Dark Mirror (30 page)

‘What appealed to Marion about this, of course, was the sensational nature of Madeleine’s past, the arsenic murderess. Which I suppose was exactly what did not appeal to me. It was all flimsy speculation, based on a supposed resemblance of portraits. My book was in the final page-proof stages, every word and image finalised, and it was out of the question for me to hold things up to include Marion’s far-fetched ideas. I told her to forget it and concentrate on her topic. She didn’t, of course. Quite the opposite. She became more and more obsessed with the implications of a murderess acting as a kind of hidden agent within the Pre-Raphaelite circle, previously unrecognised. As with any
historical story, even one as thoroughly researched as the Pre-Raphaelites’, there were plenty of gaps and contradictions if you cared to look, and she wanted to explore them all.

‘Then she came up with her theory about Rossetti murdering his wife. I was horrified. I told her I would have to reconsider being her supervisor if she wouldn’t be guided by me. Her response was to hide what she was doing. She became secretive, postponed our meetings. Then I got a call from Grace Pontius in Cornell. She said she’d confirmed an invitation to Marion to present a paper in the summer, and asked me what I knew about this amazing new body of research that she was going to reveal at the conference. I was shocked. I knew absolutely nothing about it.

‘So I tried to contact Marion, and I discovered that she’d moved, and nobody knew where she was living. She wouldn’t answer my phone calls or emails, and when I saw her once in the library she hurried away before I had a chance to talk to her. I began to think that some really big scandal was brewing—that Marion, out of stubbornness and spite at my refusal to consider her theories, was planning to challenge my reputation as a scholar in the most public and damaging way imaginable. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, picturing myself turning up at Cornell and sitting through a paper by my own student about which I knew nothing, destroying the basis of my book, my work, my career.’

‘No,’ Brock murmured. ‘Well, you couldn’t let that happen.’

‘What could I do? I tried appealing to Grace. I said that Marion’s research really wasn’t ready for public exposure, and it would be a kindness to her to make her wait. But Grace smelled a rat. She said that Wallcott at Princeton had heard something about Marion’s work from one of his colleagues who met her by chance in the university here, and Grace was afraid Princeton might publish her first if she cancelled. I was beside myself.’

‘So?’

‘Then I remembered that I’d met Marion’s mother. She turned up uninvited to a faculty tea party for students and their relatives, a year or more ago. Appalling woman. When she learned I was Marion’s supervisor she cornered me. I think she was half drunk, horribly flirtatious, and I had to listen to the story of her life before Marion realised what was happening and dragged her away. But I did remember her name, Sheena Rafferty, and the fact she lived in Ealing somewhere. She was in the phone book, and I went to see her. I assumed she’d know where Marion had moved to, only she didn’t. Her husband, Keith, was there, and when I left he came after me and said he might be able to find out where Marion lived, if I made it worth his while. He asked for fifty quid in advance. I suppose he was testing me, to see how badly I wanted to know. Maybe he sensed I was desperate. So I paid him and he said he’d get in touch.’

‘When was this?’

‘About a month ago, the middle of March.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. He didn’t get back to me. I was going to contact him, but then I heard the terrible news about Marion and did nothing until Inspector Kolla told me last Monday that Marion had been living in Hampstead. I tried to find the address from the phone book but couldn’t, so I phoned Sheena Rafferty again. She wasn’t in, but her husband was. I told him that Marion had some papers of mine that I wanted back, and asked if her mother had access to the house.’

‘Couldn’t you have asked us that?’ Brock objected.

Da Silva bit his lip. ‘I did ask DI Kolla, but she wasn’t cooperative, and she pretty much gave me the impression that I was under suspicion, so I didn’t press the point. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, you see, and wanted time to search.’

‘Go on.’

‘Rafferty said he probably could now find out where the house was, and also get me a key, if I was prepared to pay.’

‘How much?’

‘A thousand pounds.’

‘Really? And you agreed?’

‘I tried to haggle, but he wouldn’t have it. I think he believed there was something going on between Marion and me that I wanted to cover up, an affair or something. In the end I agreed, and within a couple of hours he came back to me. We met at a pub; I paid him the money and he gave me an address and a key. That evening I went to the house and removed the things you found in my office.’

