Last to Leave

by Clare Curzon

  Slightly out of breath, he reached the Intensive Care Unit in time to catch Kate binning her protective mask and apron. She looked neither dejected nor elated, but confused, and he hesitated to ask after her injured son.

  ‘They say he’s fallen into a natural sleep now,’ Kate volunteered. ‘Just for a moment it seemed he was going to come properly awake. He said something, but his eyes were still closed.’

  ‘What was it he said?’ Yeadings ventured.

  ‘He was calling for someone called Nicola. She must be a girlfriend, I suppose, but I’ve never heard of her.’

  ‘Where’s Stone?’

  ‘He went outside in a hurry. To phone, I think. He won’t have gone far.’

  They found him at the end of the corridor. He put away his mobile and turned to Yeadings with quiet urgency. ‘We need to talk, Superintendent. Kate will have told you what he said. But it wasn’t Nicola he called for. I believe it was Nicholas. He’s an employee of mine and he’s failed to report in.’

  20

  They all sat in Stone’s car while he explained that he had employed a junior assistant called Nicholas Dukakis. In fact he still paid his salary although the young man currently worked in London for his wife Giulia as an accountant, facilitating her control of finances being transferred as part of the separation settlement.

  ‘Normally,’ Stone said, ‘he contacts me twice weekly to ensure matters go smoothly, but since I left for Washington he has left no messages. I had assumed he was held up by some complex legal point and would get in touch when he had dealt with it.

  ‘My ex-wife is a very devious and demanding woman, superintendent. Which is why I chose young Nicholas. He is discreet and utterly trustworthy. If he found it necessary to get in touch with Eddie Dellar, then I suspect it was somehow in connection with Jessica.’

  ‘Why? What has he to do with Jess? And why Eddie?’ Kate demanded sharply. ‘Haven’t you other employees he could have spoken to?’

  Yeadings watched the other man hesitate, choosing how to reply. ‘Nicholas and Eddie had met before, at my office. You understand, Eddie is young, but he has already gone some way in the Department. We have had dealings together over various licences for import and export. Also, Nicholas would have been aware of Jessica’s relationship to us both.’

  ‘I’m not quite with you,’ Yeadings cautioned. ‘The Department: am I to understand you mean the Department of Trade and Industry?’

  ‘That’s where Eddie works,’ Kate put in. ‘He’s a civil servant.’

  Yeadings turned back to Stone who held his gaze with a challenging stare. No comment, Yeadings warned himself. Civil Servant was a term that covered a multitude of occupations. He was one himself, for that matter. It struck him then that both Stone and young Dellar could have interests allied to his own, but possibly on an international basis. This was spooktalk, or else serious bluff; and Stone relied on him to keep the young man’s mother in the dark.

  ‘I see,’ he granted, not really convinced that he did. ‘Go on.’

  ‘There’s not much I can offer,’ Stone said sombrely, ‘since Nicholas has failed to report back. I am seriously concerned that he’s been prevented.’

  Prevented. Like being dead, Yeadings supposed with a flash of intuition. Dead, strangled and left to burn in a house fire? The implication was there to be picked up. Jessica Dellar missing; the young man too; and Eddie seriously injured after an apparent attack. What the hell had the three of them been up to?

  ‘It’s puzzling. Kate, the answer rests with your son,’ Stone said, laying a hand on her arm. ‘Already he’s showing signs of coming round. Soon he’ll be able to tell us what happened and it can all be cleared up.’

  Never so simple as that, Yeadings thought. How could it ever be cleared up for that poor woman if her daughter was dead?

  ‘You said …’ Kate faltered. ‘This Nicholas works for your wife. And Jess works for you.’ She made it sound a question, full of apprehension.

  ‘Nicholas works for me too, but on loan to Giulia’s financial manager.’

  ‘She … your wife. I imagine she knows your intentions regarding my daughter?’

  Yes, the possibilities were getting through to Kate. Yeadings said nothing, folded away in his corner of the car’s interior. How would the man deal with her now?

