The Company She Kept Read online

  ‘Nobody. I would have known if there had been.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘On Sunday. She had lunch with me.’

  ‘How was she? Did she seem any different from usual?’

  ‘No, just the same Angie I’ve always known.’

  He said, ‘Did she have any particular man friend?’

  The doctor blinked, then shook her head decisively. Angie had known very few men. To be truthful, she hadn’t had a very high opinion of the opposite sex. ‘She had a rotten childhood, her father was a man with an evil temper, a beast of a man who used to beat both her and her mother, and eventually left them when Angie was thirteen.’ She gave a twisted smile. ‘As you might imagine, it made her very choosy who she went out with. And also, she was very conscious of her face ... though she needn’t have been. It wasn’t so very bad, and when you knew her you forgot about the mark.’

  All at once, tears sprang to her eyes, seeming to startle her as much as her audience. ‘Excuse me,’ she mumbled, taking off her spectacles and fumbling for her handkerchief to rub them angrily away, as if ashamed of them. ‘Please excuse me.’

  Without asking, Abigail crossed to a drinks tray set out on a side table, poured and brought back a long glass of mineral water. ‘Thank you.’ The doctor drank thirstily. ‘You must forgive me, it’s been such a shock.’ Clutching the half-full glass as if it were a comfort to hold on to something stable, she said, ‘We’d known each other since we were at school together and I’ve always felt myself responsible for her – she was never really very good at looking after herself.’

  A nice woman but very earnest, the doctor, Mayo summed her up, the sort of woman who felt it incumbent upon her to be responsible for others.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ she went on, ‘she lived here with me until recently – until she moved out and got another place. Perhaps if she hadn’t ...’

  ‘I noticed your house is up for sale. Is that why she did that?’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Moved out.’

  ‘Oh. Oh yes. I’m getting married next month, and moving out as soon as possible.’

  ‘Congratulations. Who’s the lucky man?’

  ‘His name’s Bouvier, Edward Bouvier, he’s a vascular surgeon. A little late in the day for both of us, but ...’ She rubbed at the frown line between her brows, as if she had a headache, but a little of her lost colour returned to her face.

  Mayo was mildly surprised. Madeleine Freeman was undoubtedly an attractive woman, in her late thirties, he guessed, not an unusually late age for marriage, considering the times. Women – he was well aware of this, to his cost – now wanted to make sure of their careers before committing themselves to marriage and family life. But she had immediately struck him as a woman who would value her independence too much for that. That her caring would be at a distance; a woman essentially central to herself.

  ‘We’ve bought a new house at Tannersley, a modern house. New furniture, much more to my taste than all this,’ she said, her quick glance sweeping round the room, accompanied by a slight shiver, as if dismissive of old ghosts and echoes. ‘All this will go.’

  ‘Quite a change in your life, then,’ Mayo remarked. ‘And in Miss Robinson’s, too, I imagine?’

  Quickly, she said, ‘Yes, but she was very happy for me. In any case, we never expected to live together permanently. We always knew it was possible that one of us might want to move out for some reason, or get married ...’ She hesitated. ‘She had the chance of a very nice flat in Bulstrode Street a few weeks ago and decided to move in immediately. She didn’t want to be left here on her own for any length of time.’

  Mayo knew Bulstrode Street but kept his expression neutral. After this? Bulstrode Street? Right in the middle of the sad no man’s land of bedsits and one-person flats just beyond the town centre. An enclave for single people, living alone, many of them women – and as such, an area with an ongoing prowler problem. Abigail caught his eye. Maybe, their exchange of glances said, they’d have the answer to her death sooner than they imagined.

