Chapters (23)
‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Craven said. ‘She never talked to me about it. I didn’t even know she was expecting. We never seemed able to talk about that sort of thing. My husband and I were getting on, you know, when we had the children. Perhaps it was a mistake … There never seemed enough time to give them. Jim was working on the estate and I helped Mrs Grenville in the kitchen. We’d never have managed to send Kate down to London without what I earned. We did what we thought was best, but now I’m not sure…’
None of us is sure, George thought, but he knew reassurance was impossible. She blamed herself for Kate’s death.
‘Was there any special friend?’ Benwell asked. ‘Someone she might have confided in about the identity of the baby’s father?’
‘Only Daniel,’ the woman said. All the fight seemed to have gone out of her. She was very small in the big chair. ‘Kate was always close to Daniel. Perhaps they were too wrapped up in each other. Neither of them seemed very good at making friends of their own.’
‘So you think Daniel might know who was the father of Kate’s baby?’
‘I’m sure he did,’ she said. ‘ But he would never tell me.’
And George thought that even after her daughter’s death she was excluded from her children’s secrets.
She was reluctant then to let them go. She wanted to talk about Kate, show photos of the four of them standing outside their cottage, smiling, to prove perhaps that there had been a time when they were a real family. Eventually they had to interrupt. They stood up, feeling brutal and heartless, and left her sitting in the small room, staring at the fire.
‘I know Geoffrey Lomax,’ George said. ‘He was a junior minister in the Home Office while I was there. He couldn’t have been the father of Kate Craven’s child.’
‘Why not?’
‘He had a vasectomy after his sixth child was born,’ George said. ‘He tried to keep it secret but the staff found out. There was, as you can imagine, a lot of ribald comment. Westminster had a lot in common with a boys’ public school – the humour is almost identical.’
‘How well do you know Lomax?’
‘As well as anyone can know an MP. They’re all performers.’
‘Would he trust you, do you think?’
‘Yes,’ George said. ‘We always had a good working relationship.’
‘Will you talk to him?’ Benwell said. ‘Find out if there was any connection between Kate Craven and Marcus Grenville. If I send in a policeman he’ll tell us nothing. After the Cecil Parkinson affair they’re bound to be sensitive about this sort of publicity. Talk to him off the record and tell him we’ll keep it quiet if we possibly can.’
So, early the next morning, George took the train to London.