  Kate drew a deep breath to steady herself. Deliberately she chose words that denied the panic inside. ‘She wouldn’ t feel very kindly towards Jess. What would she be likely to do?’

  Stone was holding her hand now. Yeadings watched closely.

  ‘Giulia’s a hard woman. She can be malicious, but she’d draw the line at real viciousness, too afraid of the consequences. She has a great instinct for self-preservation.’ His voice was level, but under it Yeadings detected a note of some emotion. Exasperation? Anger?

  No, he decided: it was bitterness. This man knew the woman he was speaking of. He’d been time and time again on the receiving end of her malice.

  ‘Has she got Jessica?’ Yeadings asked quietly.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Stone said. ‘She’ll have no direct dealings with me. Which is why I’m trying to contact my son.’

  There was a great deal more Yeadings needed to know. He found it difficult to remove Kate Dellar so that he could talk to the man alone. She was too aware of his intention and determined to hang on. Stone, after all, had been her protector. But the mention of a son had sent a ripple of new apprehension through her: a recollection that there was so much about him that she was ignorant of, and it might go against all her held principles.

  Yeadings wished he had Rosemary Zyczynski with him but, without warning, Kate surrendered. ‘Superintendent,’ she said almost tearfully, ‘you’ll do all you can, won’t you? I must stay with Eddie and find out what happened.’

  Franco felt the phone vibrate in his jeans pocket. Automatically his hand went to it, but Giulia had seen. He had to carry on with pulling it out and reading the text message.

  ‘Is that Stefano?’ his mother demanded sharply.

  ‘My new jacket’s ready. I have to pick it up,’ he lied.

  ‘That can wait. For God’s sake what has happened to the girl? She couldn’t have got far.’

  Franco wasn’t so sure of that. ‘It was a mistake to send Stefano packing.’

  ‘Turdo! Bastardo!’ She was outraged at the reminder of where they’d found her young lover and the condition he was in, but Franco had more to worry about. Somehow his father had picked up on what Giulia had done. Not surprising perhaps, because his spies were everywhere. His message had been bald enough: Where is Jessica Dellar?

  ‘He will have gone after her,’ Giulia decided.

  It took Franco an instant to realize she meant Stefano. ‘Then maybe he’ll bring her back as a trophy, with his tail wagging and be ready for you to throw him a biscuit!’

  She glared at him. He was getting too big for his trousers. That was no way to speak to one’s mother. Sometimes there was a touch of his father about him. She was reminded he was growing up. It was time to find a wife for him as a distraction. Perhaps she should have allowed him to go and study at Perugia, but it was too international. There would have been outside influences. And Carlo Massimo could reach him too easily there, if he wanted to claim him. Not that he’d bother picking up family if he was bent on cultivating that English hussy.

  The very reminder of Jessica, so deceptively meek and malleable yet scoring the final point, enraged her further. ‘He’s welcome to her,’ she said, almost spitting at the thought of her husband. ‘She’s a filthy little whore, enticing Stefano as she did. Under my roof!’

  ‘He never needed encouraging. He was all over her,’ Franco dared to claim. Habitual courtesy forbade his suggesting that Stefano had a nostalgic taste for younger flesh than he was recently allowed.

  ‘If he finds her,’ he warned his mother, ‘there’s no knowing what he’ll do to her, after the way she left him. Then how will you excuse tha
t to Father? We’d do best to contact him in London or wherever he is and explain that she’s been a guest with us and now she’s moved on.’

  ‘He’s in the States,’ she snapped back. ‘You know we don’t speak together. And how can you explain her coming here anyway? No, she must be found before he returns to England or there will be almighty trouble. Mortimer must come out here and take her back.’

  ‘If she hasn’t found some way to get back on her own,’ Franco considered. ‘She’s enterprising enough. Maybe she’ll simply go to the British Consul and say who she is; plead she’s lost her passport. They’ll send her home, a Distressed British Subject. Finito!’

  ‘Imbecile!’ Giulia stormed. ‘You are useless. Go away!’

