Murder in Waiting (Augustus Maltravers Mystery Book 5)

by Robert Richardson

  “Nothing to get too excited about yet,” he warned her. “But enough to make me start wondering.”

  “About Caroline?”

  “Yes.” Caution dragged out the word. “But I think it would be better to start with Barry Kershaw. Accepting your conviction that he was murdered, let’s start making guesses about who did it … or arranged for it to be done.”

  “I told you, it could have been any one of … God knows how many people,” Louella told him. “Just hold on to the fact that everybody hated him.”

  “Murder’s a quantum leap beyond hatred,” he replied. “If it wasn’t, a few news editors I’ve known would be corpses. It needs a more powerful trigger to actually kill someone than simply wishing they were dead … and I have a suggestion about who could have had that trigger. Jack Buxton.”

  He paused and drank while the suggestion settled. “Obviously, there’s no absolute proof that Kershaw arranged for him to be worked over, but it’s bloody likely. Buxton knew that better than anyone … so did he do something about it?”

  “But he wasn’t at the party,” Louella pointed out.

  “I imagine he found it sick being on the same planet as Kershaw, let alone in the same room,” Maltravers remarked. “But he could have made other arrangements.”

  “Who with?”

  “There was evidence at the inquest that some unidentified woman was in Kershaw’s flat late that night.” Eyebrows damp with a sheen of sweat raised slightly. “Accomplice? Come on, don’t tell me it hasn’t occurred to you.”

  “Not for a long time, but … yes, there was talk about it,” Louella admitted. “Nobody came up with a name though. Not for certain.”

  “For uncertain then?” he queried. “What names were in the frame?”

  “Quite a lot, to be honest. Jack was just about as popular as Barry was detested.”

  “How about Caroline Owen or Jenni Hilton?”

  “They were mentioned.”

  Maltravers irritably waved away the presence of some buzzing creature as it zipped round his face; moving at such speed in such temperatures was obscene.

  “Let’s concentrate on them, then. How close were either of them to Jack Buxton?”

  Louella fished a cube of ice from her glass and sucked it for a moment. “Jack was very attractive. Plenty of girls went for him, but the fact that you went to bed with someone didn’t mean much … To be honest, I can’t actually remember if he laid me. I think he did once. It was like that. Chastity was definitely not fashionable. So it depends what you mean by close. Caroline or Jenni may have slept with Jack, but just for another ride on the merry-go-round.” She suddenly grinned. “Where did we get the bloody energy?”

  “The summers must have been cooler,” Maltravers commented. “But leaving bedrooms out of it, were Caroline or Jenni ever more than that with Jack?”

  “Perhaps. Jack was much more intelligent than a lot of the pop stars and often wanted to talk about politics and religion, things that mattered. Caroline and Jenni were like that as well — so was I — so there was more than just a hedonistic link between them. Whether it ever went deeper than that I don’t know.” “But it could have done.” Maltravers looked at her very directly. “Could Caroline, with or without Jenni’s help, have killed Kershaw because Jack asked her to?”

  Louella’s fingers twisted a thin gold chain at her throat as he faced her with the possibility.

  “I don’t like to think she could,” she replied finally. “But I’ve got to accept it’s possible. I’m certain somebody did it and I can’t pick and choose who I’d like it to have been.”

  “That’s brave of you, Louella,” Tess said quietly. “Sorry it’s too hot to take your hand for comfort.”

  Louella smiled at her, then turned back to Maltravers. “Do you really suspect that Caroline killed Barry?”

  “That’s too big a step yet,” he replied. “We need to know more about her and Jack Buxton before we can start thinking like that. What happened to him?”

  “He quit the business and married … what was her name? … Kate Austin. She was a dancer. They stayed in London for a while, then bought a guesthouse at Porlock in Somerset. I stayed with them one night a few years ago. I must have their business card somewhere.”

  “Dig it out and let me have the address,” Maltravers said. “I’ll persuade The Chronicle that he could be the focus of another back to the Sixties piece and take it from there.”

