Dark Mirror

by Dark Mirror (epub)

  ‘No Anthony da Silva?’

  ‘’Fraid not. Do you want to have a look at it?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  The woman returned after a while with the now familiar small green volume in her hand, and gave it to Kathy. This time the dedication in the flysheet read: To the Public Records Office, in appreciation of your generous assistance in the preparation of this little book. Robert Harding KCMG.

  Kathy turned to page 213 and found it to be, as at the British Library, missing.

  •

  Kathy saw that the greenery in the square had thickened and darkened during the past week into more mature, summery foliage, although perversely the weather had turned cold again and grey. They mounted the front steps, went into the library and asked for Gael Rayner.

  ‘Any news?’ she said, voice hushed.

  ‘Not really, Gael. We’re trying to retrace Tina Flowers’ movements in the days before she died, last Thursday.’

  ‘Oh yes, we heard all about that, and of course your colleague came to collect the record of Marion’s borrowings.’ She nodded at Pip. ‘We just couldn’t believe it, Marion’s friend, taken in the same way. We’re all still in shock.’

  ‘Did you ever meet Tina?’

  ‘Yes, she came a number of times with Marion, helping her with her work. And after Marion died she came back again. She said she wanted to tidy up some loose ends in Marion’s research. She was obviously distressed by what had happened. I should really have charged her for a temporary reference ticket, but I felt sorry for her and let her in on the strength of Marion’s membership. But we couldn’t let her borrow books.’

  ‘Right, so we don’t have a record of what she was looking at here. Can you remember if she came in last week at all, in the days before her death?’

  ‘Oh yes, she was certainly here, her and the other girl helping her.’

  ‘Emily Warrender?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m a great admirer of her mother’s work.’

  ‘Would you have any idea what they were doing?’

  ‘Well, they had unsupervised access to the stacks, so I wouldn’t know really. Let me think . . . Yes, I do remember Tina asking about one book in particular, because she couldn’t find it.’

  ‘Do you remember what it was?’

  ‘It was in History, or should have been. But I don’t think I can remember . . . hold on, I may still have my notes.’ She took a sheaf of papers from a filing tray and thumbed through them. ‘Yes, this is the one, I think. Its shelfmark was H. India—that’s H for history—and Social etc. We arrange our books differently here, you see, not by DDC.’ She deciphered her notes. ‘Apparently it was shelved under Harding, R., but I don’t seem to have a title. I’ll have noted it as misplaced. Do you want me to check?’

  ‘I think we know what it was, Gael—a book called After Midnight? It was a memoir.’

  ‘You’re right, I do remember now. They spent quite a lot of time looking for it.’

  ‘Do you have the borrowing record for that book?’

  ‘I can check.’ She called it up on her computer and said, ‘Only one borrower—Marion herself, last September. Nobody else.’

  ‘And she returned it?’

  ‘Yes, on the twenty-sixth of September.’

  ‘So what happened to it? Did someone steal it?’

  ‘Unlikely, I think. We assumed it must have been returned to the wrong place in the shelves.’

  ‘How could that happen?’

  ‘Well, either by mistake or on purpose.’

  ‘Why would anyone do it on purpose?’

  ‘To hide it. What better place to hide a book than in a library?’ She smiled. ‘You look surprised. Obviously you were a very law-abiding student.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s a not-uncommon practice in university libraries. If a book is in demand by students and on restricted access, the first one who gets to it places it on another shelf, where its location will be known only to them, although the computer will say it’s not on loan. Very frustrating for everyone else.’

  ‘But this book wasn’t in demand,’ Kathy said. ‘Only Marion was interested in it, apparently.’

  ‘True. Let’s see its publishing history.’ Another flurry of computer keys and she said, ‘Well, it was obviously a self-published memoir, a vanity publication, probably just for friends and relatives, with a very small print run. You might find a copy in the British Library, otherwise it’s probably vanished into obscurity. Is it important, do you think?’

