The Company She Kept (11 page)

After buckling on his seat-belt and settling down while Abigail negotiated the entrance into Milford Street, he quickly read through the notes for her benefit. ‘So, there's plenty known about Mrs Wilbraham until 1979 – and you'll note that was fourteen years ago,' he remarked. ‘But since then – zilch.'

‘So it looks fairly conclusive that she was the old woman who was killed? At any rate, she's certainly disappeared into thin air. And she
did
work on the ruins at Carthage, wrote books about it, too, which ties in with all those peculiar references to the cremation urns and so on. But –'

‘But what? Doubts, Abigail?'

‘Well, anyone who writes a letter like that must be more than a bit disturbed, wouldn't you say? And Mrs Dalton did say she was a bit of a romancer.'

‘So we'd better take it all with a pinch of salt? I'd go along with that – up to a point. But what if Angie wasn't just another nutcase? She was also smart, if a bit hysterical, so maybe she was simply telling the truth in her own garbled way. If we extract the nub of it from all the flimflam, what it says is that Kitty Wilbraham was killed by some man in a fit of temper, and that Angie was very likely a witness to it.'

‘And Dido? Dido-Elissa? Was that part of the flimflam as well?'

‘Not altogether, but I don't think we should let it smokescreen the main facts. And with either a bit of luck or a lot of persuasion, Sophie Lawrence is going to be able to tell us what they were.'

He has his own ideas, Abigail said to herself, he's sussed that one out. And he's not telling me, either because he feels I ought to be able to work it out for myself or else he's going to bring it out later, like a rabbit from a hat, the great Sherlock. The latter attitude was a ploy she'd come across before but she didn't yet know whether that sort of thing was Mayo's form.

‘A more immediate question,' the DCI went on, unaware of these interesting speculations on his character, ‘is how did Angie Robinson come to be involved with Kitty Wilbraham in the first place?'

‘Sophie should be able to tell us that, too. We've struck lucky, it seems, finding her at home – finding her in England at all, in fact.'

At the moment Mayo felt he wouldn't be averse to a bit of luck. Fast approaching was his own private three-day limit, the deadline that always seemed to divide the easily sewn-up case from the one likely to drag on for months, the sort that clung on to your back like an old man of the sea. Easy, easy, he told himself. Yet impatience seethed in him to get things going, not to allow them to stagnate to the point where disinterest on the part of all concerned might set in. As if to underline his frustration, he became aware of the car slowing down. ‘What's all this?' he demanded, their progress becoming further halted when the line of cars ahead slowed to a crawl and finally stopped altogether.

‘Seems to be an obstruction ahead,' Abigail said, rolling down the window and craning her neck out.

They came marching down the middle of the road in their crisp uniforms, starched caps and aprons, red capes, sensible black lace-ups doing nothing even for those with the best of legs. Latter-day Nightingales, though not too many of them, since half their number at least would be on duty at the Women's Hospital. Followed by present-day feminists, banner-carrying supporters, committed free-thinkers, anti-government protesters. High school sixth-formers, rattling tins, handing out leaflets. Mothers with toddlers and babies in prams. Nearly a hundred women in all, stopping the traffic and chanting their theme like some Greek chorus, gaped at and occasionally cheered on by the shopping crowds.

Heading the procession was Madeleine Freeman. Tall and with her head lifted, purposeful in her stride – so, Mayo thought, must Joan of Arc have looked, or Mrs Pankhurst. He watched with admiration, for a moment finding it in his heart to envy the man she was going to marry. The feeling was transitory. He very well knew that such single-mindedness in a partner would frighten the life out of him, a view already expressed about the doctor by more than one man working on the case. Hardly comfortable to live with – not exactly a warm armful on a winter's night was the general opinion.

‘Good Lord,' Mayo said, a moment later. ‘There's Sheila Kite.'

Sheila saw him peering out of the window and gave him a cheerful wave. He wondered if Kite knew where she was, or if his wife had taken advantage of his absence to play hookey from her job and join in the protest. On second thoughts he dismissed the latter possibility. Sheila Kite had a complete absence of guile and possessed in addition the enviable trait of being able to do and think independently, without stirring up marital discord, despite the fact that she and Kite didn't always think alike. If all these women were like Sheila and Dr Freeman, he thought wryly, the authorities might just as well throw in the towel.