  ‘Yes, Mama.’ He withdrew, no way so calm as he sounded, went up to his room on the third floor and booted up his computer. Anything could happen to Jessica, a runaway on her own. He was anxious for her. Whatever his father’s likely wrath, he must be informed. He’d be the one to find her if anyone could.

  Yeadings heard the other man out. There were still unexplained elements in the story, such as the connection between himself and Eddie Dellar. It smacked too much of how young undergraduates were trawled at university and enlisted in political or intelligence organizations.

  So much depended on what Stone stood for. His interests were widespread. He spent as much time in America as here. Grandson of an Armenian refugee; he was British-born, but then so were a number of suspected terrorists. As a capitalist he was assumed to be politically right of centre, but again that was no guarantee of loyalty: look at that ambivalent spy, Anthony Blunt.

  If it was through Stone’s influence or agency that Eddie had been accepted for the DTI, it could make that young man a suspect cuckoo in the Whitehall nest. On the other hand, it could prove Stone an SIS recruiting agent.

  Yeadings himself had once stood at a crossroads in his career, and he still was in touch with the senior spook who had urged him to move across into the alternative service. He needed now to ring a given number and request a check on young Dellar’s provenance. During vetting, his link with Stone must surely have come up. There would be confidential files on them both. Not that he’d get to see them.

  Quite apart from this question there was what Kate Dellar saw as the family being ‘picked off, one by one’. ‘Do you believe,’ he asked Stone, ‘that the recent deaths of Sir Matthew and his daughter, and the earlier mugging of Eddie’s father, were in any way connected with Jessica’s disappearance?’

  Stone answered without pause. This had been uppermost in his mind. ‘I don’t. They would be of no interest to Giulia. But I do think that the break-in on the canal was the work of whoever abducted Jessica from Larchmoor Place. It was a first attempt that failed because he didn’t have updated information on her.’

  ‘And the dead man found after the fire?’ Yeadings pursued.

  ‘We shall find, I think, that it was Nicholas, and he did all he could to prevent her being taken.’

  So, Yeadings reckoned, that is the real crime we have to tackle. The others are a maybe. There was still a slender hope that the spilt oil and the car crash were accidental.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ he told Stone. ‘I think you and I should take a look at where Eddie lives. Would you ask Mrs Dellar if she has a key? We’ll go in my car, if you don’t mind. I’ll be waiting in it when you come back.’

  Stone hurried into the hospital and reappeared shortly. From his face Yeadings could pick up nothing. It was immaterial whether they had a key or not. He wouldn’t hesitate to call in an enforcer to deal with the lock.

  Stone dangled a keyring with a Pooh Bear tag.

  ‘Did she say if she’d visited there lately?’ Yeadings demanded.

  ‘Apparently she hasn’t. She seemed a little guilty that she hadn’t looked in to check on the flat.’

  ‘I take it you’ve been there before?’

  Stone smiled. ‘I have. I even know where to lay my hand on the coffee.’

  Yeadings let the other man open the outer door of the little mews. It seemed to take some fiddling in the thick wisteria foliage beside it. They entered on ancient quarry tiles and went straight through to the kitchen. The superintendent noted red glows high in the corners that denoted a security system. He waited but nothing went off. ‘I thought the house was alarmed,’ he prompted the other.

  ‘I de-activated it as we came in.’

  Nul points for observation, Yeadings awarded himself. The man certainly appeared at home in here.

  ‘What are you particularly interested in, Superintendent?’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘That we unload the cameras.’

  Something else he’d missed as they passed quickly through, but they were cunningly concealed. Yeadings put out a hand to stop the other. ‘Unless you’ve new film to reload, don’t bother. I’ll send someone down to see to it. We don’t want to make a break in his recording. ‘I must say I’m impressed. Are these just boys’ toys, or is there some significance in these precautions?’

  ‘I could say it’s a neighbourhood known for break-ins, or Eddie has a technical streak, but you have already picked up on the truth, superintendent.

  ‘As soon as he was reported injured Eddie’s boss ran a check on who would be Senior Investigating Officer for the case. We learned your background.’

  ‘I’m not exactly reassured by the security services keeping a file on a police officer,’ Yeadings said sourly.

