The Company She Kept (18 page)

Lorna left well-provided for. He had allowed himself to make no close friends, and was an enigma to those acquaintances he shared with Lorna.

He had never consciously admitted to having arranged his life thus deliberately, even to himself ... but now he knew that he had done exactly that, because of the fear that had always been there, the root cause of the intermittent nightmares that woke him in a black sweat: not through guilt at what had happened, but in panic that one day it would all come to light. As it must, inexorably, now. And be worse by ten-fold than it would have been two weeks ago, before the death of Angie Robinson. It was get out and go time.

He swept the day's work together into a pile in the centre of his desk, not bothering even to read his morning's mail. From now on, all that would be someone else's pigeon – Preston's, probably, who wouldn't be able to believe his luck. Into his briefcase Felix put the few personal belongings he kept at the office – an electric razor, a clean shirt and a few spare handkerchiefs – and left.

He didn't even tell his open-mouthed secretary where he was going. He contemplated doing so, and savoured for a moment the pleasure he'd get from informing her why it was necessary, but he couldn't be bothered. He contented himself with knowing that Preston would have her out of her chair, and his own secretary in it, before the week was out.

He drove at leisurely pace through the well-heeled Surrey countryside, surprised that he felt no urgency, heading towards Guildford and the Hog's Back, to the widely-spaced estate of executive homes, excluded from public gaze by a mini-forest of pines and rhododendron. He turned into the drive of his own acre and a half, wherein reposed the new five-bedroomed Tudorbethan-style house that was Lorna's pride and joy, her reward for not making too much fuss about the non-existent children who might have occupied some of the bedrooms. He had drawn the line at that. Children created complications he could do without.

Lorna hadn't seen it that way at first. There had been tears and pleadings, a long spell on tranquillizers, but in the end he'd been able to persuade her. She stopped crying and peering into prams and her lips no longer trembled when she looked at her friends' babies. Instead, she passed most of her time with her nose buried in
Vogue
and glossy interior decorating magazines of the sort featuring other people's houses, and then spent his money endlessly on doing up their own house and on clothes and make-up and falderals for herself. She seemed happy enough, now.

He drove slowly up the curving gravel drive and when he came in sight of the house and saw the car drawn up next to Lorna's new Renault, his heart plunged and he knew this was it. With a fatalistic sense of inevitability, he realized why he'd had no sense of urgency this morning. Though he hadn't expected the game to be up quite so soon, he'd known in his heart that ultimately he wasn't going to get away with a thing. He was only mildly surprised that what he basically felt was a great upsurge of relief. He opened the car door and walked into the house to face the police.

The man standing at the bottom of the stairs was about his own age, fair-haired, red-faced, and open-mouthed. For a split second, Felix wondered why a policeman should be carrying a bottle of white wine and two glasses. Even more puzzling was why he was only half-dressed and in his stockinged feet. And why Lorna should be standing half way down the steps, wearing nothing but a sexy négligée he hadn't seen before and a look of total horror on her face.

As the truth dawned on him, all the repressions of fourteen years welled up inside him, the temper he thought he'd learned to control beat in his temples. There was a roaring in his head, and with a great bellow, he sprang forward.

The following day, sick to the back teeth of looking for dark green Jags, Pete Deeley took himself off to stretch his legs and call for a tea-break in the bus station caff. He was reading the paper, heedless of the reek of frying chips and the pungency of the gooey sauce bottle on the table in front of him, when he noticed a filler paragraph under the headline
Laid Bare.
What he read nearly caused him to choke on his second jam doughnut:

Mr Felix Darbell, a company director, who on Monday morning returned home unexpectedly from his office and surprised his wife and a man in a state of undress on the staircase, was yesterday remanded on bail for attacking Mr David Fernley, a solicitor, and causing grievous bodily harm. When Mr Fernley was attacked he defended himself with a bottle of wine he happened to be holding at the time, injuring Mr Darbell. Both men had to be taken to Guildford General Hospital but were later released after treatment. ‘It was a storm in a teacup,' said Mrs Lorna Darbell, thirty-three.

‘I take it all back,' said Atkins avuncularly. ‘I take it all back, Pete – there must be something good comes out of all that effort you put into reading the
Sun.
This is going to speed things up. Guildford, you say?' His hand reached for the telephone.

