The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [38]
“So what’s the moral of the story?” I asked with a smile. “Don’t judge a book by its cover?”
“Something like that,” she agreed.
“And if Jess produces a carving knife?”
“Your doctor friend should be struck off for negligence,” said my mother rather dryly. “He shouldn’t have left you alone with a dangerous patient.”
I SUPPOSE I could have checked with Peter, but there didn’t seem much point. I decided my mother’s logic was sound. We make our decisions in life on who we believe as often as what we believe, and I had no reason to think the local doctor would wish a disturbed lunatic on to me. I was a lot less sure about Madeleine’s motives. There was no question she and Jess hated each other, and the old saying “Half the truth is a whole lie” applied to both. If I believed Jess, Madeleine had deliberately abandoned her mother to die of neglect; if I believed Madeleine, Jess was a dangerous stalker.
There was probably a grain of truth in both stories—Madeleine didn’t visit Lily as often as she might and Jess visited too often, which suggested jealousy was at the heart of their hatred—but I was discovering at first hand just how quickly whispers become accepted as fact. According to Dan Fry’s latest email, even Adelina Bianca was hinting that I’d faked my abduction. In an interview with an Italian magazine, she was quoted as saying: “Of course there’s money to be made out of pretending to be a hostage—the public loves horror stories—but anyone who does it belittles what the real victims go through.”
I’ve no idea if she was referring to me—there was a US deserter who faked his kidnapping before fleeing to the Lebanon—but that’s how her words were interpreted. Dan told me that four of the main terrorist groups had denied holding me, and the Arab press was full of articles claiming a foreign correspondent had sought to make money out of passing herself off as a victim. Thankfully, the Western press ignored it—either from fear of a libel suit or because they knew my story hadn’t appeared—but it made me even more reluctant to advertise where I was. It turned me against Adelina. I knew her words had probably been “rearranged” to suit the editor’s take, but I did wonder if the reason she was able to give interviews was because nothing much had happened to her.
When I finally went looking for Jess, she said she could always tell when Madeleine had been spreading her poison. It didn’t matter who the recipient was, or how sensible they were, they never smiled as freely afterwards as they’d done before. She said I’d tried harder than most but I’d made my interest in her wrists too obvious. She took the hint after a couple of days and left me to get on with it. There were some things in life that weren’t worth bothering with, and convincing strangers that she wasn’t planning to knife them was top of the list.
It was an interesting rebuttal, since I hadn’t told her I’d spoken to Madeleine. Was Madeleine so believable that everyone reacted in the same way? If so, it was frightening. I did ask Jess why she allowed half-truths to stand instead of coming out fighting, but she shrugged and said there was no point. “People believe what they want to believe,” she said, “and I refuse to be something I’m not just to prove them wrong.”
I couldn’t follow her logic. “In what way?”
“I despise them,” she said rather dryly, “and I’d have to pretend I didn’t if I wanted to change their minds.”
“You might feel differently if you got to know them.”
“Why? It won’t change the fact that they believed Madeleine.”
This was part of a conversation we had in her kitchen after I plucked up the courage to drive to her house. There was no alternative, since she hadn’t responded to either of my telephone messages, but I was terrified her mastiffs might be roaming free. I drove up the half-mile track to the farm and slowed to a halt in the middle of the yard while I tried to work out where her front door was. I had my window down because it was a rare day