll meet you at the front door in five minutes. I want to say hello to Amanda.”

Amanda was awake and looking, as Gillian had said, pretty terrible. She was obviously in a good deal of pain, but seemed reasonably alert. I hated to have to question her, but there were answers I needed.

“Hi, Amanda, nice to see you looking better.”

“You were here before?”

“A couple of times, but you were pretty well out of it. I just wanted to let you know you have a bathrobe here when you're able to get out of bed and want it. Gillian had me retrieve it from your luggage—and I have the rest of that at home, so it's yours any time. There was a note in the pocket of the robe, and I didn't know if it was important, so I saved it.”

I pulled it out of my purse and handed it to her.

“Oh, that. Yes, that was in John's pocket when I—found him. I don't know what it is. I suppose I should have given it to the police, but I forgot.”

Good Lord deliver us, as the Litany says. The woman's naivete was amazing, but bless her, she'd confirmed one part of my theory.

“Shall I do that for you, then?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, please.” She plucked at her bedclothes for a moment. “Did you know Miriam's doing better? They won't let me see her, though. Have you seen her? How is she? I wish they'd let me see her.”

“No, I haven't seen her, but Gillian says they think she's going to be all right. Gillian's going home, did you know?”