The Dark Room (17 page)

Startled, she turned her head, saw her younger brother first, then looked beyond him to Protheroe. ‘God, you gave me a shock,’ she said accusingly as they both drew
close. ‘Hello, Fergus.’ She nodded a welcome. ‘Have you two met? Fergus Kingsley, my brother – Dr Alan Protheroe, my existentialist shrink. You’re a very bad
liar,’ she told Alan. ‘You’ve been watching me for the last ten minutes, so why the sudden panic?’

He shook Fergus by the hand. ‘Because I take my responsibilities seriously, Jinx, and for all I knew your brother was a stranger to you.’ He folded his arms across his
chest. ‘As a matter of interest,’ he said without hostility, ‘which way did you come in? It’s a rule of the Nightingale Clinic that visitors seek permission at the front
desk before approaching our guests. It’s a simple courtesy but an important one, as I’m sure you’ll agree.’

Fergus reddened under the older man’s stare. ‘I’m sorry.’ He looked very young. ‘I didn’t realize.’ He gestured behind him to the other side
of the lawn. ‘I parked by the gate at the bottom and walked up.’ He looked sullenly towards Jinx. ‘Actually, I was going to do the thing properly, then I saw you under the
tree.’

Jinx removed her dark glasses and squinted up at Protheroe with one blackened eye closed against the evening sunlight. ‘I don’t recall my consent being sought before.
It’s a perverse rule that operates at the whim of the director.’

He smiled affably. ‘But a rule, nevertheless. I shall have to make sure it’s properly enforced in future.’ He nodded to them both. ‘Enjoy your visit. If you
want some tea, your brother can order it from the desk and have it sent out.’ He raised a hand in farewell, then walked briskly back to his office.

Jinx stared after him. ‘I think he’s madder than some of his patients,’ she said.

Fergus followed her gaze. ‘He fancies you,’ he said bluntly.

She gave a splutter of laughter. ‘Don’t be an oaf! The man’s not blind, and they do let me look in a mirror from time to time.’ She sobered suddenly and her
eyes narrowed. ‘Actually, I hate the way he’s always watching me. It makes me feel like a prisoner.’

‘Do you like him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he married?’

‘He’s a widower.’ She frowned. ‘Why so interested?’

He shrugged. ‘You know what they say about psychiatrists and their patients. I was just wondering if he was going to be the next one in the Kingsley marriage stakes.’

‘Do me a favour, Fergus,’ she said crossly. ‘I don’t intend to stay here long enough to develop anything more than a passing acquaintanceship with the
man.’

He leaned against the tree trunk. ‘So you’re planning to come home?’

‘
Go
home,’ she corrected him. ‘Back to Richmond and back to the studio. Sitting around and doing nothing isn’t what I’m best at.’

‘Is that supposed to be a dig at me?’

‘No,’ she said mildly. ‘Oddly enough, Fergus, I am more interested in my own problems at the moment than I am in yours.’ She studied his sullen face, which
was so like Miles’s to look at, but which lacked the charm that his older brother could switch on and off at will. ‘Did you have a reason for coming?’

He scuffed the grass with his foot. ‘I wondered how you were, that’s all. Miles said you weren’t too hot when he came, said you passed out when he was talking to
you.’

‘It’s just tiredness.’ She replaced her dark glasses so that he couldn’t read the expression in her eyes. ‘Miles told me Adam made you cry. Is that
true?’

He reddened again. ‘Miles is a bastard. He swore he wouldn’t tell anyone. You know, sometimes I don’t know who I hate more, him or Dad. They’re such shits
both of them. I wish they’d drop dead. Everything would be OK if they were both dead.’

It was the same childish whine she’d heard from him since he was five years old. Only the register of his voice was different. ‘Presumably he belted you again. So what
did you do to make Adam angry?’

‘It wasn’t me who made him angry. It’s you being in this place.’ He slid his back down the tree trunk to squat at the foot of it. ‘He just went
overboard and started screaming and yelling at everyone. Miles cowered in the corner, as per bloody usual, and Mum sat and blubbered. Well, you know what it’s like. You don’t need me to
tell you.’

‘But you must have done something,’ she said. ‘He might be angry about me and’ – she gestured towards the building – ‘all this, but
he’s never belted you without good reason. So what did you do?’

‘I borrowed twenty pounds,’ he muttered. ‘You’d think it was a hanging offence the way he carried on.’

