‘You couldn’t have done more, Archie.’ He was about to brush her concern away, but she had always been able to read his thoughts, and there was something precious in the fact that she cared enough to know him better than he knew himself. ‘I’m sure you’re looking back now, thinking that you could have asked different questions and Jack Naylor’s life would miraculously have been a bed of roses from that day onwards, but you couldn’t. Life doesn’t work like that. If it did, Marta and I would have arrived early yesterday and been chatting to Emily Soper when Mrs Pendean came in to collect the nativity figure. These deaths aren’t your fault.’
‘Perhaps not, but—’
‘Do you know the first thing that Phyllis said when she got here, after she’d asked how you were?’
‘No.’
‘She told us that she’d watched you from the window of the hotel while you were going about your work and getting ready to come back to the island. You spent a long time talking to a young man by the boats. I’m assuming it was Jonathan Soper?’
Archie nodded. ‘That’s right. I was explaining that Jack hadn’t killed his mother, and promising to find out who did.’
‘Phyllis said how kind you were to him. Obviously, she didn’t know the circumstances, but she could see how much you cared and what a difference it made to him. She told us how proud she was that you were her father.’
‘Did she?’
‘Yes, she did. And when we explained what had happened, she said that she wished she’d known you better when her mother was killed, because you would have helped her like no one else could.’ He felt again the tears that had been threatening all day, and this time he didn’t fight them. ‘Take a lesson from Dickens, Archie. You can’t change the past, but the future doesn’t have to be full of ghosts as well.’
They walked on in silence as the steep climb up to the castle took its toll. ‘Talking of brighter futures, I thought we might move on to Loe House tomorrow,’ Archie said. ‘After lunch, when all the formalities here are dealt with. How does that sound?’
‘Like all our Christmases have come at once,’ Josephine said. ‘We thought you’d never ask.’