‘Will Rafferty confirm this?’

Da Silva looked squeamish. ‘Unlikely, I should think.’

Brock sat back in his chair, linking his fingers over his chest, and turned to Kathy. ‘What do you make of that, DI Kolla?’

‘Bullshit, sir,’ Kathy replied evenly. She reached forward and took the book out of its plastic bag, opened it to the title page and read:

‘
He sees the beauty

Sun hath not looked upon,

And tastes the fountain

Unutterably deep . . .

‘That’s your handwritten dedication to her, isn’t it, Tony? You saw the beauty, did you? You tasted at the fountain, unutterably deep?’

He reddened. ‘It’s from one of Rossetti’s poems.’

‘Called “Dream-Love”, yes.’

‘It was one of her favourites,’ he blustered. ‘We’d discussed it in a tutorial some time ago. I was being . . . ironic.’

A muffled snort came from Brock.

‘Doesn’t sound like irony to me,’ Kathy went on remorselessly.
‘It sounds like a frank expression of love. You were lovers, weren’t you?’

He bowed his head. ‘No. There was a time when I felt we might have been. She seemed to encourage me, when she needed my support to get her scholarship. Then, when it was confirmed, she changed her tune. My dedication in her book was . . . unwise. I could see that it might be misinterpreted. That’s why I took it from her room, before anyone could draw the wrong conclusions.’

A frown crossed his face and he seemed to rouse himself, as if a bubble of his old self-esteem had risen to the surface. He looked Kathy in the eye and said, ‘Haven’t you ever fallen foolishly for the wrong person, Inspector?’

‘Yes,’ Kathy replied. ‘But I didn’t have to kill them.’

After they had gone, Brock said to Kathy, ‘You didn’t mention the stuff left in the kitchen.’

‘No, forensics removed it on the day we found her house. I hoped he might let that slip. Only the killer knows about that.’

‘But there is a problem, isn’t there? If he murdered Marion and planted that arsenic in her kitchen on the third of April, why did he wait until nearly a week later—after you’d told him that Marion lived at Rosslyn Court—to remove the things from her study?’

The same thing had been bothering Kathy. ‘It would all depend on the timing,’ she said. ‘It was like Alex said, he couldn’t stage the scene in the kitchen until he was sure that she had taken the poison and that it had worked. Then he couldn’t be sure how much time he would have. He had to move fast, setting up the evidence and leaving straight away. It was only later, when he realised that he was being treated as a potential suspect, that he decided to remove any embarrassing material he could find in her house.’

‘Hm.’ Brock scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘So we have a number of fixes on the murderer’s movements: he visited Rosslyn
Court prior to the murder, maybe on the Monday, to lace Marion’s juice with arsenic; he was in St James’s Square at lunchtime on the Tuesday to witness her having her lunch and being taken away in an ambulance; and he was in Rosslyn Court again immediately afterwards to stage the scene in the kitchen. If da Silva’s your man, there must surely be a record of him and his little red sports car on a camera somewhere. Find that and we’re in business.’

But by the end of the day they had found nothing.

•

Another takeaway supper, another glass of wine, Kathy sitting brooding on her sofa, facing her own private murder wall. She was conscious of how different the two halves were. The left half, the photos of Marion’s pinboard, which initially had seemed rather chaotic and confusing, now appeared as a well-balanced composition, a tightly knit pattern built around the central figure of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, balanced on each side by the two women, Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris and brooded over by Madeleine Smith, while the other players in their drama orbited around. By contrast Kathy’s own diagram, on the right, seemed disorganised and unresolved, images floating around an empty centre, without clear connections. She had two victims, Marion and Tina, and she put her pasta aside and rearranged them on the wall so that, like Lizzie and Madeleine, they were balanced to left and right of the centre. But there was no centre. Instead she had three suspects, Keith Rafferty, Nigel Ogilvie and Tony da Silva, rotating around a void.

She returned to the sofa and ate some more, considering this. The three men were very different from one another, yet were tied together in various ways. They knew each other, and were connected by self-interest, circumstance and assault. Could they all
have been involved in the murders of the two women? Or were they merely satellites of some other missing figure in the centre?