The line of cars began to move again as the procession turned in at the gates of the old Hill Street Methodist chapel, a dismal building long since dissociated from its original function, now rented out for anything from flea-markets to carpet sales or the occasional rock concert, and now the hospital campaign headquarters.

‘Have we finished checking with these women working on this lark?' Mayo asked. ‘They'd all have known Angie Robinson.'

‘So far none of them have reported seeing her on Tuesday. They rent the chapel only for three nights a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so nobody was there that night.'

He would have expected them to be working flat out, now that the closure of the Women's Hospital was imminent. Fund-raising appeals had penetrated as far as Milford Road station, where one of the WPCs had even tried to sell him tickets for an indoor barbecue and barn dance this coming weekend. He'd given her the price and told her to sell the tickets to someone else. Ninety-nine per cent of the women in the town seemed comprehensively for Dr Freeman and her campaign, and prepared to argue for it at the drop of a hat – he suspected Abigail might at that very moment be expecting him to ask for her views on the subject but he'd no desire to go down that particular path at the moment, or to be distracted from the subject of Sophie Lawrence.

She obligingly accepted the change of subject when he returned to it. ‘Apparently she travels for most of the year, sir,' she responded, driving them towards Pennybridge with some style, now that they were clear of the town.

‘What does she do for a living?'

‘I'm not sure she does anything. She owns Oundle's Bookshop at the top of Denbigh Street, although someone else runs it for her.' She was frowning as she gave him a brief rundown on what she knew of the independent circumstances of Sophie Lawrence and her sister, Roz Spalding. ‘As far as I know, Sophie's never really worked. Her sister used to teach maths at the High School, but she's given it up and become an Open University tutor.'

‘You're remarkably well informed.'

For some reason Abigail looked embarrassed at this, giving him a quick, sideways glance before turning her eyes back to the road ahead and keeping them strictly there. ‘Thank you, sir,' she answered politely, but her neat profile had taken on a set look, as though it was not a compliment she was pleased to receive. From then on she was silent unless spoken to until they reached the Green at Pennybridge and spotted the tall, pink brick house they were looking for, outside which an expensive-looking red Datsun was parked. ‘Drive on round the corner and we'll walk back,' Mayo instructed.

Women could, he thought as they walked towards the house, be the very devil to deal with. The experience of having Abigail working with him was – well, enlightening. He liked her direct common-sense approach, and perhaps even her intuition, a hitherto despised and considerably overrated function in his book, but he found the feminine nuances hard to keep up with. Was it something he'd said? Or something to do with Sophie Lawrence? The set of Ms Moon's lips might well mean that she disapproved of the other woman's superficial lifestyle, he thought, having already recognized in Abigail a streak of that same inherited Puritan work ethic he himself was alternately blessed and cursed with.

The brick house had a shiny, black-painted door and sported a highly-polished brass knocker. A brisk rat-tat brought an answer almost immediately, in the person of an energetic-looking young woman in hip- and thigh-hugging black leggings and an oversized, paint-stained man's shirt she'd belted round the waist, leaving her looking vaguely like some extra in a B film about mediaeval Florence. Assistant to Leonardo, perhaps. ‘Oh, right,' she replied cheerfully to Abigail's announcement of who they were, and her request to see Mrs Lawrence. ‘Hang on, I'll tell her you're here.'

In a few moments they found themselves seated in a large drawing-room at the back of the house, a room whose pale gold silk walls and glowing, gold-framed prints gave it the appearance of floating in sunlight, although the day outside was grey and overcast. Elegant, eighteenth-century furnishings, stiff and formal to Mayo's way of thinking. Not a thing out of line, every chair, table or cabinet a period piece. It was the sort of ambience he was ill at ease with.

It was out of his class for one thing, but anyway he preferred things gathered together haphazardly, with undemanding comfort as the prime requirement.

