More Deaths Than One Page 4

  “Perhaps.”

  By the time this case was over, the dead man would have become a person to him, Mayo thought. He would have talked to those who had known him in real life, made his assessment of his character and, if he were lucky, found out why he’d been murdered. But now at the beginning, he was just a name, a body which had been horribly done to death, and he was casting around for a peg to hang the enquiry on. Which in the nature of things was most likely to be his relationship with his wife, and maybe the rest of his family. “Tell me a little bit more about your husband, Mrs. Fleming. What was his background? Was he local?”

  No, she said, he’d actually been born in India. Patiently, little by little, like drawing teeth, he extracted from her the information he wanted. Rupert Fleming’s father, it appeared, had worked for an oil company in various parts of the Far East and Rupert and his brother had been sent home to boarding schools for the children of parents living abroad. His parents, now retired, lived in Derbyshire. Rupert had been destined as an accountant but had failed the exams. He’d tried his hand at a career in photography, then in insurance, one or two more things, but nothing had worked. That’s why he’d decided to try journalism. After that, she lapsed into silence.

  “Did he own a shotgun?”

  Her eyes flickered at the abrupt change of subject. “No. I doubt if he’d know how to use one ...”

  “Mrs. Fleming, is this your husband’s handwriting?” Mayo held out the torn-off memo page so that she could see what was written on it.

  After a moment she said tonelessly, “Yes, that’s Rupert’s writing,” and stood up.

  Thinking she imagined the interview was at an end, he said quickly, “There are still a few more questions about your husband that I’d like you to answer.”

  “Is that necessary?” She took a cigarette from a new unused pack on the mantelpiece and sat down again, but without lighting it.

  “It’s routine, in any case of violent death, to enquire into the deceased’s affairs and his last movements and, with your permission, look through his effects.”

  “Surely not when it’s – suicide?”

  “We have to be satisfied.”

  “In that case, I suppose I must.” She looked at him with unconcealed dislike.

  Mayo thought, you’ve no option, lady, and let the look slide off him. It was his job to be suspicious, to probe, to stick his nose in where relatives – and he – would rather not, to ask awkward and impertinent questions, never mind what anybody thought.

  The first question he had to ask was when had she last seen Fleming.

  It had been on Sunday evening, and no, she couldn’t say where he had been during the time since.

  “Was that usual? I mean, for him to be away from home and for you not to know where he was?”

  “He often had to be away when he was working on a story.”

  “Suppose you had to contact him in an emergency?”

  “What emergency? Look, we’re both busy people. I run my own business management consultancy, which means I’m often away too, and his movements were never very certain. Trying to give precise details in those circumstances could lead to confusion.”

  He was beginning to get a picture of their marriage. Two people, pursuing separate careers, hers the more successful of the two. In all probability with separate lifestyles, too. He hadn’t asked about children, he didn’t think he needed to. With the sort of life they led, children were unlikely to be on the agenda. He took out the photograph that had been in Rupert Fleming’s wallet and handed it, still in its protective polythene, to his wife. “Was this your husband?” She looked at it for several moments before passing it back. “Yes.”

  “Do you recognise the other woman?”

  Though he could hardly have phrased that less tactfully, he was sure by now that was just what the girl in the snapshot was: the other woman. For a moment he hoped for Mrs. Fleming’s sake that she might be able to say it was some mutual friend or relative, his sister perhaps, but she replied unemotionally, “I’ve never seen that person in my life.”

  “Have you any idea who it might be?”

  “No.”

  She was lying, but any woman in similar circumstances might have done the same, and he didn’t feel he need press her at this juncture. He went back to Sunday evening. Fleming had been away during the previous week but had then appeared unexpectedly, it seemed, read the Sunday papers and then cooked a meal while she was still busy with some weekend work she’d brought home. Cooking was one of the things he’d liked to do, while she hated it, and he’d made one of his special vegetarian dishes and opened a bottle of wine to go with it.

  She hesitated as she came to the point where they’d finished the meal, colouring very slightly, and for a split second her whole taut body seemed more pliable, the poppy-red mouth soft and full. They’d made love, Mayo thought. She’d known about the woman in the photograph, even if she’d been keeping to the strict truth in saying she’d never seen her, even if she suspected that Fleming was going to her later that evening, but it hadn’t made any difference. Was this what they called an open marriage, each taking lovers as and when they fancied? It never seemed a particularly sensible way to carry on to him, seeming to deny the honesty it was meant to proclaim. Why make the commitment to marriage at all if this was how you felt? Why play with fire?

  Later, about nine o’clock she thought, he’d left. He’d told her when he arrived that he had a meeting arranged with someone unspecified.

  “And he didn’t come home afterwards?”

  “No.” The curious amber eyes were wide and unblinking. She looked him straight in the eye. Nor had he said when he’d next be back. She hadn’t seen him since.

  He felt dissatisfied with the interview, but it was probably as far as he could profitably go at this point and, after extracting himself with some difficulty from the clutches of the leather chair, he stood up.

