‘Mrs Blakiston set down her thoughts in a diary that we found. She had some idea that the condition would be passed on to any grandchildren you might have. That was her problem.’
Pünd shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Detective Inspector,’ he said. ‘But I do not agree.’
‘She made it clear enough from where I’m standing, Mr Pünd. “… this awful sickness infecting her family …” Horrible words. But that’s exactly what she wrote.’
‘They are words that you may have misinterpreted.’
Pünd sighed. ‘In order to understand Mary Blakiston, it is necessary to go back in time, the defining moment in her life.’ He glanced at Robert. ‘I hope it will not distress you, Mr Blakiston. I am referring to the death of your brother.’
‘I’ve lived with it most of my life,’ Robert said. ‘There’s nothing you can say that will upset me now.’
‘There are several aspects of the accident that I find puzzling. Let me begin, for a moment, with your mother’s reaction to what happened. I cannot understand a woman who continues to live at the very scene where it took place, where she lost her child. Every day she walks past that lake and I have to ask myself: is she punishing herself for something she has done? Or for something that she knows? Could it be that she has been driven by a sense of guilt ever since that dreadful day?
‘I visited the Lodge and tried to imagine what it might be like for her, and indeed for you, living together in that grim place, surrounded by trees, permanently in shadow. The house did not yield many secrets but there was one mystery, a room on the second floor that your mother kept locked. Why? What had been the purpose of that room and why did she never go in there? There was little that remained in the room: a bed and a table and inside the table, the collar of a dog that had had also died.’
‘That was Bella,’ Robert said.
‘Yes. Bella had been a gift from your father to your brother and Sir Magnus did not like having it on his land. When I spoke to your father yesterday, he suggested that Sir Magnus had killed the dog in the cruelest possible way. I could not be sure of the truth of that, but I will tell you what I thought. Your brother drowns. Your mother falls down the stairs. Sir Magnus is brutally killed. And now we have Bella, a cross-breed, who is poisoned. It is another violent death to add to the veritable catalogue of violent deaths that we find at Pye Hall.
‘Why was the collar of the dog kept here? There was something else about the room that I noticed immediately. It was the only one in the house that had a view of the lake. That, in itself, I thought most significant. Next, I asked myself, for what purpose was the room used when Mary Blakiston lived at the Lodge? I had assumed, incorrectly, that it was the bedroom used either by yourself or by your brother.’
‘It was my mother’s sewing room,’ Robert said. ‘I’d have told you that if you’d asked me.’
‘I did not need to ask you. You mentioned to me that you and your brother had a game in which you knocked on the walls of your bedrooms, sending each other codes. You must therefore have had adjoining rooms and so it followed that the room across the corridor must have had another purpose. Your mother did a lot of sewing and it seemed very likely to me that this was where she liked to work.’
‘That’s all very well, Mr Pünd,’ Chubb said. ‘But I don’t see where it gets us.’
‘We are almost there, Detective Inspector. But first let me examine the accident as it happened for, as I have already stated, that too presents certain problems.
‘According to the testimony of both Robert and his father, Tom was searching for a piece of gold which was in fact in the bulrushes beside the water because that is where Sir Magnus had hidden it. Now, let us remember, he was not a small child. He was eleven years old. He was intelligent. I have to ask you, would he have entered the cold and muddy water in the belief that the gold was there? From what I understand, the games that the two boys played were very formal. They were organised by Sir Magnus who concealed the treasure and provided specific clues. If Tom was beside the lake, he might well have worked out where the gold was to be found. But there was no need to walk right past it into the lake. That makes no sense at all.
‘And there is another detail, also, that troubles me. Brent, the groundsman, discovered the body—’
‘He was always skulking around,’ Robert cut in. ‘Tom and I were afraid of him.’
‘I am willing to believe it. But there is now a question that I wish to put to you. Brent was very precise in his description. He pulled your brother out of the water and laid him on the ground. You arrived moments later – and what reason could there be for you to plunge into the water yourself?’
‘I wanted to help.’
‘Of course. But your brother was already out of the water. Your father said he was lying on dry land. Why would you want to make yourself cold and wet?’
Robert frowned. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say, Mr Pound. I was thirteen years old. I don’t even remember what happened, really. I was only thinking about Tom, getting him out of the water. There was nothing else in my mind.’
‘No, Robert. I think there was. I think you wanted to disguise the fact that you were already wet yourself.’
The entire room seemed to come to a halt, as if it were a piece of film caught in a projector. Even outside, in the street, nothing moved.
‘Why would he want to do that?’ Joy asked. There was a slight tremor in her voice.
‘Because he had been fighting with his brother beside the lake a few moments before. He had killed his brother by drowning him.’
‘That’s not true!’ Robert’s eyes blazed. For a moment, Fraser thought he was going to leap out of his chair and he readied himself to go to Pünd’s rescue if need be.
‘So much of what I say is based upon conjecture,’ Pünd said. ‘And trust me when I say I do not hold you entirely responsible for a crime that you committed as a child. But let us look at the evidence. A dog is given to your brother, not to you. It dies in terrible circumstances. You and your brother search for a piece of gold. He finds it, not you. And this time it is he who is punished. Your father told me that you and Tom fought often. He worried about you because of your moods, the way you would take yourself off for solitary walks, even at so young an age. He did not see what your mother had seen – that from the time of your birth – a difficult birth – there was something wrong with you, that you were prepared to kill.’
‘No, Mr Pünd!’ This time it was Joy who protested. ‘You’re not talking about Robert. Robert’s nothing like that.’