  ‘I really don’t know, Gael. I might ask Emily. Tell me, is Marion’s tutor, Dr Anthony da Silva, a member of the library?’

  ‘Oh yes, I know him. He was here a lot when he was researching his wonderful book on Rossetti, but I haven’t seen him lately. Not for a while. Shall I check his borrowing record?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Here we are. No, nothing this year. His last loan was that new biography of Stanley Baldwin, last December.’

  ‘Thanks for your help.’

  Kathy phoned the Warrenders’ house from the car. Emily was a little more settled, apparently, after a lie-down. They put her on.

  ‘Hi Emily,’ Kathy said. ‘Just a small thing. We’re tracing Tina’s movements before she died, as I told you, and I understand you both spent some time in the London Library last week, looking for a lost book. Do you remember that?’

  ‘Mm, yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Do you remember what it was?’

  ‘I think . . . some sort of memoir? I’m not sure. We never found it.’

  ‘Why was it important?’

  There was a moment’s silence, then Emily replied, ‘Tina thought Marion had been looking at it. I think Tina thought there might have been something there about how Lizzie Siddal died. That’s what she was most interested in, some discovery of Marion’s that got her tutor really upset.’

  ‘She said that, did she?’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  Kathy phoned Brock, and told him what they had learned.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to interview Emily later to get that on record, but that’s good enough. Come on in and we’ll get to work.’

  •

  The room was drab and dispiriting, as if to tell those who were interviewed in it that anything they might come up with had certainly been heard between these grubby walls before.

  ‘Since we saw you last, Dr da Silva,’ Brock began, ‘we’ve had a chance to check some of the things you told us.’ He stopped and stared at the man across the table.

  Da Silva tried to meet his eyes, but only succeeded in looking shifty. He was a changed man, Kathy thought, the arrogance gone along with the colour from his face. His clothes looked crumpled and soiled, as if he’d slept in them on someone’s sofa, and she wondered if his wife had thrown him out. He took a pair of glasses out of his pocket and put them on with an unsteady hand, as if for protection.

  ‘We’ve been trying to confirm your account of your movements on Tuesday the third of April, the day that Marion Summers was poisoned, but without success. None of your neighbours saw you that day, you made no calls through your house phone nor received any. There’s no evidence of you being at home that day at all.’

  Da Silva’s solicitor began to object, but Brock simply nodded his head patiently and then went on, questioning the tutor again about the details of that day, what he’d had for lunch, what letters he might have written (none), and emails he might have sent from his home computer.

  ‘No, nothing like that. I told you, I was completely engrossed in the paper I was writing for a conference presentation that was overdue.’ His voice was different, like a nervous public speaker whose throat is stretched tight with tension.

  They would require his computer, Brock said, and would carry out a search of his home, although from his tone he didn’t expect to find much. He moved on to the days following Marion’s death, and da Silva’s visit to her house.

&nb
sp; ‘I spoke to Keith Rafferty,’ Kathy said. ‘He denied that he’d supplied you with a key.’

  Da Silva made a noise intended as a scoff but that came out as a choke. He took a sip from the plastic cup in front of him and said, ‘That’s no surprise.’

  They turned to his relationship with Dr Ringland and access to his laboratory, laboriously working through every detail until eventually the solicitor said, ‘I think that’s really enough. As you can see, Dr da Silva is suffering greatly from the strain of these terrible events, of which he is entirely innocent. Unless you have something specific to ask him, I’m going to advise him to say no more.’

  ‘It’s true!’ da Silva blurted out, loud enough to make his solicitor glance at him in alarm. ‘You . . . you’re trying to make me out to be some kind of predator, preying on girls like Marion and Tina. But I’m innocent! I was proud of Marion, proud of her as a father might be proud of his daughter, proud of her development, of her intelligence and insight. Proud of her independence, too, of her refusal to accept my opinion on trust, difficult as that sometimes was.’

  There were tears in his eyes now, and the three other people in the room, despite their long experience of such situations, drew back a little in embarrassment.

