CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I parked my van in Verbena’s courtyard, right next to her Porsche. The Range Rover was parked there too, which meant she was certainly at home. The kitchen door was locked; perhaps, post-robbery, she had become more security conscious.
I crossed the courtyard to her studio.
She was sitting at a drawing board, pencil in hand, surrounded by drawings and swatches of furnishing fabrics. ‘Shades of grey, eh?’ I asked, surveying the swatches as she looked up, startled. ‘That’s a bit last year, isn’t it?’
‘What do you want?’ she demanded, suddenly pale.
‘You and I need to talk,’ I set my bum down on a swivelling stool on the other side of her desk and perched there, arms folded.
‘We have nothing to talk about.’
‘Yes we do,’ I said, swivelling slightly. ‘You accused me of theft.’
She blushed to the roots of her hair. ‘I never accused you!’
‘You sent the police round to me.’
‘I didn’t send them.’ Her schoolgirl voice was petulant. ‘I simply said you were the last person to go up into the bedroom. It was obvious that they should want to interview you.’
‘But they told me you weren’t certain when the theft had taken place. So you can’t be sure I was the last person, can you?’
She closed her eyes, holding up the palm of her hand as if mentally pushing me away. ‘Look, I never accused you. Now, please leave!’
‘Then why did you sack me?’
She didn’t answer. She began doodling on the paper in front of her, her eyes downcast, her black mascara lashes spidery against her cheeks. For a moment I watched her pencil making circles.
‘I had been working for you for two years,’ I reminded her. ‘I think I have a right to know.’
The pressure on the pencil increased, the circles growing blacker. I waited. Suddenly the point broke, Verbena gave a furious sigh and threw the pencil across the room. ‘God, this is so humiliating!’ She put her head in her hands, slender fingers lacing through her blonde curls.
‘Just tell me, Verbena!’
‘It’s none of your business,’ she cried fiercely, glaring up at me.
‘Certainly it is. In case you’ve forgotten, Nick was murdered. I found his body. And if I ring the police now, and tell them that I’ve remembered seeing you coming out of his place shortly before the murder, they are going to wonder why, after the appeals they put out in the media for anyone who knew him to come forward, you kept silent.’
It had only been a hunch really, that Verbena had been to visit Nick, that she wasn’t using the alley as a shortcut, like everyone else. But the look of horror frozen on her face as she slowly gazed at me confirmed that I was right.
‘Oh, God!’ she moaned.
‘Just tell me, Verbena,’ I repeated, this time more gently. When she didn’t speak, I prompted her. ‘Was it something to do with the earrings?’
Her blue eyes filled with tears. ‘They were never stolen,’ she admitted in a tiny voice. ‘I thought they were, I really did! And the cash was taken. I put in a claim on the insurance but the company wouldn’t pay out because there’d been no break-in. I’d left the door unlocked so they said it was down to my own negligence.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, they were right about that, I suppose, but they made me feel as if I’d made the whole thing up just to claim the insurance money.’
‘Were the earrings very valuable, then?’
‘Neil had them made especially for me. They were insured for fifteen grand.’
She hesitated. ‘And then, a few days later, more cash went missing. And this time I knew no one had been in the house, except’ − she stared fixedly down at her hands, her slender fingers knotted together − ‘except the girls.’
‘Your daughters?’
She nodded, her head hung low. ‘Then the earrings mysteriously reappeared in the dish they had been taken from. Amelia tried to claim that she’d only borrowed them to wear to a party, that she’d even asked my permission. But I knew she’d taken them, and then got scared when I called in the police and the insurers.’
‘And the money?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that was just spite.’ She gnawed at her lower lip. ‘Apparently, their father encourages the girls to steal from me. He tells them the money is really his and they’re doing him a favour.’ She returned her gaze to my face. ‘Now you’re wondering why I sacked you.’
I waited.
‘God, Juno, it was all so embarrassing!’ she burst out. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of having to admit to you what had really happened.’
