A Death of Distinction (16 page)

He was beginning to feel bad again, the way he'd felt before he met his mother. Angry, and as though something terrible was happening that he should do something about at all costs.

‘And you, Marc, tell me about your par – about June and Frank.'

‘They were all right. I don't want to talk about them.'

He was sensitive about how different his education was from what it might have been if he'd been brought up by her. The things she knew about – art, books and music – hadn't featured much in his childhood. Frank, a machine operator in a component factory, noting Marc's handiness, had shown him how to use tools, to make things; bought him his first chemistry set, taken him to football matches and taught him to swim. And

June – well, June hadn't been educated like Marie-Laure, she'd thought mothering started and ended with a kiss and a hug, seeing him clean, tidy and well fed ...

‘They were good people. You shouldn't think so badly about them,' Marie-Laure admonished quietly.

‘Especially when she wasn't your born-to mother,' Avril put in, her needles click-click-clicking.

He really hated that sort of jargon, especially when it came from Avril, uttered in such pious tones. He was beginning to see he'd never like Avril very much, either, and was sure she felt the same about him. She was very critical of everything he did, or didn't do. ‘Don't you have a girlfriend?' she asked, more than once.

‘No,' Marc said shortly.

It was none of her business. If he wanted a girl he could get one. He objected to the way she fixed that unblinking stare of hers on him and his mother as they talked, taking in avidly every word that passed between them. He thought she bossed Marie-Laure about too much. Her everlasting knitting got on his nerves.

He tried even harder to persuade Marie-Laure to go out with him to a film, a show, a slap-up meal, but the only time he was able to get her to agree to go out for dinner, she had insisted that Avril came too, and the evening was a disaster. He had chosen the best of Lavenstock's two French restaurants, thinking to please Marie-Laure with this, but both women, appalled at the prices, chose the cheapest, and therefore the most uninteresting, food on the menu, and refused wine. Marc drank more than he should have done. Conversation languished. They'd have done better to have stayed in the flat.

Abigail provided Mayo with as many details of Jack Lilburne's background as her team had been able to gather together, from a variety of sources, ranging through his entry in
Who's Who
to a brother and sister in the north and all sorts of people who were reputed to have known him well. He familiarized himself with it by reading it through twice, then put it aside and thought about it.

Born and brought up in a sea-coast mining village in Northumberland, Jack Lilburne came of a family who had been miners for generations. His father had been a tub-thumping trade unionist of the old school who had lived through pre-war poverty and remembered the Jarrow marches: Jennie Lee and Nye Bevan were his idols. He had determined his son was going to have a better life than he'd had, knowing that Jack was clever enough to get to university if he worked hard enough – and his father had made sure that he did. He'd graduated from Durham with a respectable law degree, decided to read for the Bar but unexpectedly joined the Prison Service after a couple of years. His father's reaction to this was not recorded. He rose rapidly, came to Conyhall in 1972 and had stayed there ever since. Well known for his progressive views on treating young offenders, he had been a frequent speaker at Prison Service conferences. Leftish politics, but not aggressively so. His professional life, culminating in the award of his OBE, was crowned with success. His personal one?

Twenty-one years ago, he had married Dorothea Carrington, daughter of one of the old county families. There were those who'd said it couldn't last. People who knew him before his marriage said it would never last – not so much because he and Dorothea came from opposite ends of the social scale, but because Jack had always been known as something of a womanizer, and leopards don't change their spots.

‘So, he
did
like to play the field a bit.' That was what Alex had said. He'd have to take more notice of woman's intuition in future.

‘Even after his marriage, according to Claudia Reynolds,' Abigail reminded him.

‘So. So, is it to be
cherchez la femme
? In particular, the
femme
who wrote that letter Jenny found?'

‘Kite might have something to add to that. He's come up with something he thinks you should hear.'

Mayo rang for the sergeant and found him, for once, at his desk.

