As Vintner was lifted onto a stretcher and taken from the room, Josephine explained exactly what had happened. ‘God, it’s like something out of a Greek tragedy,’ Penrose said when she had finished, and looked at Fallowfield, who was packing away the gun ready to remove it from the scene. ‘We need to circulate Marta Fox’s description immediately. If she leaves London we might never find her.’

Josephine signalled to Fallowfield to wait a moment. ‘Will she hang for what she’s done?’ she asked.

Penrose considered. ‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t actually killed anyone and, from what you tell me, a good barrister could argue that she wasn’t of sound mind when she agreed to help Vintner. She’s been through so much and, ironically, the fact that she’s been committed to an asylum will work in her favour in court.’

‘Then I think I can tell you where she’ll be, Archie. There’s only 263

one place she’d want to go now. But you have to let me speak to her.’

‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘Never in a million years would I let you go near that woman after what’s happened. She wants you dead, and she nearly got her wish.’

‘If she still wanted to kill me, she could have done it easily just now,’ Josephine argued. ‘She gave me the gun, Archie – there’s no danger for me any more. But there is for her. She’s determined to die, you know, but I might be able to change her mind. Are you really going to stop me trying?’

Penrose hesitated, but Fallowfield backed her up. ‘If anyone can get her to give herself up, Sir, Miss Tey can. And we can stay close by to make sure nothing happens to her.’

‘All right,’ Penrose said, making his mind up. ‘But I’m not going to let you out of my sight this time.’

King’s Cross was not as crowded as it had been when Josephine was last there, but the station still had an air of efficient busyness about it. The stable-yard clock over the entrance chimed six o’clock as she passed underneath it, and she walked quickly over to the huge boards that indicated arrivals and departures. As agreed, she left Penrose and Fallowfield to wait there and turned purposefully towards the trains.

Marta was standing a little way down the platform, between two trains preparing to depart and just yards from where the daughter she never knew had died. Josephine walked towards her, and sat down on a nearby bench. Certain her approach had been noted, she waited for Marta to speak.

‘You were absolutely right, Josephine,’ she said, turning round at last. ‘I didn’t know anything about my daughter, not even her name. What was she like?’

‘She was a joy,’ Josephine said simply. ‘The sort of girl who could lighten your heart without ever realising she’d done it. There was nothing self-conscious about her, you see. She was warm and honest, and she didn’t try to be anything she wasn’t – and that’s so rare. She had an innocence about her – and I do mean innocence 264

rather than naivety. Life had been difficult for her at times; she found not knowing where she’d come from hard to accept, and there were problems in her adoptive family, but a lot of love, too, and she seemed blessed with a talent for happiness. Very few of us can claim that.’ Sadly, she remembered Elspeth’s sudden shyness about her new romance. ‘She was at a crossroads in her life, as well; she’d just found love with Hedley and that seemed to have given her a new confidence, a real excitement about the future.

You would have been pleased, I think, and so would she.’

Marta joined her on the bench. ‘One of the things I loved about Arthur was that he could always find something to be fascinated by. He was so very special, you know. Whenever I was with him, all I knew was joy – and after being married to Elliott, you can imagine what a surprise that was. That talent for happiness you mentioned – that was so much a part of him. I’m glad it lived on through his daughter, if only briefly.’

‘There are a few people in life you feel privileged to have known,’ Josephine said, thinking about Jack. ‘Elspeth was one of them, although she would have laughed at the idea. I’d have loved the chance to get to know her better.’ She looked at Marta.

‘I’d like the chance to get to know her mother better. I can’t be sure, but I suspect Rafe was wrong when he said she wasn’t like you. Before all this happened, I imagine you were rather different.’

Marta nodded. ‘So much so that it feels like another life. I don’t recognise myself any more. The woman Arthur loved hated violence and revenge and mistrust – all those things that men go to war for. She would have found murder abhorrent.’

‘And craved peace and beauty? She sounds very much like the Anne of Bohemia that Vintner wrote about.’ Marta’s sharp glance was not lost on Josephine. ‘You don’t have to explain why you wanted to kill me, Marta,’ she said. ‘You hated me for the same reasons that Elliott Vintner did. But he didn’t write The White Heart, did he? You did. It was your work I was supposed to have stolen, not his.’

‘I shouldn’t have given another writer the new book if I wanted to keep that a secret, should I? Yes, I wrote the novel that made 265

Elliott Vintner’s name. I sent the manuscript to Arthur in one of the consignments that went out from May Gaskell’s war library.

Elliott must have either intercepted it or found it in Arthur’s things after he died. The next time I came across it was in the hospital that my husband sent me to. There it was on somebody’s bed, a published book with Elliott Vintner’s name plastered all over the cover. All that fuss he made and everything he put you through, and it was never his to lay claim to, never his privilege to feel wronged.’

‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘I had no proof. The manuscript was long gone and anyway, I had no fight left in me. I was so afraid of him, Josephine. I never wanted to marry him, but outwardly he was the perfect match –

wealthy, a little older than me, an academic – and my parents took it for granted that I’d accept him. I was too young and too naive to argue. He turned out to be very different behind closed doors, of course.’

‘Did he hurt you?’ Josephine asked.

Marta gave a bitter laugh. ‘Oh yes, but not by doing anything as straightforward as hitting me. No, he was far too clever to do anything that I could talk about without being ashamed. He was hateful in bed – truly hateful. He used to pride himself on thinking up new and inventive ways to humiliate me. One day, he found a stash of short stories I’d written, and he was so scornful about his little writer wife. After that, whenever he’d finished with me in bed

– and he was insatiable in his cruelty – he’d make me write about what we’d done and read it out to him. I had to relive the shame of it over and over again. It was his bid for immortality, I think, and he knew it kept him in my head when he couldn’t be inside my body. He used to give me marks out of ten for the prose.’

Josephine was shocked. ‘No wonder you turned to Arthur,’ she said. ‘It’s a miracle you could be with anyone after that.’

‘Yes, but Elliott knew exactly how to destroy me for what I’d done, and the world made it easy for him. Women like me – pregnant with a child that wasn’t my husband’s – were outcasts, fallen and in need of salvation. What’s terrible is that you start to believe 266

it yourself when you’ve been in there for a while, and the people who ran that place went to great lengths to keep you ignorant of the fact that things might be changing a little for the better in the world outside. The worst thing was the way that they stamped on any solidarity between the women; it would have been bearable if we could have helped each other through it, but we were constantly separated and played off against one another, and God help you if you got into what they so charmingly called a “particular friendship”.’ She took a cigarette out of the case in her bag.