‘But you didn’t have to,’ I protested. ‘I’d have accepted that you’d found your earrings, that they weren’t stolen after all. Anyone can make a mistake.’
She eyed me dubiously. ‘What about the money?’
‘Well, it wouldn’t surprise me if you did get cash stolen,’ I told her frankly. ‘You will leave your wallet lying around …’ I shook my head. ‘I just find it incredible that you’d rather sack me than tell me the truth.’ Actually, I did understand. The fear of humiliation, the avoidance of embarrassment, is a far stronger force than most of us are prepared to admit.
Verbena’s eyes swam with tears again. She heaved a truly tragic sigh. ‘I felt so ashamed, about the girls …’
I’d been trying hard not to feel sorry for her, but now I did. She wiped her eyes with a tissue, making black smudges beneath her lower lashes. ‘I don’t care about the bloody earrings … or the money. It’s the fact that they were prepared to steal from me to please their father … The truth is, not even my own children like me …’ She blew her nose and subsided into sniffling sobs.
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ I told her gently. It was a lie. I’d never met her daughters and I wasn’t sure at all. They were always at school when I came to clean. I only knew the kind of mess they left lying around. But it must be a horrible thing not to be able to trust your own kids.
‘I didn’t want to wear the earrings again,’ she sniffed. ‘I couldn’t bear the sight of them. I wanted to sell them, but I didn’t want anyone to know. I was frightened Neil might find out.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘They’d been made for a famous rock star to give to his dolly chick. Their provenance was more interesting than the earrings themselves. I knew if I put them on the open market they’d arouse a lot of interest, that he’d find out …’
‘But I don’t understand. Why did it matter if he found out you were selling them? You’re divorced, the earrings were yours.’
‘Well, that’s just it …’ she said awkwardly. ‘The divorce was so bloody … In the turmoil, somehow … when everything was being declared for the settlement – and I mean, everything − they got missed out. I realised Neil had forgotten them.’ She gave a nervous giggle like a schoolgirl caught cheating in an exam. ‘He’d bought me so much jewellery over the years. He liked to make extravagant gestures, especially public ones …’
‘So he forgot about these earrings and you didn’t want to remind him.’
‘Exactly. I needed someone to sell them for me, someone who’d be discreet …’
‘So you went to Nick?’ I finished for her.
She nodded. ‘I knew what he was like, that I wouldn’t get the price from him that I’d get from a jeweller. He sold them privately. I got less than half their value but I didn’t care.’ She hunched a shoulder. ‘At least I was rid of the things.’
‘Did you kill him?’
She gazed at me, blue eyes wide with shock. ‘Of course not! Why would I?’
‘So why didn’t you tell the police that you’d been in contact with him?’ I asked. ‘You weren’t doing anything illegal, if the earrings were yours to sell.’
She hesitated, her hands fidgeting with a tissue. ‘I didn’t want the police to take my fingerprints …’
‘Well, what if they did? They can only match up prints they already have on file …’
I stopped. Verbena’s whol
e body was rigid, her mouth set in a line.
‘It was when I was very young,’ she muttered. ‘I was at a club in London. The police raided it for drugs. They arrested everyone. We all had our fingerprints taken. I got off with a fine.’
‘So you didn’t want the police to know that you were a teenage drugs fiend?’ I mocked her gently.
‘I didn’t want the girls to find out!’ she cried, suddenly passionate. ‘You don’t know what they’re like. They’d be vile if … And I didn’t want the whole of bloody Ashburton to know,’ she added defiantly. ‘Things get around.’
I wasn’t sure she’d told me the truth, or at least, that she’d told me all of it. Supposing the little earring deal had gone wrong, supposing she and Nick had quarrelled?
‘You don’t happen to know who bought the earrings,’ I asked her, ‘who Nick sold them to?’
She gave an impatient shrug of her shoulders. ‘I kept out of it. I think it was somebody foreign.’
‘I see. Thank you.’