Kite was the sort who worked on intuition. Twenty years in the police hadn't yet taught him that such often led to tears before bedtime. All Mayo's caution couldn't rob him of his optimistic confidence in his own snap judgements which, to Mayo's chagrin, often turned out to be well founded. He had a way of latching on to the smallest scraps of information which turned out to be significant. Interviewing a Mrs Doreen Hancock, a civilian clerk who'd worked at Conyhall so long she was almost an institution herself, he'd recognized her as an inveterate busybody and caught a whiff of something which could fall into the ‘significant' category.

Mayo prepared to hear what he had to say, knowing Kite's unerring sense for what was relevant and what was not wouldn't let him waste time in getting to the nitty-gritty. ‘I know you've told all this once to Inspector Moon, but I'd like to hear it first hand, Martin.'

Kite, impatient, but knowing from past experience that Mayo would demand all the details, resigned himself to beginning at the point where Mrs Hancock had mentioned to him something which had happened years ago. She was a gossipy woman, given to clichés. She didn't like to speak ill of the dead, but she'd never forgotten the incident, somehow. A day in the Cotswolds, that was something she and her husband had always enjoyed, driving round the pretty villages or maybe visiting Hidcote Manor Gardens, having tea at Chipping Campden or an early supper on the way home. Real treat it was, or used to be, it was all getting too touristy now. Anyway, on this particular day they'd called in at this hotel on the way home for a meal, and who should they run into there but Jack Lilburne and a woman. Oh, the couple had tried to make it appear they weren't together, but Mrs Hancock wasn't born yesterday, and knew when she was having the wool pulled over her eyes, and had later happened to get into conversation with the receptionist – well, the proprietress, really – who'd witnessed the encounter and assumed they were friends. It turned out that ‘Mr Norman' and his wife regularly spent weekends at the hotel.

‘Disgusting, it was. At least he didn't call himself Smith,' Mrs Hancock sniffed. ‘But barefaced – I ask you, not twenty miles from home! Practically under his poor wife's nose – well, it wasn't right, was it? I'm not narrow minded, but really, I can't stand that sort of thing.'

Kite had made a spur of the moment decision to run out there and check for himself.

The receptionist, who was indeed the wife of the owner, remembered the incident clearly, since it had been a cause of much embarrassment to her. ‘It was years ago, but I haven't forgotten – I really put my foot in it, there! I'd seen them chatting to him in reception and assumed they were friends. “We're always pleased to see Mr and Mrs Norman,” I said to that woman when she brought it up in conversation – though she was just being nosy. It was the way she looked when I said “Mr and Mrs Norman”. I knew straight away, from her expression, that it wasn't his real name, and I was quite shocked, I'd thought him such a nice man. I was really naive in those days! Well, I was a lot younger, not so experienced in what goes on in hotels. The morals of our guests are nothing to do with us, but of course ...' She let her shrug speak for itself. ‘We never saw the Normans again.'

‘What do you remember about the woman – the woman who called herself Mrs Norman?'

‘I don't know that I'd recognize her again. It was her clothes I noticed mostly. She was beautifully dressed, always immaculate, and she'd some stunning jewellery. But she kept herself very much in the background ... he was the extrovert, did all the talking, a really nice man. I can't believe what you're telling me. A bomb, you say? Dear God!'

‘Well, Martin,' Mayo commented when Kite had finished, ‘that's interesting, I'll grant you, and confirms what we're beginning to know of Lilburne's character. The question is, was this the same woman that Claudia Reynolds assumed he was meeting clandestinely, or someone else entirely? We've no evidence that she was – or whether she was the one who wrote that unsigned letter, or typed the other. Or whether any of it has anything at all to do with him being killed.'

Abigail said, ‘I'll find out from Claudia exactly when it was he and this woman were meeting.'

‘If it happens to be nineteen-seventy-nine, the chances are it's the same woman he stayed with at the Gravely Arms. I've already checked that was when he and the woman stayed there as Mr and Mrs Norman,' Kite said.

