A Death of Distinction (3 page)

Several acres of land still remained behind the main house, with a small lake providing a home for a few ducks, and within the perimeter fence, separated from the housing estates by a belt of trees, was an area of kitchen garden to help support the prison, plus soccer and basketball pitches. The original house was now the administration section, and alongside was a motley collection of purpose-built accommodation blocks, kitchens, workshops, etc. Lying beyond the wire was the Elizabethan Home Farm, which had escaped the restoration of the big house and was now the governor's private home.

Before the others were down to breakfast, on the morning after the celebrations at the Town Hall, Dorothea Lilburne was out in her garden, on her knees in the beech coppice, dividing snowdrops.

The swelling buds of the ash trees were black against the light, pearly sky, early daffodils danced, crocuses spreading purple, gold and white across the grass. It was a perfect morning, though still bitterly cold for mid-March, and she was glad of her padded body warmer. Snowdrops, she thought, lifting the bulbs tenderly, were probably her favourite flower. Fair Maids of February ... She had twelve different kinds, double, single, some pink-flushed, scented, or tipped with yellow. So pretty they'd looked, a few weeks before, carpeting the ground beneath the trees with the meek, drooping white chalices hiding their delicate green stamens, but they were in danger of becoming overcrowded. There wasn't much nourishment between the gnarled, twisted, surface roots of the beeches, and they were vying for what there was of it with the naturalized daffodils and fritillarias.

‘Wouldn't move ‘em if I was you, missis.'

Tom Barnett stood sardonically regarding her efforts. With his shambling figure, his spade over his shoulder, ill-shaven, with a knitted cap pulled down over his ears and mud-caked gumboots, he looked like some oversized and disagreeable old Nibelung. ‘Snowdrops is like you and me – older we get, less change we like.'

‘Oh, rubbish!' Dorothea answered coldly. ‘If you catch them after they've flowered, before the leaves or bulbs have the chance to dry off, they'll transplant well enough.'

‘Oh ar. Have to see, then, won't we?' Parting his lips in a knowing grin, he clomped off to dig the vegetable plot, which was the only sort of gardening he thought worthwhile, and the only reason he was employed – for that, and to trim the hedges and cut the lawns. And even there, a conflict of interest arose between her own preference for gently curving borders and his conviction that they should be ruler-straight.

Dorothea rammed her handfork into the hard earth. Tom Barnett was a miserable old grump who didn't know the first thing about flower gardening. Which didn't stop him having a lot to say about it. She hadn't yet forgiven him for digging up what he swore had been a moribund shrub which nothing could save, when she'd been away once, and planting a row of onions in its place. She still mourned the little Judas tree, grown from seed, not dead, merely a reluctant specimen she'd coaxed along for years.

And how dare he put her in the same age bracket as he was?

You get back to your cabbages and leave me to my flowers, she thought huffily, nettled because he might well prove to be right: beautiful as they were, snowdrops were temperamental creatures, often sulking if they were disturbed. She'd planned to put them where they could colonize the empty space left by the crinum lilies, which hadn't survived a hard winter followed by this terrible wet spring, and she wasn't going to let the likes of Tom Barnett put her off. Firmly dealt with, they would thrive. She rose rather stiffly from her knees to cart down there the now-full trug. As she did so, the telephone rang, and went unanswered. Jack must have finished his breakfast and was probably in the shower, and Flora, who, after the late night last night, had announced she wasn't going into her shop that morning, would be fathoms deep in sleep. Reluctantly, Dorothea turned to go and answer it.

The dogs, in whom the telephone always, for some mysterious reason, engendered frenzied excitement, materialized from some far corner of the garden as she hurried towards the house. Nearly knocking her over, they rushed in as she opened the door, barking, scattering the rugs in the wide, stone-flagged hall, which had a door at each end, front and back. Delightful in summer, when one could leave the garden door open and see the long matching borders with the swathe of grass between, but cruel in winter, when the draughts whistled like a whetted knife between the doors.

