Killing a Unicorn

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘Thinking about it, though, I’m surprised she didn’t mention them to you, Fran. If she told anybody, it would be you.’

  ‘If, Chip. But she didn’t, did she, ever? Confide in anyone?’

  He wasn’t to be drawn on that. His eyes slid away. He didn’t seem to find it strange that Bibi had kept the contents of the letters secret from him and Fran wondered just what he’d told the police about his relationship with her, the astonishing circumstances of her precipitate arrival at Membery, an unknown woman with a child, whom he had never previously given an inkling of being involved with. He was revealing aspects of his personality Fran hadn’t even suspected before — a propensity for secrecy that she would never have dreamt he possessed.

  ‘What’s the matter, why are you looking like that, Fran?’ He said slowly, ‘You do know who might have sent them, don’t you?’

  ‘No, not really — I haven’t a clue, but we-ell … you know, it could have been Gary.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’

  ‘He was always mooning about after her, everybody knows that. And that might have been the reason she kept quiet, even if she’d suspected — or knew — it was him. You know what Bibi was like — she wouldn’t have wanted to get him into trouble, even though he was such a pain in the neck. Blushing and falling over his feet to do things for her. On the other hand, she may have spoken to him about it — you did say the letters had stopped recently, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh no, that’s too much of a stretch! It’d be a surprise to me if Gary Brooker can write at all — over and above his name, that is.’

  ‘There’s more to Gary than meets the eye, Chip.’

  ‘Just as well! What does meet it doesn’t give one much hope for the human race. Anyway, if it was him, the police’ll be on to him like a ton of bricks.’

  Gary was Rene Brooker’s grandson. Tall and thin, etiolated and spotty, sporting a Number One haircut and never to be seen without the requisite amount of ironmongery distributed about his person to establish his street cred. He was nearly eighteen and he’d lived with Rene practically all his life, ever since her unmarried daughter had taken off for God knows where and left her baby behind. But six months ago, after all those years of skimping and scraping on her widow’s pension, trying to do her best and worrying over him, Rene had reached a stage where she couldn’t cope with him getting into any more hot water and had taken her troubles to Alyssa. ‘He’s not a bad boy,’ she’d vowed, as mothers (and grandmothers) of bad boys the world over have been wont to do since time immemorial. No doubt Genghis Khan’s mum had said the same thing. ‘It’s them as he goes around with, but if he had a regular job to keep him out of mischief …’ Her eyes had pleaded, and Alyssa, smothering her doubts, had agreed to employ him as an odd-job man in the garden, with the result that Gary now had more money to swagger around with among his mates, and consequently his capacity for getting into trouble had increased. Despite Alyssa’s misgivings, however, he’d turned out to be useful in the garden — contrary to what his appearance might indicate, he was as strong as a horse and, as long as he thought no one was watching him, he appeared to enjoy the work.

  The odd thing was that this hard-case character had been reduced to a jelly whenever Bibi had been around. She could smile that dazzling, totally impersonal smile she bestowed on everyone, regardless, and Gary would take it as being entirely for him, hold it to his heart and blush to the roots of what hair the barber had left him. She’d only to ask him for a bunch of the flowers that were grown for cutting and he met himself coming back in his hurry to carry out the task. Delivering a letter to The Watersplash would have been the equivalent of a knight errant being sent off to the Crusades at his lady’s behest.

  But — supposing she had confronted him with writing those letters to her, would his adoration have continued, or turned to fury? Gary, Fran had no doubt, could be a very nasty customer if the occasion warranted it.

  Well, Crouch had him in his sights. And no doubt Fran wouldn’t be the only one to have made the connection, including those who worked with him in the garden. Most of the staff had been questioned throughout the day, much to Alyssa’s distress. She was sure they would all give in their notice and leave in a body.

  ‘How do you think they must feel, under suspicion like that?’

