‘Don’t,’ said Roderick, shaking his head.
‘Royal sentence indeed,’ said Jane. ‘The boy is a third cousin of the king’s. It’s not as if he was in the direct succession. We’re all probably royal if those are the requirements.’
‘Well that’s the newspapers for you,’ said Roderick, harking back to his favourite theme. ‘They will exaggerate. That’s how they’ve sold so many papers off the back of this case. I should be on some sort of percentage commission.’
‘Nevertheless,’ she said. ‘Oh look, there’s a rather good picture of him here too. That’s unusual. Not a bad-looking boy I suppose, if you see him in the right light, although I’ve never been a fan of that Hanoverian jawline. None of them has a chin, it seems to me.’
‘He was on trial for the murder of a police officer, Jane,’ said Bentley. ‘Not for the aesthetic charm of his appearance.’
‘It’s sad, though, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘He’s only the same age as Gareth. To have the rest of your life…’ She looked at her husband who was giving nothing away. ‘Well whatever happens to him, whatever the sentence, it’s unfortunate. I can’t imagine how his mother must feel, how I would feel if our son was in such a situation. I know it’s a terrible cliché but it’s impossible not to blame the parents in such a case, isn’t it? They must have set him a dreadful example.’
‘Our son would never find himself in such difficulties,’ insisted Roderick. ‘But it doesn’t matter who the defendant is, the law is the law. Whether you’re a third cousin of the king’s or the youngest and most illegitimate son of a fish trader from Cockfosters. The law is the law,’ he repeated.
Jane nodded and threw the paper back on the bed. ‘I’ll read it in the car,’ she said. ‘I better go and have my bath. And you can’t be the most illegitimate,’ she added for she was a stickler for grammar. ‘There are no superlatives. One is either a bastard or one is not.’
Roderick shrugged it off and continued to watch her as she left the room although he stayed seated until he heard her footsteps padding up the stairs to the bathroom on the third floor. Only then did he walk across to the bed and—against his better judgement—pick up the newspaper and look at it. It wasn’t the article he wanted to read, there was nothing that the reporters could tell him about this case that he didn’t already know; rather, he wanted to see the picture.
For almost six months now that young man had sat across from him in the dock, his expression changing from arrogant dismissal at the start to terrified anguish at the end and running the gamut of the emotional spectrum in the time in between. Caught by a photographer for the paper, however, being bundled into a Black Maria handcuffed to a middle-aged policeman, he looked startled, as if he couldn’t believe that this whole drama was actually drawing to a close and the curtain was about to descend on what, until now, he had viewed as little more than a disagreeable diversion. That he had been found guilty of murder and that he would either be spending the rest of his life in prison or be put to death. He appeared younger than his twenty-three years, almost like a little boy caught doing something he shouldn’t; he looked terrified.
Roderick threw the paper on the bed in exasperation at his own lack of judgement in looking at it in the first place.
‘One rule for all,’ he muttered fiercely between his teeth. ‘Paupers or kings. One rule for all.’
5
MARGARET RICHMOND WENT INTO the kitchen to check on the servants. A lot of things had changed during the nearly thirty years she had worked for the Montignacs but this was one of the rare occasions now when there was a full complement of staff on hand, although most had been hired especially for the day. When Andrew, Stella and Owen had been children there had been a full-time staff employed at Leyville: a butler, two footmen, a gardener, a cook, an upstairs girl, a downstairs girl and an in-between. And of course Margaret herself who looked after the children and supervised the girls. She had always rubbed along quite well with the butler, who managed the gardener, and the footmen, who came and went like the seasons.
But times had changed. After Ann Montignac’s death six years earlier, Peter had let half of them go.
‘We don’t need all these people hovering around,’ he had insisted. ‘I can look after myself, and Stella and Owen aren’t children any more either. Let them take care of themselves for a change. You can stop nannying them too, Margaret.’
Now there was just a part-time cook, one girl and no butler or footmen at all, and a couple of local girls who came in to clean and dust every day. Her own role was unspecified. She lived in hope that either Stella or Owen would marry and stay on at Leyville as she would then be the natural choice for nanny when the time came for them to have children. After all, she reasoned, she had only just turned sixty and had a lot left to offer yet. But there didn’t seem to be any sign of that happening. Stella had been seeing Raymond Davis for over a year and they had declared an engagement a few months earlier but there seemed no sign of them allowing that engagement to develop into a marriage. She suspected it would be one of those long-drawn-out affairs, beloved by the young these days, ending not in the purchase of a hat but in a separation. While Owen’s private life, of course, was a complete mystery to her. And so she just ran the household as best she could in the meantime. For the funeral she had hired a group of girls and young men from the local village and both Stella and Owen had seemed content for her to do so.
‘You might want to check on the guests,’ she stated firmly as she saw three of her charges standing in a corner of the kitchen, chatting to each other and smoking cigarettes. ‘Rather than standing around in here.’ They stared at her and frowned, slowly putting their cigarettes out, and walked back out towards the groups of mourners. Margaret was relieved. The last thing she wanted was an argument. Not on a day like this. But girls had to be watched, there were no two ways about that. She’d taken her eyes off one once and look at all the trouble that had caused.
She stepped out into the hallway again and considered joining the group in the drawing room but knew that she would only feel out of place among the gentry. She felt misplaced, the unwelcome drawing room to her left, the hostile kitchen to her right, and so stood perfectly still instead, wringing her hands nervously.
She tried not to think of Peter Montignac because if she did she would only think of Ann, who had not just been her employer but had been her best friend as well, and if she thought of Ann she would think of Andrew, who she had loved as if he was her own. There was too much death there, she thought, and she didn’t want their pictures in her mind any more. To summon them up would only produce tears and she wanted no more tears until the guests had left. Instead she walked upstairs and paused outside the door of Owen’s room, leaning closer in to hear whether he was inside or not. She had seen him come through the front door a little earlier but he had gone straight upstairs, taking the steps two at a time as he went, and no one had laid eyes on him since. She tapped lightly on his door.
‘Owen,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Owen, are you in there?’
There was no answer.
‘Owen? Are you all right?’