  He thought, from his assessment of her, that Georgina Fleming wouldn’t shrink from identifying the body, but with the scene of carnage in the car still fresh in his memory, he decided he wouldn’t inflict that on her unless he had to. Was there anyone else, any other close relative, who could undertake this and spare her the ordeal? he asked. She told him there was no one except Fleming’s elderly parents. She would identify him herself, she said coolly, as soon as he wished.

  “That’s up to you, Mrs. Fleming. I do realize it’s very late, and we can leave it until tomorrow –”

  “I have a very heavy day tomorrow,” she interrupted crisply. “I’d prefer to get it all over with tonight.”

  Did she, too, he wondered, weep glass tears?

  But when she looked down at the body of her husband stretched on the mortuary slab, she reacted after all very much as anyone else might. Since there was nothing left of Rupert Fleming’s features to identify, she couldn’t look at his face and say this was him, this was my husband, but as Susan Salisbury had said, you don’t know a person by his face only. Especially a husband.

  As she looked down at the body, her face took on a greenish pallor, beads of sweat broke out on her forehead. He thought she might be going to faint and took her elbow. She tried to speak and found herself momentarily incapable of doing so, a classic symptom of profound shock.

  “Mrs. Fleming, is that your husband, Rupert Fleming?”

  Her nod and the barely uttered yes which she managed sufficed. “Are these his possessions?”

  “Yes.” She found her voice. “I gave him the watch for Christmas.” He guided her from the building and they drove her home in silence. Mayo spoke to her as they drew up once more to the flats, telling her that the following day would do very well to go through her husband’s effects. “Who’s your doctor? We’ll get him to give you something to make you sleep tonight.”

  “I already have sleeping pills, thank you,” she told him in a crisp, controlled voice. She appeared to have recovered her composure as completely as though she had never for a mom
ent lost it. “And I’d prefer to carry on tonight. I’ve told you, I shan’t be available most of tomorrow.”

  “It’s your decision,” he answered, regretting the kindly impulse that had caused him to offer to postpone the search. Certainly, it would be better from his point of view to get things moving tonight. He didn’t expect it to take long, anyway.

  She told them where to look when they were once more in the flat, picked up a pen and the papers she’d been reading when they rang, and let them get on with it.

  There were two bedrooms, but only one was in use, a large one, with a double bed. The wardrobes were a set of mirror-faced built-in cupboards, her section of it crammed with expensive clothes and shoes, silk shirts and smart, executive-style business suits, while his contained a very few clothes which were much more casual.

  “Nothing but the best, though,” said Jenny Platt.

  And since, apart from the clothes and some toilet things in the bathroom, there appeared to be nothing else belonging to Fleming, they returned to the living room for an examination of his papers, which were housed in a small desk in the corner of the room.

  “You won’t find many, though,” Mrs. Fleming said. “He believed in travelling light. He kept what he was working on in his briefcase and carried it around with him.”

  Where was his briefcase now? It hadn’t been in his car. Nor had his portable typewriter, which she also said he carried around with him. Nor had his keys. “I can’t help you,” she said indifferently. But the strain was telling. He fancied she was even paler than her makeup warranted; her vivid lipstick stood out like a wound. Her skin looked tight over the bones of her face.

  All that was in the desk were one or two files containing copies of the articles and features he’d written and a book detailing what he had been paid for them. It was a meagre way to make a living, Mayo concluded, looking at the few items and totting up the total payments he’d received. No other source of income was apparent. His bank book tallied with his earnings. Only what had he lived on? He had dressed well, he ran an expensive car. He didn’t have a joint account with his wife.

  In one drawer, Kite found some handwritten notes for a feature Fleming was preparing, titled “Theatre in the Provinces.”

  “May I take these?” They would do well enough for the graphology experts, though the handwriting appeared to compare positively enough with the distinctive squiggles on the “suicide” note and there was no doubt in Mayo’s mind that they’d been written by the same hand.

  “I’ve no use for them,” she said.

  It seemed a sad epitaph for a marriage.

  “What did you make of her, Martin?”

  “Seen some hard-bitten females in my time, but she takes the biscuit!” Kite answered, making headway into sausage and chips in the canteen.

  “You think her capable of shooting Fleming, then?” Mayo asked.

  “Without turning a hair!” Kite was never lukewarm in his convictions. “But what about the note? No question the writing wasn’t his, surely?”

  “No, I should hardly think so. Difficult, if not impossible, to imitate, wouldn’t you say? But when was it written – and why? Think about it: ‘I’ve had enough. I’m packing it in. Sorry it didn’t work out.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean he meant to kill himself. Could’ve been meaning to leave her, permanently, for instance. Or about anything, almost. About that job of his, maybe ...”

  “But they were all right with each other on the Sunday – according to her, at least.”

  “A lot of things can happen between one day and the next.”

  “I suppose so.” Kite finished his chips and pushed his plate away. “I knew a bloke once took his wife out for their anniversary dinner and when they’d finished, he told her he was leaving her for another woman, there and then. Sent her home in a taxi, the rotten sod.”

  “And we wonder why women have such a low opinion of us.”

  “Women can be bitches too.” Kite remained unshaken in his opinion. “And I reckon we’ve just interviewed one of ’em.”