  ‘Like the rest of us, I suppose. I know how I feel, and it’s terrible,’ Jonathan had said, exchanging a smouldering look with Jilly, and after that escaping back into the music room for yet more practising. How could he? Fran wondered. How could he shut himself away from all the activity? Even begin to concentrate? But that was Jonathan, whose passionate belief in his work completely overrode everything else. Ruthless, in a way. Anything, but anything, that got in his way was put into a separate compartment, labelled later.

  Does he mean they suspect one of us? Fran asks herself. Surely not. But she’s seen enough television, read enough crime novels, seen enough statistics in newspapers, to know that people who kill are usually known to their victims. It’s not a happy thought.

  Undressing before her shower, preparing for bed, she scrunches up the cotton shirt of Mark’s she’s been wearing all day, ready to toss into the linen basket, and hears a papery crackle. She puts her hand into the breast pocket. Smoothing open the piece of paper, relief hits her like an adrenalin shot when she sees a telephone number written on a scrap torn from the kitchen pad — thick, black, italic, very stylish, the sort of writing you’d expect from Mark. Perhaps he’d been wearing this shirt before he left, she couldn’t remember — and stuffed the paper into the pocket and forgotten to give it to her, folding the shirt in his neat way over the chair back. But the realization brings a return of her exasperation with him, though she actually feels she ought to be more mad at him than she is, as she punches in the number. After all, the fact that she’s not known how to get hold of him doesn’t explain why he hasn’t seen fit to contact her. He ought to have realized, when she didn’t ring … On the other hand, there may be all sorts of explanations: he may not know he’d forgotten to give her the number where she can reach him and could be expecting her to ring him … possibly he’s tried to ring while she’s been up at Membery … the answerphone might not be functioning properly … the client he’s visiting is known to be very demanding and he may not have had the chance … or what if there’s been an accident and he’s languishing in some Belgian hospital with loss of memory …?

  Pull yourself together, Fran, get real! Stop acting the fluttery, anxious little wife who can’t let her husband out of her sight for five minutes without fussing! Hold on to your stated belief that day-long proximity with someone you love isn’t a necessary component of loving. When Mark is absent, he’s still with her, part of her, inside her, for twenty-four hours a day. She believes he would be if he were dead, and she knows Mark feels the same. Space between them has nothing to do with it. She’s never before expected him to have to worry about reassuring her as to just where he is and what he’s doing every minute, when he’s away conducting important business. But the more she tells herself these reassuring truths, the more the huge bubble of fear grows inside her chest, rising into her throat, making it difficult to breathe, so that she feels something near to a panic attack. The annoyance and the slight unease at his thoughtlessness is beginning to coalesce into a tight, unbearable knot of certainty that something must surely be wrong. Whatever she tells herself, never before has he left her in quite such a limbo as this.

  She dials the code for Brussels, then the sequence of numbers. She lets it ring twenty-five times — she isn’t going to give up easily, now that she’s found the blessed number at last — before she has to admit defeat. It isn’t a hotel she’s ringing, that much at least she does know, it’s a house owned by what’shisname, the client, so it must have been ringing into empty rooms.

  This is absolutely not on: there has to be some way of speaking to him!

  She tries desperately to remember the client’s name, a Belgian reputed to
be a zillionaire, but whatever name it is has been erased from her memory like computer data in a power cut. Think, think! It must be lurking somewhere in the retrieval system. He is someone, she knows, who is rich enough to have his every whim acceded to, and his latest one is to have built for him a house to his own fancy ideas, but with Art Nouveau overtones. There have been mutterings under the breath about this at The Watersplash over the last few weeks. Mark was damned if he was going to design some outlandish Disneyland fantasy, but at the same time, he knew he’d be damned financially if he didn’t pander to this potential client, who had seen in Brussels the elegant Stocklet house that Joseph Hoffmann designed, and the wonderful exuberances of Victor Horta, and had decided a combination of both, plus some of his own bizarre ideas, was what he wanted, to show off his wife’s fabulous Tiffany collection. But Fran has argued with Mark that whatever his personal opinion of these extraordinary notions, he can’t afford to turn down the possibility of a commission. They’re thin enough on the ground as it is. It’s pretentious to be so precious.