She began chewing her lip anxiously. ‘Are you going to tell the police that I visited Nick?’
‘Not if you promise me that you will.’
She hesitated and then nodded reluctantly.
As I drove back down the hill, I wondered whether, armed with that heavy candlestick, she could have delivered the crushing blow that had killed Nick. She was only a slender creature. But fuelled with rage, determined to protect her reputation at all costs, I wasn’t convinced that she couldn’t.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Whatever my thoughts about Verbena Clarke, I had promised myself that the following day I was going to put in some much needed work on the shop. Ricky and Morris had come in to lend a hand with the decorating, but frankly they were more of a hindrance than a help. Morris was meticulous but deadly slow and Ricky’s work was so cavalier and slapdash that the only task he could be trusted with was rubbing down the woodwork. And they kept arguing with me about colour. I’d painted the walls a soft white to make the shop look lighter. Morris suggested that it needed a little more warmth and Ricky said it looked like a bleeding hospital mortuary and why didn’t I slap some colour on the walls? Still, having them around was more fun than working on my own.
In the absence of Paul, I’d asked Adam to come in to help me shift the heavy bookcases back against the walls, and I’d cleaned the inside of the windows, removed all the dust and dead flies from the windowsills, taken down the wire mesh grilling and washed the exterior paintwork. The outside really needed a new paint job and a freshly painted sign over the door, but I didn’t have the cash to pay for a professional signwriter. It was going to have to wait.
Meantime, I’d come in to paint the ceiling. There was a recurring stain right in the middle, a rusty brown cloud, and no matter how many times I dabbed at it with a roller, it kept on bleeding through.
As soon as I’d prised the lid off the paint tin with a screwdriver, I realised I wasn’t going to get another coat out of it. Reluctantly, I stripped off the paint-freckled overalls I’d just put on, grabbed my bag and headed for Church’s, hoping they hadn’t just run out of the last tin of brilliant white. Church’s Ironmonger’s is set in a medieval building that used to be the Mermaid Inn. It’s a low-ceilinged, mind-your-head, sort of place. But when I got there the door was closed and there was a sign that said BACK IN TEN MINUTES.
I cursed mightily, but if I wanted my paint I had no option but to wait outside on the pavement and try and find something interesting about a display of garden rakes, yard brooms and galvanised buckets. Ten minutes was more like twenty, but an old fella turned up, who’d only come out for a couple of screws, so at least I had someone to grumble and moan with until the custodian of the hardware returned, flushed and apologetic, and let us in. Sorry, she said, she’d had to go to the bank. I understood. The high street banks have deserted Ashburton, leaving the town with a solitary cash machine outside the post office; two of them still visit the town once a week in big mobile vans, but they don’t stay long. It’s not what I’d call a service. Anyway, the old fella got in ahead of me and I had to wait whilst she tried to sort out his obscure screw requirements, which took ages, before I could buy my paint.
By the time I got back to the shop I’d been gone nearly an hour. I climbed back into my painting togs, ready to start work. But it seemed that the last time I had used them I hadn’t cleaned the brushes as thoroughly as I might and the bristles had dried stiff. It was clear that no amount of bending them back and forth was going to unglue them. They needed a good soak in white spirit and there was only a dribble left in the bottle. For a moment I resigned myself to another trip to the hardware shop. But I was willing to bet Nick had a bottle, amongst all that paraphernalia in the cupboard under his sink, so I trotted up the stairs.
I went into the kitchen and froze. Someone had been here, I could tell at once. I’d been up there on my last visit to fill the kettle and I knew I hadn’t left the doors of the under-sink cupboard open, the contents emptied out on to the floor. I stared around me. A kitchen drawer was open. I hadn’t left it like that either.
The floorboard creaked a moment too late. An arm came round my neck from behind, a smelly rag squashed over my nose and mouth. It was too late to scream. I struggled, fought to pull the arm away, scrabbled to tear off the acrid-smelling cloth. Strange smell. Not perfume this time; not Nightshade. Not a woman’s smell. A smell that reminded me of hospitals.
