A Species of Revenge Page 4

  The money had originally been made through fireclay, rich deposits of which Great-great-grandfather Kendrick had discovered lay all around Holden Hill, waiting to be dug to make firebricks and furnaces. He’d made his pile by the time he died, leaving behind a legacy of ugly and dangerous clay-pits for future generations to deal with, and a comfortable lifestyle for the Kendrick descendants – who were numerous, since he’d had nine children. Most of them, however, despised the business, sold their shares profitably and became doctors, teachers, lawyers. One became a bishop and one – Roland, the grandson of the only son to carry on the business – a good-for-nothing. When he died, the debts he left were staggering. Their solicitor had told his children bluntly that they had no option but to get rid of Heath Mount. An opportunity to sell it for building development had just arisen and they’d be well advised to grab it with their three pairs of hands. He pointed out the advantages of living in a smaller, more manageable house, and sitting on a comfortable amount of money, having sold at the top of the market, instead of struggling with the upkeep of Heath Mount without the means to do so.

  Sell Heath Mount? Pull it down? It was quite possible the elder Kendricks might never recover from the shock.

  In the end, it had been Imogen who’d pushed them into the move. Left to themselves, the twins would have lived on in Heath Mount until it crumbled around their ears, shutting their eyes to the need for running repairs until it was too late. Francis with his head in the clouds over his Byzantine art and icons and Hope with her books and her senior maths syllabuses ... did they exist on another planet, divorced from such humdrum things? Imogen demanded.

  They tried to ignore her but she could be ruthless. She’d forced them to look at the situation fair and square, made them see that their only option was to do as Mr Crytch advised and move somewhere smaller. Francis had immediately assumed this to mean a custom-built bungalow or a luxury flat and had retreated into one of his haughty silences, refusing to discuss the matter. Hope had tried to be slightly more amenable but nevertheless managed to find some excuse to turn down every suggestion Imogen made. Imogen might never have succeeded in prising them out if Simla had not come on the market at about the same time, a face-saving solution, in that the vendor was almost as stubborn as they were, having inserted a proviso on the sale that the house should not be sold to a developer. It was smaller and better looked-after than Heath Mount, but of the same vintage, and it would mean they could live more or less in the same way they’d always been used to.

  Well, that was Imo’s version of the situation! Hope thought. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been so keen on the idea herself if she’d known she’d be back living with them within five years, back from Brussels, her marriage to Tom Loxley, Euro MP, all but over. But five years ago she’d been comfortably off, and secure enough to claim only a modest sum out of the sale of Heath Mount, with the promise of a couple of rooms at the new house whenever she might need them on her visits home.

  With her usual efficiency, she’d overseen the move to Simla, insisting on having the plumbing at least updated and a new kitchen installed before they moved in. But Hope had scorned attempts to get them to abandon the old sagging armchairs, bookcases and sideboards like mausoleums, all of them familiar and less alarming than new things would have been. The old curtains had been made over somehow to fit the new windows, despite Imogen having actually sought the advice of an interior designer in the town. She might just as well have gone down to Lavenstock market and bought curtaining by the yard to machine up, for all the interest Hope could summon up. So that in the end, Simla, lacking only the Benares brass and elephant-foot coffee tables brought home from India by the general who’d first inhabited and named the house, looked much as Heath Mount had always done. And by now, even the new kitchen had acquired a decent lived-in air.

  But still, Hope considered the price for freedom from financial worries was high: to be living in the middle of a housing development like the Close, with what seemed like more than its fair share of children, when they’d been used to space and privacy, was a lot to pay. Certainly, more than she’d bargained for.

  ‘Mother would have sent round a note, asking them to tea,’ Imogen remarked, not without irony, still thinking about the new people at Edwina Lodge when Hope returned with the coffee things. ‘On the lawn, perhaps, with cucumber sandwiches. I shall have to go and knock on the door like the Avon lady, since I don’t know their name or telephone number. Oh, but of course, they’ll have the same number as the Burger, won’t they?’