  ‘OK, OK, no need for sarcasm — I get the point.’ And he’d agreed to do it.

  Fran puts the phone down and sits thinking. The situation is too silly for words, yet oddly enough, this failed attempt to reach Mark has made her see things in better perspective — it can’t be beyond the wit of woman to find out where he is. Perhaps it’s desperation, or the spur of the whisky, but she suddenly knows just what she’s going to do.

  First, however, she has her shower, blessedly cool and refreshing, then wraps herself in a cotton kimono before going into Mark’s beautifully equipped studio on the mezzanine. She throws the switch that operates only the angled reading lamp, making the big desk on which it stands spring into an eerie, isolated life among the drawing boards and plan cabinets looming in the background. It’s now quite dark outside and her own reflection in the black glass of the windows reminds her with a shiver of the owl imprint on the mirror, the sounds she’s heard outside at night. Feeling suddenly quite dithery, she quickly presses the switch that lowers the blinds electronically, sealing herself within a silky cream box, as if in the interior of a Japanese house. That’s better. Whatever might be there, real or imagined, is outside.

  The room looks alien without Mark. It’s very much his own room, full of his presence, his working paraphernalia, old black and white architectural drawings framed and hung on the pale walls alongside some of his own artist’s impressions for earlier projects. It’s oddly disconcerting not to see Mark himself there, in shirt-sleeves or casual sweater, in front of one of his drawing boards, either perched on a stool with his legs twisted into some impossible contortions around the support, or simply leaning back, his behind perched on the seat, arms folded, considering the work he’s engaged on. She has an absurd longing to feel her fingers running through his thick, dark hair, smoothing it back from his forehead where it falls into a dark comma. Shaking herself free of such thoughts, she walks over to the desk. It’s large, ebonized and antique, a single, intentional anachronism amongst all the other modern, functional items of furniture. And all the drawers are locked.

  He’s taken the keys with him. And why has he done that? It isn’t as if she ever goes into his desk. As if he fears she might pry while he’s away. Which, of course, is just what she is doing.

  She takes a deep breath and while she thinks what to do next, she dials the Brussels number again, and though, as she’d expected, there’s still no reply, it has become evident by the time she puts the phone down that there’s only one way to get into the bottom left-hand drawer, where she knows Mark keeps his client files. All the other drawers lock automatically when the top centre one above the knee-hole is locked, so that there’s only one keyhole. She only has to open that drawer and there’ll be immediate access to the rest. The desk isn’t, after all, intended to be burglar-proof so much as private. Except that Mark has never previously locked the desk that she knows of — or perhaps he has. She has never, after all, tried it before. At any rate, she doesn’t have a clue how to start breaking open the drawer without using brute force and vandalizing the unique, expensive, two hundred and fifty-year-old black Egyptian-style desk, solid as one of the pyramids. Nail files, the stock fall-back of female private eyes in similar situations, do not immediately spring to mind as the ideal solution. She has never had much faith in plastic credit cards either, after once having forgotten her Yale key and getting her card chewed up in the process of trying to open the lock with it.

  In the end the solution is much less dramatic, in the shape of the collection of junk Mark laughed at, the stuff she’d picked up at last week’s church jumble sale. Inside the rusty old tin box which had once held Karamel Kreeme toffees, among the buttons and buckles, the odd ear-rings and the pinless brooches, the hairgrips, safety pins and old suspenders, are dozens of keys, ranging from a mammoth specimen capable of unlocking the Bastille, to tiny ones for long-abandoned suitcases. The seventeenth of all the keys of approximate size that she tries fits, and the top drawer slides open.

  She riffles through the file-drawers with no success. He has obviously taken his client’s dossier with him, along with his laptop, which she might have realized he would have done if she’d thought about it. She opens the others, just in case. Nothing, until she comes to the bottom right-hand drawer.

  A current like electricity suddenly shoots up her spine and almost lifts the hair on her head as she looks at what Mark has left in there, hidden away in a locked drawer.

