The Company She Kept

by Marjorie Eccles

  After that, everyone had gone home and he, Felix, had thrown himself on his bed, still fully dressed, and slept until dawn, when he packed his things in his duffel bag, breakfasted and walked down the drive of Flowerdew without a backward glance to wait for the taxi which had been ordered to take Irena to the station.

  ‘We put her down by the jetty of the old boathouse, wedged her between the stanchions. It would’ve been better to take her to the middle, where it’s deeper, but we’d no way of getting her there. The old boat was no good, Tommo and I had been meaning to repair it but had never got around to it.’

  So far, Mayo had had no difficulty in believing what Darbell had said: it tied in with what he’d already learned, with Angie Robinson’s letter and with what the other people concerned had told him, or not told him, as the case might be. He found the explanation of how Irena Bron had come to die easy enough to believe, and even – to a certain extent – why they had all been at such pains to collude in concealing her death. But the next part –!

  He read the second half of Darbell’s statement through again with the same jaundiced disbelief he’d felt when he first listened to the man making it, well able to understand why Darbell had been reluctant to tell the story. On the other hand, it was so bizarre that Mayo felt no one in his right mind would have invented it as an excuse for being in Lavenstock, and gradually he began to have a strong feeling that somewhere within that unlikely story was concealed the nub of this case.

  He picked up the typed pages and began to read again.

  Darbell stated that having read the manuscript he had found in the envelope handed to him at the hotel, and seen the terse command at the end: 8.00p.m. 13a, Bulstrode Street, Lavenstock, Tuesday 10th March. Be there, he had immediately realized what was happening – that he was, in effect, being blackmailed:

  ‘I could at first think of only one person who might have written the manuscript – Sophie Amhurst, who had had ambitions to be a writer. But no way could I believe she was attempting to blackmail me. It was not in Sophie’s nature as I remembered her. I did not intend giving in to blackmail in any shape or form, but I was furiously angry and wanted to know who the writer was. I decided to go to Bulstrode Street to find out for myself. I arrived in Lavenstock about four-thirty, and drove out to Flowerdew. I can’t say why I decided to do this, except that I had time to spare and felt a compulsion to see it again. I only stayed a few minutes, there was no point in staying longer as the place was obviously empty and deserted. I was still much too early for the eight p.m. rendezvous at Bulstrode Street, so on impulse I drove out to Pennybridge, to the Amhurst family home, on the off-chance of finding where Sophie

  Amhurst was now living. I discovered that although she had married since then, she still lived there when she was in England, and was in fact there at that very moment. We talked for nearly an hour. I left at seven forty-five, convinced that she had not written the manuscript.

  ‘From there, I drove straight to Bulstrode Street and found the door of the flat ajar but nobody there. A note had been left inviting me to wait and to help myself to a drink, which I did, and that is how my prints came to be on the whisky bottle. I waited for half an hour and then I left, leaving a message with the woman in the downstairs flat. When I learned that it was Angie Robinson who lived upstairs, I was inclined to dismiss the whole things as a hoax. I remembered Angie as a rather stupid woman and I had no doubts about being able to deal with her threats.

  ‘I freely admit to having killed Irena Bron, under extreme provocation, but I did not kill Angie Robinson. Immediately I left her flat, I drove home. I did not at any time see her or speak to her.’

  In fact, Felix had had not one, but several, very large drinks from the whisky bottle while waiting to meet his unknown correspondent, feeling he needed them before facing whatever was to come. Unused to alcohol in such quantity nowadays, it had made him very drunk, and he’d had no clear idea of events after leaving the flat, or of how he’d arrived home. He didn’t, however, see the necessity to make things worse for himself by admitting this to the police.

  Coffee was sent for and Mayo prepared to go over the evidence with Cherry once more. Cherry sat at ease in Mayo’s chair, a spruce, bandbox figure, looking more like a parliamentary private secretary than a policeman. Sometimes Mayo thought he was more politician than policeman these days. He was ambitious, and he’d no intention, in the interests of his career if nothing else, of allowing this investigation into Angie Robinson’s death to reach stalemate.

