A Death of Distinction

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘But you knew about the affair.’

  ‘I put two and two together, from things I’d picked up, and what I saw. I’d a small cottage at the time, a few miles from Conyhall – I’ve always preferred to provide my own accommodation whenever I could. All that summer, I saw his car parked down a small lane which you could see from my bedroom window. It was there for hours at a time, and I assumed he was meeting someone. And then, suddenly, it stopped.’

  Claudia stared down into her half-drunk coffee, which must have been quite cold by now. ‘Something was evidently very wrong with the governor just about then. Whether it was because of that, I don’t know, but he was unapproachable, which wasn’t like him, and looking rotten ... everyone noticed. Eventually, he put it about that his doctor had told him he was overworking and had advised him to take a long holiday. He went alone, walking in the Dolomites. When he came back, it was just as if nothing had happened.’

  The Elgar cello concerto moaned softly through the room.

  Mayo had taken it into his head to structure his listening – saturate himself in one composer so that he understood him more, and this tape was a new acquisition that he’d bought off a market stall. It had come to something, he reflected, when that was virtually the only place you could buy tapes now ... he’d have to succumb to the blackmail in the end, get himself a C D player.

  After hearing the piece through, he decided he could have saved himself the money and left it on the market stall. Disappointing. A slow piece, which the conductor took even slower, it wasn’t Elgar at his confident best. Downbeat, uninspiring, despite the occasional beauty of the solo cello, with none of the sweep and vigour and majesty of the Variations.

  Alex sat on the floor, leaning against his legs, writing a letter to her mother, the pad propped on her knees, finishing off a Bounty bar. She had a very sweet tooth, which he didn’t share. He hoped the letter was to her mother, squinting at the rapid, decisive handwriting, and not to her former lover, the execrable Liam, who had given her a bad time but still had a nasty habit of popping up when least wanted or expected. Ashamed of the aberrant thought – Alex wasn’t like that, promises and decisions once made were kept – he got up and went to make a pot of tea. They’d had a lean and virtuous meal of steamed plaice for supper, with new potatoes and peas. He hated plaice, a tasteless fish, even with parsley sauce, which they hadn’t had. Alex was still absorbed in Her letter when he came back and took her teacup from him, with a quick smile but not so much as a glance at the three-decker corned beef and tomato sandwich he’d made himself, dripping with pickle, mayonnaise, calories and cholesterol.

  He felt more at one with the world after he’d eaten it.

  Because the sofa, his favourite seat, was still missing, he sat in a chair opposite the rose pink chaise longue. The room looked different from here. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea, occasionally, to change your habits, you saw things from a different angle, got a different perspective. New perspectives were what was needed on this damned investigation. Lateral thinking. He reached for the scratch pad and the ballpoint beside the telephone and after a moment, he wrote, ‘Davis?’ Then sat staring into the simulated coal fire, not thinking, as he usually did, of the money going up the chimney in wasted gas, but of the case for Dex having actually planted the bomb.

  Alex twisted her head round and saw what he’d written. ‘Not satisfied that our Dex is the right one in the frame?’ she asked. ‘He’s a nasty customer, from what I saw of him, and so’s his dad.’

  ‘He worries me – too obvious a suspect. Far too pat, too smooth.’

  All right, the obvious suspect was very often the correct one, but Dex Davis seemed just too convenient. And so did the name of this man, this John Clarke Dex said he’d got the bomb materials for, a name Mayo was bloody certain Dex had pulled off the top of his head. ‘But he’s suddenly acquired money from somewhere, or someone – to buy the Orion, for one thing. Nicked it may have been in the first place, but he didn’t get it for nothing, even though it was through his dad. And there’s still the question of the explosives.’

  The possibility of subversive organizations being responsible for the actual placing of the bomb was fast receding in the absence of any claim being put forward, but they were the ones you’d go to if you wanted the know-how, the ones to give advice on what steps to take to obtain the necessary ingredients. ‘Dex must have Irish connections, through his mother,’ he mused aloud.

