Dark Mirror bak-10

by Barry Maitland

  ‘She said that, did she?’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  Kathy phoned Brock, and told him what they had learned.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to interview Emily later to get that on record, but that’s good enough. Come on in and we’ll get to work.’

  •

  The room was drab and dispiriting, as if to tell those who were interviewed in it that anything they might come up with had certainly been heard between these grubby walls before.

  ‘Since we saw you last, Dr da Silva,’ Brock began, ‘we’ve had a chance to check some of the things you told us.’ He stopped and stared at the man across the table.

  Da Silva tried to meet his eyes, but only succeeded in looking shifty. He was a changed man, Kathy thought, the arrogance gone along with the colour from his face. His clothes looked crumpled and soiled, as if he’d slept in them on someone’s sofa, and she wondered if his wife had thrown him out. He took a pair of glasses out of his pocket and put them on with an unsteady hand, as if for protection.

  ‘We’ve been trying to confirm your account of your movements on Tuesday the third of April, the day that Marion Summers was poisoned, but without success. None of your neighbours saw you that day, you made no calls through your house phone nor received any. There’s no evidence of you being at home that day at all.’

  Da Silva’s solicitor began to object, but Brock simply nodded his head patiently and then went on, questioning the tutor again about the details of that day, what he’d had for lunch, what letters he might have written (none), and emails he might have sent from his home computer.

  ‘No, nothing like that. I told you, I was completely engrossed in the paper I was writing for a conference presentation that was overdue.’ His voice was different, like a nervous public speaker whose throat is stretched tight with tension.

  They would require his computer, Brock said, and would carry out a search of his home, although from his tone he didn’t expect to find much. He moved on to the days following Marion’s death, and da Silva’s visit to her house.

  ‘I spoke to Keith Rafferty,’ Kathy said. ‘He denied that he’d supplied you with a key.’

  Da Silva made a noise intended as a scoff but that came out as a choke. He took a sip from the plastic cup in front of him and said, ‘That’s no surprise.’

  They turned to his relationship with Dr Ringland and access to his laboratory, laboriously working through every detail until eventually the solicitor said, ‘I think that’s really enough. As you can see, Dr da Silva is suffering greatly from the strain of these terrible events, of which he is entirely innocent. Unless you have something specific to ask him, I’m going to advise him to say no more.’

  ‘It’s true!’ da Silva blurted out, loud enough to make his solicitor glance at him in alarm. ‘You… you’re trying to make me out to be some kind of predator, preying on girls like Marion and Tina. But I’m innocent! I was proud of Marion, proud of her as a father might be proud of his daughter, proud of her development, of her intelligence and insight. Proud of her independence, too, of her refusal to accept my opinion on trust, difficult as that sometimes was.’

  There were tears in his eyes now, and the three other people in the room, despite their long experience of such situations, drew back a little in embarrassment.

  ‘When she hid her Cornell paper from me, and I began to suspect the way in which it was intended to undermine me, I felt bitterly betrayed. Her disloyalty was like a knife in my heart. But I never, for one moment, thought of hurting her. That is obscene.’

  Silence filled the room, then Brock said mildly, ‘Where were you on the afternoon and evening of Wednesday the eleventh of this month, Dr da Silva?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A week ago, between the hours of three and eight. Please think carefully before you answer.’

  Da Silva frowned, then reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a small diary. ‘Umm… lunch with Dr Ringland, a two o’clock lecture, then…’ He looked up. ‘I believe I went up to the British Library.’

  ‘What was the lecture?’

  ‘Victorian literature.’

  ‘To?’

  ‘Third-year arts students mainly. Why?’

  ‘Tina Flowers was in that class, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Um… it’s possible, I suppose.’

  ‘And then she went to the British Library, where, shortly after four o’clock, she requested two books. Do you know what they were?’

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘Because the following morning you returned to the library as soon as it opened, and requested those same two books, books so obscure that almost nobody else has ever requested them.’

