The Chalon Heads (33 page)

Brock sighed. ‘Yes. It was seeing what they’d done to Eva that really decided me, although I’d been uneasy from the beginning. You have to understand how it was the first time, with Sammy and Keller and the others. You know about Superintendent Tom Harley, do you? How he died?’

‘Yes.’

Brock gazed out over the meadow, as if he might catch sight of the ghosts of ancient armies. ‘That was one of the worst things I’ve had to work through. I’m not saying that Sammy deliberately framed him, but Sammy is a fighter— when it comes to the crunch, he’ll use whatever he’s got to hand, and Tom Harley’s suicide certainly got him off the hook. Seeing Sammy again last week, grinning hopefully at me as if we were old pals setting out on a great new adventure, brought it all back. I wanted none of it.’

He sighed again and returned his attention to Kathy. ‘And, as things developed, I liked it less and less. I could see things turning out badly, and I wanted you out of it. What they did to Eva, the business with the Canada Cover . . . These people are playing very rough. So I thought I would move you somewhere safer. When I became aware of Jock McLarren’s interest, I thought that he might do very well. You would be removed, but still could keep a useful eye on the fringe. I didn’t realise how quickly things would develop.’

‘But couldn’t you have explained all that?’ Kathy protested. ‘Couldn’t you have taken me into your confidence a little?’

Brock shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Would that have been better? If I’d said, “Kathy, things are getting a bit rough around here, I think I’m about to be accused of theft, women are getting their heads cut off, and I want you to clear off somewhere a bit safer, out of the firing line,” you would have said, “Yes, fine, whatever you say, Brock.” Would you?’

Kathy chewed her lip but didn’t reply.

‘Now, with Bren it wouldn’t have been a problem,’ Brock continued. ‘Tell Bren to bugger off to Barbados, and he packs his bag without a murmur. But you? Did you get him to help you find me, by the way?’

Kathy shook her head. ‘I tried. He told me to leave you alone, like Dot.’

‘Exactly! Everybody tells you to leave me alone, so what do you do? You track me down into the depths of darkest Sussex.’ He snorted and added, ‘Like Lassie.’

‘
Lassie?
’ Kathy flared.

‘All right,’ Brock relented. ‘Not Lassie.’ He smirked, and they both began to laugh.

When this passed, Kathy became serious again and said, ‘Why does McLarren hate you, Brock? He seems to relish every chance to put you down.’

‘I really don’t know. I’ve never done anything to him, as far as I know. There’s poison in this. The whole thing is poisoned.’

‘Poor Eva,’ Kathy whispered.

‘Yes. Poor Eva. This is not a game.’

‘That’s what Peter White said last night.’

‘Have you been talking to him again?’

‘He rang me. He’s desperate to help. Wanted to know what he could do.’

Brock groaned. ‘Sorry. I should never have told you to see him. It was part guilt, because I’ve never kept in touch, but I shouldn’t have put it on to you. He was always a pain when you wanted a short answer—always wanting to give you more and more. Sometimes it was worthwhile, I suppose.’

‘I think now he’s just very sad and lonely. He needs something to think about, to be involved in.’

‘And the last thing you need is to be his social worker.’

Kathy shrugged. ‘I’d better let you get back to your, er, friends,’ she said.

‘Yes. My, er, friends have probably had enough history by now,’ Brock said drily. ‘If they haven’t been bumped off by a lone sniper.’

‘If it’s any consolation, Sammy’s a very bad shot, apparently.’

When she got back to her car, Kathy put a call through to the local police at Farnham, then headed north. When she reached the M25 she turned west, towards Surrey.

Sylvester’s area was surprisingly large and dispersed, and it took Kathy the best part of an hour, driving slowly round the suburban streets and rural lanes around Farnham, before she finally spotted the electric milk float parked at the kerb. A big, ruddy-faced man was engrossed in his account book, trying to reconcile the figures with the fact that he’d run out of gold-topped dairy full cream before he rightfully should.

‘Sylvester, is it?’

‘Hello there,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Who wants him?’

Kathy showed him her ID.

‘Ah, thought I’d hear from you lot again,’ he said, putting down his book.

‘What can you tell me?’

‘Well, now, it was that report on the radio, the police asking for information from anyone who had seen Mrs Starling any time after Thursday morning, the third of July, when she had gone up to London.’