  “Darling, he’s hardly going to blurt out that he arranged Kershaw’s death,” Tess objected.

  “I’m going to use a rather more subtle approach than ‘Good morning, are you a murderer? Please confess everything into this tape recorder.’” Maltravers looked at Tess with mock concern. “Is this heat addling your brain? I hope not, because I want you to come with me. Don’t worry, it’ll be cooler in the Quantocks.”

  *

  Skin like a crumpled manila envelope, Maureen Kershaw’s face was rigid with the shock of a believer whose life-giving faith has been shattered. Fingers, twisted as a knot of roots, lay clenched on the dark olive-green of her skirt, white showing on painfully squeezed knuckles. Through the open window of the echoingly silent room, children’s laughter came from the next-door garden. She turned to face her son, but he was leaning forward in the chair, hands clasped together, staring down at rich blue patterns on the carpet. He did not raise his head as she spoke with hoarse bitterness.

  “You promised. You promised time and time again. It was the only thing I’ve ever asked you to do for me. Now you won’t.”

  “I’ve told you. I can’t.” Terry Kershaw was suddenly conscious that over the previous half-hour his voice had lost its false polish of elocution and he sounded as though he had never left the East End. It was all part of a relationship his mother had thought special and he had known was deceit. “For God’s sake, Mum, I’m not a murderer.”

  “Not for bloody God’s sake,” she snapped. “For Barry’s sake. For your brother. For my sake. Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

  Childhood conditioning instantly obeyed the command. All he saw was a stranger who used to be his mother, features which he still could remember as impishly merry when he had been a toddler made cruelly serpentine by cancerous depths of resentment. How mad had she become?

  “It’s Stephanie, isn’t it?” she demanded. “Snotty bitch with her la-di-dah voice. She’s got at you again, hasn’t she?”

  “Christ Almighty.” He sighed with weariness. Did she really think he had told Stephanie — or anybody else — about this? “Stephanie knows nothing except that Barry died years ago. We never talk about him.” From some churning well of emotion, a shaft of long repressed honesty leapt out. “I get more than enough of him in this fucking house!”

  “Wash your mouth out with soap!” The instinctive order was directed at the child she had been able to control, not the man she had lost. He turned away in frustration; there were no channels of communication left. When had the final one crumbled? They had corroded so subtly over a lifetime that it was impossible to tell.

  “Anyway, that’s how it is.” He stood up. “Sorry, Mum, but it’s just not on. I’ll see you as usual next week.”

  “Sit down while I think.”

  He almost refused, but the commanding glitter of beady eyes snatched him back. Maureen Kershaw’s pinched nostrils flared as she breathed in and out deeply. “All right. But you can’t refuse to do one thing for me. Find out where she lives.”

  “Why?” The request instantly alarmed him.

  “I want to send her a Christmas card,” she replied sarcastically.

  “Mum, I don’t think — ”

  “You think too bloody much,” she interrupted savagely. “Not straight, but too much. Just let me have the address, then forget about it. Run home to Stephanie and she can wipe your backside for you.”

  “I don’t know how to find where she lives,” he said evasively.

  “Ring the Express. They could know.”


  “They might not tell me.”

  “Then try somewhere else. Get that private detective who chases bad debts for you on to it. Just find her.” Maureen Kershaw drew herself upright, challenging a refusal. “A street and a number. That’s all I want. Don’t tell me you won’t even do that for me, Terry?”

  “What will you do if I manage it?”

  “Ask no questions, hear no lies.” Another echo of the litany of childhood. “But I’ll make you a promise. Once you’ve told me, I’ll never mention her to you again. And I keep my promises. Remember that.”

  He knew that he should refuse, that agreeing was only pandering to a dangerous sickness in her. The adult he had become wanted to say no, rejecting the request and its grotesque motives; but the child he had been made into flinched from cutting the last terrible knots that had bound them together. Finally, he yielded to obedience forged by a distorted, greedy and possessive love.

  “All right. I’ll find out somehow.”

