The Malcontenta (37 page)

Laura was becoming more and more agitated, as if this was the one thing she had been unable to come to terms with.

‘A few days before she died, I spoke to her after I caught that man Brock questioning her. I wanted to know what he had been asking her. She became difficult, secretive, refused to discuss it with me. As we talked I suddenly noticed how her complexion had changed. She looked radiant and I thought, she
is
pregnant. It obsessed me, blotting everything else out, and I just had to know. If it wasn’t Geoffrey’s, whose was it? I asked her - she was in the middle of saying something about Brock, but I interrupted her and said, “Are you pregnant? Who’s the father?” ‘

Laura paused, and Kathy could see that she was trembling.

‘What did she answer?’

‘She told me to mind my own business. I can see her now. Her face was flushed, her chin up - she was angry with me. She said something about me …’

‘What?’

Laura Beamish-Newell’s eyes dropped to the floor. She shuddered and forced the words out. ‘That I must leave her and Geoffrey alone now, because I only destroyed things. She said she wouldn’t be destroyed as Alex Petrou had been.’

‘She accused you of killing him?’

‘I wasn’t sure if that was what she was saying. I didn’t understand. I tried to tell her he had been an evil man, and that for Geoffrey’s sake she must say no more about him. She burst into tears and ran out of my office.’

She stared wildly at Kathy. ‘I never told Stephen! When he killed her, he had no idea that she might be carrying a child. You must believe that!’

‘Laura,’ Kathy spoke intently, ‘listen to me. Stephen believes it was you who killed Petrou and Rose, and you believe it was him. You have each been trying to protect the other, just as Geoffrey has been trying to protect you both.’

Laura looked blankly at her. ‘No,’ she protested, ‘that’s not true. I don’t want to hear any more. I’m so tired. You must leave now. I beg you, give me ten minutes before you come back.’ She pulled back the sleeve of her cardigan and placed the needle against the inside of her forearm.

‘It’s true, Laura. Chief Inspector Brock and I interviewed Stephen just now. Brock is still with him. There’s no doubt in our minds that he genuinely believes you were responsible for both deaths.’

Laura frowned, confused. ‘That isn’t possible … Who …?’

Kathy hesitated. ‘We need your help. Please, you must put that away and come back to the house with me.’

‘I think you’re just saying this,’ Laura said, but she was either too tired or too stubborn to think it all through again. Her protest was half-hearted, and when she saw the look on Kathy’s face her determination crumpled and her arms fell to her sides. Kathy stepped forward and took the syringe and its box from her fingers and packed them safely away.

‘Come on,’ she said. She reached out, took Laura’s arm and in guided her towards the stairs. They made their way slowly back up through the temple.

As they reached the doors Laura stopped and said to Kathy, ‘Was it Stephen who was with Petrou that afternoon when I first tried the door to the gym?’

‘What’s his blood group, Laura?’ Kathy asked.

Laura looked puzzled. ‘It’s O.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, it wasn’t him. Whoever it was, was AB.’

They didn’t speak as they picked their way in the pitch darkness towards the house. Someone had switched off the basement corridor light and locked the entry door, so Laura used her master key. They reached the Director’s office and opened the door. Beamish-Newell looked up and panic crossed his face as he saw his wife. ‘Oh God!’ he whispered, and tears welled up in his eyes. ‘My dear, I’m so sorry … so sorry.’

‘It’s all right, Stephen. It really is,’ she said, and went round the desk and put an arm round his shoulders. ‘I think it’s going to be all right.’

After composing herself, Laura told them all how she had found her brother the evening Petrou died and had persuaded him to help her. They had lifted Petrou from the exercise machine and hidden him temporarily in a corner of the gym under a pile of mats. Later, in the early hours of the morning, they had returned to the basement and carried him out to a wheelbarrow which Geoffrey used to move him to the temple. They took with them the hood and whip which they had found in the gym, as well as some rope which Geoffrey had brought. At the temple they took off Petrou’s tracksuit and shoes before hanging his body as best they could.

‘Why the temple, Laura?’ Kathy asked.

She shrugged. ‘I wanted to hide the time and the place where he died to confuse things. Also, I wanted to make it look like suicide or some kind of bizarre accident. Afterwards, when you wouldn’t believe that, I wished we’d just driven his body miles away and dumped it somewhere.’

