A Death of Distinction Page 3

  From where she knelt, pulling on her garden clogs, she could see the left-hand border, twin to the right, in summertime effulgent with colour, heady with scent, and was reminded of what she’d meant to do this week. During this last long spell of wet weather, when it had been too damp even for her to contemplate working outdoors, she’d spent the time in her dark little room under the eaves rearranging, on squared paper, some of the plants and shrubs in the borders, seeking for better plant associations, and she now had all sorts of exciting projects in view.

  It was there that Flora had found her the other day, with her head bent over her plan, occasionally looking up from it to consider the sodden garden below, and getting a whiff of fragrance from the sprig of Daphne odora in a vase on her desk.

  ‘Blimey, it’s gloomy in here! Don’t you want a lamp on, Mother?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Dorothea spoke absently, surveying her handiwork. ‘I’m just wondering whether the colours are too pale towards the middle – here?’ Had she followed received gardening wisdom too slavishly, or did the pale froth of pastels need something more daring, a touch of thunder-purple, or perhaps crimson? She had it – a Cosmos atrosanguineus, its delicate feathery plumes and purple-black flowers would make a perfect foil for the strong heads of the pale pink phlox and that creamy scabious ...

  ‘Moth-er! The garden’s perfect as it is. Why d’you want to make more work for yourself?’

  ‘More work? Good gracious, the work in a garden’s never finished – and if it were, I wouldn’t want it. Don’t you see?’

  ‘Heavens, no!’ Flora threw herself into the sagging old armchair next to the bookshelves, crammed with Dorothea’s gardening books. ‘I’ll never understand how anybody can enjoy breaking their back and their fingernails gardening! I suppose I’m far too lazy, not like either you or Da.’ She always called Jack Da, the name he’d called his own father. ‘There are better ways of enjoying yourself.’

  Oh, Flora, Flora! thought Dorothea now, preferring not to imagine the ways Flora had meant, pushing aside these troubling thoughts with the decision to drive down after lunch and order the Cosmos from the specialist nursery she used. Only first, she must finish the snowdrops or she might not get round to it again today.

  She went outside and took the trug of snowdrops to their new home, and it was then that the deafening explosion occurred.

  The sky went dark, the very ground rocked beneath her feet. Dorothea never afterwards knew whether she’d imagined the silence between the explosion and the terrible sound of falling debris and broken glass, or whether it was merely her own heart which had stopped beating. But after that, there certainly was a silence, when even the birds stopped singing. Into it came a distant, smaller crash, which later she was told was one of the stone nymphs, slowly toppling from its alcove above the front door of the main building. Followed by the noise of the ducks on the little lake, filling the air with panic-stricken squawks and beating wings.

  By the time the real pandemonium broke out, the ducks had settled to paddling around in aimless circles, to an occasional indignant quacking, upending themselves into the mud, wondering what all the fuss was about.

  4

  There wasn’t much left of Jack Lilburne’s Nissan, and still less of Jack Lilburne.

  If anybody could have been naive enough to believe it might have been an accident, the team of experts from the army bomb disposal unit quickly removed the idea. A bomb it was, though what type they weren’t saying, not yet, until they’d more to go on. Shouldn’t be long, the major from the Royal Engineers said. They’d already begun to poke about among the wreckage, now that the pair of well-trained sniffer dogs had made sure there were no more devices likely to go off. But Christ, one had been enough!

  Mayo stood outside the cordoned-off area, surveying the disaster with something approaching disbelief. A pall of yellowish, choking dust, redolent of old plaster, still hung like a miasma. A car wheel, intact, lay in the gravel drive, and shreds of blue fabric seat-covering had caught on a piece of dangling spouting. Broken glass splintered sunlight on to the yellow, stripped blossom from a huge forsythia, lying scattered like confetti in front of the house. Miraculously, the only apparent damage to the old house itself was that all the front windows had shattered and the ceiling of a downstairs room had come down.