  ‘I’ll warn you, Francis is being difficult,’ Hope said.

  Imogen raised expressive eyebrows. ‘What’s new?’ She added, despite her promises to herself, before she could bite it off, ‘Do rinse those mugs out and empty the pot, don’t just leave them there,’ which had patently been Hope’s intention. Instead of saying, ‘Wash them yourself, if you’re so concerned,’ as any other sister might have done, Hope washed and dried them with a meticulousness which, even if she hadn’t meant it, was even more insulting. Imogen tried not to sigh.

  They were just too damned exasperating for words, her brother and sister, too brainy and too superior to bother about mundane tasks until they assumed crisis proportions. She hadn’t yet got over her fury, on her return from Brussels, at seeing the scruffy state of the kitchen she’d left newly refurbished. Hope had declared loftily that she’d got rid of Doreen Bailey, it was demeaning to both parties to pay someone to do menial work, which was all very well, but not if you then shut your own eyes to it. It was only Doreen’s good nature that allowed her to return. She was independent enough not to share Hope’s views on what was demeaning, and she’d worked for the Kendricks, as well as Mrs Burgoyne, even before their father had died and the old house had been sold, so she knew what she was letting herself in for.

  By now, the house was at least liveable in, and Imogen felt better for having asserted herself, banished the memory of that terrible old house. As a child, she had felt extinguished in the presence of her older brother and sister, in the shadow of their intellectual superiority, and frequently afraid of them. It hadn’t been until she’d married Tom, in fact, and found that she could hold her own in his sophisticated world that she began to gain self-confidence.

  It had been a mistake to think of Tom.

  She hurriedly began with the list of neighbours and friends she might ask to the proposed welcome party, concentrating fiercely and pressing so hard with the ballpoint that it nearly tore through the cheap paper of the kitchen pad. She tried to ignore the nasty, lurching pain in the pit of her stomach. When was she going to be able to go through a single day without thinking about him?

  Tom. A humorous, tolerant man. Threads of grey in his hair, small lines etched at the corners of his kind eyes. The look of utter desolation when she told him she was leaving him. The words had come out of her mouth, unintended until given voice. Nothing, he’d repeated, his face bleak, the girl had meant nothing to him. Propinquity, an over-convivial evening, an adjacent hotel room, nothing else.

  Nothing to him, perhaps, but everything to her.

  She should have tried to shrug it off. Lots of men had their bit on the side, it was irrelevant, in some circles it almost seemed mandatory – their wives forgave them, in public at any rate. But she couldn’t. Theirs hadn’t been a relationship like that, it had been based on mutual trust, on knowing the other person through and through. It was this that had shattered her, the realization that she hadn’t, in fact, known him at all. Was he, then, like every other man, not special as she’d always believed? She’d only his word that it had been no more than a one-night stand, that there’d been nothing of the sort before, and never would be again, she’d told herself, trying to make herself doubt him.

  Why? she’d asked herself repeatedly. Why did he have to do it? Is there something wrong with me?

  She’d scrutinized herself in every available mirror and found nothing physically wrong, apart from the usual female dissati
sfactions with a body less than perfect. Glossy dark hair, discreetly and expensively hennaed, trim figure, tall but not, like Hope, enough to intimidate shorter men. Beautiful clothes that she’d learned how to wear.

  Me, myself then. It must be I who am lacking.

  Her own subsequent behaviour had helped nothing.

  She closed her eyes. What are you doing now, Tom?

  She saw him in her mind’s eye in the elegant Brussels apartment, unlikely as it was that he’d be there at that time of day, listening to the opera recordings he loved: a world of music contained within softly coloured walls, pale spreads of carpet, cushioned chairs and sofas in jewel-coloured fabrics. Lamps that lit the gilt-framed Georgian mirrors, the deeply glowing pictures, the oil paintings that were his other passion in life. Nothing spared in the way of expense and taste. Nothing lacking, except a wife.

