Murder at the Mill

by M. B. Shaw

  Packing up her things, she logged out, grabbed her coat and headed for the nearest taxi rank.

  * * *

  Igor Gardievski had just hung up on a difficult call to one of his investors in Moscow when his secretary bustled in.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr G,’ the girl whined, in the nasal Birmingham accent that Igor somehow hadn’t noticed when he interviewed her but that now grated on him daily, like a squirt of lemon juice in the eyes, ‘but there’s a lady outside who’s refusing to leave the premises until she talks to you. I’ve told her your agenda’s full and she needs to make an appointment, but she’s not budging. Should I ask security to get rid of her?’

  ‘Is she a reporter?’ Igor scowled.

  ‘I don’t think so. She didn’t say so.’

  ‘Well, who is she?’

  ‘Her name’s Iris Grey. Says she’s an artist.’

  ‘An artist?’ Igor’s scowl deepened. ‘What business can an artist have with me?’

  ‘I asked her what she wants to see you about, but all she said was it’s a “private matter”.’

  Igor gave an irritated grunt. In Russia, you could eject anyone you wanted from your own offices with no questions asked: artists, beggars, disgruntled investors, ex-lovers. Here, you could hire security, but if any of them actually laid a finger on someone, especially a woman, you risked lawsuits at dawn.

  ‘Show her in,’ he growled.

  ‘Are you sure?’ the secretary asked. ‘Because I could—’

  ‘I just said so, didn’t I?’ snapped Igor. ‘Tell her she’s got five minutes. And warn her in advance I’m not buying any damn art.’

  As soon as Iris walked in, however, Igor’s entire manner changed. This particular ‘artist’ was a strikingly good-looking woman, and very much his type. Igor liked his women tiny and breakable. His wife, Irina, had been that way once, before the children and middle age had thickened her waist into that of a babushka doll.

  ‘Ms Grey.’ He gave Iris his most ingratiating smile. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met. To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  His English is a lot better than Vasile Gretski’s, thought Iris. She’d pictured him as a Muscovite thug in the Gretski mould, when in fact he was anything but.

  ‘I’m a friend of Dom Wetherby’s.’ Iris waited for him to flinch, but there was no discernible reaction. Even when she dived directly into questions about his relationship with Dom and the soured Hazelford housing deal, he betrayed not the slightest emotion. Instead, he waited patiently for her to finish and then said simply, ‘I was shocked when I heard about Dom. Very shocked.’

  Stretching out his long legs in front of him on the expensive leather sofa where both he and Iris were sitting, he seemed utterly at ease.

  He’s an attractive man, Iris thought, more handsome in person than in the pictures she’d seen online. There was a certain languid grace about him, a confidence of manner that oddly reminded her of Dom.

  ‘Murder is a shocking thing, after all,’ he went on, as unperturbed as if they were talking about the weather. ‘And yet on the other hand I was not entirely surprised. It’s no secret that Dom Wetherby and I were not friends. But many, many people had an issue with him.’

  Iris’s eyes narrowed. This comment echoed what Vasile Gretski and others had told her. It was uncanny how often, when she asked somebody about their own enmity with Dom, they would rush to draw attention to everybody else’s.

  ‘What was your issue, Mr Gardievski?’

  ‘Igor, please. He owed me money,’ he answered, matter-of-factly. ‘And I found him to be dishonest in our business dealings.’

  ‘Dishonest enough for you to want him dead?’

  Igor’s smile didn’t waver. ‘For me personally? No. But others may have wished that. Certainly. The man was dishonest in business and he was dishonest at the card table, which many consider to be worse. When I heard he was dead, I supposed that somebody, one of the many people he cheated, must have had enough and snapped.’

  ‘Dom’s murder was carefully orchestrated,’ said Iris. ‘Both in its execution and afterwards. The killer left almost no physical evidence. This wasn’t a case of somebody “snapping”, Mr Gardievski.’

  Igor held out his arms in an innocent, ‘if you say so’ gesture.

  ‘I imagine this must be painful for you, Ms Grey,’ he said. ‘You mentioned earlier that the two of you were friends. But I fear that perhaps you and I saw different sides of Dom Wetherby.’