  It was the heap of wreckage under the half-demolished barn which was the focus of the horror. Of Elizabethan vintage, the same age as the house, what was left of it suggesting it had possibly been decrepit even before the bomb had blown half of it away, the brick and timber building had stretched at right angles to the house, with a gravelled forecourt lying between them. Half the roof now leaned crazily to one side, its corner still shakily supported by a single upright beam of stout weathered oak. From beneath the heap of bricks and roof tiles poked an obscene mass of buckled steel and tangled wires. Some of the man who’d been in the car might still be there, too. Parts of him were already in black plastic bags awaiting the attentions of the pathologist.

  Mayo turned aside from the milling crowd of uniformed and plain-clothes men and women, the army personnel in their camouflage fatigues, the scenes-of-crime team. He felt cold to the bone, nothing to do with the biting wind, an inner cold that thick boots and a serviceable padded anorak taken from the boot of his car and donned over his sober funeral garments did nothing to alleviate. Alive one moment, then – oblivion. Howard Cherry, Jack Lilburne ... Well, it happened, but thank God, not often like this ... a heart attack, yes, but bombs, until now, hadn’t been part of the Lavenstock police scene.

  ‘When did he last use his car?’ he asked abruptly of his assistant, Inspector Abigail Moon.

  ‘About half-four yesterday. Parked it where he always did, parallel with the barn.’ Her face was pinched and pale under her cap of bronze hair, but resolute, determinedly professional, she’d already sussed out the necessary. He’d have been disappointed in her if she hadn’t.

  ‘Which is why the barn took the brunt of the damage. Lucky he didn’t leave it nearer the house.’

  ‘You’ll want to see Mrs Lilburne later, I suppose. She was out in the garden at the other side when it happened, but –’

  ‘I’ll want to talk to anybody who was around when it happened, yes, but Mrs Lilburne can wait. She’s enough worries at the moment, poor woman. Plenty others we can see first.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. I’ve arranged for us to see Miss Reynolds, the deputy governor, over at the prison, in about twenty minutes.’

  The prison, the YOI, the Young Offenders’ Unit. It was very near. Apparently not near enough for the house to be included in its security system, being outside the perimeter fence, but close enough for the bomb to have caused some panic over there, no doubt.

  ‘– and there’s a Mr Spurrier who’s asked for a word – Anthony Spurrier, one of the governor-team.’

  ‘Oh? What does he want?’

  ‘He hasn’t said, but he was out with the Lilburnes last night, at some sort of celebration at the Town Hall – for the governor’s OBE, I gather. A chauffeur-driven limo arrived at about seven to pick up Lilburne and his wife and daughter, and then brought them home at eleven.’

  ‘So the bomb could’ve been planted on the Nissan any time between seven and when it went off – by virtually anybody. Wonderful!’ Mayo looked at his watch. ‘If I’m not due to see Miss Reynolds for another twenty minutes, we’ve time to see Spurrier first.’

  ‘No point in driving round to the main building, there’s a short cut through the garden.’ Her tone was resolutely neutral.

  ‘And you’d like to get a look at it.’ Mayo smiled. ‘All right, all right, I suppose one way’s as good as another.’

  The scene behind was grim, Abigail was still shaken, but she recognized a generous offer when she saw one, a chance to get herself together. It was especially generous, coming from a man who’d never been known to pick up a spade – at least willingly. Career-orientated and single-minded about it, sh
e’d discovered a keen gardening streak in herself since she’d become the owner of a derelict cottage with an even more derelict garden. He could still surprise her. Something was making Mayo more benign these days, and she’d put money on it being the settling down of his relationship with Alex Jones. Good for them, she thought, but unenvious, her own love life, her association with Ben Appleyard, editor of the local Advertiser, being quite satisfactory at the moment, thank you.

  She could feel the colour coming back into her cheeks. ‘You never know, you might pick up a few tips yourself.’ A bit cheeky, that, but she knew him well enough now to know when to risk it. He didn’t seem to mind. Might be different from now on, though, with more rank between them. His new status could put their partnership at risk. Pity, really, when they’d just got into stride, as you might say.

