Oh God. Not only had this evening failed to bring aunt and nephew closer together, but now the aunt was trying to sabotage his marriage?
‘I don’t think I’m the one who’s not seeing clearly here,’ Lulu snapped back.
‘Oh, no?’ Yvonne strode to the door, but instead of storming out, she slammed it and came back to Lulu and said rapidly, ‘You know Michael said they were digging field drains, at the time Duncan, Maggie and Isla disappeared? That meant there was a digger sitting in the field. Michael always puts the key on the back wheel, and Nick knew that. He also knew that Michael was going to be spending all day tinkering with one of the tractors. The coast was clear.’
Lulu gaped at her. ‘Just what are you suggesting?’
‘How could a sixteen-year-old boy possibly have had anything to do with his family’s disappearance? That was the police thinking. That was everyone’s thinking. There was no way he could have cold-bloodedly killed the three of them and somehow disposed of their bodies.’
Lulu couldn’t believe she was hearing this. ‘Yvonne, no! Nick would never ever –’
‘You know him so much better than me, of course, after your two months of marriage.’ Yvonne held Lulu’s gaze. ‘And you’ve got degrees in psychology. So tell me – is the controlling behaviour Nick is demonstrating a classic sign of a psychopath, or is it not?’
Lulu shook her head. ‘He’s not “controlling”! He’s overprotective, yes, but only because he’s so anxious about me. He bends over backwards to accommodate my every whim in all other ways! I can’t believe you could think he . . . what? Used the digger to –’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘To take their bodies to the drain and tip them in? But whoever was digging the drains would have seen them!’
‘Not if he back-filled that part of the trench. But no, actually, that’s not what I’m suggesting. The police dug up some of the drains and brought in sniffer dogs, and they found nothing. But they didn’t even look at the top field, which had just been ploughed and would have been perfect to dig a hole in. Nice, soft, ploughed soil.’
She was standing again at the door. The white panelled kitchen door with no handle. She needed to get in there. She needed her family to open the door.
‘Mum! Dad! Dennis! John!’
She thumped on the door with the thing in her right hand.
Thump thump thump!
It was heavy and made of metal, the thing in her hand. It had a big, wicked-looking hook on one end.
It was a big crowbar.
The next day, very early in the morning, while Nick was closeted in the study making trades, Lulu set off on a walk in a soft drizzle, striding away from the house up the farm track. The fields here were so lush, such a contrast to the parched land at Braemar Station. The air smelt of damp earth and verdant undergrowth. To her left was grazing land, cattle turning lazily to watch her pass by and, beyond them, sheep and the stark hump of the bare hilltop. To the right was a sea of oats, green tinged with yellow ochre, the surface rippling in places as a little breeze got up.
It was hard to imagine that this rural idyll had ever been part of The Debatable Lands, which must have been like some sort of dystopian, sci-fi nightmare. But it had been real. And it had happened here. Nick’s ancestors, probably, had been caught up in it all.
She walked up the edge of the oats, up a slope to a little knoll covered in beech trees, and sat on the weathered, bone-grey smoothness of a fallen tree under a sheltering beech canopy, looking back down the fields to the trees that screened Sunnyside from view.
Oh God – was this the ‘top field’ Yvonne had spoken about?
She jumped to her feet and ran back down the edge of the field, the breath tearing in and out of her lungs. How could Yvonne think that Nick – Nick – might have murdered his own family? She was his aunt. Surely she should know him better than that?
But she didn’t, of course, because she’d never taken the trouble.
Oh, Nick! The only blood relative he had left didn’t just dislike him, she thought he was some kind of monster.
By the time she got back to Sunnyside, she was sobbing.
The study door came open and Nick was standing there, hair slightly rumpled, eyebrows raised in that gently enquiring way of his, ready to hear all about what was going on with her, ready to provide a sounding board, a shoulder to cry on, an ally against the world who would always be in her corner.
He was so kind, so empathetic.
How could Yvonne not see that?
He strode across the hall and swept her into his arms. ‘What the hell’s happened?’
‘Nothing! Nothing.’
He held her away from him, tipping her chin with one finger and contemplating her gravely, just a hint of a tender smile lifting his lips. ‘Funny sort of nothing.’
‘Yvonne . . . Yvonne said something to me last night, and I can’t believe . . . I can’t believe your own aunt would think something so terrible.’
‘Ah.’ He raised his eyebrows.
‘She said – she suggested that you . . .’
‘Might have killed them?’
And now she was blurting, ‘She suggested you could have used the digger that was standing in the field to . . . to dig a hole and –’
He tightened his arms around her. ‘Shh. Shh. It’s okay. She’s been peddling that little rumour for the past twenty years, but I don’t think anyone seriously believes it.’
‘But why would she do that? She doesn’t actually believe that you hurt them?’