More Deaths Than One

by Marjorie Eccles

  “I guess he wouldn’t have kept up that feud with Georgina so long if he hadn’t been ... stubborn, I mean,” his wife said.

  “Susan, what’s that got to do with it?” The question was flat and uninflected, but something in it – a warning, perhaps? – alerted Mayo.

  “Why nothing, I suppose, darling,” she admitted with a smile, “but they’re going to hear sooner or later, I imagine.”

  “What feud is this?” Mayo knew he was expected to ask and he did because the answer interested him very much.

  “Oh, it was all too Gothic for words,” she explained lightly. “ ‘You marry my daughter and neither of you will set foot over my ancestral threshold again!’ Or words to that effect.”

  “Some ancestral home!” Salisbury put in. He became all at once informative, seeming just a little over-anxious to keep the conversation going his way. “Bought it lock, stock and barrel from the Paulings, who’d lived there since the year dot, when the old girl died. Culver’s a self-made man – made his pile buying up army surplus and scrap metal after the war and went on from there.” He didn’t bother to hide his fourth-generation contempt for someone so ungentlemanly as to have actually made his own way up in the world, rather than have had a privileged lifestyle handed out on a plate, plus the wherewithal to continue it.

  “What did he have against Fleming?”

  After the slightest suggestion of a pause, Salisbury’s wife shrugged and said obliquely, “We hardly knew Rupert, as I said, and Georgina’s not one to exchange confidences.”

  “Especially since you’re not exactly friends,” Mayo reminded her. “No,” she agreed, eyeing him rather sharply. “Not since she married.”

  “What did Rupert Fleming do for a living?”

  “He was some sort of journalist, I think.”

  “Local paper?”

  “No, I believe he was a freelance.”

  “Not very well known,” Salisbury commented, then, showing a rather belated sympathy, he asked, “When was he murdered, poor devil?”

  “Murdered? Who said anything about murder, Mr. Salisbury?” An unreadable expression crossed his face. “Well, wasn’t he? God, you mean it was suicide?” he asked Mayo, who thought it better to leave the question unanswered.

  Mrs. Salisbury had given a soft cry of distress. “Oh Tim, what did you think? He must have shot himself ... if you’d seen ... but why? You’d have thought he’d everything to live for. He was young and good-looking and – oh, it’s too horrible to think of!”

  So she’d noticed. However horrified she’d been by her discovery, she’d looked long enough to see the gun on the floor, the suicide note stuck on the dash, to draw the inferences.

  At that moment a little mewling cry started up from somewhere near the fireplace, like a kitten or the bleat of a lamb, making Mayo realize that he’d been aware for some time of strange little snuffling noises coming from the same corner. He saw now that a baby alarm was installed there, and the noise issuing from it was the relentless demand of a small baby.

  Susan Salisbury had jumped up, not, Mayo thought, without relief. “You must forgive me, that’ll be Clarissa. I’ll see you when I come down.”

  “Just one question before you go, Mrs. Salisbury. What were you doing last night?”

  “Me? I was in bed. I had a very bad headache, and I went to bed about nine o’clock.”

  “And you, Mr. Salisbury?”

  “I had an N.F.U. meeting.”

  “What time did it finish?”

  “I don’t really remember, it was very late, I suppose it was after midnight when I got home, but what the hell’s that got to do with anything? What does it matter what we were doing? We’ve got nothing to do with all this.”

  “Just checking, sir,” Mayo said blandly, “just checking.” The baby’s cry was working up to panic proportions and Susan Salisbury was growing fidgety, as any mother would. “I don’t think we need any more from you at the moment, Mrs. Salisbury. We’ll have your statement typed out and perhaps you can come in and sign it sometime tomorrow. Good night to you, ma’am.”

  Before she went out she paused, framed becomingly in the doorway. “If there’s any way we can be of further help ...”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Salisbury, I appreciate that offer.”

  She acknowledged this gracefully and went out.

