A Death of Distinction Page 18

‘I’m on my way,’ she informed Mayo, popping her head round his door, ‘before she has the opportunity to change her mind and disappear again. She must have arrived home at the flat last night after we called. Unless she spent the night at the convent and went straight to Catesby’s from there. At any rate, she’s gone in to work this morning.’

  ‘Has she, by Jove? I’d like to think that shows she’s nothing to hide, but I’m more inclined to believe it’s the influence of the Mother Superior. Extraordinary.’

  Abigail smiled to herself, noting how much the Reverend Mother Emmanuel had impressed Mayo, despite the grumbles which had accompanied them all the way home at the way he considered she’d outsmarted him.

  The personnel officer at Catesby’s was a Mrs Patterson, who had no option but to agree, in the face of Abigail’s warrant card, to fetch ‘Mrs Nicoud’ from her duties, though it was with some reluctance and suspicion that she did so.

  ‘What’s going on? She was very late this morning, as it is, and this is our busiest time, you know.’

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry, but it’s either that, or we take her down to the police station.’ Abigail was adamant, knowing it was certain to be both.

  Curiosity unsatisfied, a little piqued, Mrs Patterson disappeared, leaving Abigail and Jenny Platt in her office, a blandly pleasant, neutral sort of room with a group of chairs set around a small table in front of a big window. Green-carpeted. Chairs covered in grey, royal blue and kelly green. Catesby’s colours. The room was at the end of a corridor, removed from the bustle of the main offices, and was very quiet. Presently, the personnel officer returned, accompanied by a slight woman with dark hair and brown eyes, a sallow complexion. It was easy to see Marc Daventry’s resemblance to his mother.

  ‘Please sit down, Mrs Nicoud. Thank you, Mrs Patterson.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’ Dismissed, the personnel officer shut the door with a precision just short of a bang.

  ‘Mrs Nicoud –’

  She came forward hesitantly and took the seat which Jenny pulled out, offering a wary smile.

  Breaking bad news was something Abigail was used to but hadn’t yet learned to do dispassionately, especially when it was news of a death; even more so when that death had been a violent one, and the recipient of the news was someone close to the victim. It was all too easy to empathize with the distress of the other person, difficult to find the right words of condolence, while at the same time keeping a sharp eye out for the sort of reaction the news produced. In this case, a sudden, draining pallor, a loss of focus in the dark eyes.

  ‘Put your head down between your knees,’ she ordered, rushing to the chair where the other woman sat and pushing her head down in case she might be going to faint, while Jenny, who had noticed a drinks dispensing machine in the corridor outside, nipped out of the door. But almost immediately Marie-Laure sat up. Her lips moved, she crossed herself, and for several moments her eyes stayed lowered, her hand on the ivory crucifix which hung on a chain at the neckline of her overall. She was either a very good actress, or genuinely shocked. Or could the reaction simply be panic on hearing that the body had now been found?

  By then, Jenny was back with a paper cup of scalding liquid. ‘Drink this and you’ll feel better. Sorry it’s not water, tea was all I could find.’

  Marie-Laure obediently took the steaming tea, so hot she was able to sip only a tiny amount. ‘Avril?’ she murmured.

  ‘I’m afraid so, Mrs Nicoud,’ Abigail said. ‘I’m sorry, I know she was a friend of yours – I understand you lived together for some time.’ On the face of it, two very ill-assorted women, but Abigail had seen odder associations.

  ‘I stayed with her until I found a place of my own. Hers was very small – only big enough for one ... I don’t understand, there was nothing to steal... she had little enough, God knows.’ She spoke with barely a trace of an accent. She was fine-boned and good-looking, with slender legs and neatly groomed hair. Out of the depersonalizing candy-striped green uniform she was probably a very elegant woman. The degradations of prison had left no obvious, coarsening mark. ‘Why?’ she repeated.

  ‘Her purse is missing, possibly credit cards and cheque book.’

  ‘She did not have credit cards. Did someone break in, then?’

