‘Yes. Well. I only mentioned it because I think it has some bearing on what I’ve come about.’ He took a moment to organize his thoughts, and Mayo, beginning to be intrigued by the man and his purpose in coming here, didn’t push him.
Fitz looked down at his hands, breathing deeply. He was fully aware that he wasn’t one of the world’s best communicators, and this was something he’d never yet been able to talk about freely, not to anyone: those reasons why it had been necessary for him to have the attic flat at Edwina Lodge as a bolt hole, where he could paint, and leave behind for a measure of time the woman who had been his wife, his responsibility, his burden but ultimately, as he’d continually reassured himself, his enduring love.
Elspeth, cool and beautiful when he’d married her, neurotic and unstable within a few years, bringing the structure of their lives crashing down. Her illness, a disturbing and little understood dysfunction with an unpronounceable name, had made her impossible to live with, impossible to abandon. It had resulted in a steady erosion of their marriage, problems with drink, drugs, suicide attempts. There were those who’d urged him to have her ‘put in care’ but, hellish though life had become, it would have shamed him not to cherish her as he had in the days before her illness, at least to try and love her and care for her as much as when she’d been well, and whole. All the same, when eventually she did manage to take her own life in that monstrous way, he blamed himself for not listening to the advice.
That day, she’d pumped into herself a cocktail of drugs and drink, taken her car out and driven it at speed along a busy road, with the inevitable conclusion: an appalling pile-up, with the people in the other car, an eight-year-old boy and the driver, his mother, being killed instantly.
‘Mr Fitzallan?’
He blinked rapidly, then opened his briefcase and passed a sheet of grey drawing paper across the desk. ‘I think you should look at this.’ It was a child’s drawing. There was a silence as Mayo studied it.
‘Who drew this?’
‘Allie, Voss’s little girl. I’m doing a portrait of her, trying to, and she likes drawing, so I usually give her pencils and paper and let her draw while she sits for me. Can’t expect a little girl to sit unoccupied for any length of time.’
It was a drawing in thick crayon, not remarkable for its talent. It was crude and childish, but it made the hairs on the back of Mayo’s neck stand on end. The sheet of paper was large, and the simple outline filled it. A staircase in profile, with a man at the top, standing with arms outstretched. At the foot of the stairs lay a woman, flat out, arms and legs stretched out like a fly. Against the grey background, the crayoned lines were slashed on to the paper, heavy and thick, the chosen colours angry deep red and black. The circle that represented the man’s face had been furiously scribbled over in black.
‘Why did you bring this here? You said you thought it had some relevance?’
‘You’re familiar with art therapy? The theory that you get disturbed people to paint or draw, in the hopes that they’ll bring out their anger, or fear, or whatever’s hidden inside and troubling them. Something like that, anyway – a simplistic way of putting it, no doubt, but I’m no expert. My wife had years of therapy, it was one of the things they tried ... But it wasn’t deliberate on my part when I gave Allie a paper and pencil, it was only for her to amuse herself while I painted her.’ He paused, eyeing them from under his brows. ‘I suppose you knew that Voss’s wife died from a fall down the stairs?’
‘She fell downstairs?’ Mayo had known only that Lisa Voss had died during pregnancy, there’d been no reason to assume her death hadn’t been caused by some condition arising from that. ‘What are you suggesting?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything. Only that Allie’s apparently had a history of sleepwalking and nightmares since her mother died – and you must agree, it’s a pretty morbid subject for a child to choose. And now that she’s disappeared …’ He left the rest of the sentence unsaid.
After a moment or two, Mayo said, ‘Right, Mr Fitzallan. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Leave it with me, if you would.’
Fitz stood up. He hadn’t expected it to be any better received. He wasn’t sure whether he ought to have spoken at all, whether he’d made a fool of himself or not, uneasily aware that this policeman might well think the picture nothing more than a childish scrawl, and himself some sort of crackpot amateur psychiatrist. He hesitated, then decided to say nothing more, took his leave and strode out.