  ‘Um… I believe I do remember. Marion had told me about them.’

  Brock shook his head impatiently. ‘You followed Tina after the lecture up to the British Library, and watched her order the two books, one of which was the source of Marion’s revelations in her Cornell paper. You had been unable to find that book because it was stored in one of the special collections, the papers of the Havelock family, a name slightly different from the one you’d been searching for-Haverlock.

  Da Silva sat rigid in his chair.

  ‘Where is that book now, Dr da Silva? You collected it the following day, but never returned it. Where is it?’

  He said nothing, jaw locked.

  ‘Did you hide it somewhere in the library?’ Kathy pressed.

  For a moment it seemed he would keep silent, but then he gave a kind of shudder and whispered, ‘She just read and read and read, completely engrossed, but she seemed to make no notes, nor photocopies, before the library was closing and she had to hand it back. So the next morning I was there before her and took out the book. It was a scurrilous store of gossip, that’s all; a travesty, full of innuendo and rumour. Marion should never have considered it seriously. It was unconscionable that it should cause so much distress. I knew exactly what Rossetti would want me to do with the damn thing, and I did it.’

  ‘You did what?’ Kathy asked softly.

  ‘I destroyed it,’ he said defiantly. ‘I tore it into shreds and flushed it down the loo. There, I destroyed a library book. You can arrest me for that.’

  ‘But Tina had read it,’ Brock said, ‘just as Marion had before her, so you had to destroy her, too, didn’t you?’

  •

  Guiltily, Kathy now also felt like a disloyal daughter. Brock was energised by the arrest, firing instructions to the team-her team-to fill the gaps in their case against da Silva. She worked with him, of course, following up his ideas, adding her own, yet all the time she held back a little, feeling they’d got something wrong. It worried her that he hadn’t been immersed in the case as she had been, but was that just pique at having him take over now? But if there was some flaw, it was up to her, who should have developed a deeper understanding of the dynamics, to put her finger on it.

  She puzzled over this later that night, when she finally got home and sat on her sofa with a burger on her lap, staring up at her wall. The diagram, she had to admit, looked pretty convincing with da Silva in the centre, the perfect counterpart to Marion’s pattern on the left with Rossetti in that central place, ringed by his women, and Kathy could almost sense that Marion would have approved. So what was wrong?

  She went to bed without an answer, overtired and uneasy. She soon fell into a deep sleep, only to wake again after a couple of hours. Her brain immediately began whirring with images of imagined scenes-Marion collapsing in the library, Pip in the pub with Rafferty and Crouch, Ogilvie tumbling down the library stairs, Douglas Warrender meeting Marion in Bastia, then returning across flower-covered hills to suffer a pool-side barbecue with his family and friends…

  No, that was wrong. She opened her eyes in the pitch-dark room, remembering Warrender’s remark in St James’s Park: We were a perfect couple, making friends with other holidaying couples at the local restaurants, entertaining neighbours around the pool…
>
  A perfect couple, not a perfect family. Was Emily with them? Kathy realised they’d never checked.

  And suddenly it came to her that what had been wrong from the start was the way in which Marion and Tina had died. It was entirely plausible that da Silva, or Douglas Warrender, or even Keith Rafferty, might have desperately wanted Marion dead. But how would they do it? A hit and run, perhaps. An attack in a dark street. A strangling in a car, the body dumped. Something desperate, brutal and anonymous. But not arsenic poisoning.

  The way Marion died had felt… what? Bizarre, certainly. Eccentric? That wasn’t quite it. Rather elaborate and clever, with its references to her studies. Too much so. Like a student prank. It reminded Kathy of those student pranks at school on April Fools’ Day, the bucket of water balanced over the door, the boot polish on the door handle, the collapsing chair. Elaborately staged, spectacular in their effects and at their best-or worst-cruelly matched to their intended victim.

  She simply couldn’t imagine any of those men doing it that way. The diagram on her wall was all wrong, she realised. She had been so influenced by Marion’s, with its brooding male at the centre. Perhaps it wasn’t like that at all.

