Dark Room

by Minette Walters

  "It is very unclear," said the police spokesman, "why thieves would bother to steal paintings like this. Who would buy them?"

  Daily Telegraph extract * 3 February, 1984

  MEMORANDUM

  To: ACC Hendry

  From: Superintendent Fisher

  Date: 9th August, 1984

  Re: Murder of Russe11 Landy-1.2.84

  Following our conversation of yesterday, I have asked Andrews and Meredith to put together a summary of the case for you. The salient points are these:

  · None of the stolen paintings have materialized. Andrews's & Meredith's view, which I share, is that robbery was never the motive. Extensive inquiries have produced no witnesses to the break-in. (NB: Mrs. Landy has made an insurance claim for compensation. The paintings were valued at Ł200,000 plus.)

  · Landy's movements were traced for the three months prior to the murder but there is no evidence of anything remotely untoward in his background. His business was solvent, as were his personal finances, and bar some indications that he was an occasional cannabis smoker, he did not engage in any illegal activities. Despite questioning of friends, colleagues, and relations, there is no evidence of a secret liaison. It seems highly unlikely, therefore, that he was killed by a jealous rival.

  · He had several gay friends but extensive questioning of the gay community has convinced Andrews & Meredith that he himself was not an active homosexual and that this was not a "gay" killing.

  · He was on good terms with his wife. Friends describe him as "overly possessive of her" but there is no evidence of domestic violence or cruelty. Her alibi for the afternoon and evening of 1st February is solid. The only time she was alone from midday onwards was when she paid off the taxi which took her from the restaurant to the gallery and entered the premises. She was alone when she found Landy. Andrews & Meredith have taken several opinions on the forensic evidence, all of which support the original theory that Landy had been attacked a minimum of one hour before she arrived at 21:05. With the cabdriver's evidence of the time he dropped her, and the logged 999 ambulance call, there is no question of her having committed the assault herself.

  · Her movements have also been traced for the three months prior to the murder. Andrews & Meredith looked specifically for evidence of an affair, but found none. They also looked for evidence of a contract between her and a third party to eliminate her husband but, again, found none. Nor, it must be said, could they discover a reason why she would want him eliminated. Over a hundred friends and colleagues have been interviewed and they all speak of an amicable relationship between the two. There is some indication that Mr. Landy suffered periodic bouts of jealousy but this was put down to the fact that he was twenty years older than she was, and not to any infidelity on her part.

  · There remains a continuing doubt over the role played by Mrs. Landy's father, Adam Kingsley. All the evidence points to extreme hostility between him and Mr. Landy. It is clear that he opposed the relationship from the outset and was deeply angry when the marriage took place without his knowledge. He refused ever to speak to his son-in-law, however phoned and was phoned by his daughter on a regular basis. Friends of hers say she was upset by the gulf between them, but refused to pander to either man's "jealousy" and continued to relate to both on surprisingly easy terms. Her only proviso was that she would never talk about one to the other.

  · After a prolonged investigation into Kingsley's movements in the weeks leading up to the murder and on the day of the murder itself, Andrews & Meredith have concluded that while it was not impossible for Kingsley to have committed the crime himself (he was in London that day and could have gone to Chelsea between a meeting in Knightsbridge which ended at 4:30 p.m. and another in the Edgeware Eoad which began at 6:50 p.m.), they believe it to be unlikely. Kingsley refuses to give an account of his whereabouts between those two times, but independent inquiries, based on his movements in the preceding weeks, have elicited three witness statements which confirm he was with a prostitute in Shepherd's Market. This is a regular occurrence, and has been going on for many years.

  · In the absence of any other explanation, Andrews & Meredith incline to the view that Kingsley took out a contract on his son-in-law's life. However, they have been unable to substantiate this view and, without any firm evidence to support it, see no way to proceed. Their suspicions are grounded in an analysis of Kingsley's character and background, which is briefly as follows:

  1. He is known to have had extensive contacts with the London underworld since his early career. Born and brought up in and around the Docks in the '30s and '40s. Founded his fortune on black market racketeering during and after the War. Progressed to property scams in the '50s and '60s before "legitimizing" his business under Franchise Holdings and expanding into full-scale development of office sites.