She sighed. ‘Who from this time?’

‘Does it matter?’ he said angrily. ‘You’re as bad as bloody Dad. I was going to pay it back.’ His mouth thinned unattractively. ‘What nobody ever
seems to recognize is that I wouldn’t have to borrow money if Dad treated me like a human being instead of a slave. It’s really degrading having to admit you’re the son of Adam
Kingsley when everyone knows you’re earning peanuts. I keep telling him, if he’d only pay me a decent whack, I wouldn’t have to resort to borrowing. I’m the boss’s
son. That should stand for something. Why do Miles and I have to start at the bottom?’

‘You know,’ she said with sudden impatience, ‘if you called a spade a spade occasionally, you’d be halfway to earning Adam’s respect. It’s the
lies that you and Miles tell that really fire him up. Can’t you see that? You’re a thief ’ – she fixed him with a scornful stare – ‘and everybody knows it, so
why bother with this garbage about borrowing? Who did you steal from this time?’

‘Jenkins,’ he muttered. ‘But I was going to pay him back.’

‘Then I’m not surprised Adam belted you,’ she said tiredly. ‘I wouldn’t enjoy having to apologize to my gardener after my twenty-four-year-old son had
stolen money from him. I suppose you thought Jenkins wouldn’t have the nerve to say anything and that you’d get away with it. That’s almost worse than stealing from him in the
first place.’

‘Oh, leave it out, Jinxy. I’ve had all this from Dad, and you’re both wrong, anyway. I really was going to pay him back. If he’d had a word with me, I’d
have sorted it out, but, oh no, he had to go running to the old man and make a bloody mountain out of a molehill.’

Something fundamental snapped inside Jinx’s head. She would always think of it afterwards as the blood bond that had tied her physically to a family that in any other
circumstance she would have avoided like the plague. Suddenly, she found herself free to acknowledge that she didn’t like them. More, she had only contempt for them. Ultimately, in fact, she
agreed with what everyone knew Adam thought but had never put into words: Miles and Fergus were their mother’s sons and, like Betty, saw Adam Kingsley only in terms of their meal ticket.

She smiled savagely. ‘I’m going to tell you things that I’ve never told a soul in my life. First, I despise your mother. I always have done from the minute she came
into our house. She’s a fat drunk with an extraordinarily low IQ. Second, she married my father because she wanted to be a lady, and she had enough cunning to persuade him that, while she
could never fill my mother’s shoes, she could at least be a comfortable slipper for him at the end of a long day. He was lonely and he fell for it, but what he actually saddled himself with
was a vulgar, money-grabbing tart.’ She held up three fingers. ‘Third, it might not have been so bad if she hadn’t lumbered him with you and Miles. Even your names are an
embarrassment. Adam wanted to call you something straightforward, like David or Michael, but Elizabeth wanted something befitting the sons of a rich lady.’

Her voice took on the accent of her stepmother. ‘It has to be something posh, Daddy, and David and Michael are so common.’ She drew an angry breath. ‘Fourth, Adam
finds himself father to two of the laziest, most unintelligent, most dishonest sons a man could have. Every gene you have has come to you straight from your mother. You are incapable, both of you,
of contributing anything worthwhile to your family. Instead, you are only interested in bringing Adam and me down to your own shabby levels. Fifth, how the hell can you begin to justify stealing
off a gardener who works day in day out to fund his very modest house and his very modest car while you, you little bastard’ – she spat at him – ‘swan around in your swank
Porsche so that you can pick up any little tart who’s stupid enough to think the Kingsley name means something? Will you explain that to me?
Can
you explain it to me?’

He stared at her. It was a shock to see his father mirrored in the set of her chin and the fury in her voice, but he had spent years playing on her conscience and, like Miles, he was
a master at it. ‘We’ve always known you were a snobbish bitch, Jinx,’ he said idly. ‘What the hell do you suppose it was like for Mum moving into a house with the perfect
child already in residence and pictures of her perfect mother all over the walls? She says you were so condescending she wanted to slap you. I wish she had, as a matter of fact. If you’d been
treated the way Dad’s treated us, then maybe things would have been better for us all.’