  ‘It would appear not. She may have let someone in, someone she knew.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Did you know any of her acquaintances? Or anyone who might want to harm her? Someone she’d got across with at some time? Someone she knew before she went into prison?’

  Slowly, the other woman met Abigail’s gaze. ‘If you know that,’ she stated flatly, ‘then you must know about me, too.’

  ‘Yes. We know she was in Gormleigh, and that was where you met and became friends.’ Abigail watched her carefully. ‘You changed your name when you came out of prison, Mrs Nicoud, so obviously you want to make a new life. Didn’t it occur to you that in keeping up with her, once outside, you might be in very suspect company?’

  That, at least, provoked a reaction. ‘Avril was going straight! She had cut herself free from all that. She was very good to me. She gave me somewhere to stay when I needed it.’

  ‘Why did you need it?’ The Reverend Mother had said she had returned here to find her son but that wasn’t necessarily the whole truth. ‘Tell me why you came back to Lavenstock? It can’t have many happy memories for you.’

  ‘That is my business. You have no control over me now, or what I do.’

  ‘You’re wrong there. We’re investigating a murder, which is very much our business. If you’ve any sense you’ll help us to eliminate you from the inquiry.’

  ‘But I had nothing to do with it,’ she said stonily. ‘And I have nothing more to say.’

  Abigail sighed. ‘All right. I think it’s better we continue this interview down at the station.’

  19

  ‘Lavenstock Divisional Police.’

  ‘My name is Lilburne – Dorothea Lilburne. I should like to speak to the officer in charge of the bombing at Conyhall – Mr Mayo, I believe.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Superintendent Mayo’s not available at the moment, ma’am. Can I put you through to someone else?’

  ‘No. I’ve something very important to say to him personally about my husband’s murder. I don’t have a car at the moment so if he’d be so good as to come here ... but tell him, not before ten, please.’

  Dorothea Lilburne couldn’t have known when she rang the police station that her request to see Mayo had pre-empted an earlier decision of his to see her again on that same day. He’d already made up his mind that she’d been left simmering on the back burner for long enough, and he congratulated himself on the strategy that had prompted him to leave her there in the first place. She had, as he’d known she would, finally seen the sense in telling what she knew. He felt momentarily annoyed at her peremptory summons, the assumption that he could leave everything at the drop of a hat, but standing on his dignity wasn’t going to get him anywhere. It was a token grumble anyway. It was his problem, trying to squeeze a gallon into a pint pot, if that was how fitting his new duties and responsibilities in with the urgent priorities of an important case could be described. That was how it felt, for sure, though it was a challenge that had the merits of keeping the adrenaline flowing.

  In any case, though Dorothea’s summons might have sounded like a royal command, he sensed an urgency in it that he couldn’t ignore.

  Abigail he needed with him, he decided, remembering the affinity between the two women the last time they had talked. Marie-Laure Daventry, who had just been brought in, would have to be left in Jenny Platt’s hands until his return.

  Abigail drove to Conyhall in the silence she knew Mayo preferred, smoothly and expertly, leaving him to his own thoughts. Mid-morning now, and the countryside, in the grip of this unexpectedly hard overnight frost, was only just beginning to warm up. The road, where the traffic had melted the rime, was a black ribbon between the s
tiff white grass verges. A pale sun shone and the trees and hedgerows glittered. The beauty of the day brought a catch to your throat. A day to be working outdoors in the garden, with the sun warming your face, exercise sending the blood coursing through your body. Not to be thinking about Jack Lilburne and Avril Kitchin, dead and cold and never to feel the sun again. Despite herself, Abigail shivered a little.

  Mayo gave her a sharp glance, then sat up and began to take notice as she made the right turn, a few hundred yards along the main road past the entrance to the Young Offenders’ Unit, down the lane which led to the governor’s house.

