A Death of Distinction (27 page)

It seemed a long time since he'd eaten the stew: he was ravenously hungry again, and desperately needing hot coffee and aspirin, not to mention a shave and a shower; worst of all, his clothes reeked of the blanket that had covered him last night. Normally so fastidious, he hated that.

He drove along, looking for a café that might be open, but this was Lavenstock, where people had their breakfasts at home and didn't demand coffee at ungodly hours. The supermarket which offered all-day breakfasts in its coffee shop didn't open until eight – an hour to go yet – and it was too far to drive to the nearest motorway services.

He turned into the park and pulled up on the hard standing near the lake. It was a mild, heavy morning, with the rain coming down soft and insistent, the sky like pewter, the sort of day that would be dark until evening. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. If he could snatch some sleep, maybe his head would clear ... but he soon realized that no way was he going to be able to do that for the noise the damned ducks were making, and the barking of unruly dogs, being taken for their early-morning runs.

Images of Flora swam before his closed lids, Flora or his mother, he couldn't properly tell, the focus seemed to be wrong, and somehow they were blurred together. The photographs, that was what he'd left behind, those damning photos ... how was it possible he'd forgotten
them
? Well, it was too late now. If it
had
been the police, waiting for him to come home, they'd surely been into his flat and would have seen them.

There must be something wrong with him, the way he forgot essential things at crucial moments ... like forgetting the typewriter at Avril's flat, after going there that morning specifically to pick it up. The
only
reason he'd gone back there, after swearing he'd never step through the door again ...

He willed the memory of her to recede, her hectoring voice to cease, but she wouldn't go away.

‘What do
you
want?' she'd demanded as she opened the door, pink from her bath, wearing a fluffy, baby-pink dressing-gown hastily tied, partly revealing a pink slip. ‘This is my flat, you're not welcome here.'

‘I've come for my typewriter. My mother left it here and now she needs it; she wants to make another job application.'

‘Take it and go.'

If she'd left it at that, that's where it would have ended. But she had to go on. ‘So she hasn't come to her senses, yet? Still thinks the sun shines out of your bum, does she?' she began aggressively, and, just as the previous time they'd met, in no time at all she was hurling further abuse at him ...

‘Shut up!' he'd ground out, when he could get a word in, disgusted at her coarseness. ‘Shut up, shut up!'

But she didn't. She went on and on ... I should never have let you meet her ... all you've done is make her miserable ... quite content before you came ...

At last, pushed to his limits, he'd grabbed the nearest thing handy, snatching up her knitting from the settee. He pulled the needle out from the row of stitches and lunged, only to find his wrist caught in a vice-like grip, Avril's contorted face inches from his own.

‘Look what you've bloody done!' she hissed between her teeth, more concerned with the knitting than with his attack on her. And well she might be – with reflex actions like that, and a strength he hadn't guessed she possessed, she'd no need to fear.

She dropped his arm. The belt of her dressing-gown had come loose, and it flapped open, revealing more of her unappetizing flesh than he wanted to see, but she didn't seem to notice. ‘You've gone too far. I warned you once before I could make trouble for you. I've only kept my mouth shut because of Marie-Laure, but there's a limit. You've always looked on me as dirt, you patronized your mother – oh, yes, you did, think about it! – and all the time you were worse than either of us – and thinking we didn't know you'd done that bomb.'

He was suddenly aware of the cheap, tinny alarm clock on the sideboard with its loud, insistent tick, that seemed to underline his every heartbeat.

‘How did you know that, Avril?' he asked, feeling all at once cold and clear, dangerously calm. ‘How could you have known?'

‘There's knowing and knowing. I'd nothing to prove it but once I'd thought about it, it was obvious from everything you said. The police'll work it out the same way, once they've got your name and know who you are.'

He remembered the avid way she'd hung on their words, the questions she'd asked, the clever way she'd turned conversations in the direction she'd wanted them to go. He shouldn't have underestimated her.

