by Susan Moody
‘Doesn’t it seems a bit coincidental that Stefan Michaels manages to escape from prison, and that very same evening, he’s murdered?’ asked Kate.
‘Of course it does; you might almost suspect it was planned that way.’
‘My friend who’s engaged to the prison officer told me that he must have had help.’
‘Oh, he definitely had that, all right,’ said the DS.
‘If you can call it help,’ added the DC.
‘Get him out, get him up here, whack him,’ said the DS, unemotionally.
‘You think someone was waiting up here to . . . whack him?’ Kate said.
‘Almost certainly. Probably hired specially to do the deed.’
‘By whom?’
‘Ah well, that’s where we came in, isn’t it?’ The two of them thanked Kate for her help, not that she felt she’d been of any use whatsoever, and went outside, followed by the gaze of most of the café’s customers.
‘What the hell did they want?’ someone asked and everyone glanced at Kate and then away, as though she was somehow tainted with crime, that it sat on her face like a birthmark that you couldn’t help noticing but had been brought up not to stare at.
‘There was a murder last night, didn’t you hear?’ a voice said helpfully.
‘What, here? Small place like this?’
‘Some drunk outside a wine bar, way I heard.’
‘Hanging’s too good . . .’ someone ventured, and was shouted down. The general consensus among the café’s clientele was a complete, and several times repeated, lack of knowledge as to what the world was coming to.
Kate meanwhile pushed away her plate, and sat over her coffee. Why did everything slant towards Ecuador, from Jefferson Andrewes going there for his ‘holiday’ to Magnus and the mysterious letter from the lawyers in Quito, to her own family, even Janine, who only the other night had let drop that her secret lover (‘married, thank God!’), the silent partner in TaylorMade Travel, was originally from Guayaquil. Now it appeared that Stefan Michaels and his family were also tied in. If only she could observe it carefully enough, might she finally see a pattern emerge, where all the pieces would finally fit together?
Magnus
Twenty-One
‘Will you be at home this evening, Dr Lennox?’
The voice was unknown to Magnus, and he wondered if he should casually drop into the conversation, if conversation there should ensue, some mention of the four beefy brothers or three stalwart sons who lived with him, plus the collection of guns in a locked (of course) case (which could easily be unlocked), in order to forestall any impromptu turnings-up on the doorstep. These days you never knew what you were letting yourself in for, and the world was, as Padhraic O’Brien, one of his more brilliant students, had told him only last week, full of nutters, not to mention drunken yobs, who’d glass you soon as look at you, O’Brien had said. Hitherto, Magnus had always pictured O’Brien, when he pictured him at all, bent over his books or drinking tea from a mug featuring a leprechaun and labelled A Present From Cork, not out in the local pubs in imminent danger of being glassed, whatever that was, by drunken yobs.
‘I might,’ he said cautiously, trying not to crunch too loudly the piece of toast he had just popped into his mouth.
‘You have no idea who I am, but my name is Andrewes, Jefferson Andrewes—’
‘Ah, the famous Mr Andrewes.’ Magnus swallowed hastily, the toast scratching painfully at the soft tissues of his throat, and spoke in the kind of hearty voice he never normally used, and despised in those who did. The man certainly didn’t sound like either a nutter or a drunken yob, but you couldn’t be too careful.
‘You’ve heard of me, then?’
‘Yes, indeed. The . . . er . . . woman (girl, lady, salesperson?) at the travel agency mentioned you.’
‘The thing is, I’ve just returned from a trip to the Galápagos, and I was given your name by a Dr Bork who works at the Research Station there. I wondered if I could drop by and discuss something with you.’
‘I . . . er . . . yes, why not. What’s it in connection with?’
‘My mother’s death, mostly. Dr Bork thought you might be able to clarify one or two matters for me.’