Kathy thought of the small white marble slab in the temple, and how odd Laura’s choice had been, as if she had been gathering together her husband’s sacrifices.

‘Well, you certainly did confuse things. And again the next morning.’

‘Yes, we hadn’t anticipated Stephen wanting to change Petrou’s clothing. Geoffrey put it down to his sense of guilt. So did I.’

‘Didn’t Geoffrey discuss it with you?’ Kathy asked Beamish-Newell. ‘Talk about what had happened?’

He shook his head. ‘It was as if we were acting out parts, trying to do and say what an innocent person would do and say. After that, Geoffrey seemed to avoid any contact with me.’

‘He was frightened of you,’ Laura said. ‘He was terrified by what he thought you had done.’

‘What about the rope, Laura? Did Geoffrey have some left over after he’d strung Petrou up?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t remember that. I carried the torch and tried to do what I could to help. It was dreadful, so cold, and the body was so awkward. Rigor had set in while it had been lying on the floor of the gym, and when we eventually got it into place it looked so twisted and wrong. I just hoped that its weight would straighten it by morning.’

She fell silent, head bowed.

Kathy looked across at Brock and murmured, ‘I could do with some of Ben Bromley’s strong black Italian coffee.’

Brock nodded. ‘Good idea. In fact, I think we could do with Mr Bromley in person.’

Ben Bromley woke with a start, the telephone burbling in his ear. He had insisted that it go on his wife’s side since, in a household with five women, he reckoned the chances of a call being for him were infinitesimal. He heard his wife mutter groggily that it was for him.

‘What’s the effing time, for God’s sake?’ he grumbled, but she had rolled over and fallen asleep again.

‘Hello?’ he said cautiously.

‘Ben, it’s Stephen here. Sorry to wake you at this hour.’

‘Stephen? What time is it?’

‘Just after two.’

‘What! What on earth is the matter?’

‘I’m sorry, but we have a bit of an emergency here.’

Bromley was waking up fast now. There was something odd about Stephen’s voice, remote and expressionless. What the hell was going on?

‘What sort of emergency?’

‘I can’t really talk about it over the phone, Ben. We need you here right away. Could you do that? Could you come to your office, please?’

‘It’s not another break-in, is it, Stephen? If that bastard’s been into my bloody computer again -’

‘Please, Ben. If you would just come over right away.’

Bromley put the light on and groped around for some clothes. The time-switch of the central heating was off, and it was damn cold. He swore and woke his wife.

‘There’s some stuffing crisis at the clinic,’ he said. ‘I have to go.’

‘Oh Ben! Not another murder?’

‘How the fuck would I know?’ he muttered, leaving her to switch out the light.

It was a twenty-minute drive to the clinic, and he pulled up at the foot of the front steps. He could see a dim light in the entrance hall, and lights in the windows of both his own office and the Director’s. He raced up the stairs, made his way along the corridor, and opened his office door.

He was startled to find Brock, alone, sitting behind his desk in his executive swivel chair, drinking a cup of his best coffee. Before he could sort through the expletives forming in his mind, Brock said, ‘Ah, come in, Ben, come in. I hope you don’t mind me taking advantage of your hospitality, but under the circumstances … Sit down and have a cup of coffee.’

‘What circumstances?’ Bromley didn’t move.

‘Stephen and Laura are just tying up a few loose ends with Sergeant Kolla.’

‘Sergeant Kolla?’ Bromley repeated dumbly.

‘You remember her from the first investigation of Alex Petrou’s murder? I expect you know that I’m also with the police - the Metropolitan Police, Detective Chief Inspector.’ Brock showed him his warrant card.

‘What’s happened? Why are you here?’

‘We should probably wait until they can join us. Why don’t you sit down and have a cup of coffee? Not much fun being woken up like that in the middle of the night.’

Looking slightly disoriented, Bromley took the visitor’s seat Brock indicated, and accepted a cup of black coffee.

‘I don’t know where you keep the milk,’ Brock smiled.

‘Jay brings it for me fresh each day,’ he replied dumbly.

Brock nodded, sat back and sipped appreciatively at his cup. ‘Very nice, Ben. In fact the whole office is very nice. A centre of calm. I imagine you can really
think
in an office like this, unlike mine, which is always chaotic. I’d love to know how to get my desk as clean as this at the end of the day. I tell people that the only ones who can keep a clear desk are those who deal with simple problems, but I know I’m kidding myself. It requires discipline, I suppose. A tidy mind.’