  FIVE

  “Mine honour is in question,

  A thing till now free from suspicion. ”

  DOWN AT HER BUTTER LANE SHOP, Lois French was carefully examining the latest finished orders of lampshades and cushions with the woman who made them up for her. There were no flaws and she’d have been extremely surprised to find any. Myra Conway was matter-of-fact, spry, middle-aged and miraculously deft with her fingers, and the articles were perfectly crafted, as they always were, no matter how unsuitable or intractable the fabrics selected by Lois’s clients.

  “Beautiful, Myra.” Myra raised her eyes to heaven. “Well, beautifully made, anyway,” Lois amended with a wry smile.

  “Not everybody’s choice, colours like that,” Myra agreed.

  They began to stack the cushions and shades on a table in the corner of the back room. Lois, whose whole life was spent harmonising colours and furnishings and creating interesting and original environments for those who could afford her prices, could hardly bear to look at the garish things. Lavenstock United had been doing particularly well this season and, as a tribute, the wife of the chairman had commissioned French Interiors to re-do her sitting room in the team’s colours. Gold and a particularly virulent shade of puce, euphemistically called claret, were hardly the most felicitous choice for soft furnishings, and it seemed to Lois they’d dominated most of her waking thoughts – and some of her nightmares – for weeks. All the braids and fringes had had to be custom dyed to get that exact shade of purple-red to go with the brassy yellow of the gold, while finding a suitable fabric for the chairs to tone down all that glorious Technicolor had been next to impossible. The cost of the specially woven, quite hideous, carpet had been hair-raising. She’d seriously considered refusing the commission – after all, her reputation was at stake – until common sense prevailed. But now it was almost completed, thank God, and the client over the moon and that was nearly all that mattered.

  She put coffee to brew while they discussed Myra’s next batch of work, then she brought out the delicate Chinese red silk for the lampshades Myra was to cover to complement several pairs of already-finished curtains. Myra raised scandalised eyebrows while commenting on the price of the trimmings for the curtains, which had cost almost as much as the fabric itself.

  “At this rate they’ll have to set up a subscription fund to pay for the new stage curtains down at the Gaiety, when we we get around to doing them,” she remarked.

  Lois poured the coffee, Myra added sugar and milk to hers and settled for a gossip. “Terrible thing about that shooting, isn’t it?”

  “What shooting?” Lois picked up her own coffee cup and took a sip.

  “Haven’t your heard? Some poor bloke shot himself in his car up Scotley Beeches. Name of Fleming, Rupert Fleming.”

  The cup slid from Lois’s grasp and coffee poured in a dark stream right across the Chinese silk.

  “Ooh, that’s done it,” Myra said.

  Lois seized a cloth and dabbed distractedly at the dark stain and succeeded in blotting most of it up before it spread too far. With trembling fingers, she picked up the scissors, snicked the selvedge and tore off the ruined half metre. “It could’ve been worse. Where ... did you hear about this, this shooting?”

  “On the late news last night, and on the radio this morning.” Myra stared. “Here, you didn’t know him, did you, love? Oh God, I’m sorry ...”

  “No, I didn’t know him,” Lois lied.

  Myra looked at her shrewdly but said nothing more.

  When the rest of the silk had been safely parcelled up and Myra had gone, Lois collapsed onto the nearest chair.

  Rupert Fleming? She had let a demon into her life when she let him in, of that there was no question. But suicide?

  Rupert?

  Kite was still feeling peaky the next day with the aftermath of his cold, but the harder he worked the better he felt, he decided. He set himself to find out what he
could about Georgina Fleming’s affairs, managing to muster up a surprising amount of energy. By late afternoon, when Mayo had returned from the inquest which had, as he’d fully expected, been adjourned for further police enquiries, he was able to tell Mayo first that the shotgun’s owner had been traced, and secondly that he had the information Mayo had requested about Georgina Fleming.

  The shotgun was registered in the name of John Culver, residing in a house by the name of Upper Delph, adjacent to Fiveoaks Farm and not much over a mile from Scotley Beeches.

  John Culver, Georgina Fleming’s father.

  Mayo heard the news with interest. “Long-standing feud finally resolving itself? Is that what it is?”

  “Is it going to be that simple?” Kite returned.

  “It usually is, isn’t it?” As with most murders, its solution probably lay in the obvious, with someone in the family, some relative, or someone known to the victim being responsible. “Never neglect the obvious, laddie. It was his gun.”

  The big question in that case being what had John Culver and his estranged son-in-law been up to, meeting in Scotley Beeches at some ungodly hour of the night or morning?

  “Let’s go. You can tell me what you’ve found out about Georgina Fleming on the way.”

  “She runs this business with a partner, another woman,” Kite informed him as they turned off the ring road and out onto the bypass. “In fact, it’s an all women affair, no men at all. It’s an organisation dedicated to showing small companies how to give their businesses a vital competitive edge. One which will help them achieve aggressive growth targets and a level of excellence ...”

  “Spare me the sales patter.”

  Kite grinned. “Translated, it means that all these new small companies who have a good product but just don’t know how to market it properly, or run the business side of their affairs, need help. That’s where Georgina Fleming wheels in. It’s called business consultancy.”