  A pretty lane, with fields and high skeletal hedges either side, where cow parsley blossomed in summer, its dead umbels frosted now like Christmas-tree decorations. A gate, halfway along, where the car had stood that morning when the bomb went off. Mayo rubbed at the frown between his eyes. What the blazes was it that was niggling him, every time he thought about the milkman seeing that car parked there? That seemed to connect it with the Coltmore Road murder? And then he had it. The answer to why the two murders had been committed at roughly the same time of day. Because they could only be committed then. But the question of why they’d been committed at all was something else. During the next hundred yards it took to reach the house, he’d taken several further imaginative strides, all of them, unfortunately, seeming to take him in every direction but the one which must be right. He abandoned supposition as they swept into the gravelled drive of the house. There weren’t enough facts as yet to support fancy theories, and guessing games weren’t exactly his line of country.

  It was a pleasant entrance, a hint of money and prosperity – an impression immediately banished when they rounded a curve and came upon the house itself, and saw the scaffolding still netting the front, the polythene sheeting hanging pallidly from it, half obscuring the ruined, collapsed barn. A constructivist stage set, almost a metaphor for the wanton destruction of life.

  Mrs Lilburne opened the door immediately, as quickly as if she’d been waiting behind it. ‘Thank you for coming, for waiting until now. Flora left about ten minutes ago. I didn’t want her to see you here.’

  Mayo exchanged a mystified glance with Abigail, but neither of them commented or showed surprise. He wondered if she was as shocked at the change in Dorothea Lilburne as he was. Anyone else, and he would have said she was falling apart. Something had surely happened to upset her, but why did Flora have to be kept out of it? He wouldn’t jump the gun by asking. Best to let things take their course, see what would happen – find out what had happened ...

  She opened the door into the same room as before, where they were greeted with noisy enthusiasm by the two spaniels, destined for ever, it seemed, poor beasts, to be turfed out. When they had shambled out, Abigail, invited to sit down and observing dog hairs on the chair near the warm fire, chose another, less obviously comfortable one, but one which had compensations, a better view of the garden, affording a glimpse of the little lake and the old summerhouse perched on the raised bank above it. Bowered in frost-limned shrubs and trees, some hardy shrubs in flower, the bulbs adding their own grace notes, the sun sparkling over all, it was a charming sight – the curtain risen on another stage set, for a play by Barrie rather than Brecht.

  Mayo sat himself in the same comfortable chair which he’d occupied before, looking searchingly at the woman opposite while being careful not to show that he was aware of her ravaged face. However little he knew about the opposite sex, he’d learned enough to be sure that no woman likes to see in other faces what her mirror has already told her is not good. The set expression of dogged determination, the early telephone call told its own tale: she’d spent sleepless nights, wrestling with her conscience, and had come to an unpalatable decision. Though he was impatient to know what it was she had to tell them, he forced himself to let her take her time.

  All the same, for the sake of his schedule, he was glad it took her no more than a few minutes to pull herself together. Coffee was ready, she said, if they should want it. Abigail offered to pour, and Mrs Lilburne was beginning, before the cups were half filled, on what was evidently a prepared speech:

  ‘Something’s happened which I feel you should know about. It may – it may well have some bearing on who killed my husband.’

  She accepted a cup of coffee from Abigail and stopped to put it down on the small table at her side. A log fell with a shower of sparks into the rosy ash beneath it. A vehicle was heard to draw up outside, and someone walked over the gravel, the dogs as usual making their presence felt as the post slithered through the letter box into the hall. The mail van drew away, leaving a silence behind. The thread of Mrs Lilburne’s narrative had been interrupted. He willed her for God’s sake to get it grafted together again quickly, but in the event she scarcely paused, obviously wanting to get it over and done with.

  ‘A young man came to the house yesterday looking for Flora,’ she began again, looking at the carpet as she spoke, and so missed the quick glance which passed between Abigail and Mayo. ‘She wasn’t in, so I spoke to him myself. It seems that he works at the County Hospital, where Flora was looked after. He met her there – and apparently he’d been pestering her ever since to go out with him, despite the fact that she’d told him she doesn’t want to see him again, that she’s engaged to be married. I wasn’t aware that this was happening ... I’d never met the young man before ... but, I immediately recognized him. Even before he gave his name ...’

  ‘You recognized him?’

