“Maybe his wife doesn’t like it. Maybe he promised to stop when they married. What a man does when he’s single is not the same when he’s got a wife. Plus he’s a second son, and you’ve gathered that they live a very expensive lifestyle. Possibly more expensive than his older brother’s. Yachts and race cars aren’t cheap. Maybe she’s the real money and he can’t risk her leaving him.”
Agnes ran a hand through her hair, ignoring Carnet’s reaction to the result. “Marie-Chantal Vallotton is unhappy. How can anyone be unhappy when they look like her? She is beautiful, married to a handsome man, living in this incredible place, and she’s unhappy. She wants to work, of all things.”
“Do you need to work?”
“I don’t see how that matters.”
“When George died, did your family want you to return to work?”
“Of course not, they wanted me to stay home with the boys. They still want me to stay home.”
“And you didn’t. You love those boys and I know you miss them, so why did you return?”
Agnes rubbed her face and frowned. “I like my work.”
“Why? It’s not that pleasant. In financial crimes you often worked in drafty storage rooms with files, the office was always noisy and now, here, it’s cold and we don’t know if we’ll be successful. All very unsatisfactory. Why do it? Why not go home once and for all?”
Agnes frowned. “My mother-in-law and I don’t cohabit so well. And, it’s not much of a comparison. Look at Marie-Chantal and then look at me. Not exactly a parallel.”
Carnet smiled.
“If we were a parallel George would still be alive.”
“You can’t say that.”
“It’s true. Something with me, something with us, made him take his life. It wasn’t the boys or work. If I were Marie-Chantal Vallotton he wouldn’t have ended his life. Trust a woman’s judgment on this.”
“You’re wrong.”
“When he died they went through all of his work, reviewed all of his accounts for years in the past. Nothing was out of order, not one thing. He was the perfect employee with no mysteries lurking, ready to ruin him. He was healthy. His parents and I imagined he had a terminal cancer and didn’t want to tell us or endure treatment. Can you believe we actually hoped that? Before they completed the autopsy, we actually prayed that he had a nasty terminal disease because we could understand fear of a lingering death. We speculated through the night, settling on pancreatic cancer as our choice.”
“Normal responses. Of course you look for a reason, but think how irrational most were, and the rest were disproved. He didn’t have a terminal disease, so you are left with an equally irrational one that can’t be disproved now that he is dead.”
“No, it was not normal. Sybille knows it, George’s father knows it, and I know it. He didn’t love me anymore and took … took that horrible way out. I will always wonder if it was because I don’t quite fit in.”
“That’s absurd, as absurd as anything we’ve heard during this investigation.”
“You should spend time with my mother-in-law. She’ll give you plenty of details. I try, but I’m always just a little bit wrong. I still don’t like to eat rabbit and every Easter she acts like I’ve committed sacrilege.”
“Not everyone has rabbit at Easter.”
“In our village they do.” Agnes smiled. “When I think about the expense my parents went to arranging for a turkey to be delivered for our holidays. And yams and marshmallows and cranberry sauce. My mother did it because she had her own childhood memories from America and wanted to share them, but it didn’t help. I was always pretending at school. Pretending I did what everyone else did. Not wanting anyone to know we celebrated the American Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday of November.”
“George didn’t die because you don’t like rabbit.”
“That’s only a tiny example. He wouldn’t want to admit his mistake to anyone. He wouldn’t want to divorce me and upset the boys. Or hurt his parents.”
“Divorce is hardly the end of the world.”
“To my in-laws it is. Laws may change and times march on but they live in a small village and hold to the old ways. They’d prefer I came from a family who had lived in a neighboring village for the last thousand years. George loved them and knew this. He wouldn’t have wanted to embarrass them with a divorce. Standards have to be upheld. The illusion maintained.”
“Agnes, listen to yourself. His death upset the boys and brought more negative attention than a divorce would have. He had to have known that.”
“Everyone has an opinion but no one, definitely not you, knows why.”
She lifted her hands to cover her face and smelled the tang of hand lotion. George’s lotion.
Fourteen
Agnes started at the sound of footsteps approaching Felicity Cowell’s workroom. She dropped her hand from Winston’s muzzle, embarrassed to be caught talking to him.