The Dark Room (11 page)

Maddocks glanced at Fraser, who shrugged. The lad’s story certainly had the ring of truth. ‘No,’ said the DI, standing up. ‘At the moment I don’t intend
to add any charges to those you’re already facing, but we will want to talk to you again, Bobby, so I advise you very strongly to make yourself available. Neither DS Fraser nor I want the
trouble of having to look for you.’ He paused at the door. ‘Just one last thing. Had there been any attempt made to bury the bodies?’

‘You mean in a grave?’

‘No, I mean had they been covered over with anything?’

‘Only wiv leaves.’

‘Well covered?’

‘Yeah. Pretty well.’

‘Then how did you know they were there?’

Franklyn’s sharp little eyes shifted nervously. ‘Because some think ’ad been at the guy,’ he said. ‘A fox, maybe. The ’ead and top ’alf of
’is body ’ad been dug out, least that’s what it looked like. I didn’t know the woman was there till I started taking the leaves off ’im and found ’er ’ead
beside ’is sodding legs. To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I wish I’d never seen them now.’ He wiped his hands on his trousers. ‘It’s got me in bother and
I’m not sure I cleaned myself properly afterwards. I’ve been worrying about that.’

Nightingale Clinic, Salisbury – 6.30 p.m.

Alan Protheroe looked in on Jinx later that afternoon and found her walking with gritty determination about her room. ‘I’m not going out in a wheelchair again,’
she told him angrily. ‘I hadn’t realized quite how sensitive I am to being stared at. It was a deeply humiliating experience.’ She jabbed a finger at her bandages.
‘When’s this idiotic thing coming off my eye?’

‘Probably tomorrow morning,’ he said, wondering if it was only humiliation that had sparked her anger. It would be a while, he thought, before she felt confident enough
to admit she remembered anything. ‘You’ve an appointment at Odstock Hospital for nine-thirty. All being well, it’ll be removed then.’

She came to a halt beside her dressing table. ‘Thank God for that. I feel like Frankenstein’s monster at the moment.’

His amiable face creased into a smile. ‘You don’t look like him.’

There was a short silence.

‘Are you married, Dr Protheroe?’

‘I was. My wife died of breast cancer four years ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why did you want to know?’ he asked her.

Straightforward curiosity. You’re too nice to be running around free and most of your shirts have buttons missing.
‘Because it’s six-thirty on a Friday
evening in June and I was wondering why you were still here. Do you live in?’

He nodded. ‘In a flat upstairs.’

‘Children?’

‘One daughter at university, who’s nineteen and very strong-minded.’

‘I’m not surprised. You’ve probably been using her as a guinea pig for your theories on individual responsibility since she was knee-high to a
grasshopper.’

‘Something like that.’

She eyed him curiously. ‘As a matter of interest, what happens when one of your patients chooses a wrong set of values? Acts in bad faith, in other words. I can’t believe
they all toe the existentialist Protheroe line. It’s a statistical impossibility.’

He lowered himself into one of the chairs, stretched his long legs in front of him and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘That’s an extraordinarily loaded question but
I’ll have a stab at an answer. By “wrong” you presumably mean that they leave the clinic with the same problems they came in with? In other words, their time here hasn’t
persuaded them that another
modus vivendi
might be worth considering?’

‘That’s a very simplistic way of putting it, but it’ll do, I suppose.’

He lifted an amused eyebrow. ‘Then the simplistic answer is that my methods haven’t worked for them, and they either remain as they are or seek alternative therapy. But
they’re usually the ones who discharge themselves within forty-eight hours because they didn’t want to be here in the first place.’

Like me, she thought. ‘You must have your share of back-sliders, though. I can’t see Matthew sticking to the straight and narrow once he’s away from
here.’

‘I think you’re underestimating him. He’s only been here two weeks, you know. Give him another month and then tell me he won’t make it.’

She looked appalled. ‘A month? How long am I supposed to stay here then?’

‘As long or as short as you like.’

‘That’s not an answer. How long does my father expect you to keep me?’

‘This isn’t a prison, Jinx. I don’t
keep
anyone.’

‘Then I can leave tomorrow after the bandages have been removed?’

‘Of course you can, subject to what I told you on Wednesday. You’re still not physically fit, so I’d feel duty bound to inform your father that you’d
discharged yourself.’

She smiled faintly. ‘Does that mean I’m mentally fit?’

