A smile would have triggered it. Even a weak and watery one would have justified a lunge towards her. He’d have sunk to his knees and seized her hands. He’d have thrown away his uncertainty, his reserve, and blurted that this time they would travel with a marriage license and to hell with everything else.
She looked back at him stonily, unable to respond to his emotion.
Joe controlled his desperation and said more soberly, “We’ve no worthy part to play here, Dorcas, you and I.”
At last a smile but the comment that accompanied it was barbed. “Part? I thought you were playing Major Domo perfectly, Joe. How ever would we manage without you?”
Disgust with himself and anger with Dorcas provoked a brusque response. “Time, perhaps, to let you find out!” He began to walk to the door.
A stifled gasp made him look back. The familiar face was wearing an unfamiliar expression—saddened and disbelieving. But it was the expression of a girl who’s just been given the news that her favourite dog has to be put down, Joe judged, distressing enough, but hardly the emotion of a girl whose lover is leaving.
They stared at each other in silence for an uncomfortable moment as seven years of intimacy crumbled between them. Joe resisted the urge to stride back and seize her in a comforting hug. This girl, suddenly a stranger, might well have screamed for help. He began to speak to her urgently, confidingly, appealing to a quality he knew she still possessed: her enquiring intelligence.
“Listen Dorcas! You’ve always been my equal in ‘sleuthing’ as you call it. Join me in one last combined effort will you? Working together, we can flush out the person really responsible for Lavinia’s death. You do want to know, don’t you? You have to know!” He waited for her reluctant nod before he continued. “It will involve trickery, lies, floods of tears and possibly fisticuffs. How about it? What do you say?”
“Not sure about the tears, but all the rest I can manage,” she said dubiously. “And I’ll do anything I can to clear James’s name. I told you—that’s why I’ve come back here to this terrible place. I would much rather have worked it out for myself without benefit of your conjuring tricks but … Oh, go on, Joe.”
Joe went on, eager but uncertain, his plan evolving as he talked. It sounded ridiculous to his ears but Dorcas began suddenly to smile and the smile widened. “Same old Joe!” she said. “Still the Fusilier! If in doubt stage a controlled explosion!”
Finally: “It’ll never work. And, if it does, you’ll be thrown out of whatever clubs you’re still a member of. You’ll lose your job and they’ll cut off your buttons with a ceremonial sabre.”
“Lucky if it’s just my buttons,” he said, managing a rueful grin.
CHAPTER 22
All he could do was get on with his job. Finish, point an accusing finger, pose for the camera and leave. He’d had enough. In fact he rather thought he’d talked himself into a solitary dash down into France, where he’d always found a balm for his emotional abrasions. Just one more piece of evidence and he could be reasonably sure he knew who had tricked Lavinia Truelove into walking into her death in the stable.
All was quiet in the telephone room. Sunday lunch time in the outside world. He was surprised there was even an operator on duty.
“A trunk call please, Miss, to a London number … Julia! Oh, I’m so sorry to bother you on a—”
“Joe! At last! Ralph was just wondering where you’d got to. Here he comes. Don’t keep him talking—he was just about to carve the leg of lamb and we’ve got my mother-in-law for lunch.”
There was a clunk as Superintendent Cottingham seized the telephone. “I managed! Not easy—you know what these highfalutin lawyers are like. Upshot is—no surprises. Lavinia Truelove’s last will and testament turns out to have been her first and only will and testament. Drawn up at the time of her marriage, on lines agreed by her father, it has remained gathering dust on a shelf, unaltered since the day she signed it. No attempt was ever made to look at it again. She retained control of what I’ll call her ‘resources’—sounds more modern than ‘marriage settlement.’ ”
“These resources, Ralph? Any indication …?”
“I tried to find out how much we were contemplating. I gave their discreet Mr. Brewer a choice of ‘plentiful/comfortable/adequate.’ He picked ‘plentiful.’ Throughout her married life she spent freely, to the advantage of the Truelove estate, apparently. Nothing we didn’t know in all this. No dramatic changes in her will of the kind we favour, like—all to my lover, Vicenzo, the second footman, or to Pets’ Paradise, or the Communist Party. Nothing of the sort. ‘Everything of which I die possessed’ etcetera goes to husband, James. Full stop.”