  Mayo stood by the window, hands stuck in his pockets, looking out at his least favourite view. They were erecting scaffolding around the Town Hall. Maybe they were going to clean it and improve his outlook. He abandoned the prospect without much difficulty and, since his chair was already occupied, went to perch on the corner of his desk, and switched on his desk lamp.

  ‘So he reckons he’s been framed,’ Cherry said, tapping immaculately manicured fingers on the desk. ‘I’d give a lot to see that manuscript he claims was substituted.’

  ‘The guy’s a lunatic, he says he put it through his office shredder. Didn’t want it to get into the wrong hands, though he swears it contained nothing more than he’s already told us – but then he would, wouldn’t he? As soon as I mentioned Flowerdew he caved in. He must’ve known that sooner or later, when it came to being questioned, one or other of that lot was going to spill the beans. They might for one reason or another have ganged up to protect him at the time but that sort of loyalty only goes so far. He’s admitting to the Bron murder because he knows he’s less to lose. He’s claiming provocation and hoping to get done only for manslaughter, whereas the Robinson one was obviously premeditated – and he’s categorically denying any involvement in that.’

  ‘How far is he to be believed?’

  ‘Hell, I don’t know! He’s a tricky customer, too damn smooth by half – but come to that, I don’t trust the rest of ’em, either. Together or singly. Working alone or in cahoots. And if,’ Mayo added broodingly, ‘Darbell’s as innocent of Robinson’s murder as he claims, the question of who did murder her still remains.’

  ‘He’s the only one with a credible motive. She was evidently putting the screws on him and he silenced her,’ Cherry said with conviction. ‘Keep at him, he can’t hold out for ever.’ He thought for a moment or two, then said, more cautiously, ‘Is it feasible that Angie Robinson could have written that manuscript he claims someone wished on him?’

  ‘She was clever enough, or so we’re given to understand. Anyway, I don’t think any great expertise was demanded. According to Darbell, the manuscript was simply a fictionalized account of what actually happened the night Irena Bron was murdered.’

  Cherry blew out his lips, more disbelieving than ever. ‘Why fictionalize it?’

  ‘Maybe because Sophie Lawrence was known to have had ambitions to be a writer. Darbell had been in love with her. When he read it, presumably, she would come to mind as having written it and that would bring him to Lavenstock.’

  ‘I’m having problems in believing this, Gil! Nobody would go through all that rigmarole just to fit Darbell up!’ Common sense told Mayo the same thing. ‘Maybe not. Maybe not one person. But three of them together ... ?’ He broke off. They’d been through all this before and he was only slightly less sceptical than Cherry. ‘If it did happen like that, we’re back to motive, aren’t we? What could have been so imperative to all three of them that they should need to kill Angie Robinson and agree to let Darbell take the blame?’

  One by one he’d interviewed them and taken their statements. All three had categorically denied being concerned in any way in the killing of Angie Robinson of course, but he’d made sure they had a rough passage before being charged with their part in the disposal of Irena Bron’s body, breathing fire and brimstone in a way he rarely did. But then, rarely had he been so infuriated at having his time wasted, being led up the garden path. They were like three children, playing games. Somebody had to tell th
em there was a real world out here. Their case had been adjourned; they were on bail for the moment but would have to appear on further charges. None of them would escape the publicity they had tried so hard to avoid; even their attempts to conceal the truth from Kitty Wilbraham had been disastrous. She would have to know now.

  ‘And yet,’ he mused, ‘if it was Darbell, I can’t believe he’d be such a fool as to leave his dabs over everything and to let Mrs Kitchener know he was there – unless he was totally out of his mind at what he’d done. Why go to the flat at all? Apart from the fact we’ve found no evidence to suggest she was killed there, there’d be all that difficulty of getting her downstairs and into her car – which wasn’t parked near. They’ve been over Darbell’s Jag with a fine-tooth comb and there’s no evidence of her ever being in it.’ Back once more to the hypothesis of some sort of conspiracy. If they’d conspired once, they could do it again. And yet ... he could envisage all of them playing separate parts, and he could see Thomas killing someone in a blind rage, given the right amount of provocation ... but taking part in a cold-blooded, premeditated arrangement to murder Angie Robinson? And what about the rape?