‘Quiet, Sam! And you, Kip!' She leaned on the door to shut it against the wind, paused to slip off her muddy gardening shoes, and the wretched telephone stopped. Dorothea, who was not the swearing kind, clicked her tongue in annoyance. The old spaniels, disappointed, floundered up on to the cushioned window seat above the radiator, one eye on her because they knew this was forbidden. They were Flora's dogs, and very spoilt.

‘Who was that on the telephone?'

Jack, now showered, shaved and dressed in his best suit, ready to drive round to his office via the main road for his meeting with Quattrell – Jack who was as fit as a flea but never walked when he could drive – came into the hall as she was shooing the animals off the window seat. She explained what had happened but he was barely listening.

‘Enjoy it last night, did you then, hinnie?' he asked, smiling at her, throwing an arm around her shoulders, using the northern endearment she would only allow in private. Not that she was
ashamed
of his origins – but there was no need to flaunt them quite so deliberately. She'd once overheard him described as a professional Geordie, and was afraid this could be true.

‘It was very pleasant, Jack,' she answered, lying for his sake, because it had been an evening very special to him, although such occasions were torture to her. She'd no small talk, and was afraid of making a fool of herself by speaking on topics of which she knew nothing. She knew she was thought dull when she failed immediately to laugh at a joke, or see the point of something, but she didn't catch on quickly, and repartee was beyond her. So she'd gradually learned to take refuge in polite smiles and anodyne remarks, like the Queen, and though she knew her reserve was often mistaken for coldness, she didn't know how to remedy it. Strange that Jack, who always seemed to be able so easily to recognize inadequacy in the youths in his care, had never seen that.

He failed to appreciate her lack of response now. ‘Aye, it went very well. Our lassie looked lovely, didn't she?'

‘Flora always looks lovely.'

But oh, that frock! Dorothea sighed deeply, though truly it was the least of the things on her mind about Flora. Not to approach Jack with, however, who could see no wrong in his daughter, and certainly not at this time, when he was evidently feeling optimistic, brimming with goodwill for all the world.

‘I hope your meeting goes well,' she contented herself with saying as he picked up his briefcase.

‘Oh, it will. I'm sure of that, Quattrell as good as gave me the nod last night.'

He sounded so confident that she didn't voice her own doubts about the strident local element who were vociferously opposed to his scheme. The new block, if and when completed, would come within fifty yards of a children's playground. That it would merely consist of additional offices, and be staffed by civilians, made little difference to the objectors, who were out to make trouble.

In a rare gesture of spontaneous affection, she kissed him. He looked surprised, but pleased, and patted her cheek. ‘Be back about twelve. I'll dodge the mess today. Sandwich for lunch, eh? After last night, I'd better be on short commons for a bit.' He drew in his flat stomach, well aware that he weighed no more than he had when she'd married him, twenty-one years ago.

Smiling, rattling his keys, he made for the front door, pausing, as she knew he would, to filch the newspaper and read the front page before flinging it on to the back seat of his car and driving off with it.

He was halted by the appearance of Flora flying down the stairs clad only in flip-flop mules and a short nightshirt with a naughty slogan across the bosom, calling out, ‘Da! Wait for me – I want to ask you something.' Dorothea tut-tutted as she went out to the car arm in arm with her father, just as she was, barely decent. The front door opened and the garden door, insecurely caught on the latch, burst open as was its wont. Dorothea forgot them both.

From where she knelt, pulling on her garden clogs, she could see the left-hand border, twin to the right, in summertime effulgent with colour, heady with scent, and was reminded of what she'd meant to do this week. During this last long spell of wet weather, when it had been too damp even for her to contemplate working outdoors, she'd spent the time in her dark little room under the eaves rearranging, on squared paper, some of the plants and shrubs in the borders, seeking for better plant associations, and she now had all sorts of exciting projects in view.

It was there that Flora had found her the other day, with her head bent over her plan, occasionally looking up from it to consider the sodden garden below, and getting a whiff of fragrance from the sprig of
Daphne odora
in a vase on her desk.

‘Blimey, it's gloomy in here! Don't you want a lamp on, Mother?'