  Her large, pale hands, bare but for her wedding band, were clasped so tightly together that the knuckles were white. Her feet, similarly long and elegant, were pressed closely together. ‘He’s the image of his mother – his mother as she used to be, as I remember her.’

  ‘Who was this, Mrs Lilburne?’

  She stirred her coffee but made no move to drink it. ‘Her name was Daventry – Marie-Laure Daventry. He was her son, Marc.’

  She looked directly at Mayo, evidently expecting to read recognition in his face, but he gave no sign that the name meant anything to him.

  ‘Don’t you recall the Daventry case, sixteen years ago?’ she asked. ‘The Frenchwoman who killed her husband with a carving knife?’

  ‘I know which one you’re talking about.’

  He’d been sure, from the beginning, with that copper’s instinct for spotting evasions, that Dorothea Lilburne had known, or suspected, more about her husband’s murder than she’d been prepared to say, but there’d been no way of forcing her to tell what she knew; it had taken the shock of finding Marc Daventry on her doorstep to make her admit at last what he devoutly hoped would now be the truth. It was taking an unconscionable time to get at it.

  ‘Mrs Lilburne, let’s get this straight. You say you believe this old tragedy has something to do with your husband’s death. You must have your reasons for saying that. Tell me what your connections with Charles Daventry and his wife were?’

  ‘They were simply acquaintances, nothing more, as far as I was concerned. I scarcely knew them. It was Jack who had the connections. With her, at least – with Mrs Daventry.’ Her eyes, as she spoke, were on Abigail, not him. He nodded, willing enough to let Abigail take it, if Dorothea felt happier responding to her. ‘You understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘They were having an affair?’ Abigail’s voice was gentle.

  Dorothea gave a dry little cough that was probably meant to mean yes, reached out and sipped the now cold coffee, grimaced and put it down with distaste. Waved away Abigail’s offer to pour fresh and sat rigidly upright. It was hard for her to admit betrayal, but she was going to do it courageously, with as little loss of face as possible.

  Mrs Lilburne’s secret wasn’t the astonishing revelation to them, by now, that she must have thought it would be, after having stayed undisclosed all these years. But how had Lilburne, Mayo wondered, not always as circumspect about his affairs as he might have been, managed to keep his liaison with Daventry’s wife from emergin
g at her trial? By virtue of the others, possibly – in that it had been thought just another affair when they’d been seen together, with nobody curious enough to wonder who she was. Yet Dorothea had known ...

  ‘It wasn’t something that came out during the inquiry, Mrs Lilburne,’ he remarked.

  ‘No, I’ll give her that. She had the sense to keep quiet about it – but there was no reason why she should implicate him, was there? After all, she was the one who’d killed her husband. Jack had nothing to do with it.’

  Abigail said bluntly, ‘This young man you say has been pestering your daughter – this Marc Daventry – do you have any reason to believe he’s your husband’s child?’

  ‘What? Oh, heavens, no, there’s no question of that! The child was two or three years old when they came to live in the district – before she and Jack ever knew one another.’

  ‘Then what makes you think he could have anything to do with your husband’s murder? If he’s implicated in any way, wouldn’t he be likely to keep away from your daughter?’

  ‘I’d have thought so, yes, that’s what I can’t understand, but he struck me as being a very strange young man – oh, he was polite enough, but there was something – well, not quite right about him. One never knows what that sort will do.’

  ‘Even to planting a bomb? Thinking your husband morally, if not actually, responsible for his father’s murder? Is that what you’re saying?’

  Dorothea looked thoughtful. ‘You could be right. No, I hadn’t thought of that.’

  Not true, Mayo thought. She’d worked that one out, all right, but she hadn’t wanted the suggestion to come from her.

  ‘I could be overreacting,’ she admitted, ‘though I’m not easily alarmed, and there was something about him that made me nervous.’

  ‘Mrs Lilburne, where was your husband the night Charles Daventry was killed?’ Mayo asked suddenly.

  She stiffened. ‘He was here, with me, all night.’

  ‘All night? No emergency at the Young Offenders’ Institution, or anything like that?’