  ‘I’ll have you know I appreciate a nice garden as well as the next man ... under the strict proviso that I don’t have to look after it,’ he replied equably, unlatching the gate which opened on to extensive lawns that sloped down to a beautifully landscaped garden. Its immediate area was still thick with policemen of all sorts, some of them engaged in picking up scattered debris, and worse, for the explosion had been big enough to blast some of it as far as a shallow lake, about a hundred yards from the house. This wasn’t deep enough for frogmen, and several unhappy police officers were wading through the mud and the water lily pads with dragnets, further disturbing the affronted ducks.

  Leaving the main centre of activity behind, they followed the serpentine curves of a shredded bark path, alongside tranquil beds and borders where the graceful shapes of bare-branched trees, evergreen shrubs and spreading conifers gave form and substance to a landscape bursting forth from its winter sleep. Abigail, still subdued by the succession of events – the funeral, followed by the explosion – felt her spirits lifted by the sight of rare shrubs beginning to burst into flower, underplanted with bright blue scillas and narcissi and what looked like acres of crocuses – purple, white – and gold, too, she noticed jealously. Why were these left alone, and not hers? In her own little garden, hooligan sparrows had descended in marauding gangs to decapitate all the yellow ones – the yellow ones only – that she’d so painstakingly planted in the autumn.

  As the path turned, they came across an old man forking over a patch of ground near to where the garden ended and the perimeter fence began. He glanced up, without stopping what he was doing, as they drew level, and the smell of damp, newly turned earth came to them.

  Mayo paused beside him and introduced himself. ‘And this is my colleague, Inspector Moon. You must be the Mr Barnett who was working in the kitchen garden behind the house when the bomb went off?’

  Pausing to crumble a ball of soil in one horny hand, the old man nodded, apparently unaffected by the shock of what had just happened, though you could never tell, shock took people all ways, and perhaps for him getting on with the job was its own kind of therapy.

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘Dunno, rightly. Just parked me bike in the barn and got me barrer out not five minutes afore I heard this hell of a bang. How is her, then, the missis?’

  ‘Bearing up,’ Abigail said. ‘The chaplain’s with her now.’

  ‘Oh ar.’ The two laconic Lavenstock syllables that could express anything: agreement, disbelief, approval, scorn ... His boot on the fork, he drove the tines into the earth again.

  ‘Spare us a minute of your time, if you will.’

  Barnett removed his foot, even went so far as to lean on his fork and look at Mayo, but he was a surly old devil, not inclined to be forthcoming. Mayo nodded to Abigail and then watched in silence while she questioned the gardener. His answers were as short as he could make them and didn’t tell them much: he came twice a week, yesterday being one of his days, and he’d worked as usual, leaving at about quarter to five, having checked that all the tools and garden machinery were in place in the barn where they were kept, before locking up. Noticed nothing out of the ordinary, but he’d been anxious to get off. He lived with his daughter and she went on at him summat rotten if he wasn’t home on time. ‘Don’t want me to think her’s hoping I’ve fallen off of me bike so her can collect on me insurance,’ he remarked sardonically. The barn had still been locked when he arrived this morning at nine-thirty, and hadn’t been disturbed as far as he could see. He’d noticed nothing at all unusual, and he’d be glad, his attitude implied, if they’d let him get on with his digging.

  ‘Nothing and nobody at all?’

  ‘Not unless you count that there chap with the camera last week.’

  ‘Oh? What chap was this?’ Mayo put in, holding on to his patience.

  ‘Up by the house. Taking pictures for one of them posh magazines, I reckoned. Wouldn’t be the first time – though the missis said nowt to me about it, and he nivver come into the garden – it was just the house he was snapping. But he soon took his hook when he saw me watching him.’

  ‘Didn’t you think to mention it to anybody?’

  ‘Why should I? There’s a footpath from the lane into them woods over yonder. He coulda been one of them hikers, couldn’t he?’

  Just possible. The house was picturesque enough to have provided that excuse, anyway, had the photographer been challenged. It wouldn’t have disgraced a calendar, above a month in spring or summer. But this had been early March and the recent weather conditions for photography had been appalling. And to disappear so promptly when he was aware of being watched?

  ‘Describe this man to me if you can.’

