Free Fox Evil by Minette Walters

leather-bound legal documents relating to the lobster industry that had flourished in Shenstead Valley during James's great-grandfather's tenure. "This room was made for you," Ailsa told him the first time he came. "Your two favorite subjects-history and law. The diaries are old and dusty, my dear, but they deserve a read."
    He had felt more saddened by Ailsa's death than he'd ever been able to say because he, too, had not been given time to grieve. So much turbulent anguish had surrounded the event-some of it affecting him personally-that he had retreated into coolness in order to cope. He had loved her for a number of reasons: her kindness, her humor, her generosity, her interest in him as a person. What he had never understood was the gulf that existed between her and her children.
    Occasionally she talked of siding with James, as if the breach were not of her making, but more usually she cited Leo's sins of omission and commission. "He kept stealing from us," she said once, "things that we didn't notice… most of them quite valuable. It made James so angry when he finally found out. He accused Vera… it made for a lot of unpleasantness." She fell into a troubled silence.
    "What happened?"
    "Oh, the usual," she sighed. "Leo owned up. He thought it was very funny. 'How would an idiot like Vera know what was valuable?' he said. Poor woman-I think Bob gave her a black eye over it because he was afraid they'd lose the Lodge. It was awful… she treated us as tyrants from then on."
    "I thought Leo was fond of Vera. Didn't she look after him and Elizabeth when you were away?"
    "I don't think he had any feelings for her-he doesn't have feelings for anyone except possibly Elizabeth-but Vera adored
him
, of course… called him her 'blue-eyed darling' and let him wrap her round his little finger."
    "Did she never have children of her own?"
    Ailsa shook her head. "Leo was her surrogate son. She bent over backward to protect him, which wasn't a good thing in retrospect."
    "Why?"
    "Because he used her against us."
    "What did he do with the money?"
    "The usual," she repeated dryly. "Blew it on gambling."
    On another occasion: "Leo was a very clever child. His IQ was 145 when he was eleven. I've no idea where it came from-James and I are very average-but it caused terrible problems. He thought he could get away with anything, particularly when he discovered how easy it was to manipulate people. Of course, we asked ourselves where we went wrong. James blames himself for not taking a stronger line earlier. I blame the fact that we were abroad so often and had to rely on the school to control him." She shook her head. "The truth is simpler, I think. An idle brain is the devil's workshop, and Leo was never interested in hard work."
    Of Elizabeth: "She lived in Leo's shadow. It made her desperate for attention, poor child. She adored her father, and used to throw tantrums whenever he was in uniform, presumably because she knew it meant he was going away again. I remember once, when she was eight or nine, she cut the legs off his regimental trousers. He was furious with her, and she screamed and yelled and said he deserved it. When I asked her why, she said she hated him dressed up." Another shake of her head. "She had a very disturbed adolescence. James blamed Leo for introducing her to his friends… I blamed our absences. We lost her effectively by the time she turned eighteen. We set her up in a flat with some girlfriends but most of what we were told about her lifestyle was lies."
    She was ambivalent about her own feelings. "It's impossible to stop loving your children," she told him. "You always hope things will change for the better. The trouble is, somewhere along the line they abandoned the values we taught them and decided the world owed them a living. It's led to so much resentment. They think it's their father's bloody-mindedness that's caused the money to dry up instead of recognizing that they took the pail to the well once too