A Death of Distinction Read online

  ‘What do you remember about the woman – the woman who called herself Mrs Norman?’

  ‘I don’t know that I’d recognize her again. It was her clothes I noticed mostly. She was beautifully dressed, always immaculate, and she’d some stunning jewellery. But she kept herself very much in the background ... he was the extrovert, did all the talking, a really nice man. I can’t believe what you’re telling me. A bomb, you say? Dear God!’

  ‘Well, Martin,’ Mayo commented when Kite had finished, ‘that’s interesting, I’ll grant you, and confirms what we’re beginning to know of Lilburne’s character. The question is, was this the same woman that Claudia Reynolds assumed he was meeting clandestinely, or someone else entirely? We’ve no evidence that she was – or whether she was the one who wrote that unsigned letter, or typed the other. Or whether any of it has anything at all to do with him being killed.’

  Abigail said, ‘I’ll find out from Claudia exactly when it was he and this woman were meeting.’

  ‘If it happens to be nineteen-seventy-nine, the chances are it’s the same woman he stayed with at the Gravely Arms. I’ve already checked that was when he and the woman stayed there as Mr and Mrs Norman,’ Kite said.

  Marc’s depression was deepened by the fact that he hadn’t heard from Flora about the flowers, not even whether she’d received them or not. Then he reasoned that she wouldn’t have wanted to ring him at the hospital to thank him, she would know it was more than likely he’d be on theatre duty. At the same time, it came to him that she couldn’t write to him, either, since he’d never told her his full name. When she’d asked him what he was called, he’d simply said ‘Marc’. From that she wouldn’t know that it was spelt in the French way, with a ‘c’, and she probably hadn’t noticed the way he pronounced it, with a short ‘a’. For all she knew, there might be fifty Marks working at the hospital, which is what the woman at the flower shop would have written down when he telephoned the order. He was furious with himself for not thinking it through properly, though he wasn’t sorry he’d sent them, she was the sort of girl, he knew, who’d love flowers ... though it did seem that he didn’t have much luck where women and flowers were concerned.

  But no way could he give up in his attempts to contact her again. There were other ways, as Frank used to say, of skinning a cat.

  At the beginning of March, Marie-Laure had told him about the new flat she would be moving into.

  It was one Avril had found for her, through Search and Sell, and he’d been not only bitterly disappointed that she didn’t offer to share it with him, but also obscurely affronted because, although it was small and not in the best of neighbourhoods, it was better than any he could have afforded to buy – one that would have been large enough, at any rate, for them to share. Prices seemed to have risen overnight and each time he looked at his capital, he saw it buying less and less. But it was still a mean flat, and this had never been part of his plan. She deserved better – she would have had better, if she hadn’t been so self-sacrificing. He bottled up the anger he felt at this needless waste of her life, but she sensed it, all the same.

  ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ she’d said gravely. ‘I can’t go on sponging on Avril for ever, that’s only a one-person flat she has, though she has been wonderful about letting me stay there.’

  ‘You’re not going to share the new flat with her, then?’

  ‘What made you think that? The arrangement was only temporary. I need – how do you say it? – my own space.’ She almost achieved a smile.

  He felt very slightly better. Women’s friendship – the deep, caring sort of relationship Avril and his mother appeared to have – was something he’d only ever heard talked about in a lubricious sort of way, and he hadn’t cared to dwell on it, pushing the implications to the back of his mind. But he saw, now, that it hadn’t been like that – not on Marie-Laure’s part, anyway. Perhaps he was projecting his own feelings on to his mother, but they were two such different personalities that he wondered, sometimes, if it wasn’t merely gratitude that made her want to keep Avril as a friend.

  ‘It’s very convenient,’ she’d said of her new accommodation. ‘The shops are nearby. I can easily walk to Catesby’s to work ...’

  ‘Well, I hope you won’t be doing that much longer.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  She’d agreed, after a good deal of persuasion, to try and get herself a more worthwhile job, in teaching, what she was trained for, and had applied for several positions, though so far without success.

  ‘And the church is just round the corner,’ she added.