  ‘Not everyone who’s Irish sympathizes with terrorists.’

  ‘True, but some do – though I have to admit Carmody hasn’t succeeded in turning up any in Lavenstock.’

  He wrote rapidly on his pad for several moments, then handed it to Alex. ‘What do you make of this? It’s a letter Jenny Platt turned up among Lilburne’s papers, what I can remember of it, though I think it’s substantially correct. Written on plain cream writing paper with a ballpoint pen. The handwriting was distinctive, spiky, a bit Gothic, feminine looking. Coinciding with the tone of the letter, which suggested to Jenny that it was from a woman.’

  My dear Jack, it had begun, followed briefly by the usual congratulations, and ended: I have never ceased to regard you with affection, for what you did for me, and I have not forgotten our agreement, but the time has come when we should meet again to discuss what concerns us both. I will telephone you to arrange a time.

  ‘Any comments?’

  ‘Stilted, isn’t it?’ Alex said. ‘But I think Jenny’s right, it is from a woman. And a bit peremptory, don’t you think? Though I don’t read any particular threat in it.’

  Was there any connection with the scrap of paper found in Lilburne’s breast pocket – which had also suggested a meeting? Mayo didn’t think so, he didn’t think it was even written by the same person.

  ‘No address, either, and it’s unsigned, which suggests that Lilburne might have had some sort of relationship with her that neither would want made public.’

  ‘Ye-es ... But it’s not really a lover-like letter, is it? Not the sort of love letter I’d want to get, at any rate, please note,’ she added with a grin. ‘But if they did have some sort of relationship going, the inference in the text is that it was some time in the past.’

  ‘Abigail’s looked into it, and she says that if the writer did ring to arrange a meeting, Lilburne must have taken the call personally, because neither his secretary, his wife nor his daughter remember him being telephoned by anyone they can’t identify. I’m not sure how relevant this letter is, yet, if at all. It may well turn out to be crucial to the bombing, but ...’

  ‘How about revenge for an affair gone wrong? Hell hath no fury ...’

  ‘Unless we’re talking terrorists, bombs aren’t usually a woman’s weapon.’

  ‘Two people, then?’

  ‘Well, it’s possible ...’

  At the moment, he felt that anything was possible. He scarcely remembered ever having been quite so much at sea with a case.

  12

  After that first visit, in January, to the home Marie-Laure shared with Avril Kitchin, there began a strange period in Marc’s life. Now that he’d found his mother, he was so overwhelmed he didn’t quite know what to do with her, so to speak.

  He couldn’t – he wouldn’t – bring her to his own grotty bedsitter, but time spent with her and Avril in their poky flat was something of an endurance test, the three of them squashed together for a whole evening, and not even a television set. He wanted to take her out, to see her have fun, to make her smile a bit, and was disappointed when she refused. There was the age gap, of course, which meant she wouldn’t want to hang around the pubs and clubs he and his acquaintances frequented, but she wasn’t the sort, anyway, he could see that. She spent all her spare time reading, the newspaper, or books from the library – dull, heavy stuff: religious subjects, and books she said had been short-listed for the Booker Prize. Whereas Marc never read anything, apart from motor magazines and the textbooks he’d had to read to get through his exams. The tru
th was, though it was a bitter thing for him to have to admit, they didn’t seem to have much in common.

  ‘You don’t have to feel responsible for me,’ she said gently. ‘I’m quite happy as I am.’

  He found this hard to believe. Her life was no big deal. She and Avril occupied their weekends with shopping, going to the library, walks in the park. Their evenings were spent cleaning the flat, cooking their supper, reading. Marie-Laure went to church a good deal, and Avril knitted.

  She never sat down without a piece of knitting in her hands. She was an expert, able to keep an intricate pattern in her head and to work rapidly and evenly without looking at what she was doing, without dropping a stitch, her round stare fixed on Marc and his mother as they talked. Marie-Laure explained that Avril knitted samples for a woollen manufacturer: they would send her wool from the factory, and a pattern, and she would test it out for accuracy, sending back a perfect, unflawed garment. The rapidity with which she worked meant that she was able to knit for herself and Marie-Laure as well; plain sweaters and cardigans in neutral colours for his mother, the lacy things which she evidently preferred for herself, like the pink top she’d worn on his first visit to the flat. She was very fond of pink.