  ‘It does mean I can be open with you. Or as open as I have been so far.’

  Yeadings smiled grimly. ‘I’m investigating at least one murder, Mr Stone. Those films belong to me.’ He held out his hand for Kate’s keys. Stone smiled and dropped them into it.

  ‘Good. I suggest we later look at the films together.’

  Robert Dellar and Marion Paige walked side by side down Windsor High Street, under the shade of the looming Castle. There was no attempt by either to touch. Both were wrapped in private thoughts which permitted no intrusion.

  ‘Here?’ the woman asked, stopping by the door of a restaurant.

  ‘It’ll do. I don’t feel much like eating, but maybe some soup …’

  They had avoided the Castle Hotel in case there were press photographers there. The first of the swarm had turned up at the hospital as soon as the news of Sir Matthew’s critical condition was known. Now that he was dead the paparazzi were eager for gloomy shots of the grieving family.

  As if Maddie didn’t matter, her brother thought. She was worth ten of him, the wicked old devil. Their early childhood had been partly shielded by Joanna, but once his mother died he’d felt the full force of his father’s severity. Boarding-school had saved him. At least there he’d been buoyed up by the experience of already having been bullied by an expert. Nothing new the other boys thought up could penetrate his techniques for sliding out of trouble.

  He had resisted the pressure to study law, but finally Matthew had so doubted his abilities that entering journalism had been accepted as faute de mieux. Then, to avoid living under the same roof, he had rushed into an unsuitable marriage and paid the price. Within a few weeks his divorce decree would be made absolute. He would be joined in the desirable flat in Regent’s Park by Marion Paige, who wasn’t an empty-headed blonde as Shelley had been.

  He glanced sideways at her now. Marion’s mouth had set in a hard line as if she were immersed in unpleasant memories. Upset, no doubt, by the double death in her fiancé’s family. ‘All right, Mopsie?’ he demanded.

  She said nothing, smiled her enigmatic smile and flapped one hand towards a corner of the dining-room. ‘There’s a vacant table over there. Let’s snaffle it before we’re headed off.’

  Seated, she chose lamb cutlets for her main dish, with duck pate to start. Robert dithered, conscious that sticking with soup would leave him with time to fill when he didn’t feel much like talking. Perhaps he should order the same that she had.

  ‘So,�
� she said when they had been served, ‘why are the police making such a fuss over the car crash? I heard they’d taken the Mercedes in for forensic examination. Is this some special show they’re putting on because your father was a VIP?’

  ‘I suppose they have to cover themselves. The oil spillage at the scene was unusually widespread. Maybe they’re expecting us to bring a civil case against whoever’s found responsible.’

  ‘And who’s that likely to be?’

  ‘God knows. Some lazy slob who didn’t fix the tailgate of his truck, I guess.’

  ‘You think that’s all they’re bothered by? It struck me they were asking a lot of questions. As though they thought it might not have been an accident.’

  Robert laid down his knife and fork. ‘Vandalism, you mean? That’s an inner city problem. Highly unlikely out there in the wild.’ He snickered. ‘No, it’s a spectator sport. Why cause mayhem if there’s no one there to see?’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘I usually am.’ It was said without a hint of humour. Marion looked sideways at him to make sure.

  ‘So you can go right ahead with the funerals?’

  ‘With my father’s, yes. I don’t know what Gus wants done about Maddie’s. That’s up to him.’

  ‘M’m. I wonder how her death affects the wills.’

  ‘It may simplify matters. Depends just how deviously my father screwed up the provisions. I doubt he’ll have provided for the Railtons if Maddie pre-deceased him – as she did.’

  ‘Poor old Gus. He won’t be very happy about that.’

  ‘He’ll get whatever Maddie meant him to have. Which is probably the lot in her case. So he’s been lucky. Another year or two and she’d have got wise to his womanizing and probably cut him out.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Marion chased a smear of sauce with the last forkful of broccoli. ‘I’ve yet to hear what you’re expecting for yourself. As only surviving child, you must be old Matthew’s heir.’