  2. Began to amass an enormous fortune in the early '70s during the property boom. He has always had a reputation (unproven) for dishonest business practices but has twice won out-of-court settlements against newspapers who were foolhardy enough to suggest it.

  3. Since Thatcher came to power he has been acquiring tracts of London's Docklands at deflated prices. To do this, he is known to be using his contacts in the underworld.

  4. He has been married twice. His first wife, the mother of Jane Landy, died in 1962 of septicemia. She was a middle-class doctor's daughter who was educated at private school, and Kingsley is said to have adored her. He remarried in 1967. His present wife, Elizabeth Kingsley, came from his own background and was a girlhood friend of his sister. It is thought he was engaged to Elizabeth in 1958 but broke the engagement to marry his first wife. The second marriage has not been a success. Mrs. Kingsley has a drinking problem and the two sons from the marriage have been cautioned for petty thieving, vandalism, and car theft. The boys have been educated privately at Hellingdon Hall since their expulsion from Marlborough for possession of drugs. Kingsley is known to adore his daughter.

  In conclusion, I endorse Andrews's & Meredith's analysis. Kingsley remains the prime suspect, although it is extremely unlikely that he will have committed the offense himself. In the absence of any witnesses to the break-in or the murder, or indeed the stolen paintings coming to light, it is difficult to see how we can proceed. Even were we given leave to search Kingsley's numerous accounts for evidence of a contract payment, it is very doubtful we would find it.

  *8*

  SATURDAY, 25TH JUNE, ROMSEY ROAD POLICE STATION, WINCHESTER-12:30 P.M.

  DI Maddocks and his team had put together a substantial amount of information about Jane Kingsley in the short time they'd had, but had discovered nothing about Meg Harris or her parents. "At the time of Miss Kingsley's car crash, a couple of PCs went out to talk to her parents," he told Cheever. "The stepmother, Mrs. Elizabeth Kingsley, was tipsy and offered some vitriolic comments about Leo and Meg. They were both bastards but Meg was a snake in the grass and had set out to steal Jane's boyfriends since they were at Oxford together." He looked up. "BT can't help us. At a rough estimate, Wiltshire has over five thousand families called Harris living in it. If we had the father's initial it might help, or a profession even, but you say Sir Anthony doesn't know what her father was called."

  "No," said Frank Cheever with rather more cynicism than was his wont. "Despite his enthusiasm for her as an alternative daughter-in-law, he seems to know remarkably little about her."

  Maddocks eyed him curiously. Well, well, well, he thought, times they are a-changing. "I've put two of our guys onto tracing Meg's next of kin through the university," he went on, "but then there's the other problem that Harris may not be her maiden name. I still say our quickest route is via the flat in Hammersmith, so Fraser and I are going up there this afternoon."

  "Understood. What about Jane Kingsley?"

  "Okay, after the Landy murder-" Maddocks pointed to some papers on the Superintendent's desk. "That's as much as we've managed to get hold of on the case. It seems pretty comprehensive and there's a phone
number you can call for an update. I guess you missed the Kingsley connection because she was calling herself Jane Landy in those days. Anyway, within weeks of her discharge from hospital following her treatment for depression, she negotiated an extremely favorable sale of his gallery and invested the lot in a photographic studio in Pimlico. She bought it out, lock, stock, and barrel-premises, equipment, and goodwill. Until then, she'd been working part-time as a stand-in photographer when regulars didn't show." His voice took on a note of reluctant admiration. "She appears to have turned it into a success. Under the old management it was a run-of-the-mill enterprise, dealing in portraits of the local bigwigs' families, friends, and pets; under Miss Kingsley's management it's become a favored studio for promotional work-actors, pop stars, fashion models, magazines. She's earned quite a name for herself in the trade."

