The sign of Death, wasn’t that?
He knew they were a superstitious lot, theatre folk, but this was going a bit far. Maybe she believed it or maybe she knew more than she was saying. “Let’s get this clear. What you’re really saying, Lili ... you think Ashleigh Cockayne murdered Rupert Fleming?”
“Am I? Well, then, perhaps I am.” Her voice trembled but her hands began again, darting among the fantasy on her canvas. “But if he did, it was no more than Fleming deserved because I am telling you,” she said, suddenly very French, “there were times when I could have killed him myself. And I’ll tell you something else ... I am glad he is dead.” She smiled and drove her needle through the eye of a robin.
He followed the progress of her sewing in silence for a while. “I think,” he said, “there’s something you’re not telling me.”
Her eyes met his consideringly, then she sighed. “I knew I should have to tell you some time. They’d had a row, and Ashleigh ... well, one thing you must know – it wasn’t temper. He’d never let fly, but I’m afraid he could sulk. He could bear a grudge, let things smoulder for weeks until the time when he could get his own back.”
“What was it all about, this row they had?”
“I don’t know. He came home in such a state one evening last week –”
“Which evening?”
“I don’t remember which – oh yes, Wednesday, it must have been Wednesday.”
So that was when the row had begun, and it had lasted until the following Monday, the same evening that Trish had had her date with Ashleigh Cockayne so rudely cancelled, when Fleming had arrived at the theatre to make up the quarrel with Cockayne.
“He was still a bag of nerves,” Lili went on, “right through the weekend. In the end I asked him what was the matter and he said, ‘Oh God, Lili, I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. This is a decision I’ve got to make for myself. I’m in it up to the neck and it’s either me or that bastard Fleming.’ That was Monday evening, when he said that, before the rehearsal, and when I got up the next morning he’d gone – no note, nothing.”
“Fleming was there at the Monday rehearsal, I believe?”
“Yes, he came in when we’d nearly finished, as he usually did. Sat in the front and waited, watching the women, as always. I could see Ashleigh didn’t like it, but it wasn’t any business of mine. They were two grown men, they had to sort it out between them, whatever was bothering them.”
“Did you think it was about a woman, this row they’d had? Fleming seems to have known a few. Susan Salisbury, maybe?”
“Susan?” She laughed shortly and rethreaded her needle. The robin was finished. A bluebell had begun to blossom under her hand. “You’re like all men, you think just because a woman looks like Susan, she’s available. Take it from me, she’s not.”
He said mildly, “Not me, I don’t think that, but maybe Fleming did.”
“No, no. You’re on the wrong lines there.”
“All the same, Mrs. Salisbury interests me. What sort of future did she have, as a professional actress?”
“Who can tell? She’s very gifted, and with those looks she’d have got to the top one way or another, bound to, and maybe in time she’d have become a great actress as well. But it’s a hard life and you need more than a bit of talent and a pretty face. Here of course she’s a star, but how she’d have shaped up professionally ...” Her shoulders lifted in a Gallic shrug and she gave him an assessing glance. “How old do you think she is?”
He replied without thinking too much about it, “Twenty-six, twenty-seven?”
It was what came to mind and yet he wasn’t altogether too surprised when she said, “She’s nearly forty. You’ve been to her home, she tells me. Have you seen her husband?”
“Yes, I’ve met him.”
“Well, then.” He raised his eyebrows and she spelled out, “Susan likes it easy, Mr. Mayo, and Tim Salisbury’s very comfortably off. She laps up admiration and he gives it. But more than anything, she adores those two lovely children of hers. She wanted babies more than she wanted fame. Before it was too late.”
As he reflected on that, another thought recurred to him. Despite their apparent difference in age, Salisbury was evidently besotted by his wife. Supposing he’d discovered, or imagined he’d discovered, some sort of liaison between her and Fleming? Supposing all this stuff about Cockayne’s quarrel with Fleming was smokescreening the real truth? Fiveoaks Farm was near enough to where Fleming had been found, near enough to have been a lovers’ trysting place. Supposing Tim Salisbury had come across them, and shot Fleming?
