An Accidental Shroud

by Marjorie Eccles

  Why had she decided to leave Lavenstock now, at this particular juncture? 'You've had a buyer for your house, then?'

  'A buyer? Scarcely anybody's even been to view it.' Naomi laughed shortly, unaware that Cassie, showing at least two sets of buyers around in her absence, had skilfully managed to point out the many defects not apparent among the equally numerous and all too obvious ones. 'My mother managed to live happily here for thirty odd years but nobody seems to want anywhere without two bathrooms and central heating nowadays.'

  'That's the way it goes.' Abigail smiled sympathetically, but she knew better than to let herself be deflected by discussions of that sort. 'To go back to your jewellery designing -'

  The rest was drowned by a noise like the roar of Niagara suddenly filling the room, as two trains rushed past each other through the cutting below. The windows rattled and a small scatter of rubble, dislodged from the chimney, fell down the back of the gas fire to join the dust and the fag-ends and spent matches thrown into the hearth as if it were a real fire.

  'It's always like this. You get used to it.' The remark was intended, presumably, to apply to the noise, though it could equally have applied to the general ambience, Abigail was sure. Naomi seemed to be the sort of person whose natural habitat was chaos and confusion.

  Doggedly, she went back to her original point. 'What made you give up such interesting work?'

  'Perhaps I discovered I'd no talent, after all.'

  'That's not what I've heard.'

  'My mother has a silver ring you made,' Jenny offered, a fact which had emerged during her conversation with Abigail on the way. 'It's really lovely.'

  'Perhaps I came to despise such a decadent trade, then. It doesn't add a lot to the sum of human existence, does it? It caters for women's vanity, that's about all you can say for it.'

  It was possible she genuinely felt this, with her jumble sale clothes and a total absence of any jewellery at all – unless this last was a remnant of her designer's fastidiousness, a scorn of wearing any jewellery that was tawdry, or not genuine.

  'But you're right about one thing!' Suddenly, Naomi was flushed and animated. 'I did have talent. Why deny it? Here, let me show you something!'

  She might have been more loosened up by the wine than Abigail had thought. It could have been that she still had her own small vanities. Whatever it was, with a sudden access of energy, she began scrabbling in the half-packed trunk, throwing out in all directions the clothes which had been more or less folded and put in it, and finally came up with a roughly finished wooden box, inside which was a tray containing tools. Lifting this out, and then using one of the small chisels as a lever, she half prised up the base of the box, which proved to be merely a piece of plywood resting on a fillet of beading, thus forming a shallow cavity, apparently little more than half an inch above the real base. With a slightly furtive gesture, she slid in her hand and extracted a soft suede pouch. Turning it upside down, she allowed a slender gold snake bangle to slide on to her palm. Formed out of strands of differently coloured gold twisted together, the strands knotted halfway, it had a single large garnet glowing at the centre of the knot.

  'My apprentice piece.' Naomi's expression was unreadable as she looked at the bangle, which she had slipped on to her forearm, where it wound sinuously downwards with the snake's head resting on her wrist, but she was unable to resist smiling a little when she heard Jenny's drawn-in breath and Abigail's soft exclamation of admiration. 'Derivative, and plenty of mistakes if you know where to look, but not bad, I suppose. I haven't looked at it for years.'

  It was hard to associate the free yet disciplined design of the piece and its meticulous execution with this untidy, haphazard woman, the miserably furnished room and what appeared to be a hand to mouth existence. Hard not to make judgements, too, to feel that here was a woman who had wasted her life and talents, and that she must have made many of the difficulties of her life.

  Offhanded all at once, wrenching the bangle off, Naomi said, 'Can't think why I've never got rid of it, sold it. It's no use to me and I could've done with the money more times than I can count.'

  But Jenny was asking questions about the way it was made, about the different coloured golds, and she couldn't resist explaining. 'Well, you have to add copper to pure gold to make red gold, silver to make green gold and so on.'

  'And the engraving?'