  Maybe, thought Mayo, adding to himself that the dead woman was unlikely to have been as happy at the change in her fortunes as the good doctor wanted to think. Her naïve assumption of her friend’s acceptance of the big change in her life surely involved a certain amount of self-deception, or even guilt, that she herself was coming off decidedly better in the switch-round than Angie. He reminded himself of the photo of the murdered woman, now in his pocket. Petite, with a lot of blonde hair, an above-the-knees skirt, wearing the high heels that many short women considered indispensable. But that first assumption, at the first sight of her body with its disarranged clothes, that she’d been a tart, that was all wrong – he’d been right to have doubts about that. One look at the closed, prim little face told you otherwise. She was simply the sort of woman, he suspected, who had got herself locked into a style of dressing that had once suited her, with a hairstyle that was many years too young for her ageing face and a skirt length, despite its current fashion, several inches too short for her. A woman, he strongly suspected, afraid of growing old.

  ‘I shouldn’t have let her go,’ Dr Freeman said abruptly. ‘I should have looked after her better. But it was only temporary, that flat of hers, until she got herself fixed up with somewhere better. Though as a matter of fact, I’m inclined to think she’d probably already found it. At lunch on Sunday she was very excited. She’d only hint at what it was but I guessed. She was like that, you know – she used to get a childish enjoyment out of keeping a secret, she liked to keep you guessing.’ The ghost of a smile briefly touched the corners of her lips. ‘She spoke about a very important meeting with some man and she laughed and said it was going to change her future, and in the context of what we’d been speaking about, I took it to mean she was going to view some new accommodation.’ Her long capable fingers convulsively clutched the glass that had held the mineral water. ‘Oh God, perhaps I was wrong –’

  ‘No, that may be very helpful. We’ll make inquiries with all the house agents in the town, unless ...This man – I don’t suppose she told you his name, where he lived, what he did for a living?’

  ‘Nothing at all. Though I must confess I wasn’t paying all that much attention. I had other things on my mind, the new house for one thing ...’

  He finally stood up, after establishing that the doctor had had a surgery the previous day until seven. She’d gone straight home when it finished and at eight-fifteen her fiancé, Edward Bouvier, had called to take her to dine out. He wasn’t entirely satisfied with the interview. Abigail

  had taken several pages of notes – but even so, what they had about the dead woman didn’t amount to much more than an eyeful of cold tea. She had worked at the Women’s Hospital as a clerk on the reception desk. Angela Margaret Robinson, aged 38, unmarried, unattached. No special friends other than Dr Freeman, no interests except helping tirelessly in the doctor’s campaign to keep the Women’s Hospital open. It didn’t sound much of a life, nor give any indication of the sort of woman she had been, popular or disliked, happy or dissatisfied. She must have had her hopes and aspirations, too, but this bald outline revealed nothing except that she had seemingly been content to live in the shadow of her friend. There was nothing on this showing that could have led to someone wanting to murder her.

  ‘What was she really like?’ he asked in a final attempt to fill out the picture. ‘It always helps to know what sort of person –’

  ‘I’m sorry, that really is more than I feel able to cope with just yet. You’ll have to give me time. Later, perhaps ...’

  ‘I understand.’

  Her distress was evident, perhaps through fear of letting emotion get the better of her again, and Mayo felt that any more questioning was likely to be counter-productive. They were only ferreting around at this stage for anything they could pick up that might be of use. More relevant questions could come later, if necessary.

  She
took leave of them at the door, already shrugging on her coat again and exclaiming at the time, ‘I must get on!’

  ‘You’ve had a shock,’ Mayo said. ‘Couldn’t you get one of your partners to take your calls today?’

  ‘Good heavens, that won’t be necessary, I’m far too busy!’ She added wanly, ‘And mooning around being miserable isn’t likely to bring Angie back to life, is it?’

  ‘Well, take my advice, and don’t overdo it.’

  In his sympathy for her, he’d forgotten he was talking to a doctor and she managed a smile. ‘And if you’ll take my advice, you’ll go home and get a few hours’ sleep, yourself. You look as though you could do with it.’

