A Death of Distinction (19 page)

She gave him a quick upward glance from under her lashes, then lowered them and went on smoothing down the suit skirt.

‘I don't think that would be a good idea, Marc,' she said quietly, at last.

‘Why not?'

‘I – I don't have much spare time, for one thing, and for another –'

‘I'm not your social class – is that it?' he interrupted, quick on the defensive, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

‘No, of course not, not at all! It's just that –'

A woman came in from the back of the shop. ‘Flora? Anything wrong?' she asked in a cut-glass accent.

‘No, Charlie, Marc's just going, aren't you, Marc?'

Charlie – what sort of stupid name was that for a woman to call herself? Marc judged her to be a few years older than Flora, heavily made up, with shiny, streaky hair tied back with a black velvet bow, wearing a very short-skirted navy blue suit that showed legs with knobbly knees, and enough gold chains clanking round her neck to anchor the
QE2.
She gave Marc a look that froze.

After Flora's unwillingness and that look, he wasn't going to hang around to be humiliated further. ‘I'll ring you,' he said to Flora. ‘You must have
some
free time – this week, next week –'

‘Don't, Marc, it won't be any good.'

He wasn't all that experienced in asking girls out, but this was supposed to be how some of them reacted, wasn't it? Played hard to get? He didn't believe that was Flora's style, yet she couldn't really mean what she said.

‘Why not? Why won't it be any good?'

The Charlie woman began, ‘Look here –' But Flora interrupted her.

‘Because for one thing, I'm engaged to be married.'

‘I – I don't believe you.'

‘Yes, I am. To Anthony. Anthony Spurrier, the man you just met.'

He was stunned. ‘You can't be. You're lying!'

‘You'd better go,' the other woman said coldly, though he could have sworn all this was news to her, too.

‘Yes, Marc, I think you had,' said Flora. Her eyes were huge, and her face had gone very pale.

They stood there, looking at him, and he had absolutely no idea what to say. He couldn't have spoken anyway at first for the tumult boiling up inside him, churning his stomach. At last, he managed it. ‘All right, but I'm not going to leave it there. You let me think ... You
kissed
me when you left the hospital!'

‘Oh, Marc, that meant nothing – except that you'd been so nice to me! Everybody kisses, it doesn't mean any more than shaking hands.'

It was true, people kissed all the time, when they met, when they said goodbye, even people who didn't know each other very well. But not Marc. Kissing was special, for when you wanted to show affection, or love, for someone. Using kisses in that casual way debased their currency.

He was bitterly disappointed in Flora. Disappointed, and so angry he felt that he couldn't breathe. She'd made him look a fool in front of that other woman he'd taken an instant dislike to. But if she thought it was over with, she was wrong. He wouldn't be put off so easily, he hadn't finished yet, far from it.

Without another word, he turned and left the scented, feminine atmosphere of the shop and stepped out into the workaday bustle of Fetter Hill. The sense of isolation which he so often felt had never seemed greater.

The Mayor's new rose garden outside the Town Hall, of which he'd spoken so enthusiastically to Dorothea on the night of the dinner, was still a collection of bare, lifeless twigs set in square cushions of earth. Bordered with massed purple and white crocuses, a thing of pride and joy to the municipal mind, the beds were cheerful, if not aesthetically pleasing, on a miserable morning. Or what Abigail could see of them as she perched on a desk in the incident room, the telephone to her ear.

‘Yes, that's it, that's the name,' she answered Anthony Spurrier. ‘Clarke. John Clarke.'

‘Well, I've been through the records, way back, and we've never had a John Clarke, with or without the “e”. Sean Clarke, yes. Michael, Justin, Andrew. Even a Tristram, poor devil. But no John, ever, not even as a middle name. Funny, when you think how common it is.'

‘Maybe that's why it was chosen. If the owner of it ever existed, outside Dex Davis's mind.'

‘Giving you a hard time, is he?'

