The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [87]
For a moment, I thought she was going to come clean, but something changed her mind. Probably my mention of kindness. “She was taking up too much time, that’s all. I thought if I left her to cope on her own for a bit, Peter would realize how bad she was and organize proper care.” She gave a hollow laugh. “Fat chance. He relied on me to tell him if she went downhill…then vanished off to Canada for a month.”
I shrugged. “You can’t blame him for that. First you help Lily hide her condition, then you want to expose her. At the very least, you could have told Peter you’d stopped visiting. He’s not a mind-reader. How was he supposed to know Lily had lost her safety net? How was anyone supposed to know?”
An obstinate expression closed over her face. “You’re in the same position. Do you want me to send round a note if I decide to stop visiting you? Whose business is it except yours and mine?”
“I’m not ill. I can ask for help if I need it.”
“So could Lily. She wasn’t completely shot.”
“Then why didn’t she?”
“She did,” Jess said stubbornly. “She took herself to the village…and none of them did a damn thing about it.”
We’d been this route before. It’s where every conversation about Lily ended—with Winterbourne Barton’s perceived indifference. I sometimes felt it was Jess’s excuse. As long as she could accuse them, she didn’t have to address her own part in Lily’s rapid decline. Although in truth I couldn’t see that anyone was really to blame. There was no law that said Jess had to take the brunt of a demanding woman’s care indefinitely, and no law that said her doctor and neighbours should have foreseen their sudden falling out.
It was harder to excuse Madeleine because she was Lily’s daughter, but was she any better at guessing from London what was going on than the people on the ground? I was willing to accept Jess’s view of her character—grasping, vindictive, spiteful, selfish—but not that she had a supernatural intelligence. “How could Madeleine have known that she could turn the Aga off with impunity? Did she know that you and Lily had a row? Would Lily have told her?”
“We didn’t have a row. I just stopped coming.”
“OK. Would she have told her that?”
I saw from Jess’s sudden frown that she knew what I was driving at. She could hardly accuse Madeleine of attempted murder if Madeleine was as ignorant as everyone else. She didn’t dodge the question. “No,” she said flatly. “Madeleine would have wanted to know why.”
I went back to the question she wouldn’t answer. “So what did Lily say to you that made you angry? And was so awful that she couldn’t repeat it to her daughter?” I watched her lips thin to a narrow line. “Come on, Jess. You play slave to a first-class bitch for twelve years…drop her like a hot potato when she really needs you…then start defending her the minute she’s off your hands. Does that make sense to you? Because it doesn’t to me.”
When she didn’t say anything, I lost patience with her. “Oh, to hell with it,” I said wearily. “Who gives a shit? I’ve better things to do.” I stood up and fetched the axe and the lead-weighted walking-stick from beside the door. “Do you want to help me stash these things or are you going home in a huff?”
If her mutinous glare was anything to go by, she was certainly thinking about leaving, and it made me angry suddenly. She was like a spoilt child who used tantrums to get its own way, and I found I didn’t want to play anymore. “There’s only one person who might have turned off the valve, and that’s you, Jess. Who else knew where it was or what impact it would have on Lily? Who—other than you—knew you weren’t visiting any more?”
With a funny little sigh, she pulled the pile of notes towards her and started tearing them up.
I made a half-hearted move towards her. “You shouldn’t be doing that.”
“Why not? Who do you want to show them to? The police? Peter? Madeleine?” She picked up the pieces and transferred them to the sink. “Can I borrow your lighter?”
“No.”
She shrugged indifferently before pulling a booklet of matches