  ‘A sexual crime for a non-sexual reason?’ Abigail said. ‘But she wasn’t raped, sir, was she?’

  ‘Strangled, though,’ Atkins said, ‘and Thomas did help to cover up Irena Bron’s murder, so he had a motive.’

  ‘Of sorts,’ said Mayo absently, looking at Abigail and feeling a slight prickling sensation at the back of his neck.

  They had chapter and verse on Thomas now. He had preferred to be known as Tommo, not simply because of his dislike of his feminine-sounding Christian name, but because his full name was Maryon Glenister Thomas. As soon as Abigail mentioned his real name, bells had rung for Mayo, though the man had been generally known as Glen Thomas. ‘I was still working in the North then, and I wasn’t personally concerned with the investigation but I remember the stir it caused. Just refresh my memory on the details, Abigail.’

  ‘He was in his early twenties, married, but playing around with a woman who ran a rather up-market fashion business. His wife found out and went and shot the other woman. There was enormous publicity. She was convicted of manslaughter and he had to take a lot of stick – and why not? He wasn’t exactly blameless.’

  Why not, indeed? But as far as Mayo remembered it the wife herself hadn’t been entirely without blame, either; she too had played the field. It was a sordid affair altogether. He could understand why Thomas had changed his name and buried himself in that cottage, yet scandals like that never died down, but tended to follow wherever you went. The reporter Darbell had met snooping around – it was about the time Thomas’s wife had been released to much public outrage, after serving only three years of her sentence, on the grounds of good behaviour. Thomas wouldn’t want all that raked up again – it would be disagreeable, but it hardly constituted a motive for murdering Angie Robinson.

  ‘I want this wrapped up, Gil,’ had been Cherry’s parting shot. ‘Darbell obviously killed Robinson and it shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man to prove it.’

  All very well, but if Darbell was charged with Angie Robinson’s murder on the evidence so far, he might well get away with it. If charged with Irena Bron’s murder, Mayo might well be left with another unsolved murder on his hands.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘So you’ve come to see me at last?’

  Only now could Mayo truly believe Kitty Wilbraham was alive, now that he could see the evidence of it with his own eyes. At the back of his mind had been the ridiculous feeling that somehow, she had to be dead.

  It was almost as difficult to believe she was over ninety, though she was a strange, small, desiccated creature. She was dressed in a floor-length dark blue caftan sewn with tarnished metal threads, her head bound with a twisted silk scarf low on her forehead. Barbaric ornaments depended from her ears – very similar to the earrings she had given Angie Robinson – and hung around her neck and her thin, chicken-bone wrists. Her hands in contrast were swollen and knotted with arthritis, and her skin hung in loose folds around her neck as if she had once been very fat. But her eyes were as alive and as alert as someone twenty years her junior. He wondered, looking at the embroidered slippers emerging from under her robe, if she had dolled herself up in this bizarre manner solely for their benefit or if it was her normal mode of dress. Abigail, whom he had brought with him in case Mrs Wilbraham became upset under his questioning, looking sensible and ordinary in her nice green suit, clear-eyed and intelligent, was a great relief.

  ‘Do have some tea. Jessie has left some in the Thermos jug there, it’s Earl Grey. I take it you’d prefer that to mint tea?’

  Abigail said quickly, with an inquiring lift of the eyebrow towards Mayo, ‘Earl Grey, thank you. It would be very nice.’

  Mrs Wilbraham had chosen to see them here in the red room, the contents of which had so horrified Angie Robinson, although on this bright afternoon, with the sun throwing dusty greenish reflections from the lake outside, the room’s richness appeared merely tawdry. But in the evening, when the pierced ceramic lamps were lit, and the reflections of the grinning masks, the urns and ceramic panels and the carved, obelisk-shaped objects threw grotesque shadows on to the lurid red walls, Mayo could envisage a most sinister ambience, capable of invoking the echoes of past horrors to someone as susceptible as Angie had been. Even he had to remind himself that they were only replicas; that their significance was all in the mind.