When Fitzallan had gone, Mayo took the drawing back to his office and then stood in front of the window, staring out. The sky was a soft, heavy pearl-grey, one of those still, windless, moody evenings of late summer. It would be dark in an hour. A pigeon sat on the sill of one of the Town Hall windows opposite, listening to the grinding of gears at the traffic lights, the hiss of air brakes, looking too bored to move. The top of a red double-decker bus cruised past ...
Rather than money, perhaps the source of the quarrel between Voss and Ensor had been Lisa Voss.
He turned his back on the window and went to look at the childish, disturbing drawing where it lay on his desk, depicting – what? Something Allie had actually witnessed? Was that scribbled-out face Ensor’s, or was the whole thing something imaginary, an invented scene to explain to herself the deeply disturbing shock of her mother’s death? Was it even possible that the child had seen it happening in reality? And told her father? Or had she done other similar drawings, which he’d seen, and drawn his own conclusions? If Voss had had reason to believe it possible that Ensor had pushed his wife downstairs, it was more than a motive for him to have killed the other man.
Yet why should Philip Ensor, if he was guilty of murdering Lisa Voss, have come to Lavenstock to meet her husband?
It would surely have been more logical for him to have kept out of the way. Why should he have killed Lisa, anyway – unless they’d quarrelled – if they’d been having an affair? He picked up the phone. ‘Somebody get me details of the inquest on a woman called Lisa Voss,’ he requested, giving the necessary details. ‘Get them to fax it through. I’ll be in my office for a while yet.’
When it came, he read it through carefully. The inquest recorded a verdict of accidental death. She had apparently tripped over the loose belt of her dressing gown and fallen to the bottom of a flight of polished, open-tread stairs. Her neck had been broken. She’d been alone in the house, except for the children, who hadn’t wakened. She’d been discovered the next morning by the cleaning lady when she let herself in. Dermot Voss had been expected home the following day, and had in fact arrived about four o’clock, to find his wife dead.
‘Check out Voss’s flight from Belgrade,’ Mayo said to Farrar, slapping the details on to Farrar’s desk in the CID room. ‘See what time he actually arrived. I’m on my way up to Edwina Lodge. When Inspector Moon comes in, ask her to meet me there.’
The doorbell rang yet again. Voices sounded in the hall, then the Superintendent came into the drawing room. ‘Nothing new, yet, I’m afraid,’ he said gently. ‘There’s a call out for Miss Kendrick’s car, as you know, but it hasn’t been seen yet.’ His face was grim and set. ‘We still don’t seem to be able to contact anyone else at Simla.’
‘What?’ Dermot looked up, his eyes wild. ‘What did you say?’
‘We’re finding difficulty getting hold of Mr Kendrick. He doesn’t seem to be at home, nor does Mrs Loxley.’
‘Imogen?’ Sarah suddenly remembered that she and Imogen had tickets for an open lecture on William Morris in the Ferraby Hall, part of Lavenstock College. She looked for the hundredth time at the clock on the mantel. The lecture would be over, they’d be well into the cheese and wine which was to follow by now. She hadn’t given anything else a thought since hearing about Allie, but she couldn’t understand why Imogen hadn’t let her know if there’d been a change of plan. The disappearance of everyone from whom she might have expected moral support suddenly took on a frightening aspect.
; ‘No one there at all? Are you sure?’ For a moment Dermot looked nonplussed, then his eyes narrowed. Sarah saw that his mind was working in that peculiarly fast and connective way it sometimes did. Then he said, coldly and deliberately, ‘There’s something you should know about Francis Kendrick.’
‘Francis Kendrick?’ Mayo’s voice was sharp as a whip.
‘There was an incident – when he was a young professor at Cambridge. He played the organ at one of the churches – there was a young choirboy ... It was all hushed up, just a piece of gossip – I only came across it incidentally because we happened to be making a documentary about his college at the time. Several people thought the boy was being mischievous, because Kendrick had reprimanded him over something, but...’ He shrugged his shoulders.
Mayo was staring at him in speechless disbelief which echoed Sarah’s own. When he found words, he said, incredulously, ‘A young girl’s been murdered – you have two of your own, one’s disappeared – and you kept all this to yourself?’