  A final image came into Kathy’s mind, of Emily sitting sobbing on the leather sofa, as pale and racked as the two victims, whose symptoms she almost seemed to mimic. Da Silva wasn’t the only one who’d been at the British Library when Tina died. Emily had been there too. thirty

  S uzanne also spent a disturbed night. Angela’s story about Dougie had unsettled her more than she’d been prepared to admit to herself. He had been her first great love, a dazzling figure against whose memory later boys had been measured and invariably found wanting. Even much later, when she matured and married, the summer in Notting Hill remained a lost Eden in her mind, to be nurtured and occasionally savoured in secret. Angela’s story had thrown all that into a new, grotesque perspective, and one that, if it were remotely true, resonated horribly with the case David was working on. She shuddered to think of the ramifications if she told him; but suppose Angela, who obviously hadn’t heard of the connection between Marion Summers and the Warrenders, did eventually pick it up, and decide to tell her story to the police? Where would Suzanne be then? One way or another, she didn’t see how she could keep it to herself without some kind of reassurance that the story was nonsense. She couldn’t approach Dougie, that was unthinkable, but in the end she decided that there was perhaps just one person who might put her mind to rest. And so, that Wednesday evening while Brock and Kathy were charging Tony da Silva with Marion’s murder, Suzanne had phoned the house in Notting Hill and asked to speak to Lady Joan Warrender.

  Joan remembered her straight away. She was polite, but naturally puzzled at being approached like this, especially after Sophie had told them all about how angry she’d got with DCI Brock.

  ‘But how exactly can I help you?’

  ‘I wondered if I could meet you briefly in the next day or two, perhaps over a cup of tea, Lady Warrender.’

  ‘Oh, I really don’t think that would be a good idea. Things have been said, you know, people upset. Sophie is very touchy about it. This is a very tense time for us all.’

  ‘Of course, I do understand.’ The old woman sounded so stern, and Suzanne tried in vain to think of some way to mollify her. It had been a bad idea approaching her like this.

  ‘Perhaps if you gave me some idea of what it’s about?’

  ‘Well, I happened to meet another old friend recently, Angela Crick, who used to live next door to you, remember?’

  ‘Yes?’ Joan sounded bemused.

  Suzanne ploughed on. ‘She told me a story that your nephew Jack had told her, all those years ago, about something that happened in India when you were living there, to do with Dougie.’

  ‘In India? About Dougie? Good Lord, what sort of story?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t very nice, and I’m sure it was completely untrue, but I thought it might be a good thing if I could talk it over with you, and get to the bottom of it, so that I could get back to Angela and put her right. I didn’t like the idea of her repeating it to anyone else.’

  Suzanne heard a little gasp from the other end, and imagined the old woman sinking onto the chair in the hall beside the telephone, trying to gather her wits.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lady Warrender. I shouldn’t have bothered you. I’m sure I can take care of it myself.’

  ‘But… no, if it concerns Dougie… Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘I thought it best to speak to you first.’

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right. Oh dear. Very well, let’s meet. Not here at the house, and not in a cafe either-I can’t hear anything in places like that any more. Meet me at the churchyard of St John’s, just up the hill from us. I often walk up there for a little exercise. Tomorrow? Shall we say eleven?’

  •

  First thing that morning Kathy checked the passenger lists of both airline and private flights between London, Nice and Bastia for the months of February, March and April-something, she told herself, she should have done weeks ago. She established that Douglas and Sophie Warrender alone had travelled out on the tenth of March, returning on the sixth of April.

  Impatient as she was to follow this up, she couldn’t get out of a scheduled team meeting, and sat through it barely concentrating on the briefing about a new computer system. When it was finally over she picked up the phone and dialled the number of the Warrenders’ house. Sophie’s secretary Rhonda answered.

  ‘I’m afraid Sophie’s out this morning, Inspector, working in the library.’