During the day, Magnus did not have time to wonder why Andrewes thought he would know anything about the death of his mother, whom he pictured as a round sort of person, the way mothers so often were, perhaps in a tweed skirt carrying a pair of secateurs for dead-heading roses, or alternatively – these days – like one or two of his colleagues at the Department, a smart older woman in black suit or trousers with a white or magenta silk shirt and high-heeled black boots, short smartly cut hair, some kind of leather briefcase under her arm. The thought of his prospective visitor re-occurred to him while he was doing the bulk of the shopping for the evening after next, when Kate and Janine would be coming for dinner, and again while he made a cheese omelette for himself with a tomato and avocado salad, and while he brewed coffee. What ‘matters’ did Andrewes think he, Magnus, could possibly clarify about the death of his mother, a woman he’d never met and knew nothing about?
Andrewes, when he showed up at the front door, was big, an obvious rugby-player, the kind of man by whom Magnus, though tall himself, was always vaguely intimidated. The two men sat down in the drawing room, which Andrewes inspected with admiration. ‘Very nice,’ he said, ‘very nice. I live in one of those converted warehouses, a huge flat there, not exactly a family home like this, I’m afraid, very modern, sort of minimalist, I’m not sure I really like it very much. Taupe sofas,’ he inexplicably added.
‘A family home . . .’ Magnus repeated, deciding not to pick up on the sofas, and he remembered a remark about nurseries that Janine, in her estate-agent incarnation, had made, which had puzzled him at the time, but which now came back to him, the fair-haired little boy on the rocking horse, the non-Edwina with baby Isabella on her hip. ‘That’s a compliment,’ he said, ‘though as yet I’m afraid there is no family.’
‘I haven’t got anyone, either,’ Andrewes said, which wasn’t quite what Magnus had intended to convey, what with Bisto the Boston Historian, and a colleague (one of the black-suited ones) at work who was always coming in to his office and perching in a manner which could only be described as provocative on the corner of his desk, and who had just that very morning asked him if he wanted to go to a concert at the Arts Centre with her, since someone had given her tickets.
‘So tell me about your mother,’ he said.
Andrewes laughed. ‘How long have you got?’
‘But why do you imagine I would know anything about her?’
‘The thing is, she was killed in a car accident – except that there’s more than a little suspicion that it might not have been an accident.’
‘Like my father,’ Magnus began, then frowned. ‘Where was this?’
‘Sorry, didn’t I say? In Ecuador, about ten years ago, in the Galápagos Islands.’
Magnus raised enquiring eyebrows. ‘What was she doing there?’
‘Working, as far as I can make out, with your father.’
‘Was she by any chance . . . are we talking about Rhoda Bailey?’
‘That’s the one. She went back to her maiden name after she split up with my father.’
‘You mean my father’s summer assistant, who was in the car when he and my stepmother were killed, is – was – your mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘How very extraordinary.’ Magnus got up. ‘Tell me, Mr Andrewes, do you believe in coincidence?’
‘Not really.’
‘And do you drink cognac?’
‘When it’s offered, most certainly. My name’s Jefferson, by the way.’
‘I’m Magnus.’ The two men smiled at each other.
‘I’m going to ask you a strange question,’ Jefferson said. ‘Do you know anything about sea-cucumbers?’
‘Not a lot. Medical properties attached, aren’t there? Pills – I’ve seen tubs of them on s
helves in the health-food shops, and I know some people eat them.’ A small seismic upheaval took place in Magnus’s memory. ‘. . . I believe my father may have had a . . . there was some kind of fuss connected with them . . . aphrodisiacs, aren’t they?’
Jefferson laughed. ‘What isn’t, if you believe in it strongly enough?’
Well, teacups for example, thought Magnus, or paving-stones, though perhaps there were people for whom a paving-stone was an erotic object liable to send them into transports of lubricious delight, which could be awkward if you simply wanted to go round the corner for a pint of milk. ‘Quite.’ He had little use for aphrodisiacs himself, sadly, though given the circumstances where he might have required one, he doubted whether he would need further stimulation. The image of Janine spread on his bed suddenly jumped into his mind, and he would have liked to linger there a little, but Jefferson Andrewes was speaking further about sea-cucumbers, detailing facts he must have learned at the Institute where Magnus’s own father used to work.