  'We use these.' Naomi showed them the tools one by one, explaining their traditional uses: pliers, hand clamps, drills, mallets of different kinds, a series of fine needle files with different profiles, punches, a thick, circular mat of closely woven iron wire with a handle which she called a soldering wig, and lastly, sharp chisels called scorpers or burins for engraving, with shaped tips and curious handles, rather like an old-fashioned darning mushroom. She grew animated as she talked, almost as if she'd forgotten they were there. 'It was a good time,' she said wistfully, as she put the tools back, neatly and in order. 'I used to feel like a bird, in those days. Free, able to do anything I wanted.'

  Abigail envisaged the sort of girl Naomi might have been – dreamy, impractical, wanting to reach for the stars – but without the will to make it happen. 'What made you leave Lavenstock?' she asked gently.

  Naomi upended the wine bottle into her glass and finished it off. Her laugh had a bitter edge. 'I wanted to fly, and he wanted to put me in a cage, simple as that. Marriage is a cage, however you look at it. Especially if you have a child.' She was kneeling on the floor, her head still bent over the trunk. 'God knows why I ever came back, why I ever married Jake. I thought I'd changed, but we don't, do we?'

  Abigail was sure now that she had the answer to the question that had been at the back of her mind ever since meeting Joss Graham on the building site. 'But you didn't bring Joss with you when you married Jake, you left him with his grandmother. Why was that?'

  A tide of colour suffused Naomi's face, whether through anger or shame or some other emotion it was difficult to tell. 'He was happy where he was, with her – and I was starting a new life. I wanted no encumbrances.'

  'Encumbrances? And Jake the child's father –?'

  They looked at each other steadily. Naomi seemed just about to speak when into the room came the sudden sound of a motorbike. At which she froze then, galvanized, slammed down the lid of the toolbox, pushed it into the trunk and began throwing the clothes all anyhow on top of the lot. The moment was lost.

  A second later the door opened and Abigail found herself looking, somehow without surprise, at the dark, sultry girl she had last seen riding away from the Wilding house.

  Cassie came into the room carrying several plastic shopping bags full of groceries, most of them paid for. She nearly always did the shopping. If it had depended on her mother, they wouldn't have eaten at all sometimes, and Cassie was better at providing, anyway. She usually managed to come home with several luxury items they could never legitimately have afforded.

  She was not pleased to see two strange women in the house, still less when her mother explained who they were. Naomi was flushed, she looked dangerously bright-eyed in a way only partly explained by the now empty litre bottle of wine. Cassie's heart skipped when she thought of what she might have been saying to the two detectives, and she muttered something about unpacking the shopping and prepared to disappear into the kitchen while she thought of some excuse to get rid of them.

  But since there was no reason that Abigail could think of at the moment for detaining Cassie, and since Naomi was now so patently agitated by their presence that it was doubtful if there was any more sense to be got out of her, they left, Abigail maddeningly conscious that the girl's arrival had interrupted the interview just when she had been on the verge of learning something vital.

  'If it wasn't too fanciful, I'd almost say she was scared of that girl,' Jenny remarked as they left the house and made their way to the car, which they'd left parked round the corner, out of sight.

  The whole of the surrounding area was schedule
d for demolition and reconstruction and, desolate though the house was, it was in better shape than the derelict remains of the surrounding railway buildings and a terrace of similar houses, once taken over for motor repair shops and the like, all now abandoned. Abigail shivered.

  'Fanciful or not, she frightens me,' she replied, and she was only half joking.

  22

  While Abigail was finding out what she could from Naomi Graham, Mayo was taking Matthew Wilding through his movements up to, including and after the time of the murder, calmly, slowly, methodically, until there was no minute left unaccounted for. Now, sitting opposite him in an interview room with Carmody beside him and the beefy DC Deeley in attendance, the latter trying without conspicuous success to look unobtrusive, he was taking him through it again, looking for lies or loopholes.

  'Let's go back to the Rose,' Mayo said. 'You left at Mr Cellini's request, after being in there drinking since eight o'clock. Joss Graham drove you home, though he wasn't in a fit state, either.'

