More Deaths Than One (7 page)

“Would it have been possible for it to have been taken, without your knowing?”

Culver thought about it, drawing on his pipe. “Yes, I suppose it might. I don't lock my door during the day.”

“Rather unwise, sir, surely?”

“When my housekeeper's not here, I'm never far away. And anything of value I keep in the bank. If anybody wants to go to the trouble of stealing what I've got around here, they're welcome to it.”

Culver's attitude was one of dry ironic detachment, as if he were humouring them, which Mayo guessed might be natural to him, but Kite was becoming wooden, in the way he did with people who rubbed him up the wrong way, and Mayo felt he'd better take over. “That's an original point of view, Mr. Culver. You feel the same way about your guns?”

“The gun room is the one place that's always kept locked.”

“And the key?”

There was a short silence while Culver busied himself applying another match to his pipe, and the rich aroma of pipe tobacco was filling the room before he answered. “Ah, you can't fault me there. I keep my key with me, always.”

“Just remind me again, when did you last check your guns?”

“On Sunday afternoon, like I always do.”

“And not since then?”

The old man lifted his shoulders. “No need.”

“What were you doing on Monday evening, Mr. Culver?”

“What I usually do. Having my supper, watching a bit of television, reading till late. I don't go to bed early these days, if I do I find myself wide awake halfway through the night.”

“What time did you lock up?”

“When I went to bed – and before you ask me, I couldn't say exactly what time that was. But it's generally well after midnight when I go up.”

“So you would have heard anyone trying to break in?”

“
I
might not, if they were quiet about it. I don't hear as well as I used to, but Minty surely would. This dog sleeps with one eye open, don't you, girl?”

They all looked at the dog on the hearthrug, apparently intent on demonstrating this phenomenon. The one open eye was amber-coloured. It reminded Mayo of Georgina Fleming's tiger eyes. He stood up. “I'd like to see where you keep your guns, please.”

“You're welcome. The room's at the back.”

They followed the old man along a flagged passage which ran draughtily from front to back of the house, glimpsing gloomy rooms stuffed with ancestral furniture, presumably of Pauling inheritance, until they came to a door which Culver unlocked with a key from a small bunch taken from his trouser pocket. The room was to the right of the passage, near the back door, with a window which looked onto a small, high-walled kitchen garden, beyond which the tree-covered hill rose to the skyline.

It'd be a doddle, Kite thought, getting over that wall, and if the back door was open ... He never ceased to be amazed at folks' carelessness, and bent to examine the lock on the door. A Yale type which didn't, however, show any signs of being forced.

The room wasn't very big, probably once a pantry of some sort, flagged with the same large stones as the passage, carpeted with a worn square in the middle. On the wall opposite the windows – two small ones, neither big enough for anyone to get through – was a battered desk with a telephone, a portable typewriter and a stone jar holding pencils. To the right of the windows stood a large old-fashioned safe and on the left were the guns, tidily racked, with a shelf beneath holding cartridges and cleaning materials. Four guns, and a space where Culver said the twelve-bore should have been.

“It was there on Sunday, I know. I oiled and cleaned it with the rest and put it back.” No, he said, he wouldn't necessarily have noticed if any of the guns had been missing until the next time he came to clean them. “This is the one I normally use.” He indicated another twelve-bore which hung near the door. “I just unlock the door and reach out for it, or stick it back, without giving more than a glance. So used to doing it, I could put my hand on it in the dark.”

“What do you keep in the safe, Mr. Culver?”

“Personal papers, a bit of loose cash.”

“Would you mind checking to see if anything's missing?”

Culver raised his eyebrows but made no objection. The safe, though very large, contained nothing more than a tin cash-box and a bundle of papers which he quickly looked through and said were all present.

“And the cash-box?”

Culver unlocked it. The bit of loose cash would have amounted to a couple of thousand, possibly more, Mayo thought. “Habit of a lifetime,” Culver remarked. “Can't get used to being without a bit on hand. It's all right, it's all here.”

He closed and locked the box, and then the safe.

Once a scrap metal dealer, always a scrap metal dealer, Mayo thought. A roll of notes in your pocket that changed hands, no questions asked. He made a mental note that almost certainly Culver, though nominally retired, wouldn't be averse to doing a deal or two on the side now and then.

“When did you last see your daughter, Mr. Culver?” he asked, as Culver was closing the door of the little room.

The other turned to him with a smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “Yesterday afternoon, as a matter of fact,” he said dryly.

“Is that so? I was given to understand there was some friction between you and Mrs. Fleming as well as with her husband?”

“
Was
, yes. Happily, that's now a thing of the past. I was seventy years old yesterday, Mr. Mayo, and Georgina came to wish me a happy birthday. We both thought it time all that was put behind us.”

“Because the source of the friction had been removed?”

“Ah, but we didn't know that then, did we?”

“Didn't you, Mr. Culver? I hope that's true, for both your sakes.”

Culver smiled. He said, as he opened the front door, “I'm not going to say I'm sorry he's dead, because I'm not. But you're barking up the wrong tree, if you think I'd put my own life at risk because of him.”

He stood watching the policemen's car disappear down the drive. It was true that he felt not the slightest pang at the death of Rupert Fleming. Georgina was free at last, after seven years, free of Rupert Fleming, and it didn't much matter to him how this had come about.

His daughter had been born unexpectedly after several years of marriage, when he and Evelyn had long since ceased to expect children. He had felt momentarily let down when he was told that the child was not a son, one he could have moulded to his own pattern, but the disappointment had lasted only until he held her in his arms and looked into the tiny unformed mirror-image of his own face.