  ‘When she hid her Cornell paper from me, and I began to suspect the way in which it was intended to undermine me, I felt bitterly betrayed. Her disloyalty was like a knife in my heart. But I never, for one moment, thought of hurting her. That is obscene.’

  Silence filled the room, then Brock said mildly, ‘Where were you on the afternoon and evening of Wednesday the eleventh of this month, Dr da Silva?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A week ago, between the hours of three and eight. Please think carefully before you answer.’

  Da Silva frowned, then reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a small diary. ‘Umm . . . lunch with Dr Ringland, a two o’clock lecture, then . . .’ He looked up. ‘I believe I went up to the British Library.’

  ‘What was the lecture?’

  ‘Victorian literature.’

  ‘To?’

  ‘Third-year arts students mainly. Why?’

  ‘Tina Flowers was in that class, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Um . . . it’s possible, I suppose.’

  ‘And then she went to the British Library, where, shortly after four o’clock, she requested two books. Do you know what they were?’

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘Because the following morning you returned to the library as soon as it opened, and requested those same two books, books so obscure that almost nobody else has ever requested them.’

  ‘Um . . . I believe I do remember. Marion had told me about them.’

  Brock shook his head impatiently. ‘You followed Tina after the lecture up to the British Library, and watched her order the two books, one of which was the source of Marion’s revelations in her Cornell paper. You had been unable to find that book because it was stored in one of the special collections, the papers of the Havelock family, a name slightly different from the one you’d been searching for—Haverlock.

  Da Silva sat rigid in his chair.

  ‘Where is that book now, Dr da Silva? You collected it the following day, but never returned it. Where is it?’

  He said nothing, jaw locked.

  ‘Did you hide it somewhere in the library?’ Kathy pressed.

  For a moment it seemed he would keep silent, but then he gave a kind of shudder and whispered, ‘She just read and read and read, completely engrossed, but she seemed to make no notes, nor photocopies, before the library was closing and she had to hand it back. So the next morning I was there before her and took out the book. It was a scurrilous store of gossip, that’s all; a travesty, full of innuendo and rumour. Marion should never have considered it seriously. It was unconscionable that it should cause so much distress. I knew exactly what Rossetti would want me to do with the damn thing, and I did it.’

  ‘You did what?’ Kathy asked softly.

  ‘I destroyed it,’ he said defiantly. ‘I tore it into shreds and flushed it down the loo. There, I destroyed a library book. You can arrest me for that.’

  ‘But Tina had read it,’ Brock said, ‘just as Marion had before her, so you had to destroy her, too, didn’t you?’

  •

  Guiltily, Kathy now also felt like a disloyal daughter. Brock was energised by the arrest, firing instructions to the team—her team—to fill the gaps in their case against da Silva. She worked with him, of course, following up his ideas, adding her own, yet all the time she held back a little, feeling they’d got something wrong. It worried her that he hadn’t been immersed in the case as she had been, but was that just pique at having him take over now? But if there was some flaw, it was up to her, who should have developed a deeper understanding of the dynamics, to put her finger on it.

  She puzzled over this later that night, when she finally got home and sat on her sofa with a burger on her lap, staring up at her wall. The diagram, she had to admit, looked pretty convincing with da Silva in the centre, the perfect counterpart to Marion’s pattern on the left with Rossetti in that central place, ringed by his women, and Kathy could almost sense that Marion would have approved. So what was wrong?

  She went to bed without an answer, overtired and uneasy. She soon fell into a deep sleep, only to wake again after a couple of hours. Her brain immediately began whirring with images of imagined scenes—Marion collapsing in the library, Pip in the pub with Rafferty and Crouch, Ogilvie tumbling down the library stairs, Douglas Warrender meeting Marion in Bastia, then returning across flower-covered hills to suffer a pool-side barbecue with his family and friends . . .