  There had been undercurrents stirring in that room which he hadn’t understood, Mayo thought as the husband escorted them to the door and closed it firmly behind them. Susan Salisbury, like her furniture and her house, was cherished and perhaps more than a little spoilt. Evidently her husband adored her and she adored being adored. Nothing wrong in that, if that was how their relationship worked, but he wondered if it wasn’t a little too obvious, and momentarily why a woman as intelligent as he felt she was should ally herself with someone as irredeemably stupid as Tim Salisbury appeared to be.

  And he also wondered about her and Rupert Fleming, an entirely intuitive supposition, neither evidential as yet, nor even perhaps justifiable, but one which he didn’t intend to ignore.

  “It wouldn’t do any harm to have a poke around and see if there’s ever been anything between Mrs. Salisbury and Fleming,” he told Kite when they’d left. “I should think that’s a very long shot, and it may have nothing to do with this if there was, but I think it’s worth following up. Salisbury was a bit cagey. I should think that’s a natural condition with him, but he strikes me as the sort who could be jealous as hell.”

  “With a wife like that, who can blame him?” Kite said.

  FOUR

  “Pray resolve me one question, lady.”

  “If I can.”

  “None can so sure. Are you honest?”

  LONG BEFORE that first death occurred Alex Jones had been aware of something seriously amiss in her sister’s life, though the cause of it had to be largely speculation, since Lois was naturally secretive, never speaking much about her private life with anyone. Latterly, not even with Alex. That’s what being a police sergeant did for you, it lost you the trust of your friends and sometimes family, even of the naturally confiding ones. And Lois had never been that.

  “She’s quite capable of sorting herself out, so relax,” Mayo said. But he knew that this worrying was just Alex being Alex, something she couldn’t help. She couldn’t bear situations she couldn’t do anything about; she had an inborn compulsion to sort them out. It sometimes got her into trouble, occasionally upset people, and created a variety of conflicting emotions in Mayo, ranging from exasperation to an amused tolerance, because he knew he’d never change her. “Can’t see what you’re bothering about,” he told her, “she’ll work things out her own way.”

  “Nor can I, really,” answered Alex, frowning. “Just that things don’t seem right, somehow. Nothing you can put your finger on ... little things. You know, suddenly buying all those new clothes she doesn’t need. And she bit my head off when I said that new haircut didn’t suit her.”

  “Well, it doesn’t. Same cut as yours, but it makes her look scraggy.” He grinned, not really joking. The short, sleek haircut suited Alex’s clear profile, gave her that clean-cut, cameo look that went so well with her creamy skin, showed off the good shape of her head and the irresistible curve at the back of her neck – but not Lois.

  “Scraggy! For goodness sake don’t let her hear you say that! No, she’s upset about something and it’s making her quite waspish.”

  “What’s new?”

  “Come on, that’s not fair, Gil.”

  And it wasn’t, really. Piquant rather than waspish, you’d have said if you were being truthful. Amusing with it, but not lately.

  “It has to be a man, of course.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” rejoined Mayo, who was prejudiced. For some time he’d been convinced that Lois was behind Alex’s determination not to marry him, knowing as he did of Lois’s aversion to marriage on principle. She egged Alex on in her fight to keep what she saw as her independence, he was
sure ... but that was only one of her attitudes that irritated him. He was irked by what he thought was her pretentiousness, was wary of her sharp wit.

  And she was the only woman, apart from his mother, who insisted on calling him Giles.

  Lois, who ran an interior decorating business with great success and élan, was not so lucky in her relationships with men – and there had been quite a few, apart from her divorced husband. Unlucky, or wanting something most of them couldn’t live up to. Alex wasn’t in any position, however, to criticise on that score. The sisters didn’t always pick their men well, either of them, though for different reasons.

  There wasn’t much to go on at all, really. But it bothered Alex.

