Page 154 of The Stranger in Room Six

‘You can’t. I gave you away. I made a terrible mistake. So did Jonty. He should have stayed by me. We could have kept you if we’d been braver. We would have been a family. Now it is too late.’

That’s when I saw it. The gun in her hands.

‘Don’t,’ I said, despite everything. ‘Please don’t.’

‘But I must. Don’t you see? They will find out sooner or later.’

She thrust the gun into my hands. ‘Youdo it.’

‘No!’ I looked with horror at the weapon in my hands. ‘I couldn’t possibly. I’m not a murderer.’

Then she gave me a look I will never forget. ‘Trust me, Mabel. None of us are who we think we are. Shoot me. They are coming for me. I feel it in my bones. I don’t want to be assassinated like my Jonty.’

‘Maybe you deserve to die,’ I said.

‘But not that way,’ she pleaded. ‘I gave you life. If you have any compassion, please end mine for me.’

‘What aboutyourcompassion?’ I demanded. ‘You took my baby away.’

‘That was different,’ she scoffed. ‘The father was a lowly Italian prisoner of war from a country about to switch sides. I wasn’t having a child like that in the family.’

And that’s when I pulled the trigger.

As soon as I fired the shot, I realizedIwas a murderer. I was no better than the bombers who had targeted innocent civilians. My aunt had been a traitor, but who was I to hand out a death sentence? I should have let the authorities take her.

I knew they would come for me unless I could disguise my crime.

Shaking, I wrote one word:

TRAITOR.

I weighed the paper down with a stone beside her and ran down to the sea, where I flung the gun as hard as I could into the waves.

‘I won’t tell anyone,’ I vowed to myself. Not until my dying day – and maybe not even then.

Then I ran back into the house and told Cook that my aunt was missing.

As the villagers said at the time, almost anyone could have done it. Everyone had a grievance against Lady Clarissa. But no one, as far as I know, ever suspected me of killing her.

This is my story, which I have told no one. No one, that is, except my great-granddaughter, and only her because I know I do not have much time left and she deserves to know the truth.

‘Do you think I’m wicked?’ I asked Isabella as she sat by my side, taking all this in.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Your act was a crime of passion. It was a difficult time and you were young. I would love to write about it. May I?’

My great-granddaughter wants to be a novelist. It’s not an easy profession, but one day, I know, she will make it.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just wait until I’m dead.’

‘I hope that won’t be for many years,’ she said, putting her arms around me in the kind of warm, all-encompassing, truly loving embrace that I’d thought I’d never have.

Now I know that if I die tomorrow, I will die happy. Because at last I have a family.