  Despite the awkwardness, and the cramped conditions, Marc came to Coltmore Road as often as he could in his off-duty hours, since Marie-Laure wouldn’t go out with him, except for an occasional walk. But the evenings were still dark and with the coming of February, they’d embarked on a period of miserable, rain-sodden weather when it was wiser to stay indoors. Marc considered it was worth it, if he could persuade Marie-Laure to talk, in her almost faultless English, about her childhood in Strasbourg, where she’d grown up, the daughter of a museum curator and his wife, about her work as a teacher in Besançon, where she’d worked until she had met Charles Daventry, a wine importer ...

  Reminiscences stopped when they got to Charles Daventry.

  And the questions which Marc burned to ask but couldn’t, because he feared the answers, remained unasked: why had she ever taken that last, inevitable step? Why had she given him away, allowed him to be adopted? What had really happened?

  He was beginning to feel bad again, the way he’d felt before he met his mother. Angry, and as though something terrible was happening that he should do something about at all costs.

  ‘And you, Marc, tell me about your par – about June and Frank.’

  ‘They were all right. I don’t want to talk about them.’

  He was sensitive about how different his education was from what it might have been if he’d been brought up by her. The things she knew about – art, books and music – hadn’t featured much in his childhood. Frank, a machine operator in a component factory, noting Marc’s handiness, had shown him how to use tools, to make things; bought him his first chemistry set, taken him to football matches and taught him to swim. And

  June – well, June hadn’t been educated like Marie-Laure, she’d thought mothering started and ended with a kiss and a hug, seeing him clean, tidy and well fed ...

  ‘They were good people. You shouldn’t think so badly about them,’ Marie-Laure admonished quietly.

  ‘Especially when she wasn’t your born-to mother,’ Avril put in, her needles click-click-clicking.

  He really hated that sort of jargon, especially when it came from Avril, uttered in such pious tones. He was beginning to see he’d never like Avril very much, either, and was sure she felt the same about him. She was very critical of everything he did, or didn’t do. ‘Don’t you have a girlfriend?’ she asked, more than once.

  ‘No,’ Marc said shortly.

  It was none of her business. If he wanted a girl he could get one. He objected to the way she fixed that unblinking stare of hers on him and his mother as they talked, taking in avidly every word that passed between them. He thought she bossed Marie-Laure about too much. Her everlasting knitting got on his nerves.

  He tried even harder to persuade Marie-Laure to go out with him to a film, a show, a slap-up meal, but the only time he was able to get her to agree to go out for dinner, she had insisted that Avril came too, and the evening was a disaster. He had chosen the best of Lavenstock’s two French restaurants, thinking to please Marie-Laure with this, but both women, appalled at the prices, chose the cheapest, and therefore the most uninteresting, food on the menu, and refused wine. Marc drank more than he should have done. Conversation languished. They’d have done better to have stayed in the flat.

  Abigail provided Mayo with as many details of Jack Lilburne’s background as her team had been able to gather together, from a variety of sources, ranging through his entry in Who’s Who to a brother and sister in the north and all sorts of people who were reputed to have known him well. He familiarized himself with it by reading it through twice, then put it aside and thought about it.

  Born and brought up in a sea-coast mining village in Northumberland, Jack Lilburne came of a family who had been miners for generations. His father had been a tub-thumping trade unionist of the old school who had lived through pre-war poverty and remembered the Jarrow marches: Jennie Lee and Nye Bevan were his idols. He had determined his son was going to have a better life than he’d had, knowing that Jack was clever enough to get to university if he worked hard enough – and his father had made sure that he did. He’d graduated from Durham with a respectable law degree, decided to read for the Bar but unexpectedly joined the Prison Service after a couple of years. His father’s reaction to this was not recorded. He rose rapidly, came to Conyhall in 1972 and had stayed there ever since. Well known for his progressive views on treating young offenders, he had been a frequent speaker at Prison Service conferences. Leftish politics, but not aggressively so. His professional life, culminating in the award of his OBE, was crowned with success. His personal one?