‘It seems to me quite obvious that foul play of some kind was involved.’ Andrewes leaned forward, ticking points off on his fingers. ‘One, this boy who heard gunshots, and subsequently disappeared into the big city, was almost certainly paid to keep silent – if not silenced himself. Two, the distinct absence of any sharp bends in the road which might have caused a vehicle to go over the edge of the ravine, leading to three, the fact that your father was by all accounts a meticulously careful driver, and likely to have been even more so with his wife and daughter on board, not to mention my mother. Four, the illegal harvesting of sea-cucumbers from protected waters, which your father stumbled upon, thus theoretically bringing to an end a lucrative trade in smuggling the things to the Far East. Five, the fact that the bodies were cremated in what, even for a Latin-American country, was indecent haste, before, that is, anybody could examine them for things like bullet wounds.’
‘Six,’ Magnus said, ‘the fact that there seems to be absolutely no paperwork available in connection with these deaths. At the time, my father’s lawyer told me he’d been quite unable to get hold of anything at all, and though I’ve had him write to the authorities several times since, I’ve still seen no details, in fact he’s intimated that there are people actively interested in suppressing any details there might be. After a while,’ he added tiredly, ‘you start to wonder why you’re bothering, it’s nearly ten years ago now.’
‘Exactly. But if we’re right, this was cold-blooded murder, and I for one intend to see, if at all possible, that someone is brought to book for it.’
‘I’m with you on that one. Anna-Margarita, my little sister, was only eight when it happened; she never had a chance to live her life at all.’
Jefferson frowned. ‘You say you’ve never seen any papers, but just before I went out there my stepfather . . . my mother’s second husband would be more accurate . . . he told me he’d seen some kind of police report about the incident, that he’d gone through it quite carefully with his lawyer and that it all seemed, as he put it, hunky-dory.’
‘Do you think he’d let us have sight of it?’
‘I can’t see why not, if he’s still got it, that is. I’ll call him, ask him to have a really good look for it, as a matter of urgency, say I’d be glad to go down and collect it.’ He swallowed a little cognac. ‘You could come too, if you liked.’
One of Magnus’s students had told him just two days ago that he ought to get out more, and now here was an opportunity to do so. ‘Sounds like a good idea.’
‘I’ll call Gordon tonight.’
‘Maybe we should rope my sister in on this. She was actually in the car when it went over the edge of the road and plunged into the ravine.’
‘Jeez, that’s tough.’
‘She was lucky to get away with nothing more than some scars on her leg, and a touch of amnesia. She can’t remember anything more than a few sketchy details about the accident.’
‘Poor girl.’
‘She’s had a lot of . . . troubles.’ Magnus wondered whether to confide further in this more-or-less stranger but decided that Kate would hate to have details of her recent abduction tossed into the public arena, though he was aware that leaving the sentence in its unfinished state might imply nothing more to Jefferson Andrewes than that his sister was one of those slightly hysterical women who suffered once a month from what he thought of as Women’s Problems, but he decided that if he tried to deny this he would only land himself in a welter of explanations of a far too intimate nature, so kept silent, the unnamed ‘troubles’ hanging in the air like so many slowly fading smoke signals.
Janine
Twenty-Two
Seated at the small round dining table in her flat, Janine pored over the ledgers which had been delivered to TaylorMade Travel by DHL from London. She’d pushed back the green glass vase of narcissi which she’d bought at the market that morning, a small tight bunch of green stems and tissue-paper petals curved around hearts the colour of the egg-yolks she remembered from when she was a child but hardly ever saw these days, heavenly scented, ‘harbingers of spring’, she’d read that somewhere, although the dreary winter had long since receded, and even spring was well advanced. The night they’d spent at Magnus’s house, there had been snowdrops in the front garden of the house, hiding under a rather unkempt holly bush, and little yellow things she’d looked up on the Internet and discovered were aconites. There was a scrubby little bush of forsythia, a plant she didn’t like – was it the absence of leaves, at least in its early stages – and the remains of crocuses, too, on the lawn. She didn’t like crocuses at all, the only time she’d got the point of them had been a planting she’d seen in front of a castle in Copenhagen, a great sheet of purple and white, like a carpet. She’d root the forsythia out if it was hers, replace it with mock-orange and lilac, plant lavender along the border, anything with a nice smell, like the scented garden for the blind she used to take her grandmother to, all those years ago, curry plant and mint in pots, and lemon verbena and geranium.