  4

  Abigail Moon hurriedly splashed a watering can over the few tomato plants in growing bags outside the back door of her foursquare little house under the hill, briefly envying Harry Nevitt’s spruce allotment as it had appeared on Sunday. Passionate as she’d become about gardening since acquiring her cottage, hers was necessarily of the low-maintenance variety – nothing so ambitious as growing vegetables, which needed more constant attention than she could give. The tomatoes were as far as she could go in that direction, and as for the rest, if it couldn’t look after itself when necessary, it didn’t get garden room here.

  She loved her little plot to bits, though. Non-existent when she’d taken it over, her knowledge of gardening at the same level, she’d learned as she went along, and though small, it had burgeoned into a restful place, lush with exuberant greenery that hid twisting little paths and unexpected viewpoints to give an illusion of glamour to the flat fields and woods beyond.

  Thinking about the allotment brought the dead man vividly to mind again as she left the country lane that led to the cottage, having been allowed through by her nearest neighbours’ huge black dog, who guarded the entrance to the lane like Cerberus at the gates of Hades. It was four days since the man had been found, and still no positive identification, with the initial inquiries seeming to have reached a plateau. All available manpower had been deployed on the investigation, and throughout Sunday and Monday every inch of the area surrounding the spot where the unknown man had been found had been thoroughly searched. His car had been sought, without success. House-to-house inquiries had so far been fruitless. The media had been informed and brief announcements had appeared in the press and on local radio and television that the body of an unidentified man had been found behind the Colley Street allotments. As yet, this had brought forth no response from anyone who might have recognized him, though there was still time for this: there were bound to be some who’d missed tuning in or reading the papers.

  But neither had there been any inquiries from relatives worried about loved ones, and that was more puzzling.

  She arrived at Milford Road without getting snarled up in traffic, and parked in the station yard, noticing with a resigned grimace that the Super had, as usual, beaten her to it. His car was in its appointed place after his return from the staff college. After signing in, she checked with the night duty officer’s occurrence book and found that nothing out of the ordinary had happened during the night, certainly nothing relevant to Sunday morning’s body finding.

  It was, however, only one of several investigations which needed her urgent attention. She was currently working on a spate of motor thefts which appeared to be more organized than the usual opportunist heists, there was a factory surveillance to be organized today with a depleted staff – Sergeant Carmody on leave on the Costa Brava and Kite due in court this morning. And she’d come in early to get her thoughts straightened out on a possible child-abuse case which had also landed on her desk, needing time alone to be able to think about the harrowing facts dispassionately – if anyone could be dispassionate about such a subject – before the busy day got under way and she was inundated with interruptions from all directions. With a cup of coffee at her elbow, she worked steadily on, regardless of people arriving in the CID room and the growing noise level outside her glass partition, and had collated enough material into a file to pass on to the Child Protection Unit by the time her telephone rang.

  ‘Ready when you are, Abigail.’

  Satisfied with what she’d achieved, she closed the file and went upstairs to Mayo’s office. It was a daily routine that had developed, given time and opportunity, which was valuable to both of them. They’d worked closely together when Gil Mayo was a chief inspector, before he’d been made up to superintendent, and still maintained a brisk and friendly relationship which suited both of them. A big, forceful man who’d come up through the ranks, he didn’t let it get under his skin that she was a graduate entrant who could well leave him behind within a few years.

  She found him tinkering with the old clock he kept on the bookcase. Clocks were his hobby – the collecting, restoring, and timing thereof – and he preferred this unreliable old Victorian mantel clock with its comforting tick, needing daily tender loving care to keep it up to scratch, to the official one on the wall which kept perfect time and marked off its movements with an unnerving clunk.

