A Death of Distinction Page 15

  ‘Oh, Marc, that meant nothing – except that you’d been so nice to me! Everybody kisses, it doesn’t mean any more than shaking hands.’

  It was true, people kissed all the time, when they met, when they said goodbye, even people who didn’t know each other very well. But not Marc. Kissing was special, for when you wanted to show affection, or love, for someone. Using kisses in that casual way debased their currency.

  He was bitterly disappointed in Flora. Disappointed, and so angry he felt that he couldn’t breathe. She’d made him look a fool in front of that other woman he’d taken an instant dislike to. But if she thought it was over with, she was wrong. He wouldn’t be put off so easily, he hadn’t finished yet, far from it.

  Without another word, he turned and left the scented, feminine atmosphere of the shop and stepped out into the workaday bustle of Fetter Hill. The sense of isolation which he so often felt had never seemed greater.

  15

  The Mayor’s new rose garden outside the Town Hall, of which he’d spoken so enthusiastically to Dorothea on the night of the dinner, was still a collection of bare, lifeless twigs set in square cushions of earth. Bordered with massed purple and white crocuses, a thing of pride and joy to the municipal mind, the beds were cheerful, if not aesthetically pleasing, on a miserable morning. Or what Abigail could see of them as she perched on a desk in the incident room, the telephone to her ear.

  ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s the name,’ she answered Anthony Spurrier. ‘Clarke. John Clarke.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been through the records, way back, and we’ve never had a John Clarke, with or without the “e”. Sean Clarke, yes. Michael, Justin, Andrew. Even a Tristram, poor devil. But no John, ever, not even as a middle name. Funny, when you think how common it is.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why it was chosen. If the owner of it ever existed, outside Dex Davis’s mind.’

  ‘Giving you a hard time, is he?’

  ‘No more than we’d expect.’ No more than insisting he was telling the truth about this John Clarke. But he would, anyway. He was up to the neck in it. Tip and Farrar had done a good job in tracking down the source of the explosives, which had indeed come from the quarry, via a light-fingered truck driver doing regular pick-ups of stone for the new Hurstfield bypass. He’d admitted leaving the explosives in a car boot, picking up the money left there, just as Dex had said. ‘Well, thanks anyway for your help, Mr Spurrier.’

  ‘Er – before you ring off. There’s – er – something you might be able to help me with. I’ve got a problem, well, sort of. At least, not me, personally, not exactly –’

  ‘Whose is it, then?’ Abigail asked, looking at her watch, mindful of how long it took Spurrier to get to the point.

  ‘It concerns Flora – Flora Lilburne. My fiancée, you know.’ There was a pause which seemed to call for some comment.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were engaged.’

  ‘Only just,’ he answered with a proud bashfulness that managed to convey itself over the phone.

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Another pause.

  Abigail sighed inwardly, made a drinking motion towards Pete Deeley, indicating that a coffee would be welcome. He stuck his thumb up and as he went to get her one from the machine, she said, ‘What’s the problem, Mr Spurrier?’

  She listened patiently while he told her that Flora Lilburne was being pestered by someone named Marc Daventry. Telephone calls, flowers – even hanging around her shop – and now it was letters ...

  ‘He’s threatening her, you mean?’

  ‘No, not exactly. Rather the opposite, I suppose. He seems to have taken a shine to her, and won’t take no for an answer.’ Her own crispness was sharpening him up, and he managed to give her a fairly succinct account in less than the five minutes it took to drink her coffee, of how the situation had arisen. It seemed to Abigail a fairly familiar one – a pretty girl giving a young man too much encouragement, and then regretting it. She didn’t see what Spurrier expected of her, since there had so far been no threats to Flora’s person, but she told him to leave it with her and she’d see what she could do. Which, with all the goodwill in the world, she didn’t think would be much. Considering all the department had on just now, it wasn’t a priority.

  ‘You – won’t mention this call to Flora? She feels sorry for this bloke, thinks it’ll all blow over.’

  Abigail promised, but she thought it prudent to make a few inquiries, and when she’d collected the results, to report what she discovered when the team met for the morning briefing.