She was regarding him with scorn. ‘You're a fool, you know that? You'll never get away with it and take it from me, doing life is no picnic!'

‘I don't care about that. He killed my father. He let my mother go to prison for it.'

She stared at him as though he were some different sort of species, arrived from another planet. ‘Is that what you really believe? Do you honestly think she'd have done a life sentence for something she didn't do? Oh, for God's sake, get real!'

‘I
know.
I
saw
him there, that night.'

He'd wakened with the need to go to the toilet and, pattering along the landing, he'd seen, through her open bedroom door, his mother and a strange man, bending over the bed where his father lay. She was crying, and he'd been terrified, though he hadn't known why. His mother had seen him and taken him back to bed, and cuddled him until he went off to sleep again, telling him he'd had a nightmare and that everything would be all right when he wakened up in the morning. But it hadn't been. Nothing had ever been the same after that.

After Frank's death, when he had found the letters clipped to the newspaper cuttings, the letters which Lilburne had written to Frank over the years, he'd contacted Lilburne to ask for help in tracing his mother and, after some reluctance, Lilburne had agreed to meet him. Immediately he saw him, Marc had known that this was the man he'd seen that night, when he was four years old, the man whose face he'd never completely forgotten ... seen in dreams and half flashes of memory ever since, though never entirely recaptured. Lilburne had refused to help him in his search for his mother. He'd talked to Marc for nearly an hour, trying to persuade him, without success, that it would be better for everyone to leave things as they were.

When Marc, without his help, had eventually found Marie-Laure, he became immediately convinced that Lilburne's reluctance to help him to trace her had sprung from a desire to save his own skin ... for Marc had refused to believe that Marie-Laure was anything but innocent of the terrible crime of murdering his father. And if she had not taken Charles Daventry's life, then who else but Lilburne could have been responsible – and been despicable enough to let Marie-Laure take the rap? Why she'd allowed herself to be sacrificed in this way, what her reasons were, Marc could only speculate, but he knew enough of her by now to know that she was capable of a certain degree of martyrdom.

There had never been any question in his mind, after meeting his mother, that Lilburne should be made to pay, not only for killing his father, but for robbing his mother of the best years of her life. Marc felt no compunction for what he had done, but oh, it was a cruel irony that he had met, and now surely lost, Flora through that very same action!

Avril broke into these dark thoughts, saying scornfully, ‘What sort of proof is that? The word of a four-year-old?'

‘I saw him there, I tell you. I know my mother didn't do it. I know she couldn't have killed anybody.'

She'd laughed. ‘It's obvious you
don't
know her, Markie boy. Take it from me, she killed him.'

Whether it was the laugh, or the ‘Markie boy', or the fact that somewhere deep down he sensed there might be a grain of truth, but it was then that he'd lost control.

‘What was that you said about the bomb?' he asked softly. ‘Marie-Laure
knew
?'

‘She did when I faced her with the facts. Oh, she said she didn't believe it but she's not a fool, she –'

He still held the knitting needle in his hand. He felt it in his fist, the knob under the ball of his thumb, the prick of its sharp point where he'd been tapping it against the palm of his other hand. It was surprising how easily it went through her flesh, how quickly she died.

He left the house, and it wasn't until he was back at home that he remembered he hadn't picked up the typewriter.

Flora was ready at last, after Anthony had spent another ten minutes champing at the bit. He was somewhat short with her, telling her to hurry up for God's sake and she gave him the sort of look that said, oh, you're changing your tune now you've got your ring on my finger! Instantly appalled – surely this couldn't be their first quarrel, and at a time like this? – he said he was sorry, kissed her gently and told her how lovely she looked in her yellow suit, but they were both still a little taut when they opened the front door and came face to face with Marc Daventry, standing right there on the top step.

‘What the hell –?' Anthony began, as they both backed away. Flora turning white as a sheet with shock.

‘Don't be frightened, Flora, I don't want to hurt you,' Marc said. His voice was slurred, he was unshaven and his eyes were very bright, there was a rank, unpleasant smell on him. ‘I'm going away. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am that you've been hurt ...'