  "Who's running it at the moment?"

  Maddocks consulted his notes. "A chap called Dean Jarrett. He's been with her from the beginning. She recruited him through an ad in the newspapers, asking for samples of work with a view to employment. She had over a thousand applications, interviewed fifty, and selected one. The word among professionals is he's brilliant and devoted. I got Mandy Barry to phone through and ask whether appointments and bookings were being honored with Miss Kingsley in hospital, and the receptionist, one Angelica, was bullish and convincing about the studio's continued commitment. Loyalty to the boss was deeply felt and not feigned, according to Mandy."

  Cheever nodded. "What else?"

  "The house in Richmond was bought by Landy in '81 with an endowment mortgage of thirty thousand. On his death, the endowment paid off the mortgage and the house became Miss Kingsley's. She has shown no inclination to sell it. She gets on well with Colonel and Mrs. Clancey, who live next door, and is well regarded by other people in the road. She lives quietly and unostentatiously and, bar the occasional appearance of her father's Rolls Royce, does not draw attention to herself. Interestingly, nobody referred to Landy at the time of Miss Kingsley's traffic accident, although some of them must have remembered him, but they were very ready to talk about Leo Wallader. The general view is that no one liked him very much and that he behaved badly, but Richmond police were left with the impression that her neighbors were more put out about missing a wedding at Hellingdon Hall than they were about Leo's shenanigans."

  "What about other boyfriends between Landy and Wallader?''

  "Only what we've gleaned from the gossip columnists. There've been two or three, but nothing lasting more than six months. Mind you, Wallader didn't make six months either. She met him in February and he was dead by June. Bit of a whirlwind romance, considering the marriage was scheduled for July."

  "What was the attraction?"

  Maddocks shrugged. "No idea, but Colonel Clancey said it was very clear to him and his wife that Jane was having cold feet about the wedding, even if it was Leo who called it off. Claims he can't understand why she would want to top herself when he left."

  "Any ideas?"

  "Only the obvious, that she killed them herself or witnessed the killing and then suffered a similar breakdown to the one she'd had at the time of Landy's death. She's pretty damn weird, that's for sure. I mean, according to what we've found out, her favorite backgrounds for photographic shoots are cemeteries, derelict factories, and graffitied subway walls." He took a folded page that had been ripped out of a magazine, from his pocket. "If you're interested, that's her most famous photograph to date. It's that black supermodel standing in front of a filthy tiled wall with every obscenity you can imagine scrawled all over it."

  Cheever spread the sheet on his desk and examined it. "Fascinating," he said. "She's quite an artist."

  "Well, I think it sucks, sir. Why put a beautiful woman against crap like that?"

  "Where would you have put her, Gareth?" asked the other man tartly. "On a bed?"

  "Why not? Somewhere a bit more glamorous, anyway."

  The Superintendent frowned. "It's a statement. I think it's saying that real beauty is incorruptible, never mind how profane or ugly the setting." He pinched the end of his nose. "Which is interesting, don't you think, in view of the ugliness of Landy's death? I wonder when she started using backgrounds like this in her work. There's something rather moving about the triumph of fragile human perfection over a wasteland of mindless filth."

  Maddocks decided the old man was going gaga. It was only a creased fashion photograph, not the Mona Lisa.

  HELLINGDON HALL, NEAR FORDINGBRIDGE, HAMPSHIRE-12:30 P.M.

  Miles Kingsley shook his mother angrily, then pushed her back onto the sofa. "I don't believe it. My God, you're such a stupid cow. Why can't you keep your bloody great mouth shut? Who else have you told?" He glared across at his brother, who was skulking at the far end of the drawing room, feigning an interest in the leather-bound books his father had bought by the yard when they first moved into the Hall. "Your neck's on the line too, you little shit, so I suggest you wipe that smirk off your face before I slap it off."