There should have been a check made on Tim Salisbury’s movements that night, he’d given orders to have that done, and presumably it had tallied with what he said he’d been doing, but he’d have another look at it when he got back to Milford Road. But he wasn’t pinning much faith on the idea. For one thing, there was the gun, Culver’s gun. They always came back to that. And the whisky and the barbiturates.
He went back to Lili and his original line of questioning. “They’d always been good friends up until this row they had, Cockayne and Fleming?”
“Oh no, never friends, I think. Acquaintances would be a better word, perhaps business partners in some way, but how should I know? Ashleigh didn’t discuss their relationship with me, I wouldn’t have expected it.”
He thought this might not be quite true. In the normal way he guessed there would certainly have been at least one or two agreeably gossipy sessions during which Fleming’s character and propensities would have been taken apart and scrutinised. Wasn’t that the way with theatre people, with most people come to that, given the chance – and it was probably his failure to do so which had excited her curiosity as much as anything else. “Fleming never came to the house,” she continued. “Whatever it was they had to do with each other it was conducted there, at the Gaiety.”
“Do you have any idea what that was?”
She shook her head but looked away, not meeting his eyes. She wasn’t ready to talk about that; she’d said enough, her attitude conveyed, more than enough. They’d find out, but not from her.
She didn’t know it, but her secrecy was wasted now. Mayo didn’t feel it expedient to say so. He wanted evidence of those pictures, if any still existed, and he told Lili there would have to be a search made of the house.
“Go ahead. You won’t find anything,” she said, meeting his glance without fear or favour. So either she had searched, herself, and found nothing, or had got rid of anything incriminating. Not deliberately obstructive, Lili, but too well-intentioned towards Ashleigh Cockayne to be of further help at the moment, he thought.
“One more thing,” he said as he rose to go. “Did Cockayne ever take sleeping pills?”
“Sleeping pills?” Her eyes widened in surprise and then she laughed in rather an odd way, saying no, he didn’t ever need sleeping pills, as far as she knew.
“Do you?”
“Once in a blue moon.”
At his request she went to look for what she had and brought back a half-full bottle. She took them so infrequently, she said, that she’d no idea how many, if any at all, were missing. Mayo took the bottle with him and she asked him no questions about why he should want it.
“You should remember what I said about Rupert Fleming,” she told him before he went, “I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me. I was too old for one thing, too old for him to be able to get round me with sex, like he did with the others. But he was a mischief-maker. He liked to set people against one another. You ask anyone. Ask de Flores – ask Greg Foster.”
TEN
“Oh, but instinct is of a subtler strain.”
A BRIGHT, BLOWY MORNING it turned out to be on Sunday, the best sort of March day. The mad wind bowling last night’s takeaway cartons as merrily as tumbleweed along the gutters, the bells of St. Nicholas’s Parish church summoning those still of the faithful. Most of the investigating team, including Mayo, could think of more t
han one thing they’d rather be doing than sitting here in a small stuffy office separated from the busy incident room by a glass partition, drinking canteen coffee, comparing notes and reports and waiting for their briefing. Washing their cars, for instance, putting up shelves, playing golf, taking the wife and kids for an outing. All wishful thinking at this stage in the proceedings. The hunt for Ashleigh Cockayne was under way.
During his time in Lavenstock, he appeared to have made no friends other than those connected with the Thespians. He had no living relatives, Lili said. On the other hand, there were theatre friends all over the country who would have taken him in with casual generosity, accepting only the vaguest of reasons for his wanting a temporary lodging. Crises in their own chancy lives happened all the time – and who cared for listening to boring and lengthy explanations as to how they’d come about?
Where had he last worked? Mayo wanted to know.
