An Expert in Murder (36 page)

This time, the shock served to strengthen Josephine’s resolve rather than destroy it. ‘You told him to kill me?’ she asked, looking incredulously at Marta. ‘Why the hell would you want to do that?’

Marta stayed silent. ‘Perhaps I was being a little disingenuous there,’ Vintner said. ‘It was my idea. After what you did to my father, you surely can’t wonder why
I
would want to kill you?

Mother just offered to help me out. We’ve been estranged for a while, you see, and she was so pleased to see me that I think she’d have agreed to anything.’ Marta opened her mouth to speak but he interrupted her. ‘There’s no need for secrecy now, not with our little friend here,’ he said, gesturing with the gun. ‘And I’m sure Josephine would like to know that you weren’t exactly opposed to the idea of bumping her off.’ He put his mouth closer to Josephine’s ear. ‘In fact, it was her idea to do it in a crowd – she thought it would be a nice tribute to your little crime novel. And she had her own reasons for wanting you dead. It’s a shame you don’t have time to talk to her about them.’

‘But you killed . . .’ Josephine began, but Vintner put his hand quickly over her mouth. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘I see you’re a few steps ahead of us, but all in good time. It’s a shame to rush a good story – you should know that.’ He paused. ‘Where was I? Ah yes –

your murder. You see, Mother was supposed to point you out to me and make herself scarce. The thing is, she was a little bit hasty in getting out of the way. She didn’t wait to meet you properly and confused you with someone else, so she gave me the wrong information. Before you got here just now, she was even blaming Lydia 253

for saying something about a hat.’ He shrugged his shoulders and added sarcastically, ‘A tragedy.’

With a mixture of horror, incredulity and pity, Josephine realised that Marta had no idea who her son had killed at King’s Cross. As if to prove her right, Marta spoke again.

‘You’re frightening me, Rafe. This is not what the plan was.

We’re no nearer to finding your sister now than we were when I agreed to help you, and you promised we’d be a family again. I thought you wanted that as much as I do.’

‘Aren’t I enough for you then?’ Vintner spat the words out, and the bitterness in his voice was almost as palpable to Josephine as the gun which rested in her back. She could not see his face, but she could tell from the growing fear in Marta’s that the agreement which she had believed to exist between them was gradually being exposed as a lie. ‘Do you have to have your bastard daughter to play happy families?’ he continued, and Marta flinched as if the blow had been a physical one. ‘Anyway, if you want to talk about promises, what about your promises to me? Like the one you made to add a little something to Bernard Aubrey’s whisky. Thank God I didn’t trust you to carry that off.’

‘I couldn’t do it – we’d already made one mistake.’ Marta was crying again now. ‘And he didn’t need to die.’

‘Oh he did, you know. He was far too close to the truth about everything, so it’s just as well I made sure, isn’t it? That’s one broken promise. Then there are the promises you made to your husband, of course. You didn’t keep those for very long, did you?’

‘We’ve been through this time and time again. Your father was an evil man.’

‘How the hell would you know? You turned your back on him after five minutes of marriage. He went off to fight for us, to fight for his country – and what do you do? Jump into bed with the gardener. I wasn’t even five years old, for God’s sake – what sort of effect do you think that had on me?’

‘But you didn’t know anything about it. I kept you out of the way.’

‘Children wander, Mother. They’re curious.’ Vintner pushed 254

Josephine over to the divan and made her sit down next to Marta, while he took his place on the piano stool opposite them both. He rested the gun on his knee, and Josephine watched his fingers moving lightly over the trigger as he talked. ‘I wonder if you remember my fifth birthday as clearly as I do? You gave me a kaleidoscope, and it was so beautiful I couldn’t tear myself away from it. It was hot, and we had all the windows open in the house.

You’d left me playing in my room and gone out to the garden for a while, and then suddenly I heard a man’s voice and you were laughing. I thought it was Father, come home for my birthday, and I ran down to show him my present. I couldn’t see you at first, but then I noticed the summer-house door was open. It was always your favourite place, remember? You went there to write and I was never allowed to go in, but I thought you wouldn’t mind on my birthday and I knew you’d want me to come and see Father.