‘This was Francis Kendrick, not his sister. Choirboys and little girls – hardly the same, are they?’ But Dermot avoided his eyes.
Sarah stood up abruptly and left the room.
‘Anyway, I reckoned you’d have found out,’ Dermot was saying, cockily – ‘that’s your business, isn’t it?’
‘We’ve no reason to go into a man’s past unless he’s a suspect.’
‘Well, you’ve plenty bloody reason to suspect him now – what are you going to do about it?’
‘My men are effecting entry to the premises now.’ It was the way people expected the police to speak. He often found it useful when he was stalling.
Sarah came back, holding a manila envelope. ‘Can I have a word with you, in private, please?’ she said to Mayo. ‘Come into the small sitting room.’
When they emerged, the telephone was once more ringing in the hall. The shrill, insistent note of the old-fashioned instrument, unlike the present-day warble, made everyone jump. Jenny went to answer it. Everyone grew silent, listening to what she said. ‘What? What? Yes, I’ll tell him. I expect he’ll be over immediately.’
18
Mayo sprinted across the few intervening yards between Edwina Lodge and Simla, though he didn’t know why he was running. It was far too late for that.
His thoughts were spinning, and in the space of those few seconds all the reasoning which had caused him to send Abigail off to Solihull again was overturned. He’d been so sure he’d had the right answer. But could he have been wrong – had he been dangerously guilty of manipulating the facts to fit a theory? Maybe Patti’s murderer had been someone with a penchant for young bodies, little girls – or little boys, come to that – after all.
The dismal hall, its upper reaches dark with shadows that swooped down from the ceiling, was lit with one central light that barely made inroads into the gloom. It was enough, however, for Mayo to see everything that needed to be seen: a longer shadow depending from one of the newel posts, a Modigliani figure, grotesquely elongated, its own shadow dancing alongside as it gently swung, a heavy, carved-oak upright chair kicked away and lying on its back.
Ison had been sent for and since he was at home when the summons came, he covered the short distance within minutes and was there almost as soon as Mayo. The body was cut down, and after a brief examination Ison was able to estimate that Francis Kendrick had been dead for only a few hours.
‘It appears to be a straightforward suicide. No note, you say? Unusual. They usually do, poor sods, don’t they, if it’s only to leave the blame with someone else?’
That was true, though Mayo had often suspected that more notes were ever destroyed than came to the notice of the police. ‘Hardly been time to look, yet,’ he said.
Kendrick was dressed in his old, baggy cotton trousers and a short-sleeved cotton shirt, with a complete absence of that self-absorbed vanity of some suicides – those who tidied their houses, wore clean clothes before they finished it all, concerned to the end with leaving behind a good impression of themselves, not even a thought of cruelty to the living. Anyone who’d seen the number of suicides he had couldn’t fail to be struck by how much humanity clung to its vision of itself.
‘What’s that in his pockets?’
A piece of paper protruded very slightly from the pocket of Kendrick’s shirt. Extracting it in the prescribed manner, Mayo read aloud the four words written on it. ‘The book is finished.’ ‘And what,’ he asked the doctor, ‘is that supposed to mean?’
‘Some cryptic reference to his life having come an end?’ suggested Ison imaginatively.
Mayo blew out his lips. He could imagine some people putting it like that, but not Kendrick. Surely too uncharacteristically dramatic a gesture for such an apparently unemotional man as Francis Kendrick. More likely it meant just what it said, that the book he was working on was finished, it was ready to be dealt with. He, like everyone else, had ultimately had his little vanities. He could not leave the world behind without making sure that something of him would live on after he’d gone.
A uniformed constable came into the room. ‘There’s an unsealed letter here, sir – it was on the kitchen table.’
Reading between the lines of the hastily scrawled note from Imogen, addressed to Hope and Francis, explaining that she had suddenly returned to Brussels, it wasn’t difficult to guess at the state of mind which had made her leave so precipitately. ‘I shall be back in a few days, either to collect my belongings, or to return permanently. It will all depend on Tom,’ she wrote sadly.