  'If I was so drunk, I wouldn't know about that, would I?' Matthew said hardily.

  'Not if you were as drunk as everybody thought you were. But maybe you weren't. Maybe you were just putting on a bit of a show.'

  'Why should I do that?'

  'To give yourself an alibi, lad. Come to that, why did you get drunk at all that night?'

  'I've told you, I don't know. Except that I'd had it in a big way. I was sick of being the meat in the sandwich – my dad being a pain about my rally driving on one side and Nigel on the other.'

  'And on top of that, not feeling all that certain now that you want to make a career out of rally driving?'

  'I didn't say that. Plenty do. Why shouldn't I?'

  Mayo understood what Matthew was feeling; at his age he hadn't yet learned how to climb down gracefully, without loss of face. He said, 'Tell me about this rallying. Costs money, I understand?'

  'Yes, but there's big money in it if you win the major races. Though you'd need to be sponsored for that.'

  'Did you know Nigel Fontenoy was going to leave you his share of the business?'

  'He'd hinted, but it was blackmail, I didn't want his money! Not if it meant standing behind a bloody counter all my life, selling bits of old jewellery to people who've nothing better to do with their money.'

  'The Fontenoys don't appear to have seen it like that. Certainly not old Mr Fontenoy.'

  'Oh well. Uncle George! He's an expert, it's different for him – and it was for Nigel. They've been brought up to it.'

  Mayo shifted his position. 'OK, then. Graham drove you home, then left you. Lindsay made you some black coffee. This was what time?'

  'Lindsay says eleven. You'll just have to take her word for it. I wasn't looking at my watch at the time.'

  'Don't get smart, lad! Then what?'

  'Then nothing. I woke up next morning with the mother and father of a hangover, went to the shop and found it all locked up. I'd hardly got the door open before there was one of your lot on the doorstep telling me about Nigel.'

  'You slept right through all the racket of that storm, in spite of the black coffee?' Carmody asked.

  'Yes.'

  The sergeant favoured Matthew with the steady, kindly look which yet had villains quaking, the one his own children would go to any lengths to avoid. 'I don't think you're telling me the truth, Matthew.'

  Matthew shrugged, with a show of bravado just short of insolence. 'Think what you like. It's all the same to me.'

  'There's the matter of Mr and Mrs Blamey swearing that they saw a car leaving your house again at ten past one. Your car.'

  'How would they know it was my car? Old Blamey wouldn't recognize anything younger than a Ford Prefect.'

  Mayo's way of dealing with cheeky young sprogs like Matthew was largely to ignore it. He was, Mayo was sure, a likeable enough lad in other circumstances, if immature for his age.

  'I'll tell you what I think, Matthew. I think you weren't anywhere near as drunk as you made out. And the black coffee helped to sober you up even further. You knew your father had an appointment with Nigel that night and you waited until you heard him come home, then drove out yourself and killed Nigel Fontenoy.'

  'You have to be joking!'

  'No, I'm very serious indeed. We know that one of your father's pick-up trucks was used to transport Nigel Fontenoy's body from his shop to where it was dumped in Nailers' Yard. The way the weather was that night, the site must have been like a wet final at Twickenham. I think we shall have to examine what you were wearing. There must be some of the mud from the site clinging to your gear – and traces on your car.'

  It was very quiet in the interview room. Outside, traffic ground up to the lights at the corner of Milford Road, inside, telephones rang, a door banged, the sound of raised voices could be heard. Deeley shifted his bulk on the hard chair and cleared his throat. Mayo waited, expecting Matthew to point out that mud wouldn't prove anything, he was on and off his father's building site all the time, but he didn't. He sat, very quiet and pale, looking down at the table. Eventually he said, 'I suppose I shall have to tell you what happened.'

  A uniformed constable came in with mugs of tea requested half an hour ago and almost forgotten about, twice as welcome now.