‘No more than we'd expect.' No more than insisting he was telling the truth about this John Clarke. But he would, anyway. He was up to the neck in it. Tip and Farrar had done a good job in tracking down the source of the explosives, which had indeed come from the quarry, via a light-fingered truck driver doing regular pick-ups of stone for the new Hurstfield bypass. He'd admitted leaving the explosives in a car boot, picking up the money left there, just as Dex had said. ‘Well, thanks anyway for your help, Mr Spurrier.'

‘Er – before you ring off. There's – er – something you might be able to help me with. I've got a problem, well, sort of. At least, not me, personally, not exactly –'

‘Whose is it, then?' Abigail asked, looking at her watch, mindful of how long it took Spurrier to get to the point.

‘It concerns Flora – Flora Lilburne. My fiancée, you know.' There was a pause which seemed to call for some comment.

‘Oh, I didn't know you were engaged.'

‘Only just,' he answered with a proud bashfulness that managed to convey itself over the phone.

‘Congratulations.'

‘Thanks.' Another pause.

Abigail sighed inwardly, made a drinking motion towards Pete Deeley, indicating that a coffee would be welcome. He stuck his thumb up and as he went to get her one from the machine, she said, ‘What's the problem, Mr Spurrier?'

She listened patiently while he told her that Flora Lilburne was being pestered by someone named Marc Daventry. Telephone calls, flowers – even hanging around her shop – and now it was letters ...

‘He's threatening her, you mean?'

‘No, not exactly. Rather the opposite, I suppose. He seems to have taken a shine to her, and won't take no for an answer.' Her own crispness was sharpening him up, and he managed to give her a fairly succinct account in less than the five minutes it took to drink her coffee, of how the situation had arisen. It seemed to Abigail a fairly familiar one – a pretty girl giving a young man too much encouragement, and then regretting it. She didn't see what Spurrier expected of her, since there had so far been no threats to Flora's person, but she told him to leave it with her and she'd see what she could do. Which, with all the goodwill in the world, she didn't think would be much. Considering all the department had on just now, it wasn't a priority.

‘You – won't mention this call to Flora? She feels sorry for this bloke, thinks it'll all blow over.'

Abigail promised, but she thought it prudent to make a few inquiries, and when she'd collected the results, to report what she discovered when the team met for the morning briefing.

‘What do you say his name is? Daventry?'

Mayo knew most of what went on in Lavenstock, it was his patch and he made it his business to know, but this name was a new one to him.

‘Yes. I've had him checked, there's nothing against him, personally. But he was connected, as a child, with a big murder case that happened around here some time since.'

Several people, those who'd been in the district long enough, remembered the Daventry case.

‘Must've been twenty years ago,' Kite said. ‘I was just thinking of joining the police. A Frenchwoman who murdered her husband with a carving knife, wasn't it? Created a regular furore round here.'

‘Eighteen years ago, to be precise,' Abigail said.

A typical domestic murder, it had been, following the usual pattern of a happy enough marriage, a couple apparently devoted to each other and to their small boy, until the dark river of discontent and unhappiness running beneath the surface had erupted in blood and death. The truth emerged only at the trial.

An attractive woman whom Charles Daventry had met when on business in France, his wife had turned out to be not the thrifty French schoolteacher he'd expected, but hopelessly extravagant – at least, in his eyes. He'd evidently tried to keep her on short commons all their married life, subjecting her to interrogations on how she'd spent his money. Although a man with a substantial business as a wine importer, he had possessed a streak of miserliness which the defence might have claimed had made life a misery for his wife, had there been any defence.

‘But she wouldn't plead mitigating circumstances, as I remember it,' Atkins said. And he
would
remember it, he never forgot anything. Elephants had nothing on George.

‘Go on.' Mayo stopped twiddling with his newly acquired reading glasses (which he didn't really need all that much, of course), a sure sign that he was interested.

‘It's all in the records, but she admitted it from the beginning, said it was all her fault. She'd been spending extravagant sums of money on clothes and such, and he blew his top.' She'd ended six years of humiliation by driving a kitchen carving knife between his ribs.