  No, that was wrong. She opened her eyes in the pitch-dark room, remembering Warrender’s remark in St James’s Park: We were a perfect couple, making friends with other holidaying couples at the local restaurants, entertaining neighbours around the pool . . .

  A perfect couple, not a perfect family. Was Emily with them? Kathy realised they’d never checked.

  And suddenly it came to her that what had been wrong from the start was the way in which Marion and Tina had died. It was entirely plausible that da Silva, or Douglas Warrender, or even Keith Rafferty, might have desperately wanted Marion dead. But how would they do it? A hit and run, perhaps. An attack in a dark street. A strangling in a car, the body dumped. Something desperate, brutal and anonymous. But not arsenic poisoning.

  The way Marion died had felt . . . what? Bizarre, certainly. Eccentric? That wasn’t quite it. Rather elaborate and clever, with its references to her studies. Too much so. Like a student prank. It reminded Kathy of those student pranks at school on April Fools’ Day, the bucket of water balanced over the door, the boot polish on the door handle, the collapsing chair. Elaborately staged, spectacular in their effects and at their best—or worst—cruelly matched to their intended victim.

  She simply couldn’t imagine any of those men doing it that way. The diagram on her wall was all wrong, she realised. She had been so influenced by Marion’s, with its brooding male at the centre. Perhaps it wasn’t like that at all.

  A final image came into Kathy’s mind, of Emily sitting sobbing on the leather sofa, as pale and racked as the two victims, whose symptoms she almost seemed to mimic. Da Silva wasn’t the only one who’d been at the British Library when Tina died. Emily had been there too.

  thirty

  Suzanne also spent a disturbed night. Angela’s story about Dougie had unsettled her more than she’d been prepared to admit to herself. He had been her first great love, a dazzling figure against whose memory later boys had been measured and invariably found wanting. Even much later, when she matured and married, the summer in Notting Hill remained a lost Eden in her mind, to be nurtured and occasionally savoured in secret. Angela’s story had thrown all that into a new, grotesque perspective, and one that, if it were remotely true, resonated horribly with the case David was working on. She shuddered to think of the ramifications
if she told him; but suppose Angela, who obviously hadn’t heard of the connection between Marion Summers and the Warrenders, did eventually pick it up, and decide to tell her story to the police? Where would Suzanne be then? One way or another, she didn’t see how she could keep it to herself without some kind of reassurance that the story was nonsense. She couldn’t approach Dougie, that was unthinkable, but in the end she decided that there was perhaps just one person who might put her mind to rest. And so, that Wednesday evening while Brock and Kathy were charging Tony da Silva with Marion’s murder, Suzanne had phoned the house in Notting Hill and asked to speak to Lady Joan Warrender.

  Joan remembered her straight away. She was polite, but naturally puzzled at being approached like this, especially after Sophie had told them all about how angry she’d got with DCI Brock.

  ‘But how exactly can I help you?’

  ‘I wondered if I could meet you briefly in the next day or two, perhaps over a cup of tea, Lady Warrender.’

  ‘Oh, I really don’t think that would be a good idea. Things have been said, you know, people upset. Sophie is very touchy about it. This is a very tense time for us all.’

  ‘Of course, I do understand.’ The old woman sounded so stern, and Suzanne tried in vain to think of some way to mollify her. It had been a bad idea approaching her like this.

  ‘Perhaps if you gave me some idea of what it’s about?’

  ‘Well, I happened to meet another old friend recently, Angela Crick, who used to live next door to you, remember?’

  ‘Yes?’ Joan sounded bemused.

  Suzanne ploughed on. ‘She told me a story that your nephew Jack had told her, all those years ago, about something that happened in India when you were living there, to do with Dougie.’

  ‘In India? About Dougie? Good Lord, what sort of story?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t very nice, and I’m sure it was completely untrue, but I thought it might be a good thing if I could talk it over with you, and get to the bottom of it, so that I could get back to Angela and put her right. I didn’t like the idea of her repeating it to anyone else.’