  The Roman Catholic church.

  It was another part of her life that he found difficult to accept, having had to admit how deeply her religion still fitted into her life. He knew, bitterly, that her faith meant more to her than he ever could. Her inner life he was incapable of understanding, and the outward trappings of her religion irked and sometimes embarrassed him, especially when he thought of these last self-imposed years of martyrdom. How could she worship a God who’d allowed her to suffer as she had done? Yet he knew she slipped into the church every day to pray, and went regularly to mass and confession. The few books of her own that she possessed were almost all books of devotion. She wore the crucifix round her neck always, there was another above her bed.

  He just couldn’t understand how Marie-Laure could find peace and solace in kneeling before an altar, lighting candles in that gloomy, soot-stained building behind the market square.

  ‘What do you see in it? What’s it ever done for you?’ He was totally unable to envisage a life of that sort. Frank and June hadn’t been practising Christians. Churchgoing of any kind was quite outside his ken. Believing in some pie-in-the-sky religion was for cranks and parsons and Jesus freaks.

  ‘It has helped me to go on living,’ she answered, but refused to be drawn further. ‘We’ll talk more about it some day, when you’re ready for it, but not now.’

  She was very keen to move into the flat as soon as she could, and, after a great deal of argument, allowed Marc to buy for her the few modest pieces of mostly second-hand furniture which she insisted was all she needed. When he’d finished painting the sitting room for her, and they’d moved in the furniture, she was gravely delighted with the result.

  But really, that was when it all started to go wrong.

  He thought perhaps it was because Avril didn’t seem to visit her in her new home. Maybe she’d taken the huff, or they’d quarrelled. Or maybe it was just that Avril waited until he wasn’t there to call on her, which wouldn’t be surprising, considering their last meeting. And if she’d told Marie-Laure of this last furious exchange, it wouldn’t be surprising that there was this constraint between them that hadn’t been there before, this growing coolness. Why she seemed to shrink from any attempt by him to get closer.

  When he’d dropped in at Coltmore Road to pick up his mother’s suitcase, Avril had accused him of putting the idea of moving out into Marie-Laure’s head, insisting that he was involving her in expenses she could ill afford, when she could have stayed with her, Avril, and shared their living costs. Almost before Marc knew what was happening, they had been in the middle of a blazing row.

  She’d hefted the suitcase to the middle of the floor and plonked herself down on the bed-settee so that the springs groaned under her weight, and picked up her knitting. He’d wanted to yank it out of her hands.

  ‘Can’t you see she doesn’t want you?’ she said. ‘She got rid of you, once – why did you have to come back into her life? I’ve told her, Marc Daventry, that you spell trouble, and she doesn’t need any more of that! And I’m warning you – you get out of her hair or I’ll make trouble for you.’

  Jealousy, fury and frustration boiled up inside him. He’d grabbed the suitcase in order to occupy his hands. If he hadn’t they might have been round her throat. But a warning voice sounded in his ear. What did she mean, trouble for him?

  He could easily have dealt wit
h her, he told himself as he left the flat. But she wasn’t worth bothering about. He went off to the DIY place to buy timber and put up the shelves in Marie-Laure’s sitting room and told himself that the best thing she’d done was to separate herself from Avril Kitchin.

  For his part, he could only feel thankful that those long, tedious evenings in her company, with her suspiciously watching his every move, those sly questions of hers, her interminable needles clicking away, were over.

  13

  ‘We’ve had a break, Sarge –’

  D C Deeley, dependable and solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, but never the world’s best communicator, broke off, staring across the flickering computer screens to the far side of the room.

  ‘Well,’ Kite said, after several moments of waiting for him to continue. ‘Take your time about it, Pete, don’t break your neck, but when you’ve thought about it, perhaps you’d be good enough to inform me what it was you were about to say.’

