Author's Note: This is a light-hearted, cross-dressing mystery story, written in my normal style, which I hope you enjoy. It does contain references to adult themes, and some of its characters have little sympathy with the Catholic Church. Please don't read if you feel this will upset you.

CHAPTER 10 – DENOUEMENT
FRIDAY

"Samantha, how nice to see you. I was hoping you would visit me before you returned home."

Sam returned her smile, feeling perhaps that Lady Bottomly did not smile very frequently. "We didn't get chance to speak for very long on Saturday. Sir George has asked me to stay on for a few more days."

She gave him a careful look. "Has he tried anything on with you, yet?"

"I've told you; he's not like that. But he has asked me to go over Samantha's disappearance - see if I can find out what happened to her."

"I didn't know the answer to her disappearance then; I certainly can't help you now. But please come in and we'll take tea."

Ten minutes later, a housekeeper had brought tea into the sitting room and Sam moved the conversation away from the small talk and onto the reason he was there.

"At the time, it appeared almost everyone except her mother believed she was pregnant," he said. "But you were her best friend. Samantha actually told you she was pregnant, didn't she?"

Lady Bottomly sighed and then nodded. "Yes, she did, but she made me promise not to tell anyone."

"Christine Walters believed," Sam continued, "that Samantha died at the hands of back-street abortionists, who later disposed of her body. She must have suggested that to you at the time, Lady Bottomly."

"She was talking rubbish," Lady Bottomly said.

"You know that for a fact," Sam said, making his stab in the dark, "because that was where you went on that fateful afternoon, wasn't it? You found Samantha missing and guessed she might be having an abortion. You went round to the local back-street abortionist so as to be with your best friend during that horrible experience."

Lady Bottomly reluctantly nodded. "Yes," she said. "I'd been pressing Samantha to have an abortion, but her stupid Catholic religion thought it a sin. I found out who the local abortionist was and offered Samantha the money for it, but still she wouldn't have it. That Saturday, I thought she'd at last seen sense, but when I went round to the abortionist, she wasn't there. So I know no more than anyone else about where Samantha went, or how she disappeared."

"But you could have told Sir George she was pregnant, and put him out of his misery," Sam said.

"I promised I wouldn't tell."

"There was another reason why you wouldn't tell, wasn't there?" Sam said. "Of course, with most people accepting she was pregnant, the question then turned into, 'Who's the father?'"

Lady Bottomly shrugged agreement.

"People did their sums," he continued, "and came up with the time when the three boys and Samantha got high on drugs. Given that she'd been behaving like a good Catholic girl prior to that, it would seem logical that she had unprotected sex that evening whilst she was high. You thought that, didn't you, Lady Bottomly?"

"I thought it highly likely."

"But you didn't believe that either Steve or Barry were the father?"

Lady Bottomly shook her head. "Their behaviour towards Samantha would have been completely different after that event. It wasn't either of them who was the father."

"I suspect everyone else did the same calculation," Sam said. "They also came to the conclusion that neither Steve nor Barry was the father. So in their minds, that left only one person who had the opportunity that evening to impregnate Samantha. Her father."

Lady Bottomly shrugged and added, "So you got there at last."

"But before accepting that as a solution," Sam said, "we need to step back a little, to the real reason why you invited Samantha into your group."

"What do you mean?" Lady Bottomly quickly asked.

"It was the start of the Spring term at the Girls' Grammar School when you arrived back in Seacombe. Everyone thought you were incredibly pretty and all the guys lusted over you. Clearly, with your beauty, you enjoyed playing the field and didn't want to be tied down to one boy. When Samantha first met you, you had three boyfriends, all vying for your attention, and you enjoyed that. So why did you invite Samantha and Christine, girls who were much younger than you and your crowd, to your dinner party and consequently into your life?"

"I wanted to even up the sexes for my dinner party," Lady Bottomly said.

"But you subsequently brought Edward into the group so that once again it was unbalanced with two boys competing against each other for you. Then, one evening you chose Edward. You told him in front of everyone that your parents were away, and asked him to take you home. The next day, you were engaged to be married."

"For a time," Lady Bottomly said. "After a while, I broke it off with him in order to marry James Bottomly."

"Well known for being a boring old bachelor with a title."

"Maybe he was, but I don't see what that's got to do with anything."

"I mean," Sam said, "that you surrounded yourself with men for a reason very different from that which people were meant to think; to shield you from the public scrutiny of what your true feelings were. You invited Samantha to your dinner party because you had fallen in love with her."

Lady Bottomly gave a gasp, and then opened her mouth to deny it, but the words never came out. Instead she closed it again and paused, considering. "If you say anything outside of this room then I'll sue you for defamation," she said. "But so what? It's never been a crime for women to fall in love with other women – even to have sex with them."

"So when you were sent down from university…"

Lady Bottomly gave him a grin, the first for ages. "I was caught performing 'unnatural acts'," she said. "It would be laughed about now, but in those days it shocked everyone from the Vice-Chancellor downwards."

"Yet the Head of the Girls' Grammar School was perfectly happy to accept you as a member of staff at the school?"