‘He didn’t treat you any differently at the beginning from the way he treated me,’ she said coldly. ‘I can remember the first time he belted you because it
was the first time you and Miles were reported for stealing. You were nine years old and Miles was eleven, and you stole money from the till in the village shop. Adam paid over a hundred pounds to
Mrs Davies to hush the whole thing up, then took a strap to the pair of you to remind you what would happen if you ever did it again.’ She shook her head. ‘But it didn’t work. You
just went on doing it and he went on beating you, and it was me who had to try and calm him down because Betty was always drunk. Do you think I enjoyed any of that?’

He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t care less whether you did or not, and anyway you’re exaggerating. Most of the time you were either at school or bloody Oxford, playing the
family genius while Miles and I were being treated like Neanderthals. You should put yourself in our shoes once in a while. You know damn well he’s always hated us. We only took that money
from the shop because we thought he might notice us instead of mooning over his precious Jane.’ His mouth took on a sullen cast. ‘You don’t know what it was like. When you were
home for the holidays he was only interested in you and what you were doing, and when you were away he used to shut himself in his office with those bloody photographs of your mother.’

She saw that for what it was, the manipulative emotional blackmail of a selfish, twisted mind, but the habits of a lifetime die very hard and, as usual, she foundered on the hard
certainty of Adam’s obsession with her mother and herself. ‘But why will you never help yourselves?’ she asked him. ‘Why do you go on doing what you know he hates? Why do
you stay there and give him the opportunity to despise you? I just don’t understand that.’

‘Because it’s my home as much as his and I don’t see why he should push me out,’ he said. ‘It’s all right for you. You got Russell’s money.
You were lucky.’

She experienced the strange sensation of a door slamming shut on a memory. For the briefest second, she had a glimpse of something remembered but it was as transient as a puff of
wind on a summer’s day and the memory was lost.
Had they had this conversation before?
‘You have some very warped ideas, Fergus. How can you regard anything to do with
Russell’s murder as lucky?’
Why did Russell keep intruding into every conversation? She had banned him from her thoughts for so long, but now she was being forced into thinking about
him all the time.

‘Leave it out, Jinx. You weren’t that fond of him and you ended up with all the loot.’ But it was said without conviction, because he, like she, had lost the energy
to continue an argument that was going nowhere. Where trust had been sacrificed, knowledge was all, and it mattered very little whether thoughts were spoken or unspoken when everyone knew where
they stood.
Except . . .
‘You’re wrong to slag off poor old Mum,’ he said with a half-hearted show of belligerence. ‘She’s gone out and batted for you, which is
more than Dad’s done since you’ve been in here. She’s given the Walladers and the Harrises a pasting for the way Leo and Meg have treated you. She called Sir Anthony “a boil
on the bum of society” and Caroline Harris “a tight-arsed bitch”.’

Jinx lowered her head abruptly so that he wouldn’t see the laughter in her eyes.

‘OK, she was drunk,’ said Fergus sulkily, ‘but she meant well. Actually, Miles and me thought it was quite funny.’

So did Jinx . . . She had called Anthony a ‘parasite’ but how much more astute was Betty’s judgement . . .

Romsey Road Police Station, Winchester – 7.30 p.m.

‘You’re going to have to let me talk to Miss Kingsley,’ said Gareth Maddocks, dropping wearily into a chair. ‘Seriously, sir, bar sitting by Miss
Harris’s phone and waiting for the damn thing to ring, I can’t see how we’re going to find out where her parents live.’

‘Did you try Sir Anthony again?’

Maddocks nodded. ‘He just keeps bleating Wiltshire at us. All this guff he gave you about what a relief it was when Leo took up with a nice girl like Meg amounts to sweet FA.
The only thing she had going for her, as far as I can make out, was that she wasn’t Jane Kingsley. The impression I get is that if Leo had turned up with some old slag from the local pub and
announced his intention of marrying
her
, the Walladers would have jumped for joy.’

‘Can’t say I blame them,’ said the Superintendent dryly. ‘I wouldn’t want Adam Kingsley for an in-law either.’

‘Well, for what it’s worth, his daughter sounds fairly reasonable. She left a message on the answerphone. Nice voice, sense of humour, says she doesn’t bear any
grudges and wanted Meg to phone her.’

Frank raised an eyebrow. ‘Have you got it with you?’

The DI reached into his pocket and took out a tape-cassette. ‘We made copies at the Hammersmith nick, then took the original back to the flat.’ He put it on the desk in
front of him. ‘Hers is the last message. I’ve listened to it several times now and I’m inclined to agree with Fraser that she has no idea Leo and Meg are dead.’