  ‘What do you say his name is? Daventry?’

  Mayo knew most of what went on in Lavenstock, it was his patch and he made it his business to know, but this name was a new one to him.

  ‘Yes. I’ve had him checked, there’s nothing against him, personally. But he was connected, as a child, with a big murder case that happened around here some time since.’

  Several people, those who’d been in the district long enough, remembered the Daventry case.

  ‘Must’ve been twenty years ago,’ Kite said. ‘I was just thinking of joining the police. A Frenchwoman who murdered her husband with a carving knife, wasn’t it? Created a regular furore round here.’

  ‘Eighteen years ago, to be precise,’ Abigail said.

  A typical domestic murder, it had been, following the usual pattern of a happy enough marriage, a couple apparently devoted to each other and to their small boy, until the dark river of discontent and unhappiness running beneath the surface had erupted in blood and death. The truth emerged only at the trial.

  An attractive woman whom Charles Daventry had met when on business in France, his wife had turned out to be not the thrifty French schoolteacher he’d expected, but hopelessly extravagant – at least, in his eyes. He’d evidently tried to keep her on short commons all their married life, subjecting her to interrogations on how she’d spent his money. Although a man with a substantial business as a wine importer, he had possessed a streak of miserliness which the defence might have claimed had made life a misery for his wife, had there been any defence.

  ‘But she wouldn’t plead mitigating circumstances, as I remember it,’ Atkins said. And he would remember it, he never forgot anything. Elephants had nothing on George.

  ‘Go on.’ Mayo stopped twiddling with his newly acquired reading glasses (which he didn’t really need all that much, of course), a sure sign that he was interested.

  ‘It’s all in the records, but she admitted it from the beginning, said it was all her fault. She’d been spending extravagant sums of money on clothes and such, and he blew his top.’ She’d ended six years of humiliation by driving a kitchen carving knife between his ribs.

  ‘Her prints were all over the knife, there was blood on her clothes commensurate with her having done it. Made no attempt to deny it.’

  ‘A classic case of “I don’t know what came over me”?’

  ‘Not quite in the heat of the moment. Waited until he was in bed before she attacked him.’ The prosecution had made much of a discrepancy between when Daventry died and when his death had been reported. She had stated that was because she’d been too distraught to think clearly, belated fear of what would become of her child. Whether this had any effect on the jury or not, she had received a life sentence.

  Leaving behind her child. The child who had been called Marc, and who was now making a nuisance of himself over Flora Lilburne.

  ‘What did you say this Marc does for a living, Abigail?’

  ‘He’s an operating-theatre technician. The people he works with speak highly of him. He’s been there about two years, came to them from one of the Birmingham hospitals.’

  Mayo asked for all the documentation that was available on the case and, after reading it through, sat thinking about Marc Daventry and Flora Lilburne. Two victims of tragedy, both of them with a murdered father. Was there anything between them other than the simple coincidence of having met in the hospital? T
he trouble was, he didn’t like coincidences, simple or not. But however he looked at it, there was nothing on present showing to suggest there was the slightest link between Charles Daventry’s stabbing, and Lilburne being blown to death.

  The call came in just after half past nine the following day, when George Atkins was just finishing his early elevenses, a small snack comprising a pint mug of coffee and two sticky buns, and was looking forward to a concluding smoke. He was making the most of his pipe-smoking days, sensing they were numbered. It didn’t take much imagination to realize that a new non-smoking super would lose no time in making the office a no-go area as far as tobacco went. As far as George’s noxious pipe went, nobody would be sorry to see this – except George himself, who hoped he’d be too far gone into retirement before that happened to worry about it.

  He immediately set the routine procedures in motion, then put himself through to Mayo to relay the information, though not before he’d gulped down the rest of his coffee and plugged his pipe into his mouth, not unlike a baby with a comforter, one or two unkind souls had been heard to remark.

  ‘Sir. Looks like we have a suspicious death.’

  Mayo, surrounded by papers, was tetchy. ‘Looks like? Well, have we or haven’t we?’