The world began to spin. I struggled, both hands tugging uselessly at the arm that held me, a man’s arm, so strong. My hands felt heavy, fell away. The fight within me dissolved. And as the world began to darken, I remember thinking that this couldn’t possibly be happening to me. Not really.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Inspector Ford was in no mood to be fobbed off, and anyway I was too scared for fobbing. He was polite, sympathetic even, but across Nick’s kitchen table the penetrating stare was boring into me.
‘Do you have any idea who attacked you, Miss Browne?’
‘No, I don’t,’ I responded, more or less truthfully. I didn’t know who it was. I knew who it wasn’t. It wasn’t Vlad because Vlad would have killed me. The only other possible suspect was Richard searching for the rings, and I didn’t believe he’d be barmy enough to try that again. But I thought I’d better mention him, and Tamara. I threw in Verbena Clarke for good measure.
‘You should have told me about Mr and Mrs Nickolai and these rings at the time,’ he admonished me sternly. Next to him Detective Constable DeVille tried to look equally severe but could hardly keep the smirk off her nasty little mouth.
‘So, just to be clear,’ he went on, ‘you are now telling me that it was Mr and Mrs Nickolai who broke into your flat and coshed you with a torch?’
‘Well, it was only Tamara – Mrs Nickolai, but I think it was Richard’s idea.’
He sighed heavily. ‘And you didn’t see fit to inform us?’
‘I didn’t want to press charges,’ I admitted unhappily.
‘Breaking and entering and assault are serious offences,’ Constable DeVille informed me smugly, ‘it wasn’t up to you.’
‘It certainly wasn’t Tamara who attacked me this morning,’ I added.
‘Possibly not, but if the recovery of those rings is so important,’ the inspector went on, ‘then the Nickolais may have employed the services of someone less queasy about using violence. In any event, Mr Nickolai has lied to the police − he said he hadn’t seen his father in years.’
‘You don’t think Richard murdered his father, do you?’
‘He has an alibi for the time of the murder, which puts him in the clear. So does Mrs Burgoyne. But if either of them is responsible for this latest piece of mischief they are going to find themselves in serious trouble.’ He stopped and for a moment a faint suggestion of a smile crossed his lips. ‘Incidentally, they do have their own theory about who murdered their father.’
‘They do?’
‘You.’ It was
Constable DeVille who spoke, only one word but she managed to fit an arpeggio of malice into it.
I flopped back in my chair. ‘You’re joking?’
‘His altering the will in your favour would naturally make you a suspect, Miss Browne,’ the inspector said lightly, ‘in their eyes.’
‘Actually, there are a few people in Ashburton who think …’ Ricky’s voice trailed off as the inspector turned his gaze upon him.
It was Morris and Ricky who’d found me. They’d called in at the shop to see how I was getting on, discovered me collapsed in a groggy heap on the kitchen floor and phoned for police and ambulance. We’d already been through the whole farrago of flashing blue lights and screaming sirens before the inspector had arrived.
‘Are you telling me,’ I asked Ricky, aghast, ‘that everyone in Ashburton thinks I murdered Nick?’
‘Well, not everyone,’ he replied, looking uncomfortable.
‘Not anyone who knows you, obviously,’ Morris assured me, blushing slightly.
I glared at the pair of them. I could just imagine the gossip they’d been indulging in. ‘Fantastic,’ I muttered.
The inspector cleared his throat, returning us to the matter in hand. ‘We shall also be interviewing Mrs Verbena Clarke.’
I folded my arms and grunted. I bet her tongue had been wagging too. So, she hadn’t come forward voluntarily? That wasn’t going to look good, I thought with satisfaction.
Inspector Ford took his stare off me and gazed at the horrid rag that had been squashed over my face, now screwed up on Nick’s kitchen table. It was one of his old polishing rags.
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