Kathy nodded. After Ronnie Wilkes, Sylvester made a gratifyingly confident and precise witness.

‘But I didn’t see how that could be, on account of the strawberry yoghurt.’

‘The strawberry yoghurt?’

‘That’s right. Mrs Starling has a passion for it. Always has it for breakfast. And the point was, they didn’t stop it till the following Tuesday, see? So she must have been there till then.’

‘I see. Maybe they just forgot to cancel it.’

‘Oh, no. They put out a fresh order each morning, see? Marianna does it. She writes it on an old envelope or the like, and sticks it in the neck of one of the empties. Her English isn’t so hot, so she uses a code—M for milk, Y for yoghurt, DC for double cream, and so on. Last Monday week, for example . . .’ He opened his book again and turned the pages back to 7 July, checking his record, ‘. . . here we are. It would have been, “2M, 1Y”.’

‘You know them, then? Mrs Starling and Marianna?’

‘Oh, yes, and Mr S. We often say hello.’

‘But all the same, maybe one of the others wanted some strawberry yoghurt.’

‘No, no, no!’ Sylvester dismissed the idea. ‘People have their little ways. Marianna and Mr S hate strawberry yoghurt, think it’s muck. We’ve had conversations about it. About Mrs S’s tastes in dairy products.’

‘Is that a fact? Did you speak to any of them around that time—on the Monday or Tuesday, for example?’

‘I’ve been trying to recall that, but I can’t say I did.’

Kathy thought. ‘The order on the Monday morning included yoghurt, but I suppose she could have left on the Sunday evening, after Marianna had put out the order, and they forgot to change it.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose that’s possible. But I don’t see how it could have been before that.’

‘Thanks very much, Sylvester. You’ve been very helpful.’ Kathy stood still for a moment, a wood pigeon cooing in the branches of a great oak, bees droning from a cascade of golden honeysuckle, sunlight dappling on a dusty lane. ‘Don’t want to swap jobs, do you?’

Sylvester chuckled. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you saw the paperwork, my dear, really you wouldn’t.’ Then he added, ‘That Marianna. I reckon I saw her once with a black eye.’

‘Really?’

‘Might be nothing, mind you.’

It wasn’t far to Poachers’ Ease. Kathy stopped on the grass verge opposite the Fitzpatricks’ cottage and walked across to the gate. The click and squeak brought the usual response from the Labradors, who escorted her enthusiastically up the path, although Kathy had difficulty looking Henrietta in the eye. Toby Fitzpatrick opened the front door. The sense of unease that she had noticed earlier seemed to have intensified. He looked grey, his smile tight and shallow, his voice tentative. If it is a marital thing, Kathy thought, it’s more than a one-off row. And she thought of Peter White’s information, and the look on Fitzpatrick’s face when he had seen her by the pool. Did he spy on Eva in her pool, she wondered. Did he have a thing about her?

‘Helen’s out at the moment,’ he said, peering round the half-open door at her. ‘She’ll be back in an hour.’

‘I’d like to speak to you, Mr Fitzpatrick.’

‘Oh.’ He frowned, then reluctantly opened the door. ‘Come in, then.’

He didn’t invite her to sit down, and they stood awkwardly in the space just inside the house.

‘I wanted to check one little detail in what you and your wife told us, Mr Fitzpatrick. About when Eva left to go up to London, remember? You told us that she went on the Thursday, which would be the third. Are you absolutely sure about that?’

‘Oh.’ Fitzpatrick swallowed. ‘Yes, I think so.’

‘How did you know? Did you see her leave?’

‘Er, probably not, no. I suppose . . . I suppose Sammy told us.’ He rubbed a hand across his face.

‘Are you feeling all right? You don’t look very well.’

‘I’m all right. Was that all?’

‘When would Sammy have told you this, about Eva leaving on Thursday?’

‘Oh, God, I don’t know, I—Oh, yes!’ he said. ‘He told Helen on the Sunday, when she and the other two went to play tennis. Didn’t she tell you that?’

Kathy nodded. ‘What about the Sunday evening? Where were you then?’

‘What?’ Fitzpatrick passed his hand over his face again, and Kathy thought he looked as if he were on the point of collapse.

‘Please, sit down,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m sorry . . . I don’t feel well. Maybe you should go.’