The photo of Marion’s white flowers was pinned over to one side, and Kathy recalled Pip’s comment about their meaning,
I shall die tomorrow
, and their name, Montpellier cistus, from the south of France. And maybe Corsica. She remembered how defensive Sophie Warrender had been when asked if her husband had returned to London during their stay on the island.

She felt edgy now, unable to settle, going over her conversation with Sophie Warrender. She had mentioned London City Airport, and how easy it was for her husband to get into his office from there.

Kathy picked up her phone and got through to the duty officer’s desk at headquarters. In a little while she had a contact name and phone number for security at the Docklands airport, and placed the call. The man sounded bored, happy to have something to do, and she hung on while he got to work on his computer, checking private flights for the period around the weekend before Marion died.

‘No,’ he said at last. ‘There were only two private flights between here and Bastia around that time—Friday the thirtieth of March and Sunday the first of April. But no Douglas Warrender on the passenger list.’

Kathy sagged. ‘Oh well. Maybe he used another name?’

‘Doubt it. There was only one passenger each time. But it was a woman. Flew out Friday, returned Sunday. Name of Marion Summers.’

Kathy blinked. ‘Gotcha,’ she whispered, and took down the details of the charter company and flights. A feeling of excitement grew inside her. Poor old Sophie, she thought.

She got to her feet and plucked the picture of the white flowers from its place on the edge of the diagram and moved it to
the vacant spot in the middle. As she stepped back to consider, the sound of her buzzer jarred into her thoughts.

‘Kathy?’ Guy’s voice sounded tinny over the intercom. ‘Are you okay? I was passing and saw your light . . . Sorry, I should have phoned first. Just wanted to check everything’s all right.’

‘Come on up.’

She met him at the lift and they kissed cheeks.

‘Sure I’m not butting in?’

‘’Course not.’ Seeing him again, she felt a surge of pleasure. ‘I’m really glad you came.’

He grinned. ‘Any developments?’

‘Not really.’ She took his hand and led him into the flat. ‘Take off your coat. Wine?’

He saw the half-eaten plate of curry on the sofa and said, ‘Oh, you’re in the middle of eating.’

‘Want some? There’s plenty more.’

‘Um, well . . . smells good. I’m starving actually. I was going to suggest . . .’

She poured him a glass of wine and went to the microwave.

‘Bastia?’

She turned and saw him looking at her notes beside the phone.

‘You planning another trip? Sorry.’ He looked sheepish. ‘None of my business. But you sound happy.’

‘Not a trip, no,’ she said, bringing over his plate. ‘Bastia’s where the flowers came from.’ She nodded towards the wall and he turned, puzzled, to look.

‘Ah, they’re in the centre now. You think that’s the key? You have a new suspect?’

‘I think so. I don’t have his picture, but I know who he is. He’s been hard to find. I don’t know it all yet, but I think I may be getting somewhere at last.’

‘Didn’t you need my program to work it out?’

She laughed. ‘Sorry. I like having it up there on the wall where I can soak it in at odd moments, when I’m thinking of something else, so inspiration can catch me unawares.’

‘And it’s caught you now? That’s why you’re happy?’

‘It makes you feel good, when something slots into place, doesn’t it? And then you kick yourself because it was staring you in the face all along and it seems so obvious.’

‘So this guy doesn’t know you’re onto him?’

‘Not yet. I’ve got some more homework to do first, then he’ll find out.’

Guy raised his glass. ‘Well done. I’m really glad for you, Kathy.’ But he looked subdued.

‘You all right?’

‘I go tomorrow. They just told me this evening. That’s why I came round. I didn’t expect you to be here, but I came anyway.’

‘Ah. Did they say how long you’ll be away?’

‘A year, maybe two. I’ll have regular trips back home, of course.’ He sounded sad.

‘Well, we’d better make the most of it while you’re here, hadn’t we?’

T
he office was quiet the next day, Saturday. Kathy imagined Bren looking after his sick little girls, Brock visiting Suzanne down in Sussex, Pip recovering from a night out. She made herself a coffee, feeling simultaneously elated and bereft. She’d said goodbye to Guy at seven that morning, wanting to spend the day with him, but they both had things to do, and he’d said he didn’t want her to see him off at the airport.