Somewhere in the north, Lili thought, but she couldn’t be sure. She knew someone who might, though ... she gave them names, addresses, phone numbers.
Meanwhile, a search had been made of his office at the Community Centre and the house at The Leasowes, revealing nothing more incriminating than a dubious taste in fancy underwear and a tendency to sloppiness and carelessness over his personal belongings. Well, Mayo hadn’t expected that he would be so foolish as to leave proof of his suspect photographic activities, for instance, lying around to be picked up, either at home or at the theatre. However careless he’d been about other things, he’d always been meticulous when using the darkroom of the Camera Club in the basement for his developing, and the members had never had any cause to suspect any illicit use of their equipment. But he’d sailed on the windy side of the law regarding that activity, Mayo thought savagely, and he’d have him for it, be it the last thing he did – though that would be the least of Cockayne’s worries if he were found now. He’d covered his tracks well, if that had been his intention. If Cockayne was their man. The odds were increasing that he was.
Mayo perched on the edge of a table, facing the view of the grimy, graceless Town Hall, a view dismally familiar and marginally worse from here on the ground floor than it was from his office window on the floor above. One thing about the Town Hall, though, it was an encouragement to the mind to think of other things. He hitched himself further onto the table and, for the benefit of the whole team, began summing up as far as they’d got, ticking the facts off on his fingers as he did so.
The two men, Fleming and Cockayne, had been in cahoots over the dirty picture business. At some time during the previous week they’d had a row, cause unspecified, which still hadn’t been resolved by the following Monday evening, when Fleming had again come to the Gaiety after the rehearsal, but this time with the intention of apologizing and making his peace with Cockayne. His overtures hadn’t at first been well received. What had followed could only be conjecture, apart from two indisputable facts: one, Fleming had been murdered, two, Cockayne had disappeared. Ergo, find Cockayne, find the murderer. Q.E.D.
On the face of it, simple. So why did he still have this persistent nag that it was not as simple as that? That something was wrong with this whole business?
“What about the gun, sir?” asked D.C. Farrar, looking bright and alert as a squirrel on the lookout for nuts.
“It bothers me, lad, that, it bothers me a lot.”
“Dodgy, whichever way you look at it,” Kite agreed. “If Cockayne’s our man, why John Culver’s gun?”
“Maybe because he was the only person Cockayne knew who owned one. Perhaps Fleming had mentioned at some time that his father-in-law owned several. So Cockayne went along and pinched it,” Farrar suggested.
“Wouldn’t have been difficult,” Kite allowed. “If Culver’s to be believed, it didn’t go missing until after eleven on Sunday morning when he finished cleaning his guns. We’ve checked with the housekeeper and she went home at about half past four on Monday – leaving the door unlocked because Culver was still out and is too damned stubborn to admit he’s got anything worth pinching. If Cockayne’d been keeping watch from the woods behind the house for an opportunity, that would’ve been it.”
“No problem getting into the house, but what about the windows to the gun room? Too small to get in by, and the door showed no signs of being forced,” Mayo reminded him. “So either Cockayne didn’t pinch the gun, or he got hold of it some other way. Don’t forget either that he didn’t know Fleming was going to appear at the Gaiety on Monday night. He’d made arrangements to take young Trish out to supper.”
“If he already had the gun and the intention, he might have just taken the opportunity, sir,” Farrar said, which was sharp of him, thought Mayo, remembering Lili’s contention that Cockayne could brood and bide his time.
“Or maybe,” Spalding offered, encouraged by the approving nod Mayo had given the other young D.C., “Fleming pinched it to shoot Cockayne with and Cockayne got it off him somehow and used it against him.”
“And maybe Culver gave the gun to Cockayne to get rid of Fleming,” Atkins put in dryly. “Come on, lads, we can do better than that!”
There were plenty of ifs and buts, Mayo agreed, and skirmishing around them like this was apt to make him impatient. It did no harm to bat theories around, though. That way they might hit on a possibility no one had thought of before. At the moment, however, nobody was scoring bull’s-eyes.