‘All the way from Leeds, Mr Darbell? You drove all the way from Leeds, made a detour via Lavenstock where you spent less than an hour with Mrs Lawrence, and then drove back to Guildford? All this to see a woman you hadn't seen – or even been in contact with – for fourteen years? Takes some swallowing, that.'

‘That isn't my problem.'

Felix Darbell, a handsome man with a high-bridged nose, fairish hair and light, cold blue eyes, looked pale and patrician as he sat in the interview room, his looks marred somewhat by the large strip of plaster over his left temple. He sat with his legs crossed and would have seemed quite composed, apart from his hands, which trembled, and his forehead, which was damp with sweat.

But he was sticking to his story, that he hadn't seen Angie Robinson for more years than he could remember, that he had never even heard of Bulstrode Street, that he'd only spent an hour or so with Sophie Lawrence. ‘Which she'll confirm if you take the trouble to ask her:

‘She's not going to be much help to you. She's denied having any visitors that night.'

At that, he flushed darkly. ‘She said that? Sophie? I don't believe you!'

‘Yes, she did, Mr Darbell. So where were you? You've admitted you were in Lavenstock, and I suggest you were at Angie Robinson's flat in Bulstrode Street.'

‘No.'

‘Not a very salubrious place, Bulstrode Street – and not the sort of place to park a car like yours, either, if you don't want it noticed. It was seen, Mr Darbell. It was there from eight to eight-thirty on the night she was murdered.' Darbell said, ‘I did not kill Angie Robinson. I did not go to her flat.'

Mayo leaned back in his chair, Abigail Moon sat a little way behind him, with Farrar leaning against the wall because there wasn't room in the small space for another chair and it was his fate always to be at the end of the line.

‘Well, I have irrefutable proof you did. How else do you suggest your fingerprints got there, on the doorknob, and on a whisky bottle and a glass besides? By thought transference?'

Darbell's pale eyes flickered. ‘I –' be began, then flapped his hand. ‘Oh, forget it. I've nothing to say. Nothing you're going to believe, anyway.' He uncrossed his legs, shifted his feet. The sweat stood out thicker on his forehead.

‘I should advise you to tell the truth, in view of what's against you, Mr Darbell. You're a violent man, for one thing. Two days ago you attacked a man at your home. Oh, I can understand why – I wouldn't be in a sweet temper, either, if I came home and found my wife with her lover –'

‘Leave my wife out of this! She's nothing to do with it!'

‘We're talking about your attitude,' Mayo said quietly, ‘and that has everything to do with it. You react violently when something upsets you, don't you? Like you did that night at Flowerdew, fourteen years ago.'

‘Flowerdew?'

Darbell's head jerked involuntarily, the pale blue eyes were suddenly glassy. He hadn't expected that.

‘I don't remember any night at Flowerdew.' But it sounded like the first really spontaneous thing he'd said, an automatic, instinctive denial, a step towards panic, and as Mayo leaned forward, elbows on the table, he seemed to realize this. His eyes flickered towards the tape-recorder on the table and he licked his lips again. ‘May I have a drink?'

‘Certainly. Somebody fetch Mr Darbell a cup of tea,' Mayo said, without looking round. Farrar went out.

‘You say you don't remember,' Mayo went on. ‘Angie Robinson did, though. She never forgot what happened. From that night on, she was a very frightened woman. She'd seen murder, and it had preyed on her mind ever since. So she decided to square her conscience and tell. But then she was strangled – right on the same night that you were here in Lavenstock. Something of a coincidence, wasn't it? Shall I tell you something? I don't believe in coincidences, and what's more, I'd be very surprised if you do, either.'

There was a very long silence in the interview room which Mayo allowed to continue until Farrar came back with tea in a plastic mug which he set down on the table.

Darbell drank the tea in great gulps, then sat motionless, looking at his hands spread on the table before him as though he'd never seen them before. Finally he looked up and said, ‘You're determined to get me for that woman's murder – for Angie Robinson – aren't you? I didn't do it, I swear to God I didn't do it, but if I tell you the truth, I'll be in it worse than ever.'

It was as near as dammit to an admission that he'd been lying before. ‘You mean what happened at Flowerdew was worse than this?' Mayo asked.

Darbell blinked and was once again struck silent, staring at the blank wall opposite. The harsh fluorescent tube was not kind to his self-absorbed, highly-charged face. He looked like a man who was thinking fast, and one at the end of his rope.