He shrugged. ‘My impression, for what it’s worth, is that you’re as tough as old boots.’ He leaned forward and studied her face closely. ‘I’m
having some difficulty squaring this rugged self-reliance of yours with the picture the police gave me of a heartbroken, vulnerable woman who drove her car at a wall.’

She pressed a fingertip to her eyelid to hide the awful rush of tears. ‘So am I,’ she said after a moment, ‘but I’ve read the piece in the newspaper over and
over again and I can’t come up with another explanation.’ She lowered her hand to look at him. ‘I phoned Meg’s answer-machine today. I thought if I could only talk to her
and Leo, they could at least tell everyone that I wasn’t upset about him going.’

‘Is that something you can remember?’

‘You mean, not being upset?’ He nodded and she shook her head. ‘No, I’m just so certain that it wouldn’t have worried me.’

‘Why?’

Because it didn’t worry me last time.
‘Because,’ she said out loud, ‘I didn’t want Leo myself.’ She looked away from him, fearful perhaps
of seeing his disbelief. ‘I know it sounds like sour grapes but I’m relieved I don’t have to marry him. I can remember hanging around the studio till all hours just to avoid going
home and spending cosy evenings with him, and I don’t think it was cold feet about the wedding. I was beginning to actively dislike him.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘So much for
rugged self-reliance. Why was I marrying someone I didn’t like? It doesn’t make sense.’ She lapsed into a brief silence. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad,’ she said
suddenly, ‘if I didn’t have to keep shoring up my defences.’

‘Against what?’

She pressed her fingertips to her good eye again to shut him out. ‘Fear,’ she said.

He waited a moment. ‘What is there to fear?’

‘I don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t remember.’

Romsey Road Police Station, Winchester, Hampshire – 7.00 p.m.

Events moved extraordinarily quickly once the bodies were given tentative names and addresses. A telephone call to the Richmond police uncovered the interesting information that 12
Glenavon Gardens had attracted the attention of another branch of the Hampshire police some ten days previously, following a road traffic accident involving Miss Jane Kingsley, the
owner/occupier.

‘You want to speak to a Sergeant Halliwell at Fordingbridge,’ said the voice at the other end to Fraser. ‘He asked us to make some enquiries about Kingsley because
it looked to them like the RTA was a deliberate attempt to kill herself. The gist is, she was engaged to Leo Wallader, who lived with her in Glenavon Gardens for about two months before buggering
off on the night of Friday, the tenth of June, three weeks before the wedding, to shack up with Kingsley’s best friend. We talked to Kingsley’s neighbours who mentioned another suicide
attempt on the Sunday, the twelfth, and also to Wallader’s parents by phone. The information we were given is that Wallader and his new girlfriend have scarpered to the continent until the
fuss over the cancelled wedding has died down.’

‘Any idea what the name of the girlfriend is?’ Fraser held his breath.

‘Harris. Meg Harris.’

Bull’s-eye!
‘Do you have an address for Wallader’s parents?’

‘Let’s see, now. The father’s Sir Anthony Wallader. Address: Downton Court, Ashwell, near Guildford.’

‘What about Meg Harris’s parents?’

‘Sorry. She only came into it as the new girlfriend. We’ve nothing on her at all except her name.’

‘OK, can you fax me everything you’ve got on this?’ He read out the number. ‘Within the next five minutes, if possible.’

‘Will do. What’s the story then?’

‘Not sure yet, but we’ve got two bodies here that we think are Wallader and Harris. You’d better warn your chaps to expect us some time tomorrow. Cheers.’

He cut the line, flipped through a police directory and dialled Fordingbridge. ‘Is Sergeant Halliwell still there?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I know it’s late.’
He drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘OK, well this is urgent. Can you find him and ask him to call either DI Maddocks or DS Fraser in the Ardingly Woods incident room.’ He rattled off
the number. ‘And make that a priority please.’

