A Death of Distinction

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘Well, you’ve only to look.’

  She said what she thought, Ms Reynolds. She was a cracker to look at, she had a clear skin and large blue eyes, she smiled often, but he was not charmed. The concept of her attractiveness as a spur to wangling a few minutes in her company was fast losing ground, as far as he was concerned. In contrast to the cheerful young woman who’d guided them here, it was gradually being borne in on him that beneath the softly rounded bosom in the rust-coloured suit could beat the heart of a female Gauleiter.

  She looked covertly at her watch, a gesture not lost on Mayo. He chose not to see it. ‘What about the local residents who’re objecting to this scheme?’ he asked.

  After a pause, she said, ‘They are objecting strongly – and groundlessly, of course – but I can’t see them going to the extent of putting a bomb under his car to put their point across.’

  ‘Possibly not.’ This wasn’t something worth arguing about at the moment. ‘How did Mr Lilburne get on with his staff? Was he easy to work with?’

  ‘I never found any difficulty.’

  That wasn’t an answer to the question. She was beginning to show signs of an underlying obstructiveness, though he’d have put money on it that Claudia Reynolds was normally the type to make it in her way to get on with anyone if it suited her, on the surface.

  ‘What about personal involvements – enmities?’

  A tumbler of water from which she’d been drinking stood on the table, and she reached out a hand to take another sip, perhaps to give herself time. Unfortunately, she wasn’t looking as she did so and her sleeve brushed against the glass, knocking it on to the hard composition floor, where it broke with a crash, the glittering fragments scattering in a wide arc. She gave a little cry and immediately sprang from her chair to clear it up.

  ‘Watch you don’t cut yourself,’ Abigail warned, but she was too late. Claudia Reynolds was looking with horror at a cut on her index finger and had turned as white as paper, though it was little more than a scratch, so slight, in fact, that the blood was having difficulty in oozing out. A few tiny red drops on the white skin of her manicured hand was all that could be seen, but, looking at them, she gave a soft little moan and fainted dead away.

  ‘Was it something I said?’ Mayo wondered aloud, sitting beside Abigail as she drove him back to the station with the competence that characterised everything she did – and which was why she was sometimes resented by those of her male colleagues who couldn’t measure up to her standards, most of whom she’d skimmed past, barely touching ground on her way up to the coveted position of detective inspector. ‘Or did it just prove she was human after all? Cut her, and she bleeds ...’

  ‘Rather clumsy diversionary tactics – knocking the glass over, I mean.’ Abigail drew smoothly up to a set of traffic lights. ‘The faint was real enough though, wasn’t it? She’s obviously one of those people who can’t stand the sight of blood. Blood phobia must be a bit of a hazard in her line. But knocking the glass over ... I think there was something she just wanted to avoid at that moment.’

  ‘Personal relationships? That’s what we were talking about just then. Was there something going on between her and Lilburne?’

  ‘Nothing amorous if there was,’ Abigail said drily.

  That had been obvious, but the conversation with Claudia Reynolds had been unsatisfactory all ways, Mayo reflected. She was prickly, to say the least – a woman in what was very much a man’s world, who hadn’t yet learned how to cope with it gracefully, though he was damn sure she wouldn’t have thanked him for thinking that. Perhaps that was the reason she’d drawn in her horns about Lilburne. He felt she could have said a lot more, had she been so inclined, and whether it was relevant or not, he’d have been better pleased to have heard it – to know what it was she’d kept silent about, and why.

  6

  Flora woke with a dull, throbbing pain in her head. Her eyelids felt weighted, it was a tremendous effort to open them. When she did, she saw a white coverlet on a high narrow bed, pulled taut across her feet, flowery curtains and shiny, cream-painted walls, a sink in the corner and an open door into a corridor, from whence she heard the squeak of rubber tyres on plastic tiles. There was a smell like none other, compounded of fish and antiseptics and polish, which immediately told her where she was, but not why. Slowly, she turned her glance sideways and saw her mother sitting by the bedside, her head bent; she shut her eyes again, terrified of remembering something unspeakable and as yet unrecalled on the edge of her consciousness. The room swam around her, and presently, she slept once more.