Another grin. "I knew Miss Lavender, the Headmistress, used to lust over me whilst I was still at school. She never tried anything on with me, or any of the other girls, as far as I was aware. But when I came back from university, I, er… Well, you could say I seduced her. The job was her way of keeping me close. And you're absolutely right, I surrounded myself with men so no one would have a clue what my real inclinations were.

"But then I saw Samantha at school and she was the prettiest, most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I just had to get to know her better, hence the invite to the dinner party. She was so incredibly naïve, and her mother had imbued in her not to have sex with any man before marriage. The idea of having sex with a woman had clearly never occurred to either her or her mother, but my powers of seduction were well rehearsed by that time. Oh boy, did we have great sex. Even now, I can remember those precious few months together." She smiled, not at Sam, but into the distance, reliving the long-distant past. "And it all remained under cover because we were continually going out with the boys, seemingly just playing hard-to-get.

"But as I asked just now," she continued, "so what? It makes no difference to anything."

"It makes a difference to one very important thing," Sam said.

"I don't think so."

"It makes a difference to what happened on that evening when the others were taking purple hearts and you suggested that Edward came back to your house. The next day, you were engaged, and everyone thought that Edward had stayed the night with you. But that wasn't the case, was it? You simply used Edward to get you out of a drugs session, and when he took you home, you shut the door in his face."

"I thought the boys were being stupid taking the purple hearts, but when Samantha popped some as well, I knew exactly what she was going to do. She'd been saying for ages she didn't want to remain in the closet, whereas I thought coming out would be a disaster for both of us. Popping the purple hearts was her way of saying, 'Let's show the boys what we are really like'.

"The silly idiot. Did she not realise that two lesbians performing in front of four very randy boys was courting disaster? Grabbing hold of Edward and asking him to take me home was the best I could think of to avoid a catastrophe. On the way out, I whispered to Samantha to do the same. I thought she'd realise I wasn't going to do anything with Edward. When I heard the next day that Steve and Barry had collected Christine and gone back to see Tony for some more purple hearts, and what turned into an orgy, I breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like I'd not only avoided our exposure as lesbians, but also protected Samantha's virginity. Of course, I realised some weeks later what a mistake I'd made, although Samantha always insisted the pregnancy was not my fault – it had been her decision to pop the purple hearts, and everything had happened as a result of that. But what's Edward got to do with this?"

"It meant that an incredibly frustrated Edward could hardly go back to Tony Thompson's house since he'd be the laughing stock. So he went home. I suspect the timing was just right that when he entered the house, he could hear his father shouting at Steve and Barry. Not wishing to get involved, he stepped into the lounge as he heard them coming down the stairs. When Sir George went outside to show them off the property, he went upstairs to find Samantha. Then he had sex with her."

"Edward had sex with his sister?" Lady Bottomly said. "But that's an incredible idea."

"No more incredible than Sir George doing the same," Sam said.

"But he didn't like his sister very much," Lady Bottomly said.

"After that night, he'd want to distance himself from her," Sam said. "But when he got back to the house that evening, high on the purple hearts and sexually frustrated by your actions, he found Samantha drugged out of her mind and ready for sex. He probably didn't think twice about it. I guess that he took her back to her bedroom whilst Sir George was still downstairs, and then had sex with her. We shall never know whether Samantha willingly cooperated, or was raped. We only know she was deeply ashamed afterwards and couldn't tell anyone about it, although she obviously dropped some hints which were taken the wrong way by everyone, except her father."

"When Edward rang me next morning," Lady Bottomly said, "he obviously wanted people to believe he'd been there all night. That fitted in nicely with my pretence so I went along with it, just as I went along with our 'engagement'. But this is all only a theory, just as likely as Sir George being the father. You can't prove anything."

"That's where you're wrong," Sam said. "When Mary Harper died, Sir George closed down the house almost overnight. That house is like the Marie Celeste. This morning I found hairbrushes for all four of the family. I also brought back with me one of my father's hairbrushes, after stopping by at my house, yesterday. I'm pretty certain the DNA on them is going to prove that I am the granddaughter of Samantha and Edward, not Samantha and Sir George."

Slowly, Lady Bottomly nodded agreement.

***

"Before we start," Sam said, "I have to give you some bad news, GG. I'm afraid that your daughter, the real Samantha Harper, died whilst giving birth at the Convent of the Virgin Mary in Sheffield, on the third of October, 1966."

GG sat very still for a minute, whilst a tear ran down his cheek. Then he took out a tissue and blew his nose. He looked at Sam and asked, "And the baby?"

"Was my father," Sam said.

GG gasped with delight, and then positively leapt to his feet and bounded across to Sam and hugged him.

"Let's sit down again," Sam said, and when they had done so, he recommenced. "I told you that first evening that everyone I spoke to seemed to have different opinions about what happened to Samantha. That was the same for virtually every conversation I had for the rest of this week. But if you swept away the detail of what they said and looked at what was generally agreed, I came up with two commonly held views.

