More Deaths Than One (20 page)

“Oh well, it was just a thought. Silly, really.”

“No, it's not, love. I'm glad you mentioned it, but I doubt if it's going to make any difference at this stage.”

“I could not get the ring without the finger.”

MAYO LEARNED NEXT MORNING, with that slight sense of victimisation and injury of the unfairly afflicted, that although both Lois and Alex had eaten the shell fish, neither had been affected. Only one, though, he thought sourly, it needed only one. The one he'd eaten.

He still felt as though he might, with very great probability, die, but a day at home at this stage in the investigation, as Alex suggested, wasn't on, not even to be contemplated. Nothing would have kept him away from his office now, anyway. He went in as soon as he decently could and told Kite briefly of the new developments, arranging to discuss them more fully with him later, ignoring the sergeant's quizzical glance at his whey face. There were still things he wanted to get clear in his mind which he felt better able to deal with alone than with Kite hovering sympathetically at his shoulder.

Out of interest, before he left Mayo alone in his office, Kite told him about his conversation with Sheila the previous evening. “If we'd known there'd been any connection between Salisbury and Georgina Fleming in the first place, it might've saved a lot of bother checking it out, but it's academic now, seeing it's Cockayne we're after.”

Mayo doodled thoughtfully on his scratch pad. “I don't know, I think I'd still like to have a word with him. He
was
once attached to Georgina, and maybe we shouldn't ignore that. We haven't got hands on our murderer yet.” He stared down at the papers on his desk in so preoccupied and concentrated a manner that Kite was obliged to clear his throat to remind his superior that he was still in the room. “All right, yes, let's have a talk to friend Salisbury – but we'll do it here. I don't fancy trying to get anything sensible out of him while he's got one eye hovering over that wife of his.”

He spent the next hour apparently doing nothing, and then sent for his sergeant again, who came in bearing a stack of new reports and said that he'd put out a trace for the items Fleming had stolen, though without much hope of results. They might, or might not, turn up sometime later, but where was anybody's guess. If Cockayne now had them, as seemed likely, he wouldn't have tried to get rid of them until he was well clear of Lavenstock, if he'd any sense, and by now he'd be miles away, his car probably abandoned ...

Kite broke off and gave Mayo an anxious look. “Excuse my saying so, but wouldn't you be better at home and in bed?”

Mayo saw that Alex had told Kite what had happened, who as a recently recovered invalid himself, and having had the benefit of a good night's sleep, probably felt entitled to be concerned, but Mayo wasn't having any. “No thank you, Martin, I would not be better at home and in bed.”

“We can manage for the rest of the day, surely. You look terrible.”

“I'm all right, dammit!” Mayo rubbed a hand over his face, then smiled faintly. “As a matter of fact, though I may still look like death warmed up, I'm on top of the world.”

“You reckon?” Kite replied sceptically.

“Halfway up Everest, anyway. Look, get hold of Dexter and ask him what the hell he's doing with that fingerprint report –”

“Funny you should ask, he's on his way over with it, he wants to see you.”

“Does he? About time, too. Send him up as soon as he arrives. And come in yourself, I think you might find it interesting. Meanwhile, I do believe some hot tea and a bit of toast wouldn't come amiss.”

Dexter was a thin man with sparse sandy hair and a misleading air of anxious uncertainty that concealed extreme efficiency and positiveness.

“You've got the report for me? Good, sit down then, Dave.” Dexter placed his little bombshell on Mayo's desk, sat down and waited.

Mayo scanned the report quickly; then he read it again, more slowly. He leaned back and stared at the wall opposite. Then he smiled at Dexter and handed over the report to his sergeant, watched while Kite read. “Well?”

“Hell's bells,” said Kite.

“You're sure about this, Dave?” Mayo asked, but only for form's sake.

“Yes,” said Dexter.

Dexter was an expert. He could read fingerprints like other people read faces. They believed him without question, without need of the proof positive before them in the shape of the official report complete with diagrams, photographs and the rest, when he said the prints in Cockayne's office and in his home, all over his personal belongings – his papers, his toothbrush and razor – were identical with the fingerprints of the dead man in the car.