  Mayo still hadn’t become used to his flat being so spruce, though anywhere where Alex Jones lived was destined to be tidy. It had been perhaps the tiniest thing on the debit side of her coming to live with him – the fact that he’d have to put his clothes away, and his shirts and socks out for washing on a regular basis, not just when he’d come to the last clean ones. But on the credit side, he could see the difference – a home, as opposed to a bachelor pad. There was something to be said for having it dusted and polished and cared for, and not to have to face a sink full of washing up every time he came home. It wasn’t perhaps as pristine as Alex would have kept it, left to herself. Mayo was gradually educating her otherwise. She now occasionally left a cushion rumpled.

  It had been a day and a half, and wasn’t finished yet.

  Moses, the old grey cat who belonged to his landlady, but thought he ought to belong to Mayo, was waiting outside his door as usual when Mayo arrived home, in the ever-optimistic but never-to-be-fulfilled hope that one day he might be allowed inside. ‘Hard luck, mate,’ Mayo said, closing the door on his jealous miaow as Bert the parrot squawked out his usual low-class greeting from inside.

  He knew Alex was off duty and was looking forward to a welcome from her, to the hopeful prospect of savoury odours coming from a meal simmering to perfection point in the oven while he sipped a single malt. Some music, perhaps, the latest acquisition, with his feet up for half an hour on the old sofa whose ancient springs had learned to accommodate themselves to his shape.

  The whisky was there, but Alex was not, and the flat smelled only of the spicy bowl of potpourri on the coffee table. He read the note she’d left, informing him she’d be home shortly, there was cold food left ready for their meal in the fridge. Shrugging philosophically, he poured himself a judicious slug of Glenfinnan and crossed to the sofa, which was also not there.

  He stood contemplating its replacement. Lois, he thought.

  When Alex had finally agreed to live with him, they’d decided on his flat rather than hers because it was bigger, and had agreed to pool resources and so keep the best of both worlds. Mayo, not caring one way or another, had left the choice of redecorating it to Alex, with professional help from her sister Lois, who was an interior decorator. He, Mayo, was merely the one who slapped the paint on. Now that they’d finished decorating it and Lois’s desire to go the whole hog with ‘amusing’ furniture and dramatic lighting effects had been tempered by Alex’s insistence on a comfortable mix of old and new, it looked unbelievably smart and coordinated, with even the parrot matching the colour scheme (though he fancied he’d seen Lois casting a speculative eye on him more than once). He had to admit it was an improvement on the all-over magnolia job he’d walloped on when he moved in because he couldn’t think of anything else.

  He was becoming accustomed to seeing familiar pieces of furniture disappear and to stumbling over others he’d never seen before, but he was so bemused with joy that Alex was actually here at last, in his flat and sharing his bed, that he’d made not a murmur. The only thing he’d drawn the line at was interference with his collection of old clocks, which were sacrosanct.

  And the sofa.

  Though to be fair he hadn’t actually stipulated this last item. He’d have thought Alex would have known. He’d had it since before he was married, and it was second-hand then, but it was deeply comfortable and it had been the first piece of furniture he�
��d ever bought. There was a lot of history in that sofa.

  This one was as stylish as the rest of the decor, pretending to be a Victorian chaise longue, with a curved, buttoned end and a carved wooden back. It was stuffed as tight and unyielding as a Christmas turkey. It was velvet. It was rose pink, for God’s sake.

  And it was undoubtedly Lois’s choice. Sometimes he wondered which sister was supposed to have moved in with him.

  There had been an improvement in relations between him and the spiky Lois since she’d been involved in the Fleming case, a particularly nasty murder he’d had to investigate two or three years ago, but he couldn’t yet feel she approved of him entirely. He still felt it was her influence which was partly responsible for Alex refusing to marry him, never mind all this bollocks about wanting to keep her independence. There was also a question hanging over Alex’s professional future. Did she want to stay in the police service or would she – the latest proposal – yield to Lois’s continuing pressure to join her in her interior-decorating business?