  ‘No details yet, sir, except that the victim’s female. Flat in Coltmore Road, Branxmore. I’ve alerted Inspector Moon. Organized SOCOs – and Doc Ison’s on his way.’

  ‘Good man, George.’ Mollified, Mayo surveyed the day’s tasks lying before him, did a rapid mental review on what was lined up for him in his diary. He had a full day, including a working lunch with the ACC (Crime) which he couldn’t put off. Nothing else of world-shaking importance. And every suspicious death on his patch was his business, his presence was necessary, he reminded himself, squaring his conscience at the eagerness with which he welcomed this diversion. ‘I’ll be down there myself, George, soon as I can.’

  Coltmore Road led off the busy Coventry Road, but went nowhere except to a parade of dingy shops and other similarly drab streets, distinguished from them only because it was one degree more respectable and had municipal acers, rowans and Kanzan cherries planted at intervals along its length, some of which had survived the attentions of vandals.

  By the time Mayo arrived, the phalanx of police vehicles was creating havoc in an area where congested on-street parking left little room to pass. The pathologist’s gleaming vintage Rover was nowhere in evidence, but he could see Henry Ison’s blue Ford Scorpio parked halfway down the street, and the scenes-of-crime van, double parked with a patrol car in front of a house remarkable for its fresh paint and a tub, crammed with vivid primulas, at the foot of the front steps. The house had been cordoned off, a uniformed constable stood guarding the entry, trying not to look frozen stiff, his nose red and his breath clouding the frosty air. Mayo shouldered his way past the usual knot of gaping sightseers who were intent on disregarding the attempts of another constable to keep them back, and spoke briefly to the West Indian couple who were huddled in the doorway of the downstairs flat. Running up the narrow stairs, he found Abigail at the top, looking sick. She was standing outside a door opening into a very small room where Sergeant Dexter and his white-overalled scenes-of-crime team were already in action, sidestepping and generally falling over each other in the cramped space, while Napier endeavoured to do his stuff with his cameras.

  ‘Morning, Henry.’

  Ison, the police surgeon, was kneeling on the floor beside the body of a woman, half-dressed beneath an open dressing-gown. A sticky red stain spread across the front of her pink slip. She lay on the carpet, across the front of a bed-settee. A gas fire fixed to the wall had evidently been left on. Though now switched off, it had left the small room unbearably overheated. The smell of death was nauseating, the feeling of violence palpable.

  Ison flapped a hand in greeting. ‘Be with you in a minute, Gil. Thought you were T-L. Taking his time, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’ll be along shortly. Finishing off a PM, I’m told.’

  Abigail and Mayo stood bunched awkwardly at the door, careful not to touch anything, looking in at the room, every detail of which was visible from the doorway: the bed-settee, taking up a lot of the available space, two wooden-armed, upholstered chairs with splayed legs, one of them overturned, coffee table ditto, a small sideboard, a curtained alcove with the curtains drawn back, revealing a neatly made bed and a single wardrobe. A door at the opposite end of the room presumably led to a kitchen of sorts. The open door of a shared bathroom and lavatory was behind them on the landing.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Avril Kitchin. Worked at the house agent’s in Lorrimer Street, Search and Sell. Lived here about twelve months.’ Abigail paused. ‘Before that, she’d been doing time.’ Mayo raised his eyebrows. ‘The flat was found for her by her probation officer.’

  ‘How was she discovered?’

  ‘Mr Johnson downstairs, the landlord, found her. He came upstairs to start redecorating the next flat, presently empty – the attic flat’s occupied by a single girl, but she’s off with her boyfriend somewhere just now – and saw the door wide open, with her on the floor, as you see her.’

  ‘Somebody broke in and attacked her, hm?’ Mayo could see her handbag, lying on the floor beside her, the contents spilling out.

  ‘Not so much broke in. The outside door at the bottom’s never locked after the milk’s been taken in at about seven-thirty, apparently. No sign of forced entry up here – so this door wasn’t locked, either, or else she let in whoever did it. Or they had a key. But more likely they were after money – purse, cheque book and credit cards seem to have gone missing from her handbag.’