  CHAPTER 7

  The house had come alive again now that Sophie was home. All the rooms were in use again, not merely the kitchen. Fresh flowers filled the vases, the elusive scent she used lingered everywhere. (Maggie had heard she had the scent specially made for her in Paris – or perhaps it was New York – and had no difficulty in believing it.) She ordered delicious and expensive food, nibbling at minute portions and leaving the rest for Maggie, for Sophie ate less than a mouse.

  Maggie wasn’t grumbling. Her student days weren’t long behind; she was always short of money, and lobster and fillet steak were a decided improvement on baked beans and beefburgers.

  ‘I suppose you want me to pack up and go, now that I’ve finished my house-sitting stint,’ she said.

  ‘Now, darling, don’t be tiresome. You know you can stay as long as you want. Anyway, I don’t think I shall be here all that long. It’s always so cold in England.’

  ‘The thermostat’s up to eighty! I don’t know how you can stand it!’

  ‘Well, hie thee off to an attic, it’s cold enough up there, and get on with your painting. I’ve held you up long enough this morning.’

  ‘True,’ said Maggie, with a laugh, disappearing in a gust of energy to immerse herself in one of the large and violent abstracts which Sophie could never understand, while she herself, thin and elegant in her dress of fine soft wool, the colour of aubergines, drew her chair up to the desk near the fire to read her post, shivering in an exaggerated manner at imaginary draughts. But she loved England more every time she returned to it, realizing how much she missed this house where she’d been born. It was a small Queen Anne gem of a house on what had once been the village green at Pennybridge, its light, square rooms perfectly proportioned, the pale honey-coloured walls setting off her collection of gold-framed Baxter prints, the gathering together of which had become something of an obsession over the years.

  Perhaps this time she’d stay. Perhaps it was time to stop running away. Sometimes recently she’d found herself in some part of Europe or America with no memory of why she’d decided on that particular place, and little idea of how she’d ever got there. She’d achieved the freedom she had so longed for at eighteen, and found by bitter experience that this meant she couldn’t bear to tie herself down to anyone or anything. Now there was nothing and no one who really mattered – unless it was Roz, and young Michael. And also, perhaps ... But deliberately, and now by habit, she switched her mind away from subjects that were unremittingly painful.

  ‘Do you still write?’ Felix had asked her last night, sitting opposite her in the firelit room, under the golden light of the lamps, while she sat curled up on the pale Chinese carpet, her legs folded beneath her, her hands held out to the glowing coals. They were simulated coals but they gave an illusion of warmth and the gas flames were real enough. After a long time she’d said no.

  ‘Why not, Sophie? You had such hopes –’

  ‘We all did. We were young, we believed ourselves capable of anything.’

  ‘But you were never a real writer,’ Tommo had said the last time she saw him, ‘and never will be.’ His outspokenness, not having softened with the years, had initially enraged her but, thinking about it later, she had been forced to acknowledge that he might well be right, though it was painful to accept: she didn’t have the passion, the determination to slog on that Maggie had, for instance, young as she was. Yet she had found compensations, other things she could do: she had discovered in herself an unexpected acuity in financial matters so that now she managed not only her own affairs but, ironically, Roz’s as well.

  Felix hadn’t pressed the point. ‘I went to Flowerdew before I came here,’ he said abruptly, shocking her, though it was a logical enough follow-on from his previous remarks.

  ‘What? You didn’t!’ Sophie knew that her eyes were startled, frightened, as she raised them to meet his unblinking stare.

  ‘It was a mistake’.

  She had caught the echoes of fear in her own voice and controlled it as best she could as she answered lightly, ‘Well, it always is a mistake to go back, they say, don’t they?’ In his case, she would have thought, an act of unprecedented folly. Her heart had begun to bang. Horrified at what his return might mean, she tried to change the subject, to ask him about his present life, his marriage, his work, but he interrupted her.

  ‘Don’t you ever think about Flowerdew, and Kitty – about what happened, Sophie?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Doesn’t it ever weigh on your conscience?’