  ‘We weren’t close,’ Iris clarified. ‘His wife had commissioned me to paint his portrait. We were halfway through when he died.’

  Igor leaned forward, looking at Iris more closely. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, belatedly putting the pieces together. ‘Didn’t I read about you in the newspaper? Aren’t you the one whose husband was arrested? For Dom’s murder?’

  ‘Yes,’ Iris admitted grudgingly. ‘Except that he’s my estranged husband, and he didn’t do it. He’s been released.’

  ‘But you’re still trying to help him?’ Gardievski observed. ‘How noble of you.’

  Iris couldn’t tell if he was angry or amused. Or perhaps he was just pleased to have manoeuvred her onto the back foot.

  She was finding it altogether harder than she’d thought to get a handle on the Russian. He was certainly slick, and she imagined him to be not entirely trustworthy, but at the same time he appeared a long way removed from the brutal enforcer she’d expected, or perhaps hoped for.

  ‘You mentioned Ariadne commissioned you,’ he said. ‘How is she doing? I always thought she was a good woman, a good wife to Dom. Better than he deserved, that’s for sure.’

  ‘She’s doing well,’ said Iris, cautiously. ‘As far as I can tell.’

  ‘And the boy, Lorcan. I imagine his father’s death must have been especially hard for him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Iris agreed. ‘It’s hard to explain something like that to a child, particularly one with Lorcan’s problems.’

  The two of them sat in silence for a moment, mentally sizing one another up. It’s like playing a game of chess, thought Iris. It occurred to her that Russians were supposed to be awfully good at chess.

  ‘So you and Dom were social friends,’ she said eventually. ‘It wasn’t only a business relationship. You knew his family.’

  ‘We played poker together,’ Igor confirmed. ‘Mostly we played here, in Oxford. But I also visited Dom’s house once or twice, around the time we were pitching the Hazelford development.’

  ‘What happened with that?’ asked Iris, pleased to have moved the subject on from Ian. ‘I mean, I know Dom opposed it. The new houses would have spoiled his view from the Mill.’

  Igor laughed loudly. ‘Spoiled his view? I can assure you, Ms Grey, Dom Wetherby couldn’t have cared less about his “view”, or protecting the environment, or any of that crap he spouted to the parish council. The whole thing was about money.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Wetherby was a greedy bastard,’ Igor said simply. ‘That’s the bottom line. We’d agreed to cut him in from the beginning – ten per cent of the profits from the Hazelford Meadows development, if he helped us get it through planning. But at the eleventh hour he decided he wanted more. Twenty per cent, which is a preposterous figure, well outside industry norms.’

  ‘You’re saying you offered him a bribe?’ asked Iris.

  ‘Yes. And he took it, with both hands! Don’t look so shocked, Ms Grey.’ Igor smiled. ‘This is the way the real-estate business functions. Although we prefer the word “incentive” here at Spire. But in any event, in the end there was no incentive payment made to Wetherby, because I told him in no uncertain terms that twenty per cent was a non-starter. He was furious. I think he needed to raise money very badly at that time.’

  ‘Why?’ Iris asked.

  Igor shrugged. ‘I don’t know. There were various rumours swirling around. Some mistress he had to pay off.’

  Iris’s mind immediately flew to Rachel Truebridge. Would she really
have asked Dom for money?

  ‘Personally, I think it’s more likely his poker debts had got out of hand,’ said Igor. ‘He owed me six figures, and I know for a fact I wasn’t the only one. In any case, he asked for more on the Hazelford deal, I told him no, and he voted down the development. That was it.’

  ‘You must have lost a lot of money,’ Iris observed.

  ‘Yes,’ Igor admitted.

  Was it Iris’s imagination or was his smile starting to look just a little more forced?

  ‘That can’t have made you happy.’

  ‘No. It didn’t,’ he said. ‘I set my lawyers on Wetherby for the unpaid poker debts. They sent him a bunch of letters, none of which he responded to. After that we tried to get a lien on his house.’

  ‘Did you succeed?’ Iris was curious. This was the first she’d heard that Mill House itself might have been under threat. She wondered whether Ariadne had known, or whether Dom had kept his legal troubles a secret, like so much else.

  ‘Not so far. We’re still trying,’ said Igor. ‘I’m pursuing Dom’s estate at the moment, via a Mr James Smythe. Do you know him?’