  And then the body of Rupert Fleming turned up and the whole of the Lavenstock police force, including the uniformed branch, were so busy that worries about Lois were forced to the back of her mind.

  It was the finding of Fleming’s body, and the need to inform his next of kin, which was now propelling Mayo towards the town. It was part of his job and he’d lost count of the times he’d had to perform this particular task, but he still detested it, especially where children were likely to be involved. He hated the thought of the trouble and anguish in store and the thought of being the instrument of it didn’t do much for his self-esteem. The ancient Greeks, when they had killed the bearer of bad tidings, might have had a point, he reflected sardonically.

  In an effort to avoid thinking deeply about what would never cease to be an ordeal for him, he sat back in the car as he was driven towards Baxendine House and let his thoughts drift. But rather than concentrating themselves on the case, as they should have done, he found them floating towards Alex. He blamed the scent W.P.C. Jenny Platt was wearing, delicate but disturbing in the close confines of the car, reminiscent of one Alex sometimes used. They’d stopped to pick her up at the station in case she should be needed and she sat in the back seat, pretty, curly-haired, young and smelling delicious. Tough as they come, in spite of that, a capable young woman who expected no favours because of her sex.

  Alex had the same sort of attitudes – and yet he at least knew how vulnerable she really was. Especially in that one area that was closed to him, the subject Alex was disinclined to discuss, knowing how he felt about it. It never ceased to amaze him that she could sort everyone else out but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do the same for herself. Especially when it concerned that Irishman, that Liam, he thought bitterly, the ex-lover in her life, who wouldn’t remain ex. A man who wouldn’t let an old love die a decent death and yet wouldn’t do anything to resolve the situation hadn’t got much going for him in Mayo’s book. Lately, however, he’d had a feeling, quite unsupported by any evidence, that Liam might finally have quitted the scene. Why, Mayo didn’t know, because Alex certainly wasn’t saying. Nor where to, either. He could have jumped in a lake, flown to Australia or gone to the devil. All three for all Mayo knew, or cared.

  “Yes?”

  The woman who answered the bell regarded the three of them unsmilingly, suspiciously eyeing W.P.C. Platt’s uniform.

  “We’d like to speak to Mrs. Fleming, please,” Kite said.

  “I’m Georgina Fleming.”

  She wasn’t the woman in the photograph.

  She was taller for one thing, and where the other woman had been dark and full-figured, with her hair in a curling mass on her shoulders, this one was slender to the point of thinness, a narrow, taut figure, her light brown hair fashionably bobbed and crimped and frizzed like a rag doll’s. She was wearing a belted cream silk tunic with a high neck over a short, straight black skirt that revealed long slim legs in sheer black tights. Also, an impatient expression.

  “What is it you want?”

  Mayo explained who they were and that he wanted to speak to her about her husband, and at last she seemed to understand that she would have to let them in. Abruptly, she told them to follow her.

  She lived in one of the smart new warehouse conversion flats that had been built overlooking the river, on land that had once been heavily industrialised but was now cleared and landscaped with groups of young trees and flowering shrubs and flowerbeds at present filled with crocus. Winding through it was a man-made stream fed by the Stockwell itself, that you crossed by means of little bridges and which gave to the complex a feeling of being built on an island, and perhaps to the residents a superior feeling of insulation from the busy everyday life of the town which went on behind them. The flats were regarded as upmarket housing in Lavenstock, with prices to match. Mayo had once thought he would have liked to have owned one of them and been disappointed to find them beyond his means – or at any rate beyond what he was prepared to pay.

  Now, in the long living room of this one, he turned away from the big blank expanse of the uncurtained window – the second-floor flat was on the side of the river and wasn’t overlooked – realizing with a feeling of having escaped that this sort of place would never have suited him, much less Alex. It was too impersonal, it had no sense of ever having seen years of life lived in it, despite what the architects called “retention of distinguishing features.” Translated, this meant, he supposed, an excuse for keeping the intrinsic parts of the old warehouse it had once been, interesting when it came to the pointed arch shape of the window, but not necessarily in the exposed central heating pipes and the two enormous metal structural supports which ran floor to ceiling through the middle of the room.

