I returo my own rooms, my feet moving as slowly as my thoughts. Nothing made sense. Why had John-the-dig died? Because someone had interfered with the safety cat the ladder. It ’t have been the boy. Miss Winter’s stave him a clear alibi: While John and his ladder were tumbling from the balustrade through the empty air to the ground, the boy was eyeing her cigarette, not daring to ask for a drag. Then surely it must have been Emmeline. Except that nothing iory suggests that Emmeline would do such a thing. She was a harmless child, eveer said so. And Miss Winter herself couldn’t have been clearer. No. Not Emmelihen who? Isabelle was dead. Charlie was gone.
I came to my rooms, went in, stood by the window. It was too dark to see; there was only my refle, a pale shadow you could see the night through. “Who?” I asked it.
At last I listeo the quiet, persistent voi my head that I had been trying to ignore. Adeline.
No, I said.
Yes, it said. Adeline.
It was not possible. The cries of grief for John-the-dig were still fresh in my mind. No one could mourn a man like that if she had killed him, could she? No one could murder a man she loved enough to cry those tears for?
But the voi my head reted episode after episode from the story I knew so well. The violen the tarden, each swipe of the shears a blow to John’s heart. The attamelihe hair-pulling, the battering, the biting. The baby removed from the perambulator a carelessly, to die or to be found. One of the twins was not quite right, they said in the village. I remembered and I wondered. Was it possible? Had the tears I had just witnessed been tears of guilt? Tears of remorse? Was it a murderess I had held in my arms and forted? Was this the secret Miss Winter had hidden from the world for so long? An unpleasant suspi revealed itself to me. Was this the point of Miss Winter’s story? To make me sympathize with her, exoe her, five her? I shivered.
But ohing at least I was sure of. She had loved him. How could it be otherwise? I remembered holding her racked and tormented body against mine and khat only broken love cause such despair. I remembered the child Adeline reag into John’s loneliness after the death of the Missus, drawing him back to life by getting him to teach her to pruhe topiary.
The topiary she had damaged.
Oh, perhaps I wasn’t sure after all!
My eyes roamed over the darkness outside the window. Her fabulous garden. Was it her homage to John-the-dig? Her lifeloence for the damage she had wrought?
I rubbed my tired eyes and knew I ought to go to bed. But I was too tired to sleep. My thoughts, if I did nothing to stop them, would go round in circles all night long. I decided to have a bath.
While I waited for the tub to fill, I cast about for something to occupy my mind. A ball of paper half visible beh the dressing table caught my attention. I unfolded it, flatte out. A row of phoic script.
Ihroom, with the water thundering in the background, I made a few short-lived attempts at pig some kind of meaning out of my string of symbols. Always there was that undermining feeling that I hadn’t captured Emmeline’s utterance quite accurately. I pictured the moonlit garden, the tortions of the witch hazel, the grotesque, urgent face; I heard again the abruptness of Emmeline’s voice. But however hard I tried, I could not recall the pronou itself.
I climbed into the bath, leaving the scrap of paper on the edge
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