  The old lady waited until they had availed themselves of tea before saying, ‘Jessie Crowther tells me that tiresome gel Angie Robinson has got herself murdered. I assume that’s why you’re here – but what can it have to do with me?’

  ‘When someone dies in suspicious circumstances, we have to go back a long way, Mrs Wilbraham, and she did occasionally visit here, we’ve been told.’

  ‘Very occasionally. She was of limited appeal to me – I did not encourage her.’

  ‘I’d like to talk about another matter first,’ he said, uncomfortably conscious of the dry heat of the airless room, stuffy with Kairouan carpets on the mosaic-tiled floor and couches and ottomans heaped with cushions. Sweat was beginning to prickle out over his body. ‘What can you tell me about Irena Bron?’

  If the name had startled the old woman, she gave no sign. She stared at him impassively from the depths of her high-seated armchair that was designed for easy rising, but was also a little like a throne in this room, an illusion made more apparent by the carved, mother-of-pearl and ivory-studded screen behind it and the huge mask of the goddess Tanit on the wall above. She was like an ancient lizard, unmoving, unblinking, except for the eyes, black and alive and missing nothing. Not much like the warm-hearted, amusing, gregarious woman she’d been described as.

  ‘Irena?’ A sigh escaped her. ‘That’s a name I haven’t heard for a long time.’

  ‘Exactly how long, Mrs Wilbraham?’

  ‘Exactly? That’s a tall order for someone of my age, young man! My memory isn’t what it was.’

  This was evidently a pronouncement not meant to be taken seriously. Everything about her said she was still sharp as a needle. Moreover, there were indications that she was still working: writing materials were spread out over a table in the corner, there was even a small tape-recorder, presumably because she would find writing or typing difficult with those arthritic fingers. He suspected she had lost none of her critical faculties and that her memory was as clear as ever.

  ‘I haven’t set eyes on Irena for something like fourteen or fifteen years. Has she done something she shouldn’t?’

  ‘That would surprise you?’

  ‘Nothing about Irena would surprise me,’ she answered drily. ‘She was a law entirely unto herself. No steadfastness of purpose, she’d just as soon act on a whim of the moment ... But you must be fair with me and tell me what this is all about, otherwise, I warn you, you won’t get a word out of me.’

  He saw that he must tell her the truth im
mediately. She would have to know soon, anyway. He supposed that a person who had reached the age of fourscore years and ten must have learned to live with and accept the idea of bereavement and death, their own and that of those close to them – but she might have loved Irena Bron and be devastated, how could he know?

  He told her as gently as he could that Irena Bron, too, was dead, and that he had come to seek permission to look for her body in the lake. It did not seem to upset her as much as he had feared it might, though she closed her eyes momentarily as though against a spasm of pain.

  ‘Dead?’ she murmured, almost to herself. ‘I knew it had to be so.’

  ‘You knew, Mrs Wilbraham?’

  ‘Tell me,’ she countered. ‘Tell me everything.’

  ‘I would prefer to ask a few questions first.’

  She shrugged and spread her misshapen hands. He saw that they trembled very slightly, with age or apprehension, it wasn’t possible to tell. ‘Very well.’

  ‘Who was she?’ Mayo began. ‘And how did she come to be living here?’

  ‘She was the daughter of Miloslav Bron, a man my husband and I worked with for several years in Tunisia, before the war. We lost touch during the war. And then one day Irena appeared on my doorstep with a suitcase, saying her father was dead and had left her penniless. That was no surprise. Milo’s nature was always feckless.’

  She delivered the judgement reprovingly, but a barely perceptible smile lifted the corners of her mouth and there was a long pause, as if she had travelled far away in her mind. Mayo had to bring her back to the present with a gentle prod: ‘She stayed with you?’

  ‘Irena? Oh yes. He had left a letter, you see, recommending her to me, rather like a helpless child – though she was nearly forty and more than capable of fending for herself! However, for his sake, I willingly gave her a temporary home. Look behind you, on the chest. You’ll see a photo that might interest you. If you’ve seen Milo, you’ve seen Irena.’