  He went to set the new dining table with the new table mats and the new cutlery and then, as a gesture to his own independence, swept them away and set out the old stainless-steel knives and forks on the kitchen table.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss about,’ Alex said when she came in five minutes later. ‘It’s only gone to be recovered, and resprung. It’ll be back in a week.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mayo wasn’t so sure about the respringing. ‘It won’t be too hard?’

  ‘Feather and down cushions.’

  ‘Not rose pink?’

  Alex burst out laughing. ‘You surely didn’t think this – boudoir piece – was permanent? Would I do that to you, Gil? It’s on loan from Lois, until the other’s ready.’

  He felt a fool. He could just hear Lois, in that brittle, particularly infuriating manner of hers: ‘Well, really, Giles!’

  But Alex was saying, ‘Well, we’ve more to talk about than that old sofa. What a day it’s been for you – Superintendent!’ She gave the impish grin that had first made Mayo see distinct possibilities for letting herself go behind the cool exterior she presented to the world.

  ‘Hey, just because you live with me doesn’t give you the right to get uppity, Sergeant Jones.’ He grinned. ‘And the day’s not finished yet, not by a long chalk. ,I’ve only come home for a couple of hours – to get out of this gear, have a shower and something to eat, then I’m off again.’

  Alex also being in the police, he could announce these sort of intentions without fear of sulks or recriminations. Just as he could talk about his current cases without the risk of being either indiscreet or boring. She was as interested as he was in the present one.

  ‘How is she – Flora, the daughter?’ she asked when they were sitting down to carefully sliced cold chicken and a beautifully prepared but boring salad, with a jacket potato done in the microwave by way of a bonus. Alex might be his dear love but her best attributes didn’t lie in inspired cooking – that was left to his daughter, Julie. Mayo lived in hopes that, one day, she might turn up from Australia or Outer Mongolia, or wherever her next letter said she was living at present, and give Alex some lessons, but meanwhile good plain cooking was the most he ever got. He put more dressing on to his salad and kept mum, like Alex when she’d seen the table set in the kitchen. Perhaps they were both learning.

  ‘Flora Lilburne?’ he repeated. ‘She’s OK – but incredibly lucky – concussion and minor cuts and bruises, that’s all. Shock, of course. She must’ve walked away from the car seconds before it blew up.’

  ‘The worst’s probably still to come, for her.’ Alex spoke from experience. She knew what it was to be the victim of violence. It had taken her weeks to recover physically after being injured when tackling a thief who turned out to be armed in a petrol-station heist, a long convalescence which she could see, however, in retrospect, as a respite, an opportunity to take stock of her life, just then at a crossroads, professionally as well as privately. Whether she’d chosen to take the right direction in returning to her job or not remained to be seen; what she was increasingly certain of was the rightness of her decision to make a real commitment in her private life, to have moved in here with Gil Mayo. Since she wasn’t a person who undertook such commitments lightly, it had taken her a long time to make her mind up. She knew he thought she was fighting shy of marriage due to a conflict between that and her career. If it were only that!

  And also, she’d known his wife, Lynne, very well. Despite the fact that it hadn’t been a marriage of unalloyed bliss, mostly due to the exigencies of his job, Alex was by no means sure that he’d totally recovered from Lynne – that he still didn’t have hang-ups, reminding him of the mistakes he’d made. She didn’t want that kind of a marriage, with a man always looking over his shoulder. She needed to show him that theirs would be different.

  ‘Still nobody claiming responsibility for the bomb?’ she asked as she poured his second cup of excellent coffee. Coffee she was good at.

  He shook his head as he accepted the cup from her. ‘And I’ve a nasty feeling there won’t be.’ He half hoped his intuition would be proved wrong, that some subversive organization would call and say they’d planted the bomb, then the investigation would be in other, specialist hands; if not, it was likely to remain his responsibility ...