He gathered his notes together and made his way down the corridor to the fax machine, which was already printing the first of two pages being transmitted down the wire from Richmond.
He skimmed both sheets before shouldering his way into Maddocks’s office. ‘Here’s the Hampshire connection, Guv’nor. Leo Wallader was engaged to a Miss Jane Kingsley up
until a couple of weeks ago. They were supposed to be getting married on the second of July, but Leo jilted her on the tenth of June for her best friend, Meg Harris.’ He looked up.
‘Miss Kingsley’s father is Adam Kingsley of Franchise Holdings and the wedding was supposed to be taking place at Hellingdon Hall, which is where Kingsley Senior lives. It’s a
mansion to the north of Fordingbridge.’ He handed Maddocks the sheets of paper. ‘I’ve asked for a Sergeant Halliwell at Fordingbridge to give us a call. He’s the one who
requested this information when his guys hauled Miss Kingsley out of her car on the thirteenth of June, unconscious and drunk as a skunk. A suicide attempt, they reckon, following a previous one on
the twelfth of June.’ He tapped the Ordnance Survey map on the wall. ‘According to the guy I spoke to in Richmond, the RTA was at Stoney Bassett airfield, which is’ – he
spread his hand across the map – ‘two-thirds of the way between Ardingly Woods and Hellingdon Hall, say fifteen miles from the woods to the airfield and another seven from the airfield
to the Hall. I’ve a real gut feeling about this one, Guv’nor. The geography’s right, we’ve got skid marks on the bank made by a woman’s shoe, and the Doc said a woman
could have done it.’

Maddocks was an older and warier hand. ‘Let’s wait to hear from Halliwell,’ he said.

Half an hour later they transferred to the Superintendent’s office and brought him up to date on what they knew. ‘I accept there’s a remote chance that Wallader
and Harris are sunning themselves on the Riviera,’ finished Maddocks, ‘either because Franklyn’s lying to us or because our two bodies nicked the credit cards only to have them
nicked again by Franklyn, but it’s so damned unlikely that it’s not worth considering. It explains why no one’s reported them missing. According to Halliwell, Leo’s family
said they ran away to France to avoid the embarrassment of the cancelled wedding. So what do we do? Tell Sir Anthony Wallader we think his son’s in the bath at the lab and ask him to make an
identification? Or wait till we’re sure the ID’s accurate before we tell the families? We can probably lift some fingerprints from Harris’s flat in Hammersmith, but Richmond say
there’s no way they can go back into Glenavon Gardens without alerting Jane Kingsley to the fact that something’s up. Which could be a bad move if she’s involved.’

Frank Cheever steepled his fingers on his desk and gazed thoughtfully out of the window. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ he said at last, ‘that I began my career as a
beat-bobby in London’s Mile End?’

Maddocks and Fraser stared straight ahead. If he’d told them once, he’d told them a hundred times. Maddocks prepared to be bored. There was no merit in the old
fool’s reminiscences, beyond the one undeniably interesting fact that Cheever had been born a bastard to an East London prostitute. Even Maddocks had to admit that to work his way up through
various police forces, while remaining married to the same woman for thirty-eight years, was an achievement for a boy who began life in the gutter.

‘I was barely out of school,’ he mused, ‘and one of the first bodies I picked off the street was a black fellow who’d been bludgeoned within an inch of his
life.’ He thought about that for a moment. ‘It turned out the poor wretch was engaged to the sister of an East End gangland boss and there was circumstantial evidence to show the future
brother-in-law had done his dirty work himself. All my guv’nor needed was confirmation of identity but when the victim came round, he refused to co-operate and we had to drop it. I’ve
never seen anyone look so scared. He was black as the ace of spades but he went white every time we mentioned a prosecution.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘The bastard who
bludgeoned him was called Adam Kingsley. He wasn’t prepared to have black blood in his family.’ He fixed his pale eyes on Maddocks. ‘But he got it anyway. The black fellow had
more guts than Kingsley credited him with. He married the sister a week later, and went up the aisle on crutches to do it.’

Maddocks whistled. ‘The same guy? This girl’s father?’

Cheever nodded. ‘He made a fortune out of buying up cheap properties with sitting tenants, then sending in his heavies to evict the wretched people in order to flog off the
properties with vacant possession. He turned respectable in the sixties, probably about the time his daughter was born.’ He stared out of his window into the darkness. ‘All
right,’ he said, ‘I suggest we tread carefully on this one. You and I, Fraser, are going to visit Sir Anthony Wallader tomorrow morning. We’ll leave at eight sharp to be with him
between nine and nine-thirty, and I want you to warn Dr Clarke that we may be bringing him back with us.’ He turned to Maddocks. ‘Meanwhile, Gareth, I suggest you split your team in two
– half to concentrate on Meg Harris, the other half on Jane Kingsley. I want to know where they met, how long they’ve known each other, what sort of personalities they are. In
particular I want to know about the relationship between Jane Kingsley and her father. OK? See what you can come up with by the time we get back.’