  Smythe. Iris remembered him vaguely. He was the lawyer Billy had assaulted at Dom’s wake. The one who was helping Marcus and Ariadne challenge Billy’s entitlements under his father’s will. Cant had wanted Smythe to press charges, but the lawyer had refused, no doubt wanting to protect his lucrative relationship with Billy’s mother.

  ‘Look, Ms Grey,’ Igor concluded, ‘I think it’s a noble thing you’re doing, trying to clear your husband’s name.’

  ‘I’m trying to find out what happened to Dom,’ Iris clarified. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘You understand that there are some, myself included, who might argue Dom Wetherby deserved his fate?’

  ‘No one should get away with murder, Mr Gardievski,’ Iris said seriously.

  ‘I agree,’ said Igor. ‘But I would caution you to beware of lazy stereotypes. Not all of us Russians are Putin’s thugs,’ he added, his tone warmer than his words suggested. ‘Yes, I had a grievance against Dom, and yes, I disliked him. Not at first. But I came to dislike him, as I suspect you would have, had he lived. I didn’t kill him, though, or pay anyone else to do so. I have nothing to hide.’

  Iris left Spire Properties’ offices thinking about Igor Gardievski’s parting words. She strongly suspected that the smooth-talking Russian, with his perfect English and easy smiles, had plenty to hide. But at the same time, she had no reason to believe he was behind Dom’s murder. Other than her deep need to believe that Ian didn’t do it, she had not a shred of evidence.

  There was something else, though, something swirling in her subconscious, trying to float its way up to the surface but not quite making it.

  The picture she’d looked at earlier in the Bodleian.

  Lorcan. Ariadne. Dom. All in front of the church, with the crowd of villagers.

  Iris thought about Lorcan and his terror of ghosts. His insistence that it was a ‘ghost’ that killed his daddy. But the ghost of what?

  Of Christmases past?

  Of Dom’s past?

  Something that had returned to haunt him? Something he’d thought was dead and buried?

  What had Igor said just now?

  ‘There were various rumours swirling around. Some mistress he had to pay off.’

  All at once Jenna Wetherby’s words came back to Iris. ‘There were rumours about plagiarism, hidden things in his father’s past.’

  If that were true, it would be a scandal, a secret Dom would want to keep hidden at all costs. But was it true? And where would Rachel have heard about it? Surely it would have to have been here, in Oxford. Where Dom wrote the first Grimshaw book. Where everything started.

  Her trip to Gardievski may have been a dead end, but Oxford itself had set Iris’s mind racing. Where better than here to hunt for Dom Wetherby’s ghosts?

  Iris hailed a cab.

  ‘Christ Church College, please. Main gate.’

  * * *

  As a university member, Iris was free to wander around any Oxford college, including the parts that were closed to tourists or off limits to the general public. Christ Church was Oxford’s largest, and some felt grandest, college, famous for Great Tom, the bell in Tom Tower on St Aldate’s, as iconic an image of the university as any and a backdrop for countless movies from Brideshead Revisited to Harry Potter.

  Iris didn’t know it well, however. Ian had been at Balliol, and her own undergraduate life had revolved exclusively around St Hilda’s, Balliol, the union and the library. Graham once told her that Dom and Marcus used to share rooms in Peck, and Iris was about to head there just to walk through the quad and get a feel for it when a name on the porter’s lodge board caught her eye.

  ‘Professor Nevers.’ She cornered one of the undergrads milling around. ‘That isn’t William Nevers, is it? The English don?’

  The girl nodded. ‘Prof. Nevers is a legend. He’s been here longer than the gargoyles.’

  ‘Is he still teaching?’ Iris asked, trying to fathom how old this man must be, if he’d taught Dom and Graham’s brother.

  ‘He’s ninety-eight.’ The girl grinned. ‘There’s an active book running on whether he’ll make his century. But yes, he still takes tutorials, and he’s sharp as a tack apparently.’

  Excited, Iris hurried to the staircase leading to the professor’s rooms, a large suite overlooking Christ Church Meadows and the river. To be able to talk to Dom’s old professor, the man who knew him back when he wrote the very first Grimshaw book! It was more than Iris had hoped for. When she got to Professor Nevers’ rooms, however, the heavy wooden outer door was locked, and the old-fashioned sign outside it, next to the professor’s name, had been switched to ‘Out’.