  'All right, lad,' Mayo began again when the tea had been dispensed, hoping the interruption hadn't given Matthew a chance to change his mind. 'Let's have it.'

  'Where shall I start?'

  'The Rose might be a good place.'

  'All right. Well. All right, I'm not saying I didn't have more to drink than I should.' After an initial hesitation, he was away, anxious to get it off his chest. 'I'd had a bigger row than usual with my father and I wanted to get drunk, but 1 wasn't really as bad as everybody seemed to think. The owner – what's-his-name, Cellini – kept giving us funny looks, though, and in the end he asked us to leave, which we did.'

  'And then?'

  'Joss drove me home. I was sick in a flower bed when I got out of the car. The car lights woke Lindsay and when she heard all the kerfuffle she came across from the house to see what was happening. She helped me inside, made me some coffee and told me to get to bed, but I stayed where I was, on the sofa. I fell asleep, don't know for how long. Maybe it was my father's car coming in that woke me, I couldn't say, but anyway, it sounded like all hell was being let loose outside.'

  'And?'

  'Well, I realized after a minute or two that the storm had got up, and what a lot of damage it must be doing. For some reason, I started thinking about that old house and how easy it would be for the wind to blow it down – and I suppose that was only a step away from thinking how easy it would be to help it.'

  'You thought knocking it down would solve all your dad's problems and you'd be the hero? Or was it that you thought he'd get the blame and you wanted to punish him?' Mayo asked.

  'No!' Matthew protested. 'I don't know,' he amended, 'I don't remember what I thought! I don't believe I stopped to think very much at all. It just seemed like the most brilliant idea I'd ever had.'

  'How did you get there?'

  'My car, of course.'

  'You were sober enough to drive?' But that was more of a reproof than a question. Mayo had seen enough drivers with a skinful to know how often the devil looks after his own.

  'My car's acquired a dent or two that it didn't have before,' Matthew admitted, with a pale attempt at humour. 'Anyway, I made myself some more coffee and drove over to the building site, took the JCB across the road and well, that was it.'

  'Come on, there's a bit more to it than that! How d'you get the JCB going, for one thing?'

  'No problem, if you know how to hot-wire it. And the cab wasn't locked. It belongs to the contractors and they should immobilize the plant, leave things secure, but sometimes they don't bother. There's always rows about it.'

  'So you got in and drove it, just like that?'

  'It wasn't the first time I'd had a go! I've been mucking around on the site machine
ry since I was six years old.'

  'All right, I believe you. So you drove it where?'

  'I went to the old house, straight through the fence at the back, and clouted a couple of the props with the bucket. As soon as the second one went, the whole house sort of slid sideways and in about a minute it was total collapse. It was fantastic, I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it!'

  Clearly, whatever remorse Matthew now felt, he didn't altogether regret the kick he'd got out of it at the time. Well, who'd never experienced that primitive satisfaction of knocking things down? A baby shoving a pile of coloured plastic building bricks over or bashing a spade on a sandcastle, a kid aiming a kick at a stack of tins in a supermarket? A steeplejack demolishing a mill chimney?

  'You're a bloody young fool, you know that? Apart from anything else, you might have been killed. Don't you know that in the wrong hands, machines like that can be lethal?'

  'I knew what I was doing,' Matt said sulkily.

  'We've all heard that one, Matthew. So what did you do after that?'

  'Nothing. Well, I took the JCB back and went home.'

  'And all this without seeing a soul?'

  Matthew hesitated. 'No, I didn't see anybody,' he said finally.

  It was the only part of his story they didn't believe.

  'This may be hard for you, Matthew, but are you absolutely sure you didn't see anybody?' Mayo asked.

  'Yes, I'm sure.'

  'Nobody at all?'

  'I've said so, haven't I?'

  Mayo sighed. 'Let's go over this last part again.'

  But nothing would budge him.

  By nine that evening, it was beginning to be apparent to Abigail that the law of diminishing returns was operating in a big way: the more work she put in, the less results she was obtaining. She rubbed her eyes, closed them and decided it was time to pack it in.