“Well,” Mayo said.

All feelings of still being vaguely unwell had gone. Some colour had reappeared in his cheeks and excitement lit his eyes, making them silver-grey, like mercury. His thoughts were clocking round at a furious rate. It was not too much to say that he suddenly felt born-again, or at the very least as if he'd spent a week at a health farm. What Dexter said confirmed the conclusions he'd groped towards during the small hours. At last he knew the cause of his own unease with the case. The photograph had appeared to be the wrong way round because he'd been looking at it back to front. The shot victim was Ashleigh Cockayne, not Rupert Fleming. And it might justifiably be assumed, therefore, that it was Fleming who was the murderer, not only of Cockayne, but of Mitch too.

“I need a boot up the backside for not thinking of it before,” he admitted to Kite, when Dexter had gone. “There was something that wasn't quite right, something offbeam about this whole set-up, even from the beginning. I've been a blithering idiot not to have seen it before, because I think I had some sort of inkling right from when I picked up that jacket at the scene of the crime.”

“What had that to do with it?” Kite asked.

“I ought to have spotted earlier that it didn't belong to the dead man. Whoever he was, he must've been a heavy smoker – his fingers were deeply nicotine-stained, Timpson-Ludgate remarked on it – but the jacket didn't smell of cigarette smoke. It would've reeked if it had belonged to that body. And remember what Bryony Harper said about Fleming being so health-conscious? Is it likely he'd have smoked and run the risk of lung cancer? And I think we shall find that the forensic report will give us a bit more,” he went on. “Whoever wore the jacket had been sweating profusely. Not Cockayne's sweat, I'll bet. Nor his hairs on the collar, or his skin flakes on the fabric.”

“Fleming,” Kite said. “Good grief, yes, it has to be. He of all people would've known how to get hold of Culver's gun ... and it explains the pills and the booze. They may've been Georgina's pills, ten to one they were, but it wasn't
Fleming
who drank the whisky.”

“Right. He was the one who made the suggestion that Cockayne should take young Trish out to look for a taxi to take her home. He'd also suggested a drink to Cockayne – who, one gathers, wouldn't need much persuading – and he'd know where Cockayne kept his whisky. Easy enough then to pour two glasses, while Cockayne was down below, doping one of them, then when Cockayne began to feel drowsy, to suggest driving him home. And instead drive him to Scotley Beeches. Despite what Underwood thought he saw, I'm satisfied Fleming wasn't drunk, only staggering from holding Cockayne up, already woozy. By the time they reached the forest Cockayne would be out for the count. So all Fleming had to do was drag him out of the passenger seat and into the front one, leave his own jacket on the other seat, substitute his own wristwatch and his wallet for Cockayne's, and then shoot him with the gun he'd pinched from Culver, turning Cockayne's head first towards the window. He was shot directly in the face to make sure his features were obliterated to the point where he was virtually unrecognisable. Not possible for anyone to have done this from outside the car if he was sitting facing forward. And of course, the suicide note on the dash would've been left by Fleming himself. As far as getting away went, there'd be his car – Cockayne's car, that is, which he'd driven there earlier in the day, left somewhere accessible, ready for getting away.”

“Cockayne wasn't likely to have missed it,” Kite agreed; “he wasn't using it because of it failing its M.O.T.” He stood up and walked to the window, turned his back on the Town Hall and sat on the sill.

“So we got the wrong corpse. We assume Fleming killed Cockayne. The only thing we don't know is which of them murdered Mitch.”

“I think we'll have to assume that was Fleming too, though almost certainly it would've needed two of them to get him into the river. As I see it, that's why Cockayne kept quiet for a bit. Then he began to get windy and either threatened to confess or tried a bit of blackmail on Fleming. Either way, it became necessary for Fleming to get rid of him. So he got this idea of killing Cockayne, changing places with him and letting everyone believe him dead ... and, you know, it wasn't impossible he might have got away with it, with both murders.”