Except it wasn’t Father, was it? He was still choking on dirt in the trenches while you made other arrangements. One present for me and another for yourself, except your birthday came more than once a year. I remember standing outside the summer house, looking in at the window through all those fucking flowers you’d planted, and I was so frightened. That man had you pressed up against the desk and at first I thought he was hurting you, but then you cried out and I knew, even then, that it wasn’t a cry of pain.

So I ran away. Neither of you saw me, of course – you were too engrossed in each other. I went back upstairs and smashed that kaleidoscope so hard against the floor that it broke. You found me crying not long after, and you thought it was because I’d broken my present, so you put your arms around me – still smelling of him – and promised to get me a new one. You did, as well, I’ll give you that, but of course you could never replace the thing that I really lost that day. I thought I was the most important thing in the world to you, and suddenly I realised I wasn’t. After that, I noticed how many times you brushed me aside, how often you pretended to listen to what I was saying when you were really thinking about something else. And how often you went to the summer house, of course.’

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‘I’m so sorry, Rafe, but you don’t understand what it was like for me.’

‘Oh, I understand all right. Father sat me down and explained it to me. When he finally came back on leave, he wanted to know why I was so upset and I told him what I’d seen. I thought if he got rid of the other man you’d spend time with me, just like you used to. He didn’t say anything at first, and then he made me repeat it to him, over and over again, every detail, asking about things I didn’t understand. But he did nothing about it – not straight away, anyway. Eventually, he explained that he’d had to send you away and I thought that was my fault. I suppose, in a way, it was. After you’d gone, he’d sit in that summer house and brood for hours on end. It was your special place.’ He seemed to make a conscious effort to drag himself back into the present, away from his memories. ‘Still, I don’t think you’d like it as much these days. The décor leaves a lot to be desired since Father blew his brains out there.’

Josephine knew her presence had been all but forgotten in the recriminations between mother and son. She looked at Marta, and was surprised to see that she seemed to be growing calmer as the exchange went on. Now, she leaned forward and put her hand on Vintner’s shoulder. ‘I wanted to take you with me more than anything in the world, but your father put me away and made sure I couldn’t see you,’ she said. ‘You’ll never know how it destroyed me to lose you, and I swear I’ll make it up to you, but we need to stop this now. There’s been enough violence.’

Vintner shook her off. ‘You could never make it up to me. We could spend every day together for the rest of our lives and it wouldn’t make up for those years of not having you. There was a time when I longed for you to reach out and touch me, but not any more.’ He met her eyes, his own filled with hatred. ‘As it happens, though, I have kept my promise to you. I’ve managed to trace your daughter. In fact, I’ve known who she is for some time. I was with her just the other day.’

Josephine would have given anything not to have noticed the small flicker of hope that passed across Marta’s face before she 256

walked into the trap her son had set for her. ‘Why didn’t you say?

Where?’

‘She was on a train,’ Vintner said and sat back, waiting for the horrific truth to sink in.

Marta had gone a shade of white which Josephine had always believed to exist only for the dead. Her own sense of grievance had, she realised, all but disappeared in the face of this torture: whatever Marta had done, she did not deserve to be played with like this. Josephine reached out and took her hand. She was convinced the two of them were going to die very shortly anyway, so what danger was there in a little compassion? ‘The girl who died on the train was called Elspeth Simmons,’ she said and then, when Marta showed no sign of recognition, ‘She was your daughter.

Yours and Arthur’s.’

As she uttered the words, she saw shock transform itself into the adamant disbelief which so often delayed the onset of grief. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Marta said, shaking her off. ‘You just want to hurt me for what I tried to do to you. That couldn’t possibly be true.’

‘I’m afraid it is, Mother,’ Vintner said, and there was a hardness in his voice which signalled to Josephine that his deadly game was reaching its conclusion. ‘You see, what I haven’t told you is that Father gave me a few instructions before he died. You don’t think that pathetic note he left on his desk was his final word, do you?

That was just something to be read out at the inquest for Tey’s benefit.’ He glanced at her for a second and then turned back to his mother. ‘No – Elliott Vintner was capable of something far more creative than that. The very last thing he wrote was actually a letter to me. I’ve got it here, in fact.’ He rested the pistol on the piano and took a sheet of paper – worn and dirty from repeated handling

– out of the pocket of his corduroy trousers. Josephine recognised the scrawl of dark red ink from correspondence she had had by the same hand. ‘Shall I share it with you?’ He did not wait for an answer but unfolded the paper and started to read. ‘To become an expert in murder cannot be so difficult,’ he began, then paused and looked again at Josephine. ‘You’ll recognise that bit, of course, but guess what? It’s actually true.’