  ‘Ah. Is Emily with her?’

  ‘No, she’s at home. Do you want to speak to her?’

  ‘No need to disturb her. Actually it would be better if I spoke to her in person. I’ll come over right away.’

  Bren tried to intercept her on her way out, but she put him off. She would have found it hard to explain the sense of urgency she felt. Rather than wait for a car from the pool, she caught a passing cab, and made good time to Lansdowne Gardens.

  ‘That was quick.’ Rhonda opened the front door to let Kathy in, then hesitated. ‘After you rang off I wondered if this was wise.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Emily’s really not very well at the moment, in fact she’s still in bed, and Sophie’s very protective. She probably wouldn’t approve of you interviewing Emily with neither her nor Lady Joan here in the house.’

  ‘Well, let’s ask Emily, shall we? She is eighteen, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m sure it would be all right, but…’

  Kathy sensed something equivocal in Rhonda’s voice, as if she didn’t want to be accused of wrongdoing, but at the same time wanted to help.

  ‘Were you here at all during the month Sophie was away, Rhonda?’

  ‘Yes, I came in each day and kept an eye on the decorators and reported on progress to Sophie from time to time.’

  ‘Was Emily here?’

  ‘Yes, she and Lady Joan didn’t want to go to Corsica, so they stayed here, more or less camping in their rooms in the middle of all the mess. Emily was helping Marion with her research most days, and Joan got out in the garden when she could. Look, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you wait in the office, and I’ll tell Emily you’re here?’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Kathy walked down the short corridor to the room at the end where Rhonda and Sophie worked. The tall sash windows filled it with light, and the shelves of books gave it the appearance more of an elegant library than an office. She was examining the books on Sophie’s desk when Rhonda returned.

  ‘We’re considering Alice Kipling for the next book, after Janey Morris is done with,’ she said. ‘Rudyard’s wife, one of the MacDonald sisters. Her sister Georgiana was married to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and got very chummy with William Morris, commiserating over the fact that both their spouses were unfaithful.’

  ‘All these Victorians seem to be interco
nnected,’ Kathy said.

  Rhonda laughed. ‘Too right, you need a bloody good database to sort them all out.’

  ‘Lovely room to work in.’

  ‘Yes. Have you been up to the belvedere yet?’ She nodded to the spiral staircase in the corner.

  ‘No. Is it interesting?’

  ‘I think so.’ She said it with an emphasis that made Kathy pause. ‘Why don’t you pop up now? Emily’s getting dressed.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She mounted the stairs, arriving in the corner of the square tower room which Joan’s husband Roger had converted into his eyrie. The original owner of the house had an interest in astronomy, and built it as an open loggia to house his telescopes, but Roger had enclosed it, leaving narrow windows in each of the corners with views out over Notting Hill, and with timber bookcases and a desk filling the walls between. The room had a lingering smell of cigar smoke, which had thoroughly permeated the wood. The ceiling and floor were both polished timber, so that the room had the feeling of a large cigar box.

  Kathy sat in the red leather antique office chair, feeling the snug fit of the room around her, a sanctuary for contemplation. A thick leather-bound tome lay on the desk in front of her, and she read the title in gold letters on the front, British Pharmaceutical Codex.

  There was a place marker, a piece of folded, stained paper, and when Kathy opened the book and removed the paper she found that it was a piece of old wallpaper, faded green in colour, with a pattern of swirling leaves. It marked a section headed with the title Arsenic.

  She read for a moment, then heard feet on the stairs behind her. She turned to see Emily’s pale face appear.

  ‘What are you doing?’ The girl reached the top of the stair and took in the open book on the desk, the unfolded piece of wallpaper. ‘Oh!’ She bit her lip. ‘I put that away! How…?’

  Kathy held her eyes, saying nothing, and suddenly Emily gave a little wail. ‘You know, don’t you? You know!’ Tears started from her eyes and she sank to her knees, wrapping her arms around herself, and began to sob.