‘Thank you,’ Sergeant McIntyre replied, now with genuine warmth.
‘However,’ de Lacy went on, ‘please bear in mind that it’s only a theory. It fits all the facts, yes, but please don’t accuse me of wasting police time if it proves to be false.’
‘Your name will never be mentioned,’ she assured him. ‘But I hope you don’t mind me taking the credit?’
‘Go ahead,’ he went on. ‘I have no desire whatsoever for publicity, just the opposite.’
‘No? That’s unusual.’
‘I enjoy a peaceful, unrestricted life. The last thing I want is attention from the press and public.’
‘OK. So what are you going to do now?’
‘I,’ de Lacy stated, ‘am going enjoy an afternoon at Solsbury Races.’
VI
With the Jaguar parked in a conspicuous position, de Lacy got out and looked around. He stood on top of a low rise, with Solsbury Downs spread out around him, speckled with cars and groups of race-goers talking or seated at their picnics. Further away the cars were more densely packed, creating a solid, multi-coloured block above which the tall white roofs of the hospitality stand rose in a line of concave pyramids. Most of the actual racetrack was invisible, but to one side he could see the packed heads of the crowd in the public enclosure, turning as one when a group of horses thundered by. Here and there the brilliant yellow reflective vests of the police and security were visible, singly or in pairs, creating what was in effect a cordon around the public areas.
Satisfied with his position, he opened the boot of the Jaguar. Within was a large, wickerwork hamper containing not only the picnic he had assembled with great care that morning, but crockery, cutlery, and glasses. There was also a large rug patterned in a tartan whose shades of deep, rich green, navy blue, and black complimented both the colour of his car and the paler colours of the chalkland scenery. There was no sign of the maid he had booked to wait on him, so he began to set out the picnic, taking occasional glances at his watch or in the direction of the temporary bus stop at which she would presumably arrive.
When everything was set out to his satisfaction he opened the Champagne and took a meditative sip before lifting the glass to admire the streams of tiny bubbles rising through the pale gold liquid. He had visited three delicatessens and two wine merchants before finding a Premier Cru from a decent vintage, but it had been worth it, the wine far more subtle and complex than the familiar brands. After a second, more generous swallow he looked around once more, to find that his quarry was in sight.
A woman was walking among the cars, looking slightly lost until she noticed his Jaguar with its sleek British racing green finish. She quickened her pace and de Lacy adopted his most languid, elegant attitude, Champagne glass in hand. As she came close she made as if to speak, only for her expression to change to shock as she recognised him. De Lacy smiled.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Nowak, or perhaps I should say, Dr Mary Adams? No, please don’t try to run. We are clearly visible to any number of police officers, and while they are at present going about their ordinary duties I could change that with a simple phone call. And Solsbury Downs affords very little in the way of cover. Do sit down.’
She had frozen in indecision, but gave a single, wild glance across the downs before looking down at the phone de Lacy had laid in clear view beside the wine cooler.
‘Denial is pointless,’ de Lacy went on. ‘I know you murdered Marco Styles, and I can prove it, as I suspect you realise?’
She continued to stare at him, her face working in indecision, only to suddenly squat down, close to de Lacy as she finally spoke up.
‘You’re not with the police, are you? You were at the dinner party, between two of the girls.’
‘Yes,’ de Lacy answered. ‘My real name is Charles de Lacy, by the way. The name I gave the agency was of course false.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘Call the police, presently …’
‘Please, I beg you, give me a chance to explain.’
‘That was what I was about to suggest. Nobody goes to such lengths to kill a man without good reason, and I would like to understand what happened, and why.’
‘Are you a journalist or something?’
‘No, simply a private individual with an interest in this case. Now please do sit down.’
She glanced around once more, then sat down opposite de Lacy and after a moment began to speak.
‘I have to go right back for you to really understand, so please be patient. My grandfather, Piotr Adamczyk, was Polish, a refugee from the Nazis and a fighter pilot during the Second World War. He married my grandmother and stayed in England after the war, with the family name changed to Adams. My mother was born in the early fifties and bought up in London. She was passionate, loving, naive … very naive, and very beautiful, with an elfin figure and copper-coloured hair down to her waist. I suppose she made easy prey for a man like Marco Styles, an up-and-coming musician everybody admired. I’m not saying she was raped, but there was a lot of drug-taking and a lot of pressure to have sex. She didn’t mind, I don’t think, but when she found out she was pregnant she naturally expected Marco to marry her, or at very least support her. But he wouldn’t help at all, or even accept that he was the father. My father.’