  ‘I don’t let it,’ she said evenly.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure! I don’t see any reason for tormenting myself with something that’s over and done with. We swore we would forget it.’ And she had, with that strength of purpose she could always summon when she needed it. She had locked it away in a dark cupboard at the back of her mind and told herself that she had thrown the key away. It was the only way she could have coped. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘But I do. We must.’

  ‘Felix –’ she began.

  ‘No, you have to listen.’

  The words fell like sharp marble chips, his eyes were that icy pale blue they always used to be when he was angry.

  Fourteen years ago he had imagined himself in love with her and had tried to persuade her that she was in love with him. It would have been easy enough to go along with that – he’d been very attractive in a confident, self-aware fashion, as intent on finding an identity for himself as she had been, though quite differently. His hadn’t then been the successful, smart image he projected now, but he was working on it even then – short hair, high collars and tailored suits when everyone else of his generation was long-haired and wearing jeans and T-shirts; the affectation of writing his forename with an acute accent, his surname with an apostrophe between the D and the a, pretending he had French ancestry. Félix D’Arbell. Like Tess Durbeyfield, Miss D’Urberville. Perhaps he still wrote it that way.

  But, quite apart from the ever-present fact of Tommo that had begun to dominate her life, she’d never liked the ambition that drove him, the ruthlessness that he would certainly need to get to the top. She had always felt alarmed by his temper, which could explode into a sudden rage. She knew now that she’d been right not to let him persuade her, even though the years had changed him somewhat. He was more in control, less inclined to let his feelings get the better of him. All the same, she would never make the mistake of underestimating him.

  ‘Have you contacted the others?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why me?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Why have you really come back, Felix, after all this time?’

  ‘Don’t you know? Are you really telling me you don’t know?’

  And Sophie, to her chagrin, found herself trembling and quite unable to meet his cold, challenging stare.

  CHAPTER 8

  Angie Robinson had been only one of the growing number of women in Lavenstock who for one reason or another lived alone. Many of them had drifted like shifting sand into the district around the bypass, where affordable accommodation was still to be found – affordable largely on account of its being so run down. The noise, Mayo supposed, must have made its own contribution; rarely was it quiet, day or night. Cars, lorri
es and buses ground along, stopped and started at the traffic lights, changed gear and gunned engines ceaselessly. Run down and noisy, with two rows of identical houses facing each other, on-street parking jamming it from end to end, Bulstrode Street escaped neither condition.

  Atkins had already started the process of rounding up the pathetic bunch of known prowlers, Peeping Toms, sexual deviants of all kinds who were known to frequent the area – twenty-eight to date, and more to come – and though there was always the chance that one of them might prove to be the killer, Mayo was increasingly less hopeful that this would be the case. They were a sorry lot. Some had access to a car in which the body might have been transported away from the scene of the crime, others probably had the nous to think of taking it away. Not many had both.

  Having decided there was time for a quick look round Angie Robinson’s flat before the PM, Mayo, accompanied by Abigail Moon, let himself in with the key Angie had given Madeleine Freeman for emergencies. The flat proved to be an upstairs one, really only the bedroom floor of the house, having its own access by means of a door at the bottom of a flight of exceedingly narrow stairs. The whole place had evidently been recently redecorated and the smell of paint still lingered. Dead white paint, no doubt in an effort to lighten the gloom, but the effect was about as welcoming as a cold bath on a winter morning, an icy white contained silence in contrast with the distant grinding traffic noise outside.

  ‘Not exactly home from home, is it?’

  Mayo stood in the front room with his hands in his pockets, getting the feel of the place, not knowing what it was about this particular flat that should make him take such an instant and intense dislike to it ... he’d seen many far, far worse. It was clean and more than adequate for one person: really nothing to take exception to ... except there was no warmth, it possessed not even a modicum of individuality, the general clutter of well-loved possessions that characterizes almost every human life.