‘Her prints were all over the knife, there was blood on her clothes commensurate with her having done it. Made no attempt to deny it.'

‘A classic case of “I don't know what came over me”?'

‘Not quite in the heat of the moment. Waited until he was in bed before she attacked him.' The prosecution had made much of a discrepancy between when Daventry died and when his death had been reported. She had stated that was because she'd been too distraught to think clearly, belated fear of what would become of her child. Whether this had any effect on the jury or not, she had received a life sentence.

Leaving behind her child. The child who had been called Marc, and who was now making a nuisance of himself over Flora Lilburne.

‘What did you say this Marc does for a living, Abigail?'

‘He's an operating-theatre technician. The people he works with speak highly of him. He's been there about two years, came to them from one of the Birmingham hospitals.'

Mayo asked for all the documentation that was available on the case and, after reading it through, sat thinking about Marc Daventry and Flora Lilburne. Two victims of tragedy, both of them with a murdered father. Was there anything between them other than the simple coincidence of having met in the hospital? The trouble was, he didn't like coincidences, simple or not. But however he looked at it, there was nothing on present showing to suggest there was the slightest link between Charles Daventry's stabbing, and Lilburne being blown to death.

The call came in just after half past nine the following day, when George Atkins was just finishing his early elevenses, a small snack comprising a pint mug of coffee and two sticky buns, and was looking forward to a concluding smoke. He was making the most of his pipe-smoking days, sensing they were numbered. It didn't take much imagination to realize that a new non-smoking super would lose no time in making the office a no-go area as far as tobacco went. As far as George's noxious pipe went, nobody would be sorry to see this – except George himself, who hoped he'd be too far gone into retirement before that happened to worry about it.

He immediately set the routine procedures in motion, then put himself through to Mayo to relay the information, though not before he'd gulped down the rest of his coffee and plugged his pipe into his mouth, not unlike a baby with a comforter, one or two unkind souls had been heard to remark.

‘Sir. Looks like we have a suspicious death.'

Mayo, surrounded by papers, was tetchy. ‘Looks like? Well, have we or haven't we?'

‘No details yet, sir, except that the victim's female. Flat in Coltmore Road, Branxmore. I've alerted Inspector Moon. Organized SOCOs – and Doc Ison's on his way.'

‘Good man, George.' Mollified, Mayo surveyed the day's tasks lying before him, did a rapid mental review on what was lined up for him in his diary. He had a full day, including a working lunch with the ACC (Crime) which he couldn't put off. Nothing else of world-shaking importance. And every suspicious death on his patch was his business, his presence was necessary, he reminded himself, squaring his conscience at the eagerness with which he welcomed this diversion. ‘I'll be down there myself, George, soon as I can.'

Coltmore Road led off the busy Coventry Road, but went nowhere except to a parade of dingy shops and other similarly drab streets, distinguished from them only because it was one degree more respectable and had municipal acers, rowans and Kanzan cherries planted at intervals along its length, some of which had survived the attentions of vandals.

By the time Mayo arrived, the phalanx of police vehicles was creating havoc in an area where congested on-street parking left little room to pass. The pathologist's gleaming vintage Rover was nowhere in evidence, but he could see Henry Ison's blue Ford Scorpio parked halfway down the street, and the scenes-of-crime van, double parked with a patrol car in front of a house remarkable for its fresh paint and a tub, crammed with vivid primulas, at the foot of the front steps. The house had been cordoned off, a uniformed constable stood guarding the entry, trying not to look frozen stiff, his nose red and his breath clouding the frosty air. Mayo shouldered his way past the usual knot of gaping sightseers who were intent on disregarding the attempts of another constable to keep them back, and spoke briefly to the West Indian couple who were huddled in the doorway of the downstairs flat. Running up the narrow stairs, he found Abigail at the top, looking sick. She was standing outside a door opening into a very small room where Sergeant Dexter and his white-overalled scenes-of-crime team were already in action, sidestepping and generally falling over each other in the cramped space, while Napier endeavoured to do his stuff with his cameras.