‘What exactly are we waiting for?’ Bromley interjected.

‘They shouldn’t be too long. Please be patient.’ Brock smiled sympathetically. He continued to look appraisingly around the room, as if filling in time, and his eyes fixed on Bromley’s computer. ‘And a systematic mind. Dealing with information in a systematic way.’

Bromley saw where he was looking and his face darkened with suspicion. ‘Yes, well,’ he said sarcastically, ‘you’d know all about our computer system, wouldn’t you?’

Brock beamed. ‘That was embarrassing, Ben. I needed some information and I couldn’t see how else to get it.’

‘You could have tried asking.’

‘True. That’s probably what I should have done. But it concerned those special guests of yours - the Friends -what some of the patients call the “goats”. I thought you might feel too protective towards them to want to help me.’

Bromley said nothing.

‘Although I did get the impression that, even though you look after them, and bow and scrape when it’s necessary, you don’t really like them. Am I right?’

‘Bow and scrape!’ Bromley said indignantly.

‘Well, it’s a service industry, isn’t it? But they’re a toffee-nosed lot, aren’t they, your Friends? Public schoolboys to a man. Privileged southerners who’d only willingly travel north of Watford Gap if there was some salmon or grouse in the offing.’

‘Makes no difference to me, squire,’ Bromley said coolly. ‘I just get on with my job. You’d know more about that sort of thing, being a Cambridge man yourself. Dr Beamish-Newell tells me you’re both
Cambridge men:

‘Yes,’ Brock nodded, ignoring the veiled contempt. ‘I went up from grammar school. I don’t know what it’s like now, but there were plenty of upper-class twits around then. I remember going into a pub one night, the Blue Boar it was, and two chinless wonders were ranting away at the bar. “I say,” one said, “I knocked a chappie off his bike with my sports car just now. A black man. He put out his hand to turn right, but it was dark, so of course I didn’t see it. Those chappies should be made to wear white gloves.” I swear that’s true, his exact words.’

But Bromley wasn’t buying any of it. ‘Is that a fact, David?’ he said, unimpressed. ‘It’s hard to credit. But I suppose we didn’t get too many viscounts at Burnley Tech, so I wouldn’t really know. I’ll leave that sort of thing to you and Dr Beamish-Newell.’

The sarcasm was like water off a duck’s back to Brock. ‘Now there’s another thing,’ he went on, ‘a name like that. What kind of person would give themselves an absurd double-barrelled handle like that? Anyone with a pretentious name like that wouldn’t survive five minutes at Burnley Tech, would they, Ben? And yet it seems to impress people down here.’

Bromley snorted and gave a crooked little grin. Before he could stop he found himself reciting the limerick he’d spent idle moments perfecting:

‘Said a brilliant young doctor from Poole,
Whose name was simply Steve Newell,
To get where the cream is,
I’d better add Beamish,
And make them all eat Squeamish-Gruel.’

Brock smiled appreciatively. ‘Still, despite the absence of viscounts in your formative years, you seem to have done very well. You’ve got a nice detached house near Redhill, I understand, and a charming family. Four daughters, is that right?’

Bromley looked suspiciously at Brock. He didn’t remember telling him that.

‘Are they at the pony stage? You’ll be up to your armpits in manure with four of them. They’ll be demanding a paddock and stables of their own. Your whole life will be spent mucking out. Or does your wife do that? She doesn’t work, does she? Paid work, I mean - she’ll have her hands full with the girls and the ponies.’

Bromley started to tell Brock to mind his own business, but the conversation took an abrupt turn.

‘What I’d like to know, Ben, is what you really thought of Alex Petrou. I’ve been having difficulty understanding what he was like. To begin with, people seemed to be telling me that he was charming and attractive, but then, after a while, I got another, darker side. How did you see him?’

Bromley squinted closely at the figure across the desk -
his
side of the desk - to see if this was on the level. Then he said carefully, ‘He was unusual. Not the type we usually get. Smoother, a bit of an operator. Good with the patients. He found it easy to establish a rapport with people. Interested in their gossip.’

‘Like a woman? You implied to Sergeant Kolla that there was something odd about his sexuality - that he was bisexual.’