  Ison snapped his bag shut and got to his feet, removing himself out of Dexter’s way. ‘OK, I’ve finished, Sergeant. You can have a bit more leg room now. Straightforward stabbing,’ he said to Mayo as he reached the door. ‘In or near the heart. Difficult thing to achieve, to hit exactly the right place without catching a rib. So the killer was either lucky, or knew what he was doing.’

  ‘The weapon?’

  ‘Steel knitting needle, left on the floor.’

  ‘Here, sir,’ Dexter said, holding up a tagged plastic bag with the grey enamelled needle inside it, and indicating a bundle of fluffy yellow knitting, resembling a dead chicken, lying on the carpet in front of the bed-settee.

  ‘Size twelve needle, fairly thin, which is why there isn’t as much blood as you might expect,’ added Ison. ‘Though there was probably a good deal of internal bleeding.’

  ‘Has she been raped?’ The victim appeared to have been dressing when she was interrupted. A coral-coloured blouse and a light brown skirt were draped over a chair. What clothing she was wearing appeared to be undisturbed, apart from her pink, fleecy dressing-gown being unfastened. But it was a question that had to be asked, nowadays, whether the victim was eight or eighty.

  ‘Not interfered with at all, as far as I can tell. She was spared that.’

  ‘How long –’ began Mayo.

  ‘A matter of an hour or thereabouts, probably not much more. She’s still warm. Say around eight o’clock. Difficult to say exactly with the gas fire on. As for anything else, I’m only here to certify life’s extinct, you’ll have to wait until Timpson-Ludgate opens her up for the drama – though I doubt there’ll be any surprises. Right, I’ll leave you to it and see what I can do for Mrs Johnson downstairs. She’s understandably a mite upset. Give me a buzz if there’s anything else I can do.’

  Brisk, bespectacled, like a small beaver, he inched past them and clattered down the stairs.

  16

  ‘I just don’t know,’ Mrs Johnson sighed, in the spotless surroundings of her downstairs sitting room, after Ison had left. She was calmer now, dispensing home-made ginger cakes and pouring tea – not, Mayo noticed to his satisfaction, into mugs (what the hell did you do with the spoon?), but into violet-sprigged china cups with matching saucers. ‘I don’t know, you think you’re doing right, trying
to help, and then this happens. I won’t do it no more, I tell you that.’

  ‘Now then, Pearl!’ Her husband put an arm around her plump shoulders and squeezed. ‘She’s upset,’ he explained apologetically. ‘We offered to take Mrs Kitchin in when we was asked, we try to do the best we can, you know. Pearl, these people need help, you know that.’

  The Johnsons were a Jamaican-born couple of late middle-age who had struggled for twenty years to keep up the mortgage on their house. When their four children had left home, they’d converted the bedroom and attic floors into three flats in order to pay off what they owed to the building society. Through their local church, they’d been approached to take in occasional released prisoners as tenants. ‘And up to now, we’ve had no trouble of this sort, no trouble at all,’ Mrs Johnson said.

  ‘Be fair, she was no trouble, neither. Pearl,’ Leroy Johnson gently reminded her. ‘Kept herself to herself and no bother.’

  ‘Well, that’s right,’ his wife conceded. ‘I have to say that. The bathroom always left nice and clean, and no wasting the hot water, even when that other one was here.’

  ‘What other one was this, Mrs Johnson?’ Abigail asked.

  ‘The friend who stayed with her.’

  ‘Never did think we should’ve allowed that, you know,’ put in her husband, ‘that flat’s not big enough. Not to say they was getting two for the price of one! But we reckoned, if she was another one down on her luck, we’d turn a blind eye for the moment, especially as Mrs Kitchin – Avril – seemed so happy to have her here. Never saw her smile until her friend came. Well... anyway, she left a few weeks ago.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  The couple looked at each other. The husband frowned. ‘Not sure. We hardly saw her, never mind spoke to her.’

  ‘Mary Lou,’ said Pearl Johnson suddenly, ‘That’s what Mrs Kitchin used to call her – Mary Lou, or some such. She wasn’t English.’

  ‘American?’

  ‘No, oh, no, not American. More like French or something, I’d say.’