‘You’re forgetting I’ve lived with Lucretia’s life story – and with Alraune – ever since Trixie started her thesis,’ said Fran. Clearly he could not be asked about the running away part, but it should be acceptable to ask about Lucretia and about the years with her. Do I believe him, I wonder? More to the point, Do I trust him, because after all, I don’t really know anything about him. I suppose I could phone CHARTH tomorrow and verify that he works for them, but that wouldn’t tell me anything about his childhood. Surely he can’t have lived with Lucretia. She died years ago. If this is some kind of hoax, it’s a very elaborate one, though – unless he’s mad, of course, I suppose that’s a possibility. But she glanced at him again, and knew it was not even a remote possibility. He was unmistakably sane. And so when you have eliminated the impossible, my dear Watson, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
She discovered that he was looking at her. ‘You’re finding it difficult to accept,’ he said.
‘Well, yes. Did you really live with her? With Lucretia?’
‘I did. For ten years. In a nice old house on the edge of the Lincolnshire fens, on the outskirts of a little market town, where she lived a perfectly conventional life. Women’s Guild and shopping and library reading groups. She did quite a lot of charity work – that’s how I got involved in CHARTH – and she had a good many friends locally, although I’ll swear that not one of them had the smallest suspicion of who she really was. Which was how she wanted it. Oh, and she loved music.’
‘Conrad’s influence,’ said Fran, remembering the film music yesterday at Quondam, and feeling that she was reaching back to grasp a handful of the past.
‘Yes, I think so. She used to take me to concerts in Lincoln and Norwich or Cambridge – and gorgeous choral stuff in Ely Cathedral at Christmas and Easter. I had never heard music or singing like that before and it knocked me for six – in fact at one stage it nearly swept me into a religious vocation.’
He glanced at her as if expecting a reaction. Fran said, ‘But – it didn’t?’
‘I found out I had a fairly unspiritual side,’ he said gravely. Fran grinned, and saw that he had relaxed for the first time since he had seen Alraune’s photograph. But then he said, ‘Shall I grate the cheese?’ and she felt the barriers go back into place.
Even so, it was friendly to have him sharing the small task of making the omelettes. Marcus’s forays into the kitchen had been rare, and had usually involved cooking an impossibly elaborate dish, the preparation of which necessitated using every saucepan they possessed and apparently absolved him from washing up afterwards. Michael simply reached for the cheese and got on with it.
‘Lucretia had no patience with men who expected to be waited on,’ he said, apparently picking some of this up. ‘She was quite domesticated as a matter of fact. And she made sure I knew how to cook a reasonable meal. I’ll make you my five-star gourmet Hungarian goulash some evening if you’d like that.’
Francesca had a sudden image of Michael’s flat or his house, which would be warm and comfortable and safe-feeling, and of the two of them eating goulash and drinking wine at a small dining-table. She discovered she was smiling at the prospect, so in case he got the wrong idea, she said, ‘I’d have to say that the words domesticated and Lucretia von Wolff don’t seem to belong in the same sentence.’
He smiled properly this time. ‘Her real name was Alice Wilson, and she had been a servant in a big house in Vienna until the late nineteen-twenties.’
Francesca finished beating the eggs and poured them into the omelette pan. ‘Not kidnapped Russian royalty or the heiress to a Carpathian castle, after all?’
‘Nowhere near. A perfectly ordinary background in fact.’ He passed the little heap of grated cheese to her. ‘Would you like me to open that bottle of wine?’
‘Yes, please.’ She handed him the corkscrew and reached for two wine-glasses. They might as well use the expensive ones Trixie had brought back from one of her walking holidays; perhaps Bohemian crystal would lend an air of grandeur to the very ordinary meal and the even more ordinary bottle of supermarket plonk. This discussion of resurrected legends and ghost-children ought to be given at least a smidgeon of ceremony and be dignified by a touch of class. And Michael Sallis was somehow a person with whom you associated more than just a touch of class.
She tipped the grated cheese on to the just-setting eggs, and said, ‘It’s a remarkable thing, but ever since I heard about the Ashwood murders from Trixie, one thing seems to have overshadowed all the rest.’