"The first," Sam continued, "was that most people thought that Samantha disappeared because she was pregnant. The second was that I was so similar to Samantha that we must be related, and that I was most likely her granddaughter. That still doesn’t tell us who the father was, or how Samantha got to Sheffield. But Maureen Brown unknowingly gave me a clue when I went to St Joseph's, which it took me some time to work out. She told me that I talked the same way as Father Wigley used to, and she assumed that meant I was Father Wigley's grandchild.

"Of course, speech is not an inherited behaviour, but depends upon the environment in which a person grows up. I grew up in Sheffield, so could that mean that Father Wigley was also from Sheffield? If so, was it possible he still had links with the area, and that when a pregnant girl needed to get away somewhere, he would send her to a convent in Sheffield?

"The fact that I was not only from Sheffield and bore a remarkable resemblance to Samantha, but also that my father was born at exactly the right time – October 1966 – was too strong a coincidence to ignore. It was pure luck that I managed to find the Convent of the Virgin Mary since it wasn't listed anywhere. Apparently, it was the convent where the Catholic Church sent all the most sensitive of pregnant girls, such as those impregnated by so-called celibate priests."

"But how did she get to Sheffield? We checked the trains and long distance buses. Did someone drive her there?"

"I suspected the answer when you first told me about Samantha's disappearance," Sam said, "and something one of the Sisters told me confirmed it. She said that when Samantha came through the door from the street, the setting sun made a halo around her head. Given that the train journey alone is seven hours from Seacombe to Sheffield, there's no way that Samantha could have left home at two-thirty and got to the convent before sunset at this time of the year. The reason you couldn't find what happened to Samantha on that Easter Saturday afternoon was because she didn't disappear in the afternoon, she left in the morning."

"What are you talking about?" GG said. "Mary was with her all morning."

"I believe that the incident with the dress not fitting occurred first thing on Saturday morning," Sam said. "Mary realised Samantha was pregnant and took her to Father Wigley at St Joseph's. He suggested the Convent of the Virgin Mary at Sheffield. Mary helped Samantha pack a small bag and took her to the station that morning. It was easy to telephone Veronica Makepeace in the early afternoon and pretend the event had only just happened. Waiting for you and Edward at the station was a blinder; it ensured you would ask the ticket collector if he had seen Samantha, when she knew the ticket collectors changed duty at midday."

"But why would she do that?"

"I'll come to that in a minute," Sam said, "but I can tell you the convent was a delightful place, and everyone there loved Samantha. They would be happy for you to visit them and see her grave.

"But why didn't they tell me when she died?"

"I'm afraid," Sam said, "that after Samantha died, the convent telephoned this house and told your wife."

"Mary knew? That's impossible." GG could not believe what Sam was telling him, but then his whole body shuddered and he said, "Samantha died on the third of October? Oh God! The third of October!"

"Was the day when your wife committed suicide," Sam said.

"She knew," GG said. "She knew that Samantha had died having a baby but she never told me. How could she do that? Why couldn't she at least put it in her suicide note? And why commit suicide, anyway? We had lost a daughter but gained a grandson."

"I'm afraid," Sam said, "that Mary believed you were the father of Samantha's child. She thought that you should never see the child."

"That's obscene," GG angrily said. "How could I ever do that to Samantha? Why would Mary even suspect such a thing?"

"Samantha never told anyone who the father was," Sam said. "But probably from her attitude, Mary suspected it was a close family member. I'm afraid many people independently came to the same conclusion."

"Of course it wasn't a close family member. There was only me and…"

"And Edward." Sam finished the sentence for him. "That evening when Samantha was drugged and you threw out Steve Baines and Barry Jones, everyone believed Edward spent the night with Veronica Makepeace. But Lady Bottomly told me this morning that was not the case. He would have returned home just as you were throwing them out. I think he avoided the confrontation and went upstairs to see Samantha. He helped her back to her room and then had sex with her."

"Damn him! If only Samantha had told me," GG said, clenching his fists and shaking his head from side to side, "I'd have…"

"I think that was the very reason why she didn't tell you," Sam said. "Because she loved you and she didn't want you to get into trouble for what you might do. She thought it better to go away, have the baby and then return. Unfortunately, she died giving birth to my father.

"Life was cruel enough to you and Mary," Sam hesitantly continued. "The only way I can ameliorate it is to say that I am here now, and I will try to be an excellent great-grandson to you."

"More than a great-grandson," GG said. "I want you to continue to be a 'great' daughter. Will you do that?"

Sam smiled and gave him a hug. "Of course, Daddy." He rested his head against GG's shoulder. After a few seconds, he felt GG shaking. He looked at him, expecting him to be crying. Instead, he was laughing. "What is it?" Sam asked.

"Oh, I've just had a thought about my will," GG said.

"It wasn't because of your will that I..." Sam started to say.

"Don't be stupid," GG said. "I think you said that your half-brother was from your mother's side rather than your father. That means that, through your father, you will inherit all of Samantha's half-share of my estate.

"Not only that," he continued before Sam could speak, "since Edward had two children rather than one, his estate will be shared equally between Geraldine and yourself. So you'll get three-quarters of my estate and Geraldine, who was looking forward to getting her hands on it all, will only get one quarter. Oh dear."

He started to laugh again, and Sam couldn't help but join in.