Marc's depression was deepened by the fact that he hadn't heard from Flora about the flowers, not even whether she'd received them or not. Then he reasoned that she wouldn't have wanted to ring him at the hospital to thank him, she would know it was more than likely he'd be on theatre duty. At the same time, it came to him that she couldn't write to him, either, since he'd never told her his full name. When she'd asked him what he was called, he'd simply said ‘Marc'. From that she wouldn't know that it was spelt in the French way, with a ‘c', and she probably hadn't noticed the way he pronounced it, with a short ‘a'. For all she knew, there might be fifty Marks working at the hospital, which is what the woman at the flower shop would have written down when he telephoned the order. He was furious with himself for not thinking it through properly, though he wasn't sorry he'd sent them, she was the sort of girl, he knew, who'd love flowers ... though it did seem that he didn't have much luck where women and flowers were concerned.

But no way could he give up in his attempts to contact her again. There were other ways, as Frank used to say, of skinning a cat.

At the beginning of March, Marie-Laure had told him about the new flat she would be moving into.

It was one Avril had found for her, through Search and Sell, and he'd been not only bitterly disappointed that she didn't offer to share it with him, but also obscurely affronted because, although it was small and not in the best of neighbourhoods, it was better than any he could have afforded to buy – one that would have been large enough, at any rate, for them to share. Prices seemed to have risen overnight and each time he looked at his capital, he saw it buying less and less. But it was still a mean flat, and this had never been part of his plan. She deserved better – she would have had better, if she hadn't been so self-sacrificing. He bottled up the anger he felt at this needless waste of her life, but she sensed it, all the same.

‘I thought you would be pleased,' she'd said gravely. ‘I can't go on sponging on Avril for ever, that's only a one-person flat she has, though she has been wonderful about letting me stay there.'

‘You're not going to share the new flat with her, then?'

‘What made you think that? The arrangement was only temporary. I need – how do you say it? – my own space.' She almost achieved a smile.

He felt very slightly better. Women's friendship – the deep, caring sort of relationship Avril and his mother appeared to have – was something he'd only ever heard talked about in a lubricious sort of way, and he hadn't cared to dwell on it, pushing the implications to the back of his mind. But he saw, now, that it hadn't been like that – not on Marie-Laure's part, anyway. Perhaps he was projecting his own feelings on to his mother, but they were two such different personalities that he wondered, sometimes, if it wasn't merely gratitude that made her want to keep Avril as a friend.

‘It's very convenient,' she'd said of her new accommodation. ‘The shops are nearby. I can easily walk to Catesby's to work ...'

‘Well, I hope you won't be doing that much longer.'

‘Perhaps.'

She'd agreed, after a good deal of persuasion, to try and get herself a more worthwhile job, in teaching, what she was trained for, and had applied for several positions, though so far without success.

‘And the church is just round the corner,' she added.

The Roman Catholic church.

It was another part of her life that he found difficult to accept, having had to admit how deeply her religion still fitted into her life. He knew, bitterly, that her faith meant more to her than he ever could. Her inner life he was incapable of understanding, and the outward trappings of her religion irked and sometimes embarrassed him, especially when he thought of these last self-imposed years of martyrdom. How could she worship a God who'd allowed her to suffer as she had done? Yet he knew she slipped into the church every day to pray, and went regularly to mass and confession. The few books of her own that she possessed were almost all books of devotion. She wore the crucifix round her neck always, there was another above her bed.

He just couldn't understand how Marie-Laure could find peace and solace in kneeling before an altar, lighting candles in that gloomy, soot-stained building behind the market square.

‘What do you see in it? What's it ever done for you?' He was totally unable to envisage a life of that sort. Frank and June hadn't been practising Christians. Churchgoing of any kind was quite outside his ken. Believing in some pie-in-the-sky religion was for cranks and parsons and Jesus freaks.

‘It has helped me to go on living,' she answered, but refused to be drawn further. ‘We'll talk more about it some day, when you're ready for it, but not now.'