‘To be fair to him,’ de Lacy put in, ‘he was probably advised to avoid getting involved.’
‘I don’t care,’ she continued. ‘He should have done something, anything. My mother couldn’t cope. She was in love with him, in love in a way I don’t even understand, but it was as if she was nothing, just some worthless slut he’d had one night and couldn’t even remember the next day. She tried to get in touch with him time and again, but the only time she got close enough to talk he just called her a crazy bitch, and laughed at her. I was holding her hand at the time. I was five. Are you surprised I killed him?’
‘Not entirely, no,’ de Lacy answered, taken aback by the sheer vehemence of her words. ‘I know he could be a bit of a bastard, but was he married when you were born?’
‘No,’ she went on, ‘that came later. But that incident was the last straw. My mother had been doing her best, coping on almost nothing, but after that she gave up hope. She went into a downward spiral; depression, alcoholism, drugs. I was taken away from her, into care, then to live with my grandparents. Two years later my mother died in a squalid bedsit off the Fulham Road. She was thirty-two years old.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘We’d watched his career, seen him grow rich and successful, read the envious articles about his lifestyle and his glamorous wife. My mother felt she should have been in Irene Styles’ place, but I didn’t want anything to do with that. I just wanted to kill him.’
‘I see,’ de Lacy replied, then made a somewhat awkward gesture to the picnic. ‘Um … do help yourself. There’s a very good Champagne, partridge breasts in Sauternes jelly, foie gras, or a little salad, perhaps?’
She nodded, took a moment to wipe the tears from her face, poured a glass of Champagne, and swallowed it in one gulp. De Lacy waited until she was ready to speak again, now calmer.
‘My grandparents did their best for me, and I suppose I was in no worse a situation than many other children, but my determination never wavered. I don’t know – maybe there is a psychopathic element in my genes, but when other girls were talking about make-up or the latest styles I’d been off on my own, thinking about death. Sometimes they’d play a Marco Lawless track on the radio and I’d feel a raw fury, so strong it was if I was on fire inside, but I hid it well. I studied hard too, always fuelled by vague fantasies of revenge, but as time went by they grew less vague. In my entire school only three girls did science A-levels, and I was always first. I studied Chemistry at Oxford …’
‘Oh, which college?’
‘Summerfield.’
‘I’m a Magdalen man, myself. Do go on.’
‘I did my PhD at Imperial and took a job as a research assistant
with Vulcan. By then I knew what I was going to do, more or less, and I must have hatched a hundred different plans over the years, only to reject each one. I was scared, deep down, but then I was promoted to head of research within my department and there were no more excuses.’
‘I see. And presumably you were lucky enough to on the team who were working with the neurotoxin?’
‘Lucky?’ she echoed. ‘I designed that drug, Mr de Lacy, almost from scratch. I needed a lethal neurotoxin that could be administered by ingestion but would break down of its own accord even after death had occurred. You can’t just make something like that. It takes research, and funds, a lot of funds. So I proposed a product that would act like Botox, only temporarily, allowing the user to give themselves a simple injection to keep the wrinkles away for the duration of an event. It reacts with proteins in the blood, slowly, so that it breaks down into harmless by-products in a matter of hours. It would have been immensely popular. It will be immensely popular, once it’s released onto the market, but I needed to use it while it was still under trial, making it even less likely that it would be detected, although the chances were already vanishingly small, or so I thought. Administered in the pure, crystalline form, it would be undetectable maybe four or five hours after the subject was dead, hopefully long before it could be detected, assuming an analysis was even attempted.’
‘Brilliant,’ de Lacy admitted, ‘and if it hadn’t been for the bitter taste it imparted to the port, and that Marco happened to remark on it, and that I was seated next to him, then nobody would have noticed. You were very unlucky, Dr Adams.’
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘I even knew it would taste bitter, because of its structure, but there was no way around that. That’s why I chose the port glass, hoping to mask the flavour. If I’d chosen the dessert wine instead he wouldn’t even have been sitting next to you at the time.’