  Maureen Kershaw nodded very slightly. She could tell that she had not lost all her territory of him. She would, of course, but not before he had delivered a final offering. Then it would be just her and Barry, closer in death than in life, together in a burning vengeance. Brentwood neighbours who thought they knew the little old woman could never have imagined that she was consumed by depths of hatred that belonged in fictional passion, not in the local supermarket or Thursday chats when she collected her old age pension in the post office.

  *

  When Maltravers and Tess returned to Coppersmith Street, there were two messages on the ansaphone. One was Louella giving them Jack Buxton’s address and telephone number, the other from Owen Graham Metcalf to say there was to be a launch party at their offices for the washing-up liquid campaign that included Tess’s voice.

  “They’re mad,” she said impatiently. “I’m embarrassed enough about it already, without having to parade in front of people who want to talk about it. I’m not going.”

  “Au contraire,” Maltravers told her. “You said Ted Owen was around when you recorded the voice-over, so he’s almost certain to be at the shindig. And we can assume that the lovely Daphne Gillie will be there as well. It’s a perfect opportunity.”

  “What for?” Tess’s tone revealed she was only procrastinating. Her personal disinclination to have anything to do with the event still had to recognise its possibilities.

  “You know full well and fine,” replied Maltravers, who had caught the tone. “Endless free booze and everybody wanting to party. All we do is stay sober and see what information or indiscretions spill out.”

  “What sort of indiscretions?”

  “I don’t know … but I’ll be very disappointed if we don’t come away with something. You flutter your eyelashes at the men and leave the women to me.” He grinned mischievously. “I’ll wear my Lamborghini aftershave. You know how irresistible I become.”

  “Don’t delude yourself,” she told him. “You’re too old for a toy-boy and too young for a sugar daddy. Just be grateful for what you’ve got.”

  “I am, but leave me my illusions. Anyway, call OGM back full of girlish acceptance and make sure you can take a partner along. When you’ve finished, I’ll ring Mike Fraser and talk him into letting me do a piece on Jack Buxton.”

  Tess scowled, but picked the phone up and began to punch in the agency’s number. “All right, I’ll do it for Louella if nothing else … How close are you to believing that Caroline was murdered?”

  “Some way to go,” Maltravers replied. “But I think she could have been. The problem is trying to find the links which join the odd ends together. Caroline and Jenni Hilton both knew Kershaw and Buxton. According to Louella, Ted Owen was at university in the Sixties, but that would only have been for three years — and Cambridge isn’t that far from London anyway. There could have been overlaps that Louella doesn’t know about. Owen’s home could have been in London and he spent the vacs here. Lot of possibilities and … ”

  He stopped as someone at OGM answered the phone and Tess asked to be put through to the girl who had left the message. Maltravers was amused by another of her spontaneous bits of acting that the acceptance required. By the time she rang off, the girl must have been convinced that the invitation was the biggest thing in Tess’s life.

  “Your capacity to lie so convincingly worries me sometimes,” he remarked as he picked up the phone himself to ring The Chronicle. “Do you ever do it to me?”

  “Constantly. I have dozens of secret lovers and you’ve never guessed. I’m going for a shower.”

  “Then tell them to start buying you flowers,” he called after her. “It’ll save me money … Hello? Mike Fraser, features, please.”

  When Tess came down again, Maltravers was consulting a road atlas. “I’m seeing Jack Buxton on Saturday.” He flicked over a page. “I’ve booked us in to stay the night as well. While I’m doing the interview, you can chat to his wife — Kate, wasn’t it? — and see if she knows anything worthwhile.”

  Pulling a face, he checked the route again. “Dammit, it looks like the M4. Brain death in concrete. Let’s hope it’s worth it.”

  Chapter Ten

  Stephanie Kershaw let her husband make love to her in the same way that someone would unexpectedly show affection to a beaten dog, confusing his loyalty. She had grown to despise him, but was not going to put her lifestyle at risk through a divorce. As well as liking him, her father respected him as a businessman and was already thinking of becoming executive president of Insignia Motors with his son-in-law as the new chairman. That would keep him occupied at the office even more, leaving her ample time to indulge her private life. Sex was only made tolerable by closing her eyes and imagining she was in bed with either of her two lovers.