  Twenty-one years ago, he had married Dorothea Carrington, daughter of one of the old county families. There were those who’d said it couldn’t last. People who knew him before his marriage said it would never last – not so much because he and Dorothea came from opposite ends of the social scale, but because Jack had always been known as something of a womanizer, and leopards don’t change their spots.

  ‘So, he did like to play the field a bit.’ That was what Alex had said. He’d have to take more notice of woman’s intuition in future.

  ‘Even after his marriage, according to Claudia Reynolds,’ Abigail reminded him.

  ‘So. So, is it to be cherchez la femme? In particular, the femme who wrote that letter Jenny found?’

  ‘Kite might have something to add to that. He’s come up with something he thinks you should hear.’

  Mayo rang for the sergeant and found him, for once, at his desk.

  Kite was the sort who worked on intuition. Twenty years in the police hadn’t yet taught him that such often led to tears before bedtime. All Mayo’s caution couldn’t rob him of his optimistic confidence in his own snap judgements which, to Mayo’s chagrin, often turned out to be well founded. He had a way of latching on to the smallest scraps of information which turned out to be significant. Interviewing a Mrs Doreen Hancock, a civilian clerk who’d worked at Conyhall so long she was almost an institution herself, he’d recognized her as an inveterate busybody and caught a whiff of something which could fall into the ‘significant’ category.

  Mayo prepared to hear what he had to say, knowing Kite’s unerring sense for what was relevant and what was not wouldn’t let him waste time in getting to the nitty-gritty. ‘I know you’ve told all this once to Inspector Moon, but I’d like to hear it first hand, Martin.’

  Kite, impatient, but knowing from past experience that Mayo would demand all the details, resigned himself to beginning at the point where Mrs Hancock had mentioned to him something which had happened years ago. She was a gossipy woman, given to clichés. She didn’t like to speak ill of the dead, but she’d never forgotten the incident, somehow. A day in the Cotswolds, that was something she and her husband had always enj
oyed, driving round the pretty villages or maybe visiting Hidcote Manor Gardens, having tea at Chipping Campden or an early supper on the way home. Real treat it was, or used to be, it was all getting too touristy now. Anyway, on this particular day they’d called in at this hotel on the way home for a meal, and who should they run into there but Jack Lilburne and a woman. Oh, the couple had tried to make it appear they weren’t together, but Mrs Hancock wasn’t born yesterday, and knew when she was having the wool pulled over her eyes, and had later happened to get into conversation with the receptionist – well, the proprietress, really – who’d witnessed the encounter and assumed they were friends. It turned out that ‘Mr Norman’ and his wife regularly spent weekends at the hotel.

  ‘Disgusting, it was. At least he didn’t call himself Smith,’ Mrs Hancock sniffed. ‘But barefaced – I ask you, not twenty miles from home! Practically under his poor wife’s nose – well, it wasn’t right, was it? I’m not narrow minded, but really, I can’t stand that sort of thing.’

  Kite had made a spur of the moment decision to run out there and check for himself.

  The receptionist, who was indeed the wife of the owner, remembered the incident clearly, since it had been a cause of much embarrassment to her. ‘It was years ago, but I haven’t forgotten – I really put my foot in it, there! I’d seen them chatting to him in reception and assumed they were friends. “We’re always pleased to see Mr and Mrs Norman,” I said to that woman when she brought it up in conversation – though she was just being nosy. It was the way she looked when I said “Mr and Mrs Norman”. I knew straight away, from her expression, that it wasn’t his real name, and I was quite shocked, I’d thought him such a nice man. I was really naive in those days! Well, I was a lot younger, not so experienced in what goes on in hotels. The morals of our guests are nothing to do with us, but of course ...’ She let her shrug speak for itself. ‘We never saw the Normans again.’