‘Shall I get a doctor?’

‘No, I just need to lie down.’

‘I’ll get you a glass of water.’

Kathy hurried through to the kitchen and found a glass, which she ran under the tap. The two glass vases she had noticed the first time she had come here were standing on the draining board beside the sink, one of them filled with flowers from the cottage garden, the other empty and turned upside down after being rinsed. It still had a small adhesive label on the base,
Made in Finland.

When she returned to the front room with the glass of water, Toby Fitzpatrick seemed both more collected and more wan. He smiled faintly at her from the depths of the armchair and said, in a feeble voice, ‘I’m so sorry. I have a slight heart condition . . . nothing serious, but I sometimes have a bit of a turn. I just need to stay calm for a while, then everything’s all right.’

‘Do you have medication I could fetch?’

‘No, no. No need for that. Look, I really think it would be best if you come back when my wife is here—maybe tomorrow . . . if you still need to, that is.’

‘OK, if you’re sure you don’t need help.’

She departed, thinking that there wasn’t much to choose between the acting abilities of Toby Fitzpatrick and Ronnie Wilkes.

She left her car where it was, and began walking along the lane, trying to think. McLarren would want her back in London, she knew, following up leads on forged stamps. She could imagine him now, in his office in Cobalt Square, asking where the hell she was, and what the hell she thought she was doing, wandering through the bird-twittering woods on a beautiful sunny morning when there was real work to be done. Thinking of this, she was glad she had left her mobile in the car.

She came to the gates of the Crow’s Nest, and it occurred to her that she still had the key to the house, and knew the code to deactivate the burglar alarm. There seemed no point in going in, when every inch had been covered twice by SOCO teams and forensic staff. But if Starling had lied about when Eva had left, there must have been a reason, and that reason must surely have occurred here.

Maybe. She thought of McLarren again, and walked to the front door feeling like a schoolkid playing truant.

Inside, the stillness of the house enveloped her once more. It was like the stillness of an extremely self-contained witness, which would only yield to an indirect form of interrogation.

She made her way to Starling’s den. There was the green-baize-topped table where he had sat that night and wept over his stamps, just as Eva’s father had wept over the copies Starling had given him. Did normal people do that? Did both men suffer from some kind of personality disorder, some obscure branch of kleptomania, perhaps, that they recognised in each other, and Eva recognised in both of them?

And there was Starling’s wine rack against the end wall, an impressive collection of dozens of bottles, although he drank little according to Helen Cooper. Presumably another form of collecting for investment, for some of the bottles certainly looked old and dusty.

But why would they be dusty, Kathy wondered, in a room that was regularly cleaned? Come to that, why would they be kept on wooden racks in the den, when the house had a purpose-built wine cellar?

She went through to the kitchen, to the door that led to the cellar steps, and another question immediately faced her. The door had a lock, a Yale, the same kind as on the front door, and recently fitted by the look of it. Such locks had a knob on one side and a keyhole on the other, and were intended to prevent people on the keyhole side from coming through the door unless they had a key. Why would you put such a lock on a cellar door, with the knob on the kitchen side? To keep someone in the cellar, was the only answer that came to mind. It was so obvious that, once you’d spotted it, the lock might as well have had a flashing red light attached. And yet no one had noticed it during their searches.

Kathy turned the knob and went inside. She found the light switch and went down the cellar steps, breathing in the air, cool and fusty like a crypt. By the light of the naked electric bulb she went through the first cellar room, beneath the kitchen, to the second under the hall, where the old wine racks were formed beneath stone benches. When she examined them closely she found that a few of the apertures were thick with dust, while others, presumably recently occupied by bottles, had almost none. Not long ago someone had moved all the bottles to the new timber racks upstairs in the den. The SOCO team, looking for drugs, bloodstains, fibres, scratches or signs of violence, had paid no attention to the levels of dust inside the old wine racks. Why would they?

As a prison, the cellar was soundproof and secure. It was also spacious, clean and dry. Apart from the shelves of the wine racks, there was little dust, and the stone-flag floor was spotless. Frustratingly so. A Yale lock and some unused wine racks didn’t necessarily amount to anything at all.

Kathy was searching for something more substantial when the floorboards above her head gave a creak. She froze. Another creak. A silence, and then another. Someone was walking across the hall, slowly.