died because she’d been led to a place she’d otherwise never have gone, led there by someone she trusted. ‘There, there, Ma. It’s over now.’
Dorothy’s breathing settled to a slow steady rhythm, and Laurel thought about the nature of love. That she could continue to feel it so intensely, despite the things she was learning about her mother, was remarkable. It seemed that ugly deeds did not make love disappear; but oh, the disappointment if Laurel let it could have crushed her. It was an anodyne word, disappointment, but the shame and helplessness intrinsic to it were breathtaking. It wasn’t that Laurel expected perfection. She wasn’t a child. And she didn’t share Gerry’s blind faith that just because Dorothy Nicolson was their mother she would somehow be found miraculously innocent of all wrongdoing. Not at all. Laurel was a realist, she understood her mother was a human being and had naturally done things in her life that weren’t saintly; she’d hated and wanted and made mistakes that never went away—just as Laurel had herself. But the picture Laurel was beginning to form of precisely what had happened in Dorothy’s past, what she’d seen her mother do—
‘He came to find me.’
Laurel had been drifting off with her thoughts and her mother’s faded voice startled her. ‘What’s that Ma?’
‘I tried to hide, but he found me.’
She was speaking of Henry Jenkins, Laurel realised. It seemed they were drawing ever closer to what had happened that day in 1961. ‘He’s gone now, Ma, he’s not coming back.’
A whisper: ‘I killed him, Laurel.’
Laurel’s breath caught. She whispered back, ‘I know you did.’
‘Can you forgive me, Laurel?’
It was a question Laurel hadn’t asked herself, let alone answered. Faced with it in that instant, in the dark quiet of her mother’s room, all she could say was, ‘Hush now. Everything’s going to be all right, Ma. I love you.’
Some hours later, when the sun was just beginning to rise above the treetops, Laurel handed the baton to Rose and headed for the green Mini.
‘London again?’ said Rose, walking with her along the gar-den path.
‘Oxford today.’
‘Oh, Oxford.’ Rose twisted her beads. ‘More research, is it?’
‘It is.’
‘Getting close to what you’re looking for?’
‘You know, Rosie,’ said Laurel, sitting in the driver’s seat, reaching to pull the door shut behind her, ‘I think I am.’ She smiled and waved and put the car into reverse, glad to escape before Rose could ask anything that required heavy-duty obfuscation.
The fellow at the desk in the British Library Reading Room had seemed pleased on Friday by her request to locate ‘a rather obscure memoir’, even more so when she mused as to how one might go about finding what happened to Miss Katy Ellis’s correspondence after she died. He’d frowned determination at his computer screen, pausing every so often to jot things down on his notepad, and Laurel’s hopes had risen and fallen with his brows, until evidently her rapt attention became a hindrance and he suggested it might take some time and he’d be very happy to continue the search while she got on with something else. Laurel had taken the hint, ducking outside for a quick cigarette (all right, three) and a bit of neurotic pacing, before rushing back to the Reading Room to see how he’d got on.
He’d got on rather well, as it turned out. He slid the piece of paper across the desk with the marathon runner’s smile of satisfied exhaustion on his face and said, ‘Found her.’ The cache of her private papers, at any rate. It turned out they were located in the archives of New College Library, Oxford; Katy Ellis had studied there as a doctoral candidate and her papers had been donated after her death in September 1983. There was a copy of the memoir available, too, but Laurel figured she’d be far more likely to find what she was looking for within the primary documents.
Laurel left her green Mini at the Park and Ride site in Thorn-hill, and caught the bus into Oxford. The driver directed her to hop off on the High Street, which she did, right opposite Queen’s College; she followed directions a short walk past the Bodleian Library, and along Holywell Street, to arrive at the main entrance of New College. She never tired of the university’s extraordinary beauty; every stone, every turret and spindle pointing towards the heavens, grated and heaved with the weight of the past; but Laurel didn’t have time today for sightseeing; she put her