If questions about Mitch's death had led to the Gaiety, a possibility he couldn't afford to overlook, with himself, Fleming, supposedly dead and Cockayne supposedly having disappeared, suspicion of both murders would have rested on the absent Cockayne – as indeed it had. Faking his own death had therefore been necessary to allow him to disappear.

It had clearly not been a spur-of-the-moment killing. Risks had been taken to obtain the gun from Culver's house, and he'd been prepared with sleeping pills very likely taken from Georgina's supply. Fleming had even been prepared to sacrifice his car in the interests of verisimilitude – though that had been registered in Georgina's name and would in due course be returned to her. Which bore thinking about.

He had obviously intended to get right away and make a fresh start under another name. This would pose few problems to a man like Fleming, who was used to living a double life, on the edge of deception. Curious, then, about the money, his last-minute desperation for cash. Wouldn't he have taken care to have had ready the wherewithal necessary for his getaway, at least before he'd committed the murder? Because this time, in his new life, he wouldn't have had any handouts from Georgina to sweeten the pill. Unless Cockayne's threats had become so insistent that his immediate despatch became necessary, and unless ...

It was impossible now to believe Georgina Fleming wasn't involved.

“She swears the last time she saw Fleming was on Sunday. I think she was lying. So what the hell,” Mayo said grimly, “did she think she was playing at, leading us up the garden path, identifying the body as Fleming's?”

Lili Anand had always believed Ashleigh Cockayne was dead, so she took the news that they had found him stoically, her sorrow tempered by the fact that her predictions had been proved substantially correct, if somewhat confused regarding their application.

“Would you have said they were alike, Lili? Fleming and Ashleigh Cockayne?” Mayo asked.

“No!” Her answer was vehement. Then, “Well, maybe they were physically alike, in a way. From behind, yes, you might just have mistaken them. They both had dark brown hair, they were similar in build. Slim and loose-limbed, you know. But Fleming was taller than Ashleigh, and they weren't in the least bit alike to look at.” She paused. “So it was Fleming who killed Ashleigh? And that poor policeman too?” She nodded to herself, not needing an answer. “It's possible to believe. So where is he? If he isn't dead, where is Rupert Fleming?”

“ 'Twill hardly buy a capcase for one's conscience.”

A TELEPHONE CALL to Georgina Fleming's company the previous day had established that she was away on business for the day in Nottingham, would be staying overnight and travelling straight back to the office the following morning. Accordingly arrangements had been made to take up the first appointment of the following day at the office, where, the next morning, they made their way.

Centre Court was what the agents, when trying to lease it, had called a “prestigious office and shop development.” Just off the new shopping precinct at the top of the town, it was a two-storey brick-built complex that tried hard not to offend by too-obvious functionalism, the buildings being of varying height and styles, some with bow windows and gables and steeply pitched roofs, all centred around a cobbled, glassed-in courtyard with a fountain surrounded by a planting of shrubs, entered through a pedestrian archway. Georgina Fleming's offices were on the ground floor of one of the blocks, next to a small café with a swinging sign.

Mayo paused to study the discreet nameplate by the door as they went through. “Culver Dixon Associates.”

“
Culver
. Interesting, hm?”

“A lot of women nowadays prefer to keep their maiden name.”

“Even when they've disassociated themselves with their father?” Inside, the offices were carpeted throughout in caramel wall-to-wall, and decorated in toning shades of honey and cream. Heavy blue silk and champagne net hung at the windows, and there were plenty of pictures about, with lush displays of flourishing plants in the corners. Very stylish. Very expensive. A well-heeled look which made sense for a business consultancy, when you realized that the message was: ‘This could happen to you too.'

Although they had arrived on the dot for their appointment, she kept them waiting on the blond leather seating in the reception area for a nicely calculated seven minutes. During that time, various women in various modes of dress from mini-skirts to trousers, passed through. A large lady arriving like a bat via the front entrance, wrapped in a flapping cloak, hair all over the place, hung about with Tesco carrier bags and clutching a briefcase under her arm gave them a quick appraisal and a professional smile
en passant,
as she made straight for the reception desk.