The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  “And carbon dating?”

  “Too recent, too wide. It could say whether it was over seventy to a hundred years old, but it would give us a spread as wide as our guess work.”

  “Your guess would be?”

  “Fifty to sixty years.”

  Zita felt a lightening of her spirits; the sandals had been a good omen. “The police think thirty to thirty-five.”

  “And it may be the difference between the two, say forty to forty-five. Unless we have something to give us a co-relative, we have no way of telling.”

  “Did you come across anything in the area around the grave, anything to help with the dating?”

  “We may have. I’ll show you. There may have been more in the gravefill, but most of the soil from the upper levels had gone. If we had excavated the grave ourselves we could have done something by looking at the root growth. The way plants have grown into graves can be useful for dating. But the builders had done all that for us. We got the last few barrow loads of soil out of the skip and the students sieved it. They retrieved a number of items and we’re examining them now, but whether they relate to the body is another question.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Pieces of metal, wood, cloth. A link will be very hard to make. A garden of a house which is at least three hundred years old, on a site which may have been in continuous occupation for a thousand years, it’s a midden tip. Chicken bones, oyster shells, kitchen rags, old implements. If you dig it out, you’ll find the lot. Now where is it?” Amid the apparent chaos, Reskimer could find the photograph without effort. It was a black and white print and showed a clod of earth into which a coarse basket-weave pattern was etched.

  “This came from the rubble removed by the workmen earlier on the morning of the find. It could be the print of some unrelated rag or it could be the fabric of what the child was wearing.”

  Zita, the clothes lover, looked at it blankly. “Does it help?”

  “Not much, I admit. We’ll be able to tell you something about the fabric, the number of threads to the inch on warp and weft, if anyone’s interested.”

  She could not think this information would advance either her or Stevens.

  “And then there’s these.” Reskimer opened a little plastic bag and tipped two small round objects onto his palm. “What would you say these were?” He handed them to Zita who took them curiously.

  “They’re buttons surely?” They were round, black, domed, and on the flat underside of each one was riveted a metal eye.

  “Yes, one would say so. They were found under the ribs on the left side. It’s odd that there’s only two of them. I don’t know many garments that have only two buttons.”

  “A polo shirt?” Zita suggested.

  He shrugged. “Well, I’ve never worn a polo shirt with this sort of button on it. I’ve set a student to investigating when and where they might have been made, assuming they are of English manufacture of about fifty years ago. A hopeless task, but systematic attention to detail is the foundation of good archaeology.” He looked at his watch. “I’m glad you were early.”

  He took back the buttons. “It means I can get home sooner than I hoped.” He was already pushing back his chair. “It’s the dating that concerns you mostly, if I’ve understood you right. Give me a ring next week sometime and I’ll let you know if we’ve come up with anything more definite.” He ushered Zita out of his office, letting her step over the obstructing piles of books and reach the door, before placing his own large feet in the same spaces. He locked the door behind them and shook hands hastily.

  “I’ll just catch the 5.54 if I run,” he said and set off at a jog down the corridor. Zita watched him punch the lift button. The door opened immediately and he stepped in, calling for her to hurry, but was immediately carried away, disappearing behind the scissoring doors. She waited for the return of the lift, touched the call button a second time, at last abandoning her wait and taking the staircase. As she descended, she heard someone coming up fast with laboured breathing. She reached a landing and, as she turned to make the next stage of her descent, she encountered Stevens.

  They passed one another, and each had taken the hand rail of the next section of stairway when they simultaneously swung round. Stevens’ surprise was greater. Zita knew at once that he was going to see Reskimer and was the missed appointment preceding hers. They stared at one another for a moment, Stevens’ expression now registering suspicion as well as astonishment.

  “He’s left,” Zita said, trying to conceal her amusement. “He was obviously dying to get home. You just missed him in the lift.”

  “Bloody British Rail,” Stevens said. “The train was twenty minutes late and then we sat outside Victoria for half an hour. Would you believe it.”

  “Yes,” said Zita. “The rule is: always take a book and the earlier train.”

  “Ach.” He did not appreciate good advice. “Fine, if you have the time to live your life like that.” He hesitated, as if he suspected that Zita might be trying to prevent his meeting Reskimer, then rejected the idea. He moved alongside her.

  “Going back to Woodham now?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a train at 6.14. Would you like to share a taxi?”

  Zita had not expected such a proposal. “OK, we might just make it.”

  In the taxi they sat in silence. She felt she could almost hear the clockwork of his brain working, calculating what to ask her and when. At Victoria, he said, “You’ve got a ticket, I hope,” as he banged the taxi door. They both thrust money at the driver, who was left with a double fare as they galloped onto the concourse towards platform fifteen. The barrier was down and the board above the entrance said succinctly, 1814 cancelled.

  “The 6.44 is the next,” said Stevens, as they looked disconsolately at the empty platform. “We’ll have a drink.” Zita was thinking about Lynne and Tom. Now that they were fellow victims of British Rail, she felt more sympathetically towards Stevens. They queued together at the station buffet, placing their cups of tea on a shared tray.