A volley of barking sounded from the back of the house.

Marc's head came up, his eyes swivelled to the door leading to the kitchen but the dogs grew quiet, evidently silenced by Dorothea. His gaze went back to Flora. ‘I'd no choice, you know. Your father was bad, he wouldn't help me trace my mother. You know why? He was afraid of me because I knew he'd killed my father.'

He took a step towards her and she recoiled.

She shouldn't have done that, stepped away from him, as if he were some unpleasant species of humanity.

Anthony saw the knife in his hand and before he was aware of what he was doing, charged forward. Too late, he saw blood spreading all over the front of Flora's yellow suit. It was a moment or two, a lifetime, before he realized it was his own blood, that the knife had ripped through the sleeve of his jacket, he was bleeding like a stuck pig and that he'd performed the one and only heroic action of his life.

And that Marc still had Flora in his grip, the knife in his hand ...

She kicked backwards, catching him painfully on the shin with her heel, and for a moment he was caught off balance. Anthony prepared to charge again, only, suddenly, the hall was full of men, erupting through the front and back. He saw the knife clatter to the floor. Two policemen had Marc's arms behind his back and another was saying, ‘Marc Daventry, I'm arresting you on suspicion of ...'

And then he had to go and spoil it all by passing out cold.

Mayo took them out for lunch the next day, Abigail and Kite. The completion of a case was traditionally a time for celebrating, but he didn't feel anything more than a pie and a pint in the Saracen's Head was called for at this juncture. The echoes were still too close, especially the echoes of that last interview he'd had with Marie-Laure, which he didn't seem able to get out of his mind.

But inevitably their talk over lunch turned to Marc Daventry and the evidence against him. Apart from Dex Davis's testimony – for what it was worth – forensic evidence indicated that the bomb had been made in the kitchen at Evesham Street: traces of weedkiller and sugar had been discovered between the cracks of the ancient lino on the floor. Together with the rest of the stuff in the shed, not to mention the typewriter and the car tracks and all the rest of it. it added up fairly conclusively.

‘He thought he was being clever, using a bomb, I suppose,' Kite commented as the pies were brought to the table and they began to eat. ‘Unless he was an expert, he couldn't have been sure of killing Lilburne with a gun, and anything else would've involved personal contact with the governor, which wouldn't have been easy.'

Abigail reached for the mayonnaise, having declined the pie and opted for salad. ‘With all that against him, you wouldn't think he'd be having such difficulty in coming to terms with the truth. I've never heard such a pack of lies and evasions. What do you think'll happen to him?'

Mayo shrugged, and took a long swig of his bitter. ‘Hard to tell. He won't be in circulation for a long time, at any rate.'

‘Never'd be too soon for me,' Kite said, spearing a pickled onion with a fierce jab of his fork. He hadn't forgotten the slashed photos.

Abigail gave him a quizzical glance. ‘You're not usually so vindictive, Martin.'

‘We don't usually have double murderers to deal with – nearly triple, if you count old Spurrier – do we? Look at the way he did for Avril Kitchin, and what for? I mean, I can understand Lilburne, in a way, but why her?'

‘He's just clamming up about it. But my bet is he was jealous of her relationship with his mother,' Abigail hazarded.

Mayo wondered what the prosecution would make of that. He thought of his first meeting with Marie-Laure, and what she'd said about Avril helping her to survive in prison. But most human beings have only so much capacity for gratitude. And the two women had separated – allegedly without acrimony but possibly with a certain coolness ... About what? Not having known Avril Kitchin, he could only speculate, but he had a shrewd suspicion that it might have concerned Marc. And that Marie-Laure knew that, too. But she'd retreated into one of her silences on the subject.

She was less of an enigma now, Marie-Laure, after the long session they'd had with her. after her son had been arrested, but he still didn't feel that he, or perhaps anyone, would ever know her. But during that interview, at least, she'd been willing to talk ...