257

He continued and Josephine knew that she was watching a performance, as carefully rehearsed as anything he had ever spoken on stage. She listened while the letter was read out, and Rafe Vintner’s voice was replaced in her head by his father’s, that low, confident drawl which had tried and failed to destroy her in court. These words, however, were far deadlier; the argument, more emotionally charged: ‘“We have always been close, Rafe, bound not just by our love for each other but by your mother’s betrayal of us both. If that love means anything to you, you can keep it alive, even after I’m gone, but only if all traces of that betrayal are destroyed. I can tell you
how
to do that, but you must search within your heart to decide if I’m asking too much. If the answer to that is yes, then forgive me for asking and go on with your life as best you can; if, however, the answer is no, if you share any of the pain and resentment that has led me to ask such a thing of my son, then this is what you must do to protect my name and to lighten the burden which you will carry alone after I’m gone.”’ Rafe Vintner’s voice was filled with emotion as he read on, outlining instructions from a dead man which had sealed the fates of Elspeth Simmons and Bernard Aubrey, and now seemed certain to do the same for Marta and for her. Josephine only had to look at Marta to know that Elliott Vintner’s final wish – that she should be made to suffer beyond all measure before she died – was a
fait accompli
: she could see that Aubrey’s relationship to Arthur had been as much a revelation to Marta as the identity of the girl on the train, and the combination would surely destroy her. ‘That’s the gist of it, anyway.’

Vintner folded the letter carefully and put it back in his pocket before picking up the gun again. ‘I won’t bore you with the practical details at the end except to say that they were very thorough.’

There was silence in the room and Josephine wondered if his arrogance was such that he expected applause. When Marta eventually spoke, her voice was barely audible but surprisingly steady.

‘So it wasn’t a mistake at all. When we met at the theatre afterwards, you already knew exactly what you’d done.’ It was a statement, not a question, but her son was eager to explain further.

‘Oh yes. I had no intention whatsoever of killing Tey – not then, 258

at least. I was going to
pretend
I’d misunderstood your description of her, but then you told me to go for the woman in the hat – so it ended up being your mistake. Never in my wildest dreams could I have hoped for that. It’s the ultimate irony, don’t you think? You instructed me to kill your own daughter. How Father would have laughed,’ he said, turning to Josephine, ‘to paraphrase your
splendid
play.’

‘And then you tricked me into agreeing to kill Aubrey by making me panic,’ Marta continued, ‘knowing all along that, if I did, I’d be killing the last link with Arthur.’

‘Yes. Neat isn’t it? Two down, one to go.’

Josephine knew it was only a matter of time before Vintner carried out his father’s instructions to the letter and added her to the tally as a bonus. Playing for time, and understanding that he was the type to enjoy talking about his cruelty, she said, ‘How could you have known that Elspeth was going to be on that train? Or anywhere near me? We met by chance.’

‘Not exactly. I gather from poor Hedley – he’s a friend of mine, you know – that Bernard Aubrey arranged the tickets as a treat for his soon-to-be-acknowledged great-niece. In fact, Hedley saved me a lot of trouble all round. I knew who Elspeth was and what she was interested in – Father could tell me that much because he’d made it his business to keep an eye on things after he’d given her away. I knew I could arrange to bump into her, either at the theatre or at that ridiculous shop, but I thought I was going to have to seduce her myself to get her where I wanted. As it happened, Hedley did my dirty work for me and there was no need to venture into those murky waters, so I suppose I have to own up to a bit of help there. I couldn’t believe my luck when Hedley came downstairs one night after the show and asked for an autograph for Elspeth Simmons. It only took a bit of gentle encouragement to get them together and, after that, I could always find out where she was. It was embarrassingly easy, really. He was so excited about her coming down this weekend that he never stopped talking about it and how thrilled she’d be that his precious Mr Aubrey had arranged for her to meet her favourite author. It was pathetic.’