  “What did he have to say, Reskimer?” he asked when they had settled at the table Zita had spotted.

  She summarized; she could see that he was not chiefly concerned with what she said. He could check everything with one telephone call. It was her motives, not her report, which were exercising him. He poured two sachets of white sugar into his cup and stirred it thoughtfully, barely paying attention to what she was saying. When she had finished speaking, she picked up her cup and sipped the lukewarm, faintly bitter tea. Stevens took a gulp and made a faint grimace.

  “She’s worried, is she?”

  “Who is?”

  “Mrs Loftus. You’re acting for her presumably.”

  Zita was uncomfortable; she had not expected him to be so blunt, to go immediately for her weak point, the fact that she was acting on her own initiative, on the pretext of her clients’ interest.

  “No,” she said precisely, setting down her cup in the circular indentation in the centre of the saucer. It was too small and swam uneasily in its pond. “If you think I am acting on specific instructions from Naomi Loftus, you’re wrong. I have received only the most general watching brief from the owners of the house. I just happened to be in London on business and had a moment to spare at the end of the afternoon.”

  “I didn’t mean the London Loftuses. I meant the old woman, the Russian.”

  “No, not for her either.”

  “So why all this activity? Unusual for a lawyer to display all this unpaid energy.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Zita was not unused to displays of male rudeness and had trained her temper. “A duty of care, you might say. It’s disagreeable for the Loftuses to have a corpse discovered on their property, especially when the police insist that it is not, as it seems to me, well over half a century old, but a recent case.”

  “We’ve been through this already. I have a duty, too, and that body is certainly recent enough for the
killer still to be alive.”

  Zita went onto the attack. “My question to you is, why all this activity by the police when you’ve got the murderer already? Petre was arrested and convicted.”

  “Convicted? Who told you he was convicted?”

  “Wasn’t he?”

  “No, he was not, not for Cresacre.” Stevens was oddly triumphant, as if he had scored her off in some way. She could not understand why he, a policeman, should be so pleased by the failure of a prosecution of thirty years ago.

  “So what happened?”

  He was caressing the bland, hairless skin behind his ears. She could not see, even at such close quarters, any sign of hair regrowth. Perhaps he didn’t shave his skull after all. “Petre was a nutter. He was picked up quite early on and eventually he was persuaded to confess, but he couldn’t find the body. The case was a real shambles. Two children disappeared that year, Eddie Cresacre in October and Peter Gilling earlier, in about March. Petre confessed to that one too. We never found his body either, but for that case there was enough circumstantial evidence which, along with the confession, convicted him.”

  “The murderer’s been brought to justice, whatever you think about the matter. The case is closed.”

  “There’s a lawyer speaking. We need to know; to get things straight. If this body is Eddie Cresacre’s it’ll make an enormous difference to his family. They’ll at last know where he is. They can give his remains proper burial. They can have a focus for their grief after thirty years. That means something, you know.”

  What he said was correct, Zita acknowledged to herself. But it just did not ring true. It came out too pat, as if he had it prepared, ready for the press. She picked up her cup again and held it in front of her, like a shield.

  “You were involved in the Eddie Cresacre case, weren’t you,” she said. It was a statement, not a question. “A young constable on your first murder case. Your feelings got involved; something happened to churn your stomach, which you never forgot.”

  Stevens’ whole head turned crimson with rage, the colour suffusing the back of his neck and his skull. “Keep your cod psychology for your clients and don’t apply it to me,” he said furiously. “What do you know about people’s feelings? It is a question of duty; there are no feelings involved.”

  Zita watched him calmly, raising her cup with both hands in front of her mouth. It was amazing, she thought; couldn’t he see the contradiction between what he said and the way he said it? “Sorry, sorry.” Her tone was not apologetic.

  He swigged the dregs of his tea, unmollified.

  “Does that mean you weren’t in on the Cresacre case in 1960?”

  He got up abruptly. “The train leaves in four minutes,” he said, picking up his leather folder from the table. Zita stood up more slowly and followed him out of the buffet.

  They got onto the train together. Zita was glad to find it crowded, so they would be forced to sit separately. In the end, they found two places on either side of the aisle. She sat facing the engine, he the rear of the train. She put her new shoes under her seat and her briefcase on her lap. She took out some papers to disguise her wish not to converse. She was interested to see how intensely her dislike was reciprocated. Whereas she had taken some trouble not to give way to her antipathy, he had by now given full rein to his. There was a difference in the sources of their mutual antagonism. She found him physically repulsive and all her liberal instincts told her to resist prejudice based on appearance. She thought briefly of Xenia’s crudely expressed opinion at Yevgenia’s lunch: no liberal instincts there. Stevens, on the other hand, was not concerned with appearances. It was what she was, not what she looked like, that he loathed. She was an overeducated, affected, patronizing bitch. In which case, there was nothing she could do, no change of appearance or behaviour, that was going to modify his opinion, so she had nothing to lose. It seemed that Stevens had come to the same conclusion about her.