‘True,’ de Lacy agreed, ‘and I presume you calculated that there was a significant risk of the police tracing the origin of the neurotoxin to Vulcan and so to yourself, and that you therefore faked your own death in order to make them believe that you had been either bribed or blackmailed by the supposed murdered, then killed to ensure your silence?’
‘Yes, but I was going to vanish anyway. I still can, if you’ll only let me go.’
‘Another identity, I take it, no doubt even more carefully constructed than that of Maria Nowak?’
‘Maria only had to exist for a few months, long enough to sign up with the agency and wait until I was booked to work at Elthorne House. I speak Polish, of course. I was going to get myself sacked in a few more weeks, long enough to make sure my leaving didn’t look suspicious.’
‘I had guessed you would do that, and that you would continue to take work, hence your booking today. Incidentally, the police are still following the false trail you set them, and will probably be spending some time investigating the depths of old mine shafts around the Tamar Estuary.’
‘But you didn’t believe it: why not?’
‘Because while it is a possible explanation of the facts, it is not the most probable. As you intended, it relied on you having been bribed or blackmailed, then murdered; a dramatic and highly risky sequence of events, but not impossible. You are also fortunate in that the detective in charge of the case, Inspector Morden, lets his dislike of those he sees as the idle rich cloud his judgement, which is why he’s looking at Irene and Clive Styles, while he dismissed you and the other staff almost out of hand. However, he’s also thorough, and will no doubt get there eventually once they prove to be innocent.
‘No, it was far more likely that an employee of Vulcan Pharmaceuticals had been present at the dinner party, but whom? The chances of it being a member of the family were very low indeed, negligible in fact. Only Clive Styles even had anything to do with Vulcan, and that only as an investor, which is hardly suspicious given the number of companies he must deal with. Also, regardless of what they had to gain, or any other motive, they were very unlikely to have poisoned Marco at a dinner party. He drank like a fish, and it would have been far easier, and safer, to put the poison in his brandy one evening. Nobody need even have realised he was dead until the neurotoxin had ceased to be detectable.
‘That left Adam Carradine and the three staff. The butler, Hartfield, is a professional of several years standing and had been at Elthorne House several times before, as had the cook, so unless either of them had suddenly developed an overwhelming grudge against Marco Styles they could be discounted with reasonable certainty. There’s only one agency for domestic staff in Solsbury, and a simple phone call allowed me to ascertain the names of the two maids: Paula Scott and yourself, as Maria Nowak. Paula can’t be much more than twenty, so was highly unlikely to have gained the expertise and responsibility needed to get hold of the drug. Therefore the balance of probability pointed towards you. A little time online and I managed to find a picture of the supposedly late Dr Adams, and while you’d done a pretty good job of altering your appearance, it was not quite enough. I was then certain and so arranged this meeting.’
‘You’re very clever, Mr de Lacy, but why go to so much trouble? What do you gain? And why didn’t you go straight to the police?’
‘Call it pride. I had hoped to work with another officer, a Sergeant McIntyre. She’s ambitious, and a trifle unscrupulous, but she expected to manipulate me. As to what I gain, in large part it is the satisfaction of having worked out the truth, while I do feel some obligation to Marco Styles, too, for all his faults. I also like to see justice done, but in this case I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure where true justice lies. You have taken a man’s life, Dr Adams.’
‘I’ve told you why, but never mind, I don’t suppose you can even begin to understand what I’ve been through, or how badly I wanted to get revenge for my mother.’
‘No, I can’t. Mine has been rather a privileged life, but my father knew Marco Styles in his youth. Styles was an egotist, a megalomaniac even; a young man supremely devoted to his own needs and indifferent to those of others. He also had a cruel streak, although it was more mischievous than sadistic. Time had mellowed him, but he was heedless of his actions and the effect they had on others. So yes, I have some sympathy with your mother’s plight, and your own.’
‘My mother is dead.’
De Lacy made to answer, stopped and shrugged.
‘So be it. In precisely one week’s time I will lay my reasoning before the police, although whether they act on it or not is another matter. As far as I am concerned, this meeting never took place and I know nothing of your plans for the future. Now go … unless you’d enjoy another glass of Champagne, and perhaps some of this excellent duck liver paté with ceps and Sauternes?’
Published by Accent Press Ltd 2013
ISBN 9781783754786
Copyright © J.J. Campbell 2013
The right of J.J. Campbell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The story contained within this book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN
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The Death of Marco Styles Page 4