“Never mind the details at this stage,” he said. “Let’s concentrate on the broad outline.” He leafed through the sheaf of notes in his hand. It appeared that although Cockayne had apparently taken nothing else at all with him, he had taken his car from the bit of vacant ground behind The Leasowes where he kept it.
“He could be halfway to outer space by now,” someone muttered gloomily.
“Not if he’s gone in that car,” Kite said. “It’s a beat-up old S Reg VW Beetle and he hasn’t driven it for months until now. Didn’t pass its last M.O.T. and was hardly worth the cost of repairing. We’ll soon have it picked up.”
“Who checked that coppice just off the road?” Mayo asked. “Where that footpath from Scotley Beeches leads to? Wasn’t it you, Farrar?”
“Yes, sir,” Farrar said. “Me and Deeley. You could park a car there, no problem, there’s a little clearing behind some bushes. But there was no hope of finding any traces. Some sort of heavy machinery, probably a farm tractor or something like that, had recently turned round in the gateway and it was like a ploughed field. It’s in my report, sir,” he added with as much reproof in his tone as he dared, reminding Mayo of the pile of other reports on his desk, waiting to be read.
“Pity.”
If this had been a murder deliberated on by Cockayne, not a spur-of-the-moment killing, he must surely have made provision for getting away, left his car stashed away somewhere ready to pick up, and that had been the obvious place. There could be others, but few as convenient. Otherwise he would have been obliged to walk home via the main road, back to pick up his car. Maybe seven or eight miles, a couple of miles less as the crow flew. But Cockayne didn’t have wings and in direct line there would have been farmers’ fields and woods, muddy streams, a stretch of electrified railway line and then suburban gardens to negotiate. No, if he’d walked, unlikely as it seemed, it would have been via the road.
“Keep looking out for any other place he might’ve parked, lads. And put out a call for anyone who saw a man walking on the Lavenstock Road that night, George,” he said to Atkins. “Somebody must have seen him if he walked, maybe even given him a lift. It’s only a minor road but a lot of drivers use it as a short cut to the main Stratford Road.”
He broke the meeting up shortly after that, removing himself from the scene and going upstairs, through the busy, orderly incident room with the jangling telephones and the flashing screens of the word processors, the clacking typewriters and the constant comings and goings of shirt-sleeved officers. There was work a-plenty to be done while Cockayne was located.
And yet ...
Lili was sure that Cockayne was no longer alive. She had a shrewd intelligence, plus intuition, and never mind the Tarot cards, he wasn’t inclined to dismiss the idea out of hand. Police work was ninety-nine percent hard slog, leg-work, method and routine, but intuition played its part occasionally and you ignored it at your peril. His sceptical policeman’s mind rejected the idea as a total solution, however. And life, he’d found, when it came to the crunch, was precious, even to a murderer, even to an Ashleigh Cockayne. “If ever that would happen to me,” Cockayne had said to Lili, perhaps subconsciously admitting that enough violence was contained within himself to enable such a possibility to exist. If ever that should happen, he’d sworn to kill himself ... though not apparently through remorse, or from sorrow that he should have taken another human life, but simply because he couldn’t bear the thought of his own personal freedom being curtailed through long, mournful years. That he might have had second thoughts, when it came to the moment of truth, Mayo thought entirely possible.
But if Lili was right, and he had committed suicide, his reasons for killing Fleming might never be revealed, and Fleming’s demise might well go down as one of the unsolved murders of our time. It could happen, but it wasn’t a possibility Mayo was going to admit until he had to. Meanwhile, the big question was: where was he – or his body?
Kite was bogged down, still making telephone calls, when Mayo stopped for lunch, so he took himself down to the Saracen’s Head for a solitary ploughman’s, using the time for some constructive thought. When he’d finished, he made a circuitous route back to Milford Road, by way of the Gaiety.
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