  ‘If you’re looking for Prof. Nevers, ’e’s gone to his daughter’s in Burford for the weekend,’ an apple-cheeked scout, or college cleaner, informed Iris helpfully in a broad Oxfordshire accent. ‘Won’t be back till Monday now, my lovely.’

  Iris bit back her disappointment.

  Oh well. It wouldn’t kill her to stay in town for the weekend. There was no way she was going to miss out on the chance to talk with Dom’s old professor. While she was waiting, she could visit her favourite art supply store in Summertown and go to the Identities exhibition at the Sarah Wiseman Gallery. She might even manage to unearth some other leads relating to Dom’s Oxford days, although for the moment she couldn’t think where to start.

  Later, back at St Hilda’s, Iris checked her messages. There were two from Ian, ‘just checking in’. Iris tried not to be irritated. Was he checking in on her or on whether she’d made any progress identifying Dom Wetherby’s real killer? She told herself it was normal for Ian to be anxious, with the cloud of public suspicion still hanging over him, and DI Cant doing everything he could to try to connect him to the murder. Of course clearing his name would be his priority. Even so, it felt strange and irksome to be being hounded for progress reports by the man whose divorce lawyer was still trying to rob her blind.

  After Ian’s messages there was a long voicemail from Graham, telling her how much he missed her and how cold and lonely London was without her.

  ‘I hope you’re being careful, Iris,’ he ended. ‘I know you don’t want to believe your ex is involved in any of this, but Ian’s out of custody now, and I know I’m not the only one who’s worried about what he might do. Call if you need me, night or day. And for God’s sake, lock your doors.’

  Part of Iris wanted to laugh. Lock your doors? Against Ian?

  But another part of her felt disconcerted. She knew Ian was innocent. But somebody had killed Dom. If she was getting closer to finding that somebody, or to unearthing secrets that they or other, powerful people wanted to stay buried … perhaps she was in danger.

  Standing alone in her tiny college room, Iris felt the hairs on her forearms stand on end. As if Lorcan Wetherby’s murderous ghost was passing over her grave.

  Chapter T
wenty-three

  Professor Nevers’ rooms reminded Iris strongly of Dumbledore’s study. There was an age-worn high wooden schoolmaster’s desk complete with a working inkwell and fountain pen, a long refectory table sporting an antique Victorian globe, various stuffed animals in glass cases and endless piles of books and papers, all in various stages of disarray to the naked eye but no doubt organised according to some precise and peculiar pattern known only to the professor himself. In the corner, a day-bed strewn with dusty kilim cushions and animal hides looked suspiciously as if the professor might have spent the night on it.

  The old man assured her that this wasn’t the case, however. ‘June drove me in from Burford this morning,’ William Nevers informed Iris in the wheezy, high-pitched whisper that passed for a voice in his tenth decade. ‘She’s a good girl, June. Well, I shouldn’t say “girl”, I suppose. She’s seventy-three now, if you can believe it.’ He smiled, a broad, gummy affair that lit up his whole face and made Iris want to paint him immediately. ‘Funny to think of one’s children being that sort of age. Do you have children, Miss Grey?’

  ‘Er, no,’ said Iris, feeling stupidly flustered. ‘No, I don’t.’

  For years she’d dreaded that question. Or rather, she’d dreaded her answer, dreaded the doom-laden sound of the word ‘no’ on her own lips. But recently she found she’d begun not to care, or at least not to care as much. Leaving Ian, and perhaps finding Graham, had given her a new sense of purpose and possibility, outside of the concept of motherhood.

  ‘Never wanted them, or couldn’t have them?’ the professor asked in his clipped upper-class voice, pushing the nail deeper into Iris’s side with the refreshing bluntness that was the prerogative of the very old and very young.

  ‘Couldn’t have them,’ Iris answered, managing a smile.

  ‘Pity,’ said the professor.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Iris, thinking how much he reminded her of a 1950s television announcer.

  Changing the subject, she asked, ‘Professor Nevers, would it be all right if I asked you a couple of questions about a former pupil of yours? Dominic Wetherby?’