  "Sod off, Miles," said Fergus. "If I had any sense I'd never have listened to you in the first place." He kicked a Chippendale chair. "It was your idea, for Christ's sake. 'Foolproof,' you said. 'What can possibly go wrong?' "

  "Nothing has gone wrong. You'll see. Just a little more time, and we'll be free and clear with a sodding fortune."

  "That's what you said last time."

  RAMSEY ROAD POLICE STATION-12:45 P.M.

  Frank read the documents on his desk relating to the Landy murder, then dialed the contact number Maddocks had given him. DCI Andrews had been involved from the outset.

  "The case was effectively closed at the end of '85," he said down the wire from Scotland Yard, "when Jason Phelps was put away for the Docherty murders. Remember him? Clubbed an entire family to death for twenty grand on the instructions of Docherty's nephew. They both got four life sentences. We tried to persuade Phelps to confess to the Landy killing, because it was a carbon copy of the Docherty murders, but we never got a result. There was no question he did it, though, and if we could have got him to spill the works, we'd have nailed Kingsley. He was the one we wanted."

  "Tell me about the daughter," prompted Frank. "What was she like?"

  "I rather took to her, as a matter of fact. She was a good kid, deeply shocked of course, and suffered a nervous breakdown afterwards. She kept saying it was all her fault but we never believed she had anything to do with it. Meredith put it to her that she was afraid her father was responsible, but she said no. A day or two later she lost her baby."

  "Did she ever suggest who might have done it?"

  "An unknown artist whose work Landy had rejected. She said he could be very cruel in what he said, and she was insistent that he'd told her a few days before the murder that he was being watched by some creep who'd come to the gallery. She didn't think anything of it at the time, because he treated it as a joke, but it certainly preyed on her mind afterwards. We checked it out, but there was no substance to it and we took the view that if the watcher existed at all, it was as likely to be Kingsley's contract killer as an embittered artist."

  Cheever pondered for a moment. "Still, it's something of a minefield. The only contact I've had with Kingsley was years ago when he beat his future brother-in-law to a pulp to warn him off the wedding. Now you're telling me he pulped his son-in-law afterwards. Why didn't he do it before?"

  "That was his daughter's argument. She claimed Kingsley had done his best to get rid of Landy three years previously by having him sacked from his job, but had long since accepted defeat on the matter. Our view was that the pregnancy changed things. She admitted that she and Landy had been going through a rocky patch but said the baby had brought them together again, and we didn't think it was coincidence that the wretched man was murdered a week after she told her parents she was expecting. We guessed Kingsley was relying on the marriage failing and when he was presented with evidence that it wasn't, he signed Landy's death warrant."

 
; Cheever tapped one of the pieces of paper in front of him. "According to the memo you faxed through, you and Meredith believed Kingsley adored his daughter. But we're talking about something much sicker than adoration, surely? I could understand it if Landy had been treating her badly and Kingsley wanted him punished, but from what you've said, he acted out of jealous rage. There'd have to be a pretty powerful sexual motive behind actions like that."

  "In a nutshell, that's what we thought it was all about. Look, the man was very highly sexed, he was visiting the Shepherd's Market prostitute every week. The second marriage was a disaster because the poor creature he settled on wasn't a patch on the first wife and took to the bottle within a couple of years. Her sons never matched up to the first wife's daughter, who, to make matters worse, is the spitting image of her dead mother. There's no evidence that Kingsley abused the child, but they lived alone together for five years before he married again, and we estimated the chances were high that he did. We had his psychological profile drawn up based on what was known of him, and it was very revealing. There was a heavy emphasis on his need to control through ruthless manipulation of people and events, and it was thought very unlikely that his daughter could have escaped unscathed."

  "Did you suggest it to her?"

  "Yes"-a hesitation-"more's the pity. We gave her the profile to read, and the next thing we knew, she was under the care of a psychiatrist with severe anorexia and suicidal depression. We felt rather badly about it, to be honest."

  "Mind you," murmured Frank thoughtfully, "it's a typical reaction of an abused child who's suddenly forced to come to terms with a buried past."