As soon as she’d stepped through Magnus’s front door, she had experienced a sense of coherence, as if it was here that everything came together, all the loose ends of her existence meeting in this hallway and connecting into a life of happy ordinariness. It was the kind of house she’d always dreamed of, rather like Miss Barker’s, with its antique furniture and good pictures, nice wallpapers, wonderful linen sheets (had Magnus chosen those?). She had felt a great longing to live there, a desire to look out of the windows at the back garden and plan its so-much-needed reorganization, to move through the pleasant rooms and over the Persian rugs and know that it was hers, to cook in the daffodil-yellow kitchen, pull out a copper-bottomed pan here, or a hugely expensive Japanese chef’s knife there. She wasn’t kidding herself, it was never going to happen, but in the time she’d spent there with him, she had briefly glimpsed the multi-layered meaning of the word ‘home’.
Normally, handling numbers gave her a kind of interior glow, like a superior wood-burning stove, one of those Jotel things, if that was the right name, something Scandinavian spelled with either an ø or an ö. She loved working with figures, adding them up, multiplying and subtracting, watching them click accurately into place, reach the conclusions that she wished them to, the logicality of them, like music, the way they might soar into incomprehensibility on one side of a page and fall inevitably into their allotted position on the other. Tonight, though, she could not stop thinking of Magnus, the button missing on his cashmere cardigan which it wouldn’t take more than a minute to fix (she must remember to put a needle and thread into her bag before they went to have supper with him, because she was pretty sure he would have neither in the house), the shaggy eyebrows which given half a chance she would gladly trim for him (she’d occasionally worked in a hairdressing salon as a Saturday job when she was still at school) and his eyes, his really lovely eyes which most of the time seemed to be fixed on something only he could see (jewelled eggs and dachas
and fur-piled sledges racing through snowy forests?) and above all, his love and concern for his sister. She tried to imagine her own brother being as protective as that, being protective at all, but it was impossible. It was probably a bit sad that she had no idea where he was, her own flesh and blood, nor what he did (though it was almost certainly something which sailed far too close to the wind) and quite honestly she didn’t want to know, not after he’d spent time in prison for something which Mum insisted wasn’t his fault (‘well, he always was too gullible for his own good, Jane, you know that’); not after he’d murdered her little dog. Dad knew it was he who’d done it, even though he hadn’t watched the crime take place like she had.
During the last three evenings she had gone over her lover’s books, the lists of employees, the records of the various companies they worked for under the umbrella of one holding company, with a Board of Directors consisting of only two people, a married couple, she presumed, since they had the same surname, though they could have been father and daughter, or brother and sister. Or aunt and nephew or . . .
There were half a dozen of these companies, all with the kind of anonymous names that gave no clue as to the business activity each company conducted – Management Supplies Ltd, Communication Services Ltd, Britec Systems, Overseas Affiliates Ltd, among others – non-committal enterprises which could have been dealing with almost anything you cared to name from property to paper napkins. Meticulously, she went through the sales records, the expenditures, the pay roll, the money laid out for vans and cars and stationery and office furniture; she checked and rechecked, went over everything three times. Now she had completed the task and would shortly type into her computer the information they clearly gave her, after which she would print the pages out, take the whole lot to the all-night copy-shop and make two or three copies of everything, keeping one for herself, naturally. Her lover was right, the organization was being cheated, someone had been skimming off the top and then trying to manipulate the figures, quite cleverly, too, though as soon as you knew what you were looking for, it was obvious, and she hoped that whoever it was wouldn’t have to pay too big a price for the wrongdoing; she didn’t want to picture what the penalty for double-crossing him or his associates might be.