  They both got off the train at Broad Woodham and crossed the bridge over the line, not together, not separately, in a gaggle of other passengers. Outside the station he stopped, waiting for her to draw level with him. Most of the returning commuters had flooded past them. They were the last in the entrance to the station. Stevens spoke with suppressed violence.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I expect you’re used to that. I worked on that case. I remember it very well. She did it, you know. She killed Eddie Cresacre.” He waited for Zita’s reaction and whatever her features showed it was evidently enough for him to go on with equal force, “I know she did it and I’m going to get her after all these years. There’s no escape from the past. You can tell her that.” He walked off down the hill, his trousers rumpled by the gritty breeze that always blows around railway stations.

  Zita unlocked her car. He was mad, mad and obsessed. She noticed that her hand was shaking as she fumbled to introduce the key into the ignition. She had meant to phone Lynne from Victoria, but Stevens had distracted her. Her mind was pulled back immediately to thoughts of Tom, anticipating her conversation with Lynne on her arrival. What evidence could there be against Yevgenia that he should, thirty years later, still be convinced of her guilt? She pushed the question to the back of her mind to enable her to greet Tom

  The phone was ringing with so much emphasis as she stepped through her front door that she knew at once that it must be Valentina. She called a greeting to Lynne and picked up the receiver.

  “I’m going to Milan for a week,” Valentina announced. “I thought I’d better let you know.” She was speaking Russian, as she always did now.

  Zita who had lived for years without knowing where her mother was, beyond the geographical concept of “America”, simply said, "Da,” and then, as an afterthought, “Have a good time.”

  “I was invited to a colloquium there a long time ago.” Her mother seemed determined to explain all the details. “But I didn’t see how I could fit it in and so I turned it down. Then last week someone showed me the programme and the list of participants. It is not a very big affair or very prestigious, but there are some interesting papers on the list. So, I thought, why not?”

  “Well, why not, Mama?” Zita repeated encouragingly. “Though I don’t think Milan is very beautiful.”

  “I’m not going for tourism, Zita.”

  “No, well, good. It should be fun.” She tried to rouse herself to be a better daughter. “So, you’ll be back, when? Why not come the weekend after next? Or we could meet in London. Would you like to see a play or an opera?”

  “That would be very nice. See what you can arrange, Zi-Zi. You know I like opera best.”

  Zita, who had not been called Zi-Zi since she was eight and who detested opera, agreed to arrange something and Valentina rang off. It was very wearing having Valentina in England, much more so than she had expected. She could not understand why her mother had wanted to tell her so much, about the papers, the list of participants, the place. Was she lonely in England? Noises from Tom’s room indicated that he was still awake and had heard her arrive. She abandoned thoughts of her mother to go to say goodnight to her son.

  It was not until she lay in bed that night that she allowed herself to think again of her sporadic conversations with Stevens. Lying there in the dark, she remembered him saying what she had been refusing to acknowledge. Yevgenia had killed Eddie Cresacre.

  It was impossible. She could not contemplate a woman, a friend, killing a child. Or even wishing his death. She refused to recall those nights sitting in hospital waiting rooms while Tom-Tom struggled for breath, when the thoughts came, unwilled, what if he died? She put aside those alternative lives that presented themselves, as seductive as a photograph of Oliver, as the temptations of St Anthony. It had reached a stage that more was needed than to watch what was going on. She must resist. Stevens was a man obsessed (why? why?). He was not interested in truth. For some reason that she could not understand, in rejecting Petre, he had fixed on Yevgenia as an alternative. She began to make
lists in her head. DNA tests might show that the bones were not those of Eddie Cresacre. Even if they were, Stevens still had plenty of work to prove that Yevgenia had anything to do with them. The tests would take time. The child’s relatives would have to be traced, samples taken; extracting DNA from old bones might not be a straightforward procedure. Science, as Professor Reskimer had said about archaeology, moved slowly. In the meantime she could look at alternative explanations. If the bones were as old as she wanted them to be, they must relate to earlier owners, before the war. And Stevens himself, why was he doing this? What lay behind his duty? Or hers?

  Part Seven

  XENIA

  15

  “Darling, you haven’t forgotten that we are taking Jean to the opera on Sunday?”

  “On Sunday?”

  “Yes, it’s this weekend. I told you months ago to put it in your diary.”

  “Ah.”

  “We’ll have to leave early to get to Woodham for lunch, load her into the car and reach Glyndebourne for 4.30. It starts early on a Sunday.”

  “What are we going to see?”

  “The Queen of Spades.”

  “Ah.”

  Taking Jean to Glyndebourne was an annual ritual. She had once gone several times a season with her husband; now she was so crippled that the visit took on the nature of a major expedition and, because of that, was a great event in her life.

  Naomi and Marcus were eating peaches. Xenia was sitting with them, watching their conversation with a care which only Naomi’s lack of self-consciousness could tolerate with ease.

  “Such a shame,” Naomi was saying, “that I didn’t know you would be with us, Xenia, when I ordered the tickets. I should love you to see Glyndebourne. It’s so English.”

  “You could phone to see if there is a returned ticket.”