Evelyn's life had been sacrificed to give him the child. He deeply regretted that, though they had never been passionately in love; each had initially seen the other as a convenience, but their marriage had been amicable and when she died he had felt a sense of loss and sadness that had surprised him. They had married for practical reasons, because he had been able to provide her with the money she needed for the luxuries she thought essential to her, while she had given him, through her father, the entrée he wanted into a world where business contacts could be made through knowing the right people. They had come from different points on the social scale, though her position owed itself to her father's ability rather than his birth. He too had been a man who had made his own success, working his way diligently from counter clerk to manager of the local bank, becoming prominent in local politics and finally, for a short time before he died, at Westminster. He had always respected money and this, Culver suspected, was why there had never been any opposition to the marriage of his daughter with a man who was still, basically, a scrap metal dealer – though already, when he met Evelyn, he had been into his first half million, and the rest hadn't been long in following.

And yet, it had never been money itself that had motivated him, rather the simple need to achieve success at whatever he attempted.

If there had ever been any other passion in John Culver's life, it had been for Georgina. On her he had lavished all the love of which he was capable, though rarely showing it. Motherless, she had turned to him and they had been constant companions throughout her childhood and early adolescence. When, shortly after her return from college, she announced she was going to marry Rupert Fleming, he had been at first incredulous, then furious.

Fleming had been everything John Culver was opposed to. He had had a privileged education and thrown it away. He had had several attempts at a career and been successful at none of them. He was that unforgivable thing in John Culver's book, a dilettante, though this was not the term Culver used. His judgement was couched in much earthier terms. But Georgina, who had inherited a will as implacably averse to opposition as his own, refused to give up Fleming. Her father had spent several fruitless months while his anger mounted, trying to make her see sense, then washed his hands of the pair of them. If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out, had always been a maxim he'd lived by.

He was dimly aware that he'd done more damage to himself than to either Georgina or Fleming by this act, but he was not a man to go back on his decisions, once made. From a distance he watched her progress in the world of business with pride, grimly sticking out the loneliness, and sometimes despair, knowing that as her father's daughter she wasn't a complete fool, convinced that one day she must see the man she'd married in his true colours and come back to him.

It had taken Rupert Fleming's death for that to happen. John Culver would not have thought that too high a price for the return of his daughter.

“Think what a torment 'tis to marry one

Whose heart is leap'd into another's bosom. ”

THE POST-MORTEM RESULTS, when they came in, were straightforward enough, but for one thing.

In the report Rupert Fleming was described as a well-nourished white male, about thirty-five years of age. There were no congenital deformities, tattoo marks, old scars, or other marks of violence on the body, other than those to the head. Internal examination showed that he was in good health, that he had not eaten for some hours before he died. Death was due to cerebral lacerations caused by being shot in the head with a twelve-bore shotgun and, in the opinion of the pathologist, the wound could not have been self-inflicted. He had been dead for approximately eighteen hours when found.

The ballistics report wasn't yet available, giving an estimation of the exact distance and angles of the exit and entry wounds, nor the forensic report on the car which would amongst other things reveal the extent of any damage to it, but Timpson-Ludgate's opinion was good enough for Mayo to be going on with.

The one thing which was unexpected about the report was the presence in the body of traces of barbiturates and a considerable quantity of alcohol.

“The alcohol's understandable enough,” Mayo said, “but barbiturates as well? Somebody must have slipped one to him. But I ask myself why. Why should anyone take the trouble, Martin?”

“You mean the killer needn't have bothered with the shotgun, when enough of the pills and the booze would have done the trick? It would've looked like suicide just the same ... more so.”

“The trick being, of course, to know when enough's enough. And that's it – whoever killed Fleming would have to make sure he was good and dead. Wouldn't do for him to be found before he was dead, and carted off to hospital to have his stomach pumped. As it was, the drugs would have knocked him out sufficiently for him to be moved into the driving seat before he was finished off.”

“Barbiturates,” Kite said. “Sleeping pills. Georgina Fleming takes sleeping pills.”

“So she does.”

“And it was her father's gun.”

“And they cooked this up between them?”

“They could have,” Kite said.

“Hm.” Mayo rubbed the side of his nose with his forefinger, and thought. “That gun. I think it'd be as well to have a word with Culver's housekeeper and find out –” The telephone went. “Hold on a minute.”

“Someone on the line for you, sir. She won't give her name and won't speak to anyone but you. Says she has some info on the Fleming case.”

The young constable on the switchboard had been wary of passing the message direct to Mayo, rather than some lesser being, but fearful of his wrath if he didn't do so and the woman rang off, as she'd threatened. He was new and very green, but he thought she sounded nervous enough to do so. On the other hand, there'd already been the usual crop of those sure they had important information, all needing to be dealt with in case their stories happened to be true or relevant – some genuinely believing they could help, but a lot of them time-wasters, and not a few nutters. He wouldn't be thanked for wasting the D.C.I.'s time with any of those. He was relieved when Mayo told him to put her through.

“You don't know me, but my name's Bryony Harper.” The soft voice came over with the hint of a West Country burr, sounding young and uncertain. “It's about ... Rupert Fleming, that appeal you put out for anyone who's seen him recently ...” The voice stopped, faltered.

“Take your time, Miss Harper. Presumably you have some information about where he was on Monday?”

“He was at home, here, with me and the children.”

“With you?”

“Well, where else would he be? He lives here, doesn't he?”

This was the woman in the photograph. Now that the connection was made, the voice and the face seemed to fit together, like the foot in Cinderella's slipper. “Miss – Mrs. – Harper, I don't want to deal with this over the telephone. I'd like to see you.”

“Yes, I expected you would, but I'm afraid you'll have to come here, I can't leave my children.”