  Deeley came to with a start. ‘Sorry, Sarge. Sorry, I was just –’ Kite didn’t need to follow his fascinated glance to know what it was that Deeley was ‘just –’: he was just looking at Farrar, resplendent in a new suit of so light a grey it was almost silver. He wore grey leather moccasins to match, and white socks, and sported a gold chain around his wrist. Cool as a cucumber in the sweltering heat of the winter-graded central heating, he stood out like a snowdrop in a cabbage patch. Kite had had all morning to get used to the sight; moreover, he knew that Farrar was got up like a dog’s dinner because he’d asked for a couple of hours off to meet his wife, Sandra, for an important appointment of a delicate nature with her gynaecologist. Kite had kept that to himself. Farrar put his back up, like he did the rest of CID, but he’d already run the gamut of basic humour over his suit, the poor sod had had his share of embarrassment for the day.

  ‘Well, Pete?’

  Deeley swallowed and smartened his attention. ‘We’ve had a sighting on somebody hanging around the governor’s house that morning, Sarge.’

  ‘The morning of the bombing?’

  ‘The milkman who’d just delivered to the governor’s house.’

  ‘We’ve questioned the milkman. And the postman – and the paperboy ...’

  ‘No, Sarge, not the regular one, we couldn’t, he’s been away on holiday. Winter break in Tenerife. Only just come back and heard about the bombing.’

  ‘Tenerife? We’re in the wrong job, Pete.’

  ‘Yes, Sarge. He took the kids to Disneyland – the Orlando one – last year.’

  ‘Strewth. Well, let’s have the good news.’

  ‘He was on his way back down the lane that leads to the house, after delivering the milk. It was still dark, around half-seven, and his headlights picked up the top of some sort of vehicle in the field over the hedge. There was somebody moving about, he thought, but he assumed it was the farmer who owns the field. Nobody else likely to have been about at that time.’

  ‘Thought? He didn’t actually see anybody?’

  ‘He probably wouldn’t have seen the vehicle, either, if he’d been going faster, but you know how slow these electric milk floats go.’

  ‘What else does he remember? Did he see the driver? Can he make a guess what sort of vehicle it was? Colour? Not,’ Kite said with sudden hope, thinking of Dex Davis’s Orion, ‘red?’

  Deeley shook his head. ‘Might’ve been light coloured, he said, but he can’t say for sure. The hedge’s four foot high, and he only saw the roof, so it was probably a car. He didn’t see the driver at all.’

  ‘Tracks,’ Kite said, reaching for the phone. ‘The weather’s on our side, for once. Wet enough before the bomb, and cold enough since to have preserved them.’

  ‘Unless the geezer went back and obliterated them.’

  ‘You’ve been watching too much Inspector Morse. Nice one, though, Pete.’

  It would be even nicer if Forensics managed to match up the tyre tracks with those on Dex Davis’s Orion, but he wasn’t optimistic, rightly so, as it proved. Tyre casts established it wasn’t a farm or an off-road vehicle, maybe a front-wheel-drive car since the tread on the two front tyres was noticeably smoother than on the back ones.

  ‘Not a lot of use to us if we haven’t got a car to match them up with,’ Kite said, ‘but somebody up there loves us – there were footprints as well. Trainers, size eight, with a small circular mark on the heel, which SOCOs think might be a drawing pin somebody stood on.’

  ‘Size eight? That lets Dex out,’ Mayo remarked when this was later pointed out to him. ‘You could do yourself an injury, falling over his size twelves.’

  ‘Somebody smaller than Dex,’ Kite agreed. ‘Big for a woman – though I can think of several females not a hundred miles from here, for instance, with feet that size.’

  ‘What is interesting,’ Mayo said, ‘is why that time in the morning?’

  Just when the world was waking up, when the killer had had all the hours of darkness at his disposal? But it was probably why the dogs hadn’t barked – they’d be used to people hanging around the house then, delivering milk, papers, mail.

  ‘... and I’m truly sorry, Lois, but look, I can’t give you an answer yet. Not until I’ve talked it over with Gil.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, too, but if you don’t do it,’ said Lois French, ‘I think you’ll live to regret it. And you realize I can’t keep the offer open indefinitely in case you should change your mind? I really do need a partner, I can’t keep shutting up shop when I have to be out – and it’s not just someone to mind the shop, I need someone with flair.’