They were not a happy family, the Kendricks.
But there were no more notes, nothing from Hope to say why, or where, she had taken the child, and nothing more written by her brother Francis to indicate what had brought him to take this final step. Remembering the last time he’d seen him, the unexpected sympathy he’d aroused, Mayo felt he might hazard a guess. He hoped he was wrong, that the reason Francis Kendrick had taken his own life, in a way that Mayo always found particularly gruesome and horrible, was not because of the weight of his sins preying on his conscience. But either way, the conclusions were not particularly comfortable.
‘Sir, they’ve found the little girl!’
‘Found?’ All Mayo’s sense of dread was contained in the word as he turned to Jenny Platt, framed in the open doorway.
‘She’s all right, on her way home with Mr Fitzallan.’
‘Who did you say?’
‘Fitzallan, sir. DI Moon’s just arrived, and she took a telephone call from him. He found Miss Kendrick and the little girl. At their country cottage in Shropshire. They’re on their way back now.’
He knew the full story now, what had led up to Ensor’s murder and why Patti’s death had followed. He and Abigail had exchanged information and the whole sorry scene was clear. He could now act, but there was no hurry.
About eight o’clock, a car drew up outside Edwina Lodge. Fitzallan’s Range Rover. Fitzallan, dark-browed, strode into the house with Allie in his arms, fast asleep, her head cradled against his shoulder. Her face was dirty, she had lost her hairslide but otherwise she seemed unharmed and opened her eyes for a moment, smiling sleepily when Sarah put Angel into her arms before following Fitz as he carried the child upstairs to her room.
Hope Kendrick was beyond questioning that night. Possibly overcome by the realization of what she’d done, she sat rigidly in the passenger seat of the Range Rover until she was requested to come into the house. She had to be told about her brother’s death and it was done as gently as possible but, dazed and emotionally exhausted, she hardly seemed to take it in.
‘You’ll not get anything out of her tonight,’ Ison said. ‘I’ll give her a sedative and you can question her in the morning. Is there anyone who can be with her? I wouldn’t advise her being left on her own.’
‘We’ve already contacted Imogen Loxley in Brussels. She and her husband are coming over. I should think Mrs Bailey can be persuaded to stay with her until they ge
t here.’
Fitzallan, meanwhile, was ready to explain his reasons for charging up to Shropshire, when a call to the local police there would have simplified matters. Did he have some personal stake in the fortunes of this family? Mayo wondered, and saw from the way he and Sarah Wilmot looked at each other there wasn’t much room for doubt what that was. ‘I had this idea,’ he said. ‘I knew the Kendricks had a cottage in Shropshire, not exactly where, though I’d a fair idea, so I decided to go and have a look. I suspected,’ he said gloweringly, ‘that you wouldn’t take my idea seriously, any more than you did the drawing. In any case,’ he confessed with a smile that was all the more disarming for being unexpected, ‘I wasn’t all that convinced myself. I went, without giving it too much thought.’
Mayo cut short further explanations. Fitzallan would have to be dealt with later, Hope Kendrick, too, but both could wait. Now that the child was safe, there were other matters to be attended to. He turned to Allie’s father.
‘Dermot Voss, we’d like you to come down to the station and help us with our inquiries into the murder of Patricia Mary Ryman.’
19
Mayo drove slowly back to the station. After the last few dry, sunless, still and cheerless days the weather had taken a turn. With the new moon, a wind had sprung up, bringing rain with it. It had become heavy by the time Mayo returned from Edwina Lodge, with clouds obscuring the moon. The station, with all its lights on, glowed like a lighted ship against the black surrounding hills as he made a dash for the door.
Abigail arrived just behind him. By the time they had finished setting out the line their questioning was to take, despite her resolve, she was drinking coffee, and making no excuses for herself.
‘Those children,’ she said softly. ‘Didn’t he give a thought to his children?’
‘I don’t for one minute imagine that Voss gives a thought to anybody but himself. There’s nothing to him. He’s one-dimensional. Come on, I think we’ve left him cooling his heels long enough.’
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