‘Tell me what you know about Irena Bron,' Mayo said quietly.

It was as if the name triggered some release in Darbell. He seemed to collapse, literally, sagging in his chair. But the instinct for self-preservation was strong; almost immediately, an expression of grasping at straws crossed his face.

‘All right, I'll tell you what it is,' he said. ‘I've been framed, deliberately, for Angie Robinson's murder. But what I did at Flowerdew was at least done under provocation – and there are people who are witness to that.'

Mayo felt the pressure release in him, too, as if an elastic band wound tight round his skull had suddenly snapped.

‘But
you're
going to tell us about it, first, aren't you? And framed? You don't seriously expect us to believe that?'

‘I tell you, I was set up for this – I walked into it, if you like – but if I want to prove that, I've no option but to tell you the rest. I'm in a cleft stick, aren't I?'

‘I shan't know until you tell me. Come on, everything you can remember. It's a long time ago, but I don't suppose you've forgotten.'

‘A long time?' Darbell said bitterly. ‘It seems like yesterday. Angie Robinson isn't the only one who could never forget.'

He had walked out of the drawing-room at Flowerdew after the fracas with the broken tumbler, consumed with such a rage that he couldn't trust himself to remain in the same room as that woman a moment longer. If he had been in any condition to think, he would have known it was only partly Irena herself he was angry with. Much of his fury was occasioned by Sophie: he was in love for the first time in his life, but she'd made it even plainer than usual that night that she wanted nothing to do with him. It was Tommo she was really interested in, bloody Tommo who could've had her just by lifting his little finger. Frustrated, Felix directed his barbs and his sarcasms first at Angie Robinson and then at stupid, mad, unlovely and unlovable Irena, a despicable target because she was so easy to annoy.

If she had left him alone and let him cool off, he'd told himself a thousand times since, he would have got over his annoyance with her, but when she followed him out into the hall and began clawing at his sleeve, mouthing her anger, spittle flying from her mouth, actually almost wrestling with him, he could control himself no longer. He took hold of her strong, sturdy body and began to shake and pummel it as if it were no more than a lumpy pillow on a hot, sleepless night. How his hands came to be around her throat he never knew. He wasn't even conscious of her body growing limp and the congestion of her face until he heard Madeleine Freeman's voice and saw Madeleine herself, white-faced but controlled, ordering him to fetch her medical bag from her car, quick, quick! It took him no more than a couple of minutes at most to get the bag but by then, when he came back with Tommo, whom he'd met in the courtyard, it was too late to save Irena. She was lying on the floor with her face blue and her tongue lolling out and her skirts ruckled up around her fat white thighs, a dead, ungainly lump of flesh on the dank flagstones. Even at that moment, he found her too repellent to excite in him any sort of compassion, or any kind of remorse for what he'd done.

What he did feel was fear at his own loss of control, and the need to get rid of her and, overriding everything else, a desire to flee. Blinking, he saw that they had all now reassembled in the hall – Tommo, as well as Madeleine and Angie, who was crouching in the corner and whimpering like a frightened kitten. And Sophie. Looking at him with an expression he couldn't bear to face.

It was the silence, after the tumult of the last few minutes, which unnerved him most. Nobody was saying anything, until a hoarse voice he didn't for the moment recognize as his own broke in, demanding help, asking what could be done to get rid of her.

It astonished him afterwards, thinking about it, that not one of them had jibbed at that. At the time, it had seemed quite natural for them to agree. None of them, after all, wanted to hurt Kitty and bring trouble to her door, which was what would happen if Irena Bron's death became public. In addition, and more urgently, they all had their own personal reasons for wanting it kept quiet: it would have done Madeleine's career, and the hospital campaign she'd begun to work for, no good at all to be involved in such a scandal, blameless though she was. And Sophie ... Hope had momentarily risen in his breast: perhaps she was fond of him, after all, fond enough not to want him to be found out. As for Tommo – he had a past, something he wouldn't want revealed in the light of the publicity that would be certain to follow. There had been that woman reporter coming to the house looking for him, asking questions. She hadn't found him, for Kitty had sent her away with a flea in her ear, but Felix, keeping a jealous eye on him, had noted the hunted look on Tommo's face ever since.