  ‘Then you don’t need me. You’re the one with the flair.’

  But Alex had good taste, she knew that. And good judgement for the antiques side of the business, not to mention good sense over money. Yet she was still a little afraid that the offer was a quixotic gesture Lois might very soon repent. Brilliant Lois, flashing and skimming like a kingfisher along the surface of life, she’d always been the impulsive sister, while Alex had been the determined one, knowing where she was going and not letting anything deflect her.

  ‘I wish you would, Alicky. Before it’s too late. Next time you might not have such a lucky escape.’

  ‘Well, whether I stay on in the police or not,’ Alex said, touched by the childhood nickname Lois hadn’t used in years, ‘I don’t know that it’s a good reason for stepping from the frying pan into the fire.’

  ‘Well, thanks! If that’s how you feel about my business, darling, I agree!’ Lois’s laugh tinkled.

  ‘What I meant was – well, you know what I mean.’

  Lois was making light of it, but Alex sensed her sister’s disappointment could be deeper than she’d given her credit for.

  Recently, when having the shopfront painted, she’d had her own name removed, so that it now read simply, ‘Interiors’, rather than ‘French Interiors’, which Alex had in any case always thought misleading. This time she was leaving room for manoeuvres, hoping that Alex could be manipulated into making it into a partnership.

  She stood up and began stacking their coffee cups on the tray. ‘It doesn’t look as if Gil’s going to make it, after all. I said we’d set off if he wasn’t here before half-past. Still want to come with me?’

  ‘Seems a pity to waste the seat, though I’m not all that keen on such heavy stuff, as you know,’ said Lois, who liked her music predictably easy. Radio Two, Barry Manilow. All the same, she stood up and began to inspect her immaculate make-up in the mirror over the mantel. Alex watched as she applied more lipstick, smoothed into place the shining black hair with the Cleopatra fringe and the ends curving towards her cheeks. Not a wrinkle in sight. Slim and upright as a reed (skinny, said Mayo) and too brittle (neurotic, came from the same source). Several inches shorter than Alex. Superficially rather alike facially, they differed in almost everything else, especially the number of men in their lives. Three marriages in Lois’s case, all of them short-lived and, as she was fond of saying, she hadn’t been neglected i
n between.

  At that moment, Mayo’s latchkey was heard in the lock. ‘Saved by the bell!’ Lois cried, with obvious relief.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind? It seems so –’

  ‘Mind? It’s a positive deliverance, not having to sit through two hours of purgatory! I’ll go home and wash my underwear. Stravinsky’s not my scene.’

  ‘It’s not Stravinsky, I think it’s mainly Beethoven.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  Alex laughed and felt less guilty at having messed up Lois’s evening.

  Mayo had remembered the concert half an hour after he’d planned to leave for home. He’d told Alex to leave if he wasn’t home on time, and to take Lois, whom he knew she was seeing about now – if she could be persuaded to go – but looking at his watch, he thought he’d still make it, even though he’d walked down to the station that morning and had no car. He could have got someone to run him home, but it was a lovely evening for a walk, a positive chance to dissipate some of the tense, nervous energy that had been building up inside him.

  His long strides took him past the closed, window-lit shops in the town centre, quiet for a spell until the youth of the town emerged for their evening’s rowdy activity. The bellringers were practising at St Nicholas’s church and the chimes rang jubilantly across the town. The clear, cold night with its brilliant, starry sky and promise of frost yet again, cleared his head of the fug of the murder room, but he couldn’t rid himself of the on-edge feeling, the sense of dissatisfaction with the way the Lilburne case seemed to have reached stalemate. The break this morning, the sighting of the car, had been something, but it was only a chink in the darkness. With every stride, he tried to shake off the idea that they were getting nowhere fast, dammit. But he was beginning to have a doomed feeling about the case, which was good for nobody. It had attracted a lot of attention and he could already feel the spotlight of public criticism.

  Alex felt even less guilty about her sister when Mayo asked, after Lois had gone, ‘Are you wildly sold on going to this concert?’