‘No, thank you.' Dorothea spoke absently, surveying her handiwork. ‘I'm just wondering whether the colours are too pale towards the middle – here?' Had she followed received gardening wisdom too slavishly, or did the pale froth of pastels need something more daring, a touch of thunder-purple, or perhaps crimson? She had it – a
Cosmos atrosanguineus,
its delicate feathery plumes and purple-black flowers would make a perfect foil for the strong heads of the pale pink phlox and that creamy scabious ...

‘Moth-
er!
The garden's perfect as it is. Why d'you want to make more work for yourself?'

‘More work? Good gracious, the work in a garden's never finished – and if it were, I wouldn't want it. Don't you see?'

‘Heavens, no!' Flora threw herself into the sagging old armchair next to the bookshelves, crammed with Dorothea's gardening books. ‘I'll
never
understand how anybody can enjoy breaking their back and their fingernails gardening! I suppose I'm far too lazy, not like either you or Da.' She always called Jack Da, the name he'd called his own father. ‘There are better ways of enjoying yourself.'

Oh, Flora, Flora! thought Dorothea now, preferring not to imagine the ways Flora had meant, pushing aside these troubling thoughts with the decision to drive down after lunch and order the
Cosmos
from the specialist nursery she used. Only first, she must finish the snowdrops or she might not get round to it again today.

She went outside and took the trug of snowdrops to their new home, and it was then that the deafening explosion occurred.

The sky went dark, the very ground rocked beneath her feet. Dorothea never afterwards knew whether she'd imagined the silence between the explosion and the terrible sound of falling debris and broken glass, or whether it was merely her own heart which had stopped beating. But after that, there certainly was a silence, when even the birds stopped singing. Into it came a distant, smaller crash, which later she was told was one of the stone nymphs, slowly toppling from its alcove above the front door of the main building. Followed by the noise of the ducks on the little lake, filling the air with panic-stricken squawks and beating wings.

By the time the real pandemonium broke out, the ducks had settled to paddling around in aimless circles, to an occasional indignant quacking, upending themselves into the mud, wondering what all the fuss was about.

There wasn't much left of Jack Lilburne's Nissan, and still less of Jack Lilburne.

If anybody could have been naive enough to believe it might have been an accident, the team of experts from the army bomb disposal unit quickly removed the idea. A bomb it was, though what type they weren't saying, not yet, until they'd more to go on. Shouldn't be long, the major from the Royal Engineers said. They'd already begun to poke about among the wreckage, now that the pair of well-trained sniffer dogs had made sure there were no more devices likely to go off. But Christ, one had been enough!

Mayo stood outside the cordoned-off area, surveying the disaster with something approaching disbelief. A pall of yellowish, choking dust, redolent of old plaster, still hung like a miasma. A car wheel, intact, lay in the gravel drive, and shreds of blue fabric seat-covering had caught on a piece of dangling spouting. Broken glass splintered sunlight on to the yellow, stripped blossom from a huge forsythia, lying scattered like confetti in front of the house. Miraculously, the only apparent damage to the old house itself was that all the front windows had shattered and the ceiling of a downstairs room had come down.

It was the heap of wreckage under the half-demolished barn which was the focus of the horror. Of Elizabethan vintage, the same age as the house, what was left of it suggesting it had possibly been decrepit even before the bomb had blown half of it away, the brick and timber building had stretched at right angles to the house, with a gravelled forecourt lying between them. Half the roof now leaned crazily to one side, its corner still shakily supported by a single upright beam of stout weathered oak. From beneath the heap of bricks and roof tiles poked an obscene mass of buckled steel and tangled wires. Some of the man who'd been in the car might still be there, too. Parts of him were already in black plastic bags awaiting the attentions of the pathologist.

Mayo turned aside from the milling crowd of uniformed and plain-clothes men and women, the army personnel in their camouflage fatigues, the scenes-of-crime team. He felt cold to the bone, nothing to do with the biting wind, an inner cold that thick boots and a serviceable padded anorak taken from the boot of his car and donned over his sober funeral garments did nothing to alleviate. Alive one moment, then – oblivion. Howard Cherry, Jack Lilburne ... Well, it happened, but thank God, not often like this ... a heart attack, yes, but bombs, until now, hadn't been part of the Lavenstock police scene.