Sophie Lawrence came in, as elegant and expensive as the furnishings, and with the same delicate look, as if she might break if treated too roughly. She must have been very young at the time she worked for Kitty Wilbraham. Even now she looked barely thirty, a woman of nervous gestures with thin fingers and wrists seeming hardly adequate to support the quantities of gold jewellery jangling around them, wearing a mole-coloured suede skirt and a soft amethyst sweater. Her huge hazel eyes held an uncertain vulnerability, yet despite this, she spoke with self-assurance, quickly and a little huskily, and her smile had a fleeting charm. Abigail, instantly aware of designer clothes and a subtle scent she couldn't identify, was conscious of her own favourite, hitherto perfectly acceptable suit and matching silk shirt being actually nothing much to write home about.

Mrs Lawrence wasn't surprised to see them. She made the right, conventional noises but she had already heard the news from her sister.

‘How can I help you? Not very much, I should think. I haven't seen Angie for fourteen years.' Said with a smile. Charming and delightful, willing to help ... and yet, Mayo felt they were not really welcome, that the visit was looked upon as an ill-mannered intrusion, which he supposed it probably was.

‘Fourteen years?' he repeated, essaying a smile. ‘I'm impressed. Not many people can be so precise about when they last saw someone, especially after that length of time.'

‘I'm able to say exactly, because I last saw her just about the time I stopped working for Mrs Wilbraham. That was how I met Angie, when she visited Kitty – Mrs Wilbraham.'

‘What was their association?'

‘Kitty knew her through Madeleine Freeman, whose friend she was. Madeleine was Kitty's doctor, and Angie used to come to Flowerdew with her.'

The connections were slotting into place. He asked in what capacity Mrs Lawrence had worked for Mrs Wilbraham.

‘I was supposed to be her secretary. She'd been a famous archaeologist in her time and she was writing her memoirs.' She made a deprecatory gesture, smiling faintly, sitting lightly on the edge of her seat. For all that she seemed so much in tune with her affluent surroundings, with her expensive clothes, jewellery and scent, she had the uncertainty and impermanence of a bird of passage, feathers ruffled and a little battered by the voyage, not quite as young as she had at first appeared. ‘I have to admit I wasn't a very good secretary, but Kitty didn't mind. It was more important to her to have someone
simpatico
... you know, someone she could share a joke with, someone on the same wavelength.'

His dark glance rested on her face, reading it. ‘I can appreciate it would be important to have someone you can get on with in the circumstances.'

‘It was more than that, we were friends from the word go. But you couldn't
not
get on with Kitty. She was a darling – and such fun.' Bending over an arrangement of cream hothouse lilies in a topaz glass bowl on the low table in front of her, she tweaked off a tiny, yellowing leaf, the slender fingers not quite steady. When she looked up, he saw her eyes bright with unshed tears. They were golden brown, like dark amber. ‘I was devastated,' she went on, blinking rapidly, ‘when she suddenly decided to call off writing the memoirs and go back to Tunisia, though on reflection it was understandable. For one thing, the climate was better for her health. Flowerdew – the house where she lived – was damp, and it was never warm in the winter.' As if actually feeling the remembered chill, she shivered and moved closer to the fire, wrapping her arms round herself for warmth, despite the soft cashmere she was enveloped in. It was a self-protective gesture, gauche and school-girlish, yet she managed to invest it with grace.

‘She suddenly decided to leave, you say? Didn't she give you any warning? It must have taken some time to wind up her affairs.'

‘No, when I went in one morning, she told me what she'd decided to do. She gave me a cheque for my salary and that was that.'

‘Rather surprising behaviour, surely?'

‘Not if you knew Kitty. She was very impetuous. And she loved North Africa. She'd lived and worked near Tunis for a large part of her life and missed it very much.'

‘Presumably you've kept contact?'

She hesitated. ‘She didn't leave an address.' She had an unconsciously annoying habit of twisting her gold bracelets round and round as she spoke. ‘Actually, I wrote several times but had no answer, so naturally ...'

Mayo waited, saying nothing.

‘She was old, you know,' she said defensively. ‘She was seventy-seven when she left England, and that was in 1979. I could only assume she must have died.'