  ‘Youngish.’ Which, in Barnett’s book, meant anywhere between eighteen and forty-five, Mayo discovered. Wearing one of the padded jackets they all wore nowadays, green or blue, maybe, he couldn’t remember. It had to be Thursday or Friday when he’d seen him because those were the days he worked here. Beyond that, he couldn’t go. Whether the man was tall or short, fat or thin, dark or fair, it was too much to hope that he’d remember, and he didn’t.

  Mayo thanked him, said it might be useful to talk to him again, and prepared to follow the path which skirted the perimeter fence to the front entrance of the prison, leaving the old man to get on with his work. But once stopped, Barnett seemed to have lost the will to continue. Looking vacantly across the garden, his shoulders sagged, as if the stuffing had gone out of him.

  He said slowly, scraping his hand across his chin stubble, ‘Reckon that was it, then? He was the one as put the bomb in the car?’

  ‘I’d say there’s a good chance.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  Mayo briskly disposed of any feelings of remorse. ‘If he is, you couldn’t have known.’ Briefly, he laid a hand on the old man’s shoulder. ‘Go home, Mr Barnett. You’ve had a shock. There’s plenty of cars up at the house. Somebody’ll drive you home.’

  ‘Mebbe. When I’ve finished what I’m at,’ the old man countered stubbornly. And when Mayo looked back at the gate, he saw that he’d started his digging again.

  ‘It wasn’t the governor’s practice to check under his car before getting into it, then?’ Mayo asked when they’d been through the rituals of admittance, and Anthony Spurrier was finally ready to talk to them in his office. This after several minutes’ delay while he made a distracted and abortive search among his chaotic papers for a file which had apparently gone missing, the sort of activity the mind fastens on when events are too shocking to contemplate.

  ‘What? Oh, it wouldn’t have entered his head,’ Spurrier replied, his eyes still wandering in search of the elusive file. ‘Such things happened to other people. Jack always thought he had a charmed life. Maybe he should’ve checked – but that’s a counsel of perfection. One tends to get relaxed about these things. He wouldn’t have thought anybody could’ve had it in for him.’

  Abigail said, ‘Somebody did. The bomb couldn’t have got there by accident.’

  ‘But who, for God’s sake?’

  ‘You must have some pretty dangerous guys banged up in here.’


  ‘Some. And banged up’s the word! If they could’ve got as far as the house, you wouldn’t have seen them for dust – wouldn’t have been stopping to plant bombs, I can tell you – even if they’d had the means.’

  Dangerous, Abigail had meant, in that they had friends outside, who might conceivably have done the job for them – for reasons which hadn’t yet offered themselves.

  Spurrier had the stunned look of someone in deep shock. His hands were restless. Long, thin fingers fiddled with a treasury tag, folded and refolded a scrap of paper, rearranged a collection of biros, pencils and odds and ends in a mug with a crude, fat-lady seaside joke on it.

  ‘You wanted to see us, Mr Spurrier?’ Mayo prompted, with difficulty refraining from looking at his watch. He was anxious to get going. Kite, his high-energy sergeant, had already set the wheels of the inquiry rolling, and plodding old Atkins would be setting up the incident room, but this wasn’t going to be any straight-down-the-line inquiry. There’d been no claim so far from any disaffected or subversive organizations. There was still time for that, but no point in waiting for it: a bomb as a means of settling a personal score was unusual, but not unheard of – and that meant starting here where grudges were more than likely to have originated. ‘We’ll need to interview everyone,’ he’d told Abigail on the way over, ‘prison officers, inmates, civilian staff – everybody.’ He was anxious to brief his team, establish firm lines of inquiry. And there was Miss Reynolds, the deputy governor, still to see.

  And here was Spurrier, still skating around the edges of what he had to say. ‘They pushed the boat out for him last night at the Town Hall. Because of his OBE. The Mayor and Mayoress, speeches, champagne, the works. I was there as a friend of Flora ...’ He added quietly, in absolute misery, ‘Oh, God.’

  Ah yes, Flora, the governor’s daughter. Mayo watched the restless fingers unfold the piece of paper once more, begin refolding it even more tightly, as he added, ‘He was well liked, the governor. Respected and well liked. Better than most I can think of.’