Page 26 of The Missing Page
“James, darling, what can you be doing down there?” she asked, sounding utterly uninterested in the answer. “Goodness. This room hasn’t changed since I was a baby. Oh, you found Father’s albums. Full marks to you. Say, you don’t happen to have any Seconal, do you? My pill box is empty but I could have sworn I brought enough to last through the weekend. I mentioned it to Anthony and he said you’d be sure to have something.”
Oh he had, had he? James tried not to look deeply annoyed. Sir Anthony might only have been suggesting that James, as a doctor, would have sedatives. But Sir Anthony knew from that disastrous consultation that James sometimes took sedatives during his more troubling episodes.
“No,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t have any on me.” That much was true—he carried a pill box full of his own barbiturates, but they weren’t Seconal. He could probably give her the entire contents of his pill case and not notice the difference; he took those pills so seldom that the odds of his needing them this weekend were vanishingly low. The barbiturates James took were widely regarded as harmless, but he wasn’t going to start handing them out to people who weren’t his patients. “If you need something, I’m sure Sir Anthony could phone the chemist,” he suggested.
For reasons he didn’t quite like to examine, after he gathered up the photographs, he went directly to his bedroom and reassured himself that his own medicine was exactly where he had left it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Leo saw Lilah Marchand at the Plymouth library, he wasn’t exactly surprised. Visiting the library for archived copies of old newspapers was a natural step to take when investigating something that had happened twenty years earlier. He was rather more surprised that nobody else had thought of it. Unless, of course, they already knew that newspapers from August 1927 would contain no useful information about Rose Bellamy’s fate.
He watched Lilah talk to the librarian, but they were speaking too quietly for him to overhear. When the librarian disappeared for a moment, then returned with a large volume which she slid across the desk toward Lilah, he casually approached, his hands in his pockets.
“Miss Marchand,” he said, and watched as, for the briefest moment, she startled, then recovered herself so quickly that he might not have noticed if he hadn’t been in the habit of watching for just such a thing. She had smoothed over her surprise awfully quickly, but that was because she was an actress, he reminded himself, not because she had something dangerous to hide. Everyone in this mess was a civilian, at least. Nobody in James’s cursed family seemed to be spies, high-ranking military officials, members of criminal organizations, government operatives, would-be fascists, or literal Nazis. Just a bunch of hapless amateurs. It ought to feel like a holiday.
“It looks like we’ve had the same idea,” he told her, gallantly unburdening her of the heavy volume that the librarian brought her and simultaneously assuring his own access to whatever material she had deemed worth a trip into Plymouth. A glance at the spine confirmed that it was indeed exactly what he was looking for: a bound volume of the local newspaper dating from August 1927. “Shall we find a table to share?”
“I have a suspicion that you won’t hand that book over to me unless I agree.” Her voice held very little of the warmth it had the previous night. “Were you following me?”
“Honestly, no,” Leo said. “I only thought to get some background information on your aunt’s disappearance.”
“And what’s your interest in all this?”
Before answering, he led the way to a table in a corner of the room where their conversation wouldn’t disturb too many other patrons, and held out a chair for her.
“I’m here because James Sommers sewed me up during the war and I’m not going to forget about it anytime soon. If I can help him out with this mess, then I’ll do it.” This was close enough to the truth that he was in the rare position of hoping he looked sufficiently honest while actually being honest. But Lilah seemed satisfied.
He adjusted the volume so that it sat evenly between them. The musty smell of old newsprint and ink was intense, but not unpleasant. He pulled a small notepad and pencil from his coat pocket and watched as Lilah retrieved the same items from the handbag he had rifled through a few hours earlier.
Leo turned to the evening edition from the second of August. “Bellamy Heiress Missing,” he read aloud, the headline in heavy capitals, the black of its ink only slightly faded by time. “Reward for any information leading to her whereabouts.”
Accompanying the article was a photograph of Rose, then one of Blackthorn. In the following days, there were the usual platitudes from various local eminences as well as Rupert Bellamy and Anthony Marchand. Marchand said all the expected things, but at great length, and Leo had the distinct impression that he enjoyed the attention.
Several times the name Stephen Foster was mentioned as a person the police wished to speak to, but who was unavailable due to being hospitalized for an appendectomy. This Mr. Foster was evidently the vicar’s son, and described as a close friend of the Bellamy family, with the strong hint of a romance between him and Rose Bellamy. This was the second time Leo had run across the name Foster in connection with this case, and he made a note of it.
Then came a handful of wildly contradictory stories about the chauffeur, various pieces of unsubstantiated gossip, and a photograph of a Blackthorn maid who was also missing. Leo squinted at the photograph, but it was impossible to make out anything more than a small and colorless young woman with fair hair. There was also a photograph of all the Blackthorn servants, each of them little more than a gray-toned humanoid shape. It was too blurry for him to decide whether any of the figures could be Madame Fournier or either of the Carrows, the three people currently at Blackthorn who could plausibly have been employed there twenty years earlier.
But beneath the photographs, a caption named the missing maid as Gladys Button. She was described as a young woman with an unfortunate past: she had been arrested for pickpocketing, but instead of being sent to prison, she was given to the custody of the Society for the Reformation of Young Delinquents, where she had received training to go into service. The article went on to say that the society had been founded five years earlier and that Anthony Marchand was on the board of governors.
Leo also noticed what was absent from all the newspaper accounts: a list of guests who had been present at Blackthorn. Apart from Sir Anthony, Rupert Bellamy, and Mr. Trevelyan, nobody was mentioned by name. He wondered if Martha had been telling James the truth when she said that nobody else had been present that day.
“When do you suppose this photograph was taken?” Lilah asked, indicating the photograph of the Blackthorn servants that accompanied the newspaper article.
The group of servants was posed outside Blackthorn, in a part of the garden Leo recognized from that morning. The low-lying branches of a fruit were visible, all heavy with flowers. “It’s spring,” Leo said, touching the blossoms in the photographs. “Or early summer, maybe. But it could have been taken the previous year. There might not have been a more recent photograph. Why does it matter?”
“Why are you really here?” Lilah retorted. “And don’t tell me that James is keen on inheriting Blackthorn. I can’t imagine anybody is, other than Martha. I also can’t imagine that James is mean-spirited enough to try to do Martha out of a home.”
And wasn’t that a curious thing to say. It was true that Blackthorn would need to have a boatload of money sunk into it in order to make it comfortable, and Leo didn’t know whether the five thousand pounds in Rupert Bellamy’s estate would allow for that sort of expense after death duties were paid.
“It isn’t only the house that stands to be won,” Leo pointed out. “There’s also the money. Besides, you evidently want it at least a little, unless you research old newspapers for fun.”
“This is my family history.” There was a defensive edge to her words that probably only came through because she was annoyed with him. Why, he wondered again, had Lilah traveled all the way from London?
“It’s James’s family history as well. He hasn’t any other family, you know. And after your aunt disappeared, he was never invited back to Blackthorn. It sounds like nobody ever made an effort to even see him.”
Lilah pressed her lips together. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why not?”