  ‘We’ve never begun an investigation with less to go on. No clues, no suspects, not even a body. No real leads at all, except maybe a so-called photographer who might, on the off chance that we can find him, turn out to be genuine. Oh, and a slim chance on one of the ex-inmates at Conyhall.’ He wasn’t, he realized, pinning many hopes on Dex Davis. Despite his record at the YOI, despite Spurrier’s reluctant conclusions, and Claudia Reynolds’s convictions.

  ‘Not even a jealous husband?’ Alex asked.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Well, Jack Lilburne was quite a dish, wasn’t he? Very attractive.’

  Mayo was taken aback. ‘If you say so. Must confess, he never turned me on!’ But this added a dimension he hadn’t so far envisaged. ‘Is that right? The sort to play away from home?’

  Alex shrugged. ‘Maybe. The sort who couldn’t help giving a woman the eye, at any rate.’

  ‘Well, well.’ All the clocks in the flat reached the hour and joined together in a joyful noise, while Mayo thoughtfully finished his coffee and Alex waited patiently until they could speak again.

  ‘We may have more to go on when I’ve seen Mrs Lilburne tomorrow. And one or two of my lot should have reported in by the time I get back

  It was going to be mostly legwork at this stage: all that interviewing at Conyhall... Farrar detailed to trace Dex Davis ... Jenny Platt with her ear glued to the telephone in an attempt to trace the photographer ... None of them fighting for the privilege of questioning Lavenstock’s small but occasionally troublesome and always volatile Irish community. Although so far any local political affiliations with the Provisional IRA were unknown, they had to check whether any mistaken vestiges of sympathy remained, whether the violence had been channelled against the governor as a legitimate target. The task had fallen to the unenthusiastic Sergeant Carmody and DC Deeley whose names, it had been agreed by popular vote, would give them a head start. Deeley only got a big laugh when he protested that his ancestors had come from darkest Devon, and Carmody hadn’t had a leg to stand on from the outset. He was Liverpool-Irish right down to his toenails.

  Marc Daventry unhooked the clipboard from the iron footrail of the bed and read the notes carefully. Replacing it, he smiled at the patient. ‘Won’t be long before you’ll be home, I should think.’

  Flora said nothing, just turned her head and stared out of the window. Marc looked at the pale, lovely profile and, despite himself, felt a stirring of pity for her. She’d been told what had happened, her memory of it had come back and she was taking it badly, though everyone kept repeating that it was a miracle she should be thankful for, that she’d escaped with barely a sc
ratch and was still alive. Marc understood and sympathized. He knew from intimate experience how bad she must be feeling: he could recognize the numbness and the unwillingness to believe what had happened – only for him the shock had been twofold, and a long-drawn-out agony, because, unlike her father, they hadn’t died immediately, the two people he had until then loved as much as he’d loved anybody. An icy road, a drunken motorist taking a corner too wide, too fast, with the result that they’d ended up in hospital, he in a coma, and she still conscious but attached to a blood drip.

  A malign fate had decreed that Marc had been on duty, working overtime, when they’d been brought into Accident and Emergency at the hospital where he was working. Of course, he wasn’t allowed, when it was discovered who they were, to continue working in the theatre, and he understood and accepted that. They told him sympathetically to go home, another ODP would take his place in the support team, they’d let him know when there was any news. But he waited at the hospital, his nerves twitching – this time an anxious, waiting relative on the other side of the fence, drinking endless cups of coffee from the dispensing machine. They couldn’t keep him, later, from their bedsides.

  He hadn’t, until then, known their blood groups; there’d been no reason why he should. June, he read on her chart, was A negative – and Frank, he later saw with a shock that still sent tingles down his spine, was also A negative. While he himself, their son, was B positive.

  It wasn’t possible. Two A-negative parents with a B-positive child. He’d done his haematology stint during his training, and knew it couldn’t be. Something was seriously wrong.

  Frank died the next day, and it was to June that Marc spoke, even though she was so ill. Because she was so ill. He was all too aware how little time there was left, and he had to know the truth. He’d felt no compunction at pressing her, since any explanation must be so cruel to himself that he felt he was absolved from any necessity to spare her. All the love and kindness between them was forfeit after what those two had done. One of them was not his true parent. Or perhaps neither.