  Although she never knew it, one of the repeated pinpricks of scorn she thrust into her husband drew dangerous blood. After leaving the suffocating presence of his mother, Terry Kershaw had felt again the surge of self-reproach and shame that he still allowed her to control him. He had backed away from the extreme demand he had thought would never come, but had not been able to make the final rejection and simply refuse to let her have Jenni Hilton’s address. Everything told him he must and he persuaded himself that he could face the venom that would follow. But he was alone with no ally to support him, least of all his own wife.

  “Mummy’s boy been home again, has he?” Stephanie sneered as he walked into the living-room. She was curled like a cat at one end of the sofa, make-up as flawless as a girl’s on a cosmetic counter; her vanity insisted that she should never look less than perfect. “No, it’s not Mummy is it? It’s Mum. Old Mother Kershaw, the Brentwood bitch.”

  He came home every night not knowing what mood she might be in. Low-key tolerance was the most common, but she would sometimes deliberately throw him off balance with unexpected strokes of remembered warmth. This evening she was fully armed and ready for a vicious fight. A series of minor irritations had ruffled the indulgent pattern of her day; a rude shop assistant in Bond Street, her pet hairdresser unable to provide an immediate appointment, a friend who had cancelled a lunch engagement. Already frustrated by one of her lovers’ increasingly suspicious excuses, a handful of little incidents had inflamed a spoiled and spiteful personality.

  “Don’t call her that,” he replied wearily as he crossed the room to the drinks cabinet. Countless defeats had replaced anger with the sort of impotent gestures that follow retreat. “Whatever you think of her, she’s still my mother. I don’t ask you to get involved any more.”

  “No. You just let me sit at home on my own for hours,” she replied petulantly. “Then expect to walk in and find a meal waiting for you.”

  “It’s only once a week.” His hand shook with tension as he held the decanter and he poured out more whisky than he had intended. He decided to drink it neat.

  “Washing out the taste of her, are you? I’m not surprised. She must only have a bath once a month.”

 
The casual, malicious barb stung him like acid hurled on an open wound. He still had his back to her, so she did not see the spasm of pain that twisted his face as he almost cried out. More clearly than the glass he was holding, he could see the glistening bathroom in Etruria Street and the image of his mother through the steam as she bent her head over the wash-basin. Her long hair had been rich chestnut then, like the princess in his best story book. Unquestioning, totally trusting love of infancy swallowed him up and only a shuddering effort stopped him turning and hurling the glass into his wife’s face. Whatever else she may have been, his mother had never been dirty. The wracking agony began to recede, leaving an aftershock of coldness. Without another word, he walked out and Stephanie heard him cross the hall and open the door of his study. She felt no remorse at what she had said, only the sadistic satisfaction of discovering a new weapon whose torment she could use again.

  As he closed the study door, Terry Kershaw gave a convulsive sob of repressed rage. For a moment, he felt dizzy, then recovered and went to the desk, taking an address book from the drawer, and looked up the home number of the owner of Insignia Motors’ private inquiry agency.

  “Alan? Terry Kershaw.” He was surprised at how calm he sounded. “I need you to do a personal job for me — not Insignia business. I want you to find someone.”

  Five minutes later, after being warned that it could take time, he rang off and slumped back in his chair. It was done and now he had to rationalise it. If Jenni Hilton was found, he would tell his mother. Nothing wrong in that. If she then did something without letting him know, he could not be held responsible. And how would Stephanie cope with being the daughter-in-law of a woman who … No, leave that alone. Just think of it as another kind of revenge.

  *

  “Have you found anything out?” Maltravers asked as he pulled up an empty chair and sat down next to Matt Hoffman. The crime reporter turned from a story he was writing on his Atex screen and reached for a notebook.