  The seminar had evidently gone well. He was cheerful and alert and got straight to the point. One thing you could always guarantee with Mayo, he didn’t hang about. After a swift canter through the details of the rest of her cases, he said, ‘Give me a rundown on what you’ve gathered on the Colley Street job so far. I don’t like the way it appears to be shaping up – or not, as the case may be.’

  ‘Not’s the right word,’ she said, taking the point that he’d already made himself familiar with what had been going on in that direction while he’d been away. But he listened attentively to what she had to tell him.

  An active and practical man, he fitted into the chair of Super somewhat ambivalently, playing his new role to his own rules, more than he’d felt able to do in his previous job. Impatient of the amount of time needed for endless committees and policy meetings, he took every chance he could to play an active part whenever possible, to be in at the sharp end. It didn’t worry Abigail, as long as he didn’t interfere with her own responsibilities. He’d earned the reputation of being a good boss from those he outranked ... if you toed the line. If not ... well, it wasn’t often he let fly.

  He kept his powder dry until he needed it for his big guns, but when he did – take cover!

  ‘Let’s hear what you’ve got, all the same. Sit down and have some coffee. You look as though you could do with it.’ He poured her a cup from the fresh pot which had just been brought in.

  God, did she look that bad? Probably. She wondered if he remembered she’d had her day off cancelled on Sunday, with fat chance of being able to make it up, never mind take time off for an overdue hairstyling, which always made her feel a hag. She took a drink of coffee and vowed she’d make time to visit the hairdresser, somehow. She could take on board as much pressure as anybody, but she’d enough common sense to grab time off in lieu as soon as she could manage it. Which might, in the circumstances, unfortunately for her, be some time in coming, all things considered. Too bad. No use complaining. It went with the territory.

  ‘We’ve had the PM report through,’ she said. ‘It’s fairly conclusive.’

  Asphyxial death due to drowning in water, was how Timpson-Ludgate had phrased it. The occipital fracture of the skull had resulted in loss of consciousness, whereby the victim, lying face downwards in the puddle, had subsequently drowned. Diatoms, or microscopic water algae, in the blood, proved conclusively that he was alive before the water entered his air passages. There were no contre-coup injuries to the brain to indicate that the fracture was due to his fall. Translated, this meant that he had been hit with, rather than fallen on to, some irregularly shaped, heavy object, possibly a stone. Had he fallen, the brain damage would have showed up on the opposite side to where the skull injury had
been sustained, a seeming anomaly which occurred for some complex and not yet fully understood reason. A nice distinction, but important, since it proved conclusive evidence that his death was no accident.

  ‘But the weapon hasn’t turned up. We’ve combed the area, and found nothing. Plenty of stones, but none that obviously fit the bill. And nothing else that looks likely.’

  ‘So we’re talking murder. At the least manslaughter, a fight that got out of hand?’

  ‘We’ve had no reports of any undue disturbances nearby, either in the Leasowes or Colley Street, apart from the usual Saturday-night rumpus at the Punch Bowl – bikers and some drunken louts celebrating United’s win. Ending up with one youth in hospital, several others enjoying free lodging here for the night. We’ve ascertained it had nothing to do with our man.’

  And in any case, she added, the Punch Bowl, or any other pub, was probably a nonstarter, since the medical evidence had revealed no traces of alcohol in the victim’s system. ‘The car keys are for a last year’s BMW, but so far we haven’t had any reports of one being abandoned. Kite’s been on to the manufacturers ... they’ve given him the model, and the retail outlets they were sent to – but it’ll be a long job tracing it that way – could’ve changed hands several times since then. And of course, our man could have disturbed thieves or joyriders in the act and tackled them as they were taking it away.’

  ‘Might be some connection with your motor thefts, is that what you’re thinking? They’ve all been prestigious type cars so far.’

  ‘I’m currently working on the theory, but I’m not optimistic, if it’s part of the same scam. Respray, new numberplates and its chassis number ground off, you name it, and it’ll be over the channel before you can blink.’