Ruth touched her hand. ‘I know it’s hard for you to accept she’s gone, but a post-mortem isn’t going to help you.’
‘I get all her shares,’ said Helen pointedly. ‘Sweetman told me.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Letitia will.’
‘Oh, yes, she’ll be bloody furious.’ Ruth laughed. ‘She might agree to a post-mortem but it’ll be because she thinks you had something to do with it.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, crazy, isn’t it? We’re all crazy.’
‘I’m not.’
‘That’s because you grew up away from all of it. Small mercies, I suppose.’
‘There’s something else I need to talk to you about.’ Digging into her rucksack, Helen pulled out the roll of chamois leather and unwrapped it. Ruth blanched.
‘This knife is the twin of the one they say Fay used to kill my mother. It disappeared around the time my mother was murdered. So did the murder weapon. I don’t think Fay did it, so perhaps you’d like to explain what this was doing in your grandfather clock, and where you took it from?’
Ruth sat still as a statue with her hands in her lap. Helen could have told her there were two more knives like this one, but she wanted to see her sweat.
Finally Ruth said, ‘You really don’t like me very much, do you? Think me capable of the most terrible things.’
‘Isn’t everyone? Capable, I mean.’
‘I suppose so, but why you think I did it when everyone knows there are three more knives like this one, I don’t understand.’
‘Who’s “everyone”?’
‘Me, Letitia, Aggie. Your mum’s friends. Loads of people. The story goes that those paper knives belonged to a Russian tsar. It’s not something you forget. Everyone also knows your uncle doesn’t keep the best company, and since he has two of the knives, well …’
‘Where did you get it? Did you take it from my mother’s house after she died?’
Ruth sent her a speculative look. ‘If I tell you, will you promise me not to jump to conclusions? I didn’t take it from your mother’s house. I found it at Ransome’s, tucked away in the corner of the packaging hall behind some old ledgers.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘I told you not to jump to conclusions,’ Ruth said when she saw Helen’s expression. ‘It could be that your mother dropped her own knife there by mistake, although why she should bring it to work with her I’ve no idea. Then there was Mother. She and Mimi got on well, but they’d recently had a set-to, over what I don’t know. She could easily have taken it for spite. As for Letitia, she was close to your uncle, and when I suspected your mother had used him as a free sperm donor, I thought my sister may have taken revenge for that. That’s why I took the knife. They are my family after all.’ She made a noise halfway between a sneer and a snort. ‘I needn’t have worried about Letitia, though, because she quickly found another man to amuse herself with.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, just one of our shareholders. Some chap named Moody. He was married, and the affair didn’t last long.’
Ruth didn’t notice Helen jump at the name. Moody. Again.
‘What will you do now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Will you tell the police?’
Helen still had DI Whitehouse’s card in her wallet. Call me if you find anything, no matter how insignificant. Except she didn’t have enough pieces of the puzzle. No way was she making a fool of herself in front of the Cream of the Met again. She’d keep digging.
But she didn’t want Ruth to know that. ‘What’s the point? The knife belonged to my mother, and now it’s been returned to me. The rest is in the past.’
Ruth breathed a sigh of relief. When Helen left, they embraced awkwardly. ‘Come and see me some time.’
‘I will.’
She left Ruth in her big empty house, to her aimless life. Her obsession with her childlessness seemed to have pushed everything else to one side, but surely there was more to life than having babies? Things like friendships, travel. A dog maybe. It saddened her that Ruth couldn’t see it.
Back home she dumped her rucksack on her bed and flung herself down on the sofa in the kitchen. The big house was quiet, almost watchful, without even Lee creeping about. It gave her the emotional space to brood over Aggie’s death and her complex, bitter family, which should have pleased her. Instead it was as if the walls moved in on her, squeezing her chest so she couldn’t breathe.
Shaking off the feeling, she fetched her wallet and headed for the market. As soon as she stepped under the metal arch, she was bombarded with noise, colours and materialistic gaiety, and the numbness, which had started to spread inside her, slowly bled away.