  Chapter Ten

  A mobile incident room was now parked in a farmer’s field adjacent to the Membery Place Gardens, from which the search operation was being mounted. It was the usual thing when crime scenes were in out of the way places, it made sense, being more accessible than the headquarters in Felsborough, but even as a temporary centre of operations it was less than perfect. It wasn’t a good place to work and conduct interviews in for one thing, and for another, its limitations of size posed problems, especially for one of Crouch’s dimensions.

  In the end, Alyssa had been persuaded to allocate a room in the house where Crouch himself could spread out and work in greater freedom, formerly the library but now a room of unspecified function, though it was still so called, justified by the tall, glass-fronted, solid oak bookcases lining one wall. It smelled damp and unused, with the nose-twitching, musty odour emitting from the long unopened law tomes and books of jurisprudence ranged on the shelves. It could never have been anything other than cheerless, being situated on the same side of the house as Bibi’s room: like hers, it could rarely have seen the sun except for a short period in the late afternoon or early evening. No doubt that hadn’t mattered when a roaring fire was kept constantly lit in a fireplace big enough to roast an ox — as it was, the room’s one virtue now was that it was the coolest spot in the house.

  ‘You’ll leave everything as you found it, I trust, when you’ve finished?’ Miss Arrow had asked, nay threatened, finally allowing herself to abandon her supervisory activities and eyeing with disfavour the various pieces of up-to-date technology already littering the floor.

  Bloody sight better than before we came, Crouch had muttered under his breath. And so it was, after Kate had gone round the lampshades with a duster in an attempt to gain more light, and had persuaded the technicians to fit light bulbs of somewhat higher wattage than forty to the ancient electrical fittings. Rolling their eyes, muttering at the dodgy state of the wiring, they’d all the same finally managed to set up all the necessary electronic equipment, and without, moreover, blowing the fuses for the whole house. It still felt as though they were working under the sea. Even this time in the morning, Crouch had to suffer the indignity of wearing his reading glasses in order to see his notes. Sure, there was the privacy he needed here for interviews, but he wasn’t making much headway in controlling his irritability.

  Chip Calvert was not at his happiest to have been summoned there either, at barely 8 a.m., hardly having finished his breakfas
t. ‘Look here,’ he began, ‘I need to get down to my office in London for a while. I do have business to sort out there, you know, and I’ve already told you all I know.’

  Crouch eyed him over his spectacles. ‘All in good time. But let’s make it clear from the start, Mr Calvert, I’m not here for my own amusement, either. I’m here to sort out this case. And it doesn’t improve my temper when witnesses hamper me by not giving me the full facts.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it does, but how does that concern me?’

  Crouch toyed with his pen. He sat at the foot of a mighty oak table, ten feet long, with Chip to one side of him and an empty chair waiting for Kate at the other, his papers spread over the green baize with which Miss Arrow had ostentatiously covered the polished wood. His back was to the glassed bookcase wall of great, leather-bound volumes, never opened for nearly a century and maybe not much before then at a guess, judging by their size and weight and the off-putting titles on their well-preserved spines. He’d chosen this place to sit so that he would have the advantage of seeing the people he was talking to with what light there was on their faces, but he wasn’t sure he’d picked the right spot: on the edge of his vision, he was aware of yet another portrait of Judge Calvert, hanging broodingly over the fireplace. It was the fifth of those Crouch had already counted, variously disposed around the house. That guy had really loved himself.

  Chip threw down a packet. ‘You said you wanted photographs. These are better than the snap I gave you.’

  Crouch made no move to open it. Indeed, he seemed in no hurry to get on with the interview at all, and sat with his elbow on the baize, one hand supporting his chin, flicking through his notes with the other. Chip shifted uneasily in his seat, looking warily at him but not inclined, after that first barbed remark, to precipitate the situation by asking him what he’d meant. Eventually, Crouch opened the packet and fanned the photos out on the table in front of him, studying each one carefully. He took his time about that, too, as if he were waiting for something.