  Perhaps it was also the way in which it was furnished, no expense spared but in total contrast to the warm, comfortable, lamplit room they had just left. Severe modern lighting, a polished parquet floor with one or two Persian-type rugs, and the rest of it all chrome and glass, in monochrome black and white except for the leather seating, which was a bright shocking pink. A tall square glass vase containing three silk lilies stood on the black glass coffee table and there was a collection of white Lalique on a bookcase. Blown-up surrealist black and white Man Ray photographs decorated the walls, the one called “Glass Tears” over a fireplace into which was set an unlit modern functional electric fire – no flickering flames, real or imitation, here.

  All very tasteful, no doubt, but equally uncompromising. The central heating was switched on and the room was warm, but there was a chill pervading it that had nothing to do with the temperature, that surely emanated from the cool, brisk Mrs. Fleming herself.

  “You’d better sit down.”

  Her tone was pretty chilly too. She made no indication where they might sit and Kite chose an upright C. R. Mackintosh-type ladder-back chair with an exaggerated length of back which looked, and was, extremely uncomfortable. Mayo sank inescapably into the sighing embrace of pink leather, opposite Mrs. Fleming. Curly-haired Jenny Platt, wiser than her superiors, chose a camel-saddle stool at the end of the room to perch on.

  The fact that Kite had warned Georgina Fleming there was serious news about her husband didn’t seem to have shaken her unduly. In fact it was a long time since Mayo had seen anyone so self-possessed in any circumstances. Perhaps the meaning hadn’t penetrated, or he hadn’t been specific enough. Or perhaps she didn’t care.

  Maybe she knew already.

  Mayo kept a close, careful watch on her as he spoke. She was a good-looking young woman, around thirty, palely made up, her mouth painted poppy-red, not beautiful in the way Susan Salisbury had been, but her looks were the sort which would serve her well into old age. There was no softness about her to crumple or blur the fine edges. In profile her face was sharp, her eyebrows were shapely and well defined above curiously clear eyes, tawny-coloured, with a dark rim around the iris and thick, dark lashes.

  Not wanting there to be any mistake this time, Mayo told her in plain words that her husband had been found shot dead in his car, where he had apparently been since the previous evening. There followed a long silence. She still showed no visible emotion. If she hadn’t indeed been prepared, Mayo reflected, she was the coldest fish this side of the Antarctic.

  “Where
?” she asked finally. “Where did you find him?”

  Where? The question was unexpected. Most people reacted with disbelief, or horror, or shock. They burst into tears. They wanted to know how. And why. He reminded himself that at a time like this anyone’s actions were likely to be unpredictable – thought was rarely rational – and told her he’d been found at Scotley Beeches.

  “Scotley Beeches?”

  “That’s going towards –”

  “Oh, I know where it is,” she interrupted. “It just seems a peculiar sort of place for him to choose.”

  She’d immediately assumed, either innocently or otherwise, that Mayo had meant suicide, though he’d never mentioned the word. He didn’t correct her.

  “This might not be easy for you to answer – but can you think of any reason why he might have wished to take his own life, Mrs. Fleming? Did he have any problems?”

  She shook her head vehemently, the Raggedy Ann haircut swinging round her face, but she seemed less certain. “Why does anyone?”

  “Had he any worries?” Mayo pressed.

  “Not really.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Well, he wasn’t too happy about his work.”

  “What was his job?”

  “He was a freelance journalist.” With seeming reluctance, after a few more prods, she informed them that he’d been doing it for about a year. It had been difficult, what with unions, and most papers having staff writers, and God knows what else. He’d done several features for the county magazines and some reviewing, he’d reported on local theatre productions, but it hadn’t amounted to much and he’d been talking of giving it up. “It must have been worrying him more than I thought.”