by Clare Curzon
Because of the extravagant security precautions and Wormsley’s newly chosen career as a photographer – or at least the owner of a studio where the work was mainly carried out by two young assistants – the searchers expected to find pornographic pictures. If any of the team had refined tastes in this line they were disappointed. Those efforts they turned up were amateurish, of poor artistic merit, badly lit and unposed.
‘Exposures,’ was Beaumont’s unavoidable pun.
Among assorted prints was a wallet containing negatives and ten pictures of Vanessa Winter in various stages of undress and intoxication. ‘I don’t think we have to doubt any more who it was you saw with her,’ Yeadings told Z. ‘I suspect these were taken in order to have some hold over the poor woman.’
‘Do you think he showed them to her?’
‘I’m sure we’ll find she has a set of her own.’
‘Could that be what he was searching for in her bedroom when I disturbed him? He must have seen how unreliable Vanessa was getting. She might have left them around when the cleaners were here, or shown them to someone who would talk. He couldn’t afford publicity of that sort.’
‘And Vanessa wouldn’t have stood for blackmail. She had to be the heroine every time, not the pathetic fool,’ Yeadings considered. ‘In her precarious mental state that could have been aggravation enough. So can we assume she lay in wait for Wormsley coming home, then struck him with some heavy object as he went to open his door? She’d resorted to violence once before and got away with it. It’s said to be easier the second time around. Her clothes would have been splashed with blood. We’ll see what comes to light in her apartment.’
From a distance Yeadings watched the SOCO team at work. Vanessa’s fingerprints on Wormsley’s key-ring had appeared to confirm his theory. She couldn’t find the photos and negatives on his unconscious body, and she couldn’t get to them in his flat because of his secondary electronic entry system. Whether the single blow was meant to kill or stupefy was left to supposition, but in that way Vanessa Winter committed her second murder. If she hadn’t jumped when she did that last evening, she’d have ended locked up for the rest of her life.
The final piece of jigsaw that condemned her was discovered in a black plastic bag in her waste bin: a foot-high bronze statuette of a figure Yeadings recognized as The Dancing Faun. It had previously stood on a walnut side table in her drawing-room.
There had been no attempt to wash off the blood, nor from the dress it was wrapped in. Again the photocopied fingerprints taken from her corpse were used to identify the smears on the figure’s base.
‘So all’s well that …’ Z began on a cynical note. She was interrupted by the Boss’s mobile phone that twittered from an inner pocket. She moved discreetly away while he took the message. When he came back towards them his face was creased in a broad smile. ‘That was Angus, all the way from Kosovo,’ he said happily.
‘Is he coming back?’
‘For a short leave. The message kept breaking up but I thought he said something about – ’
‘About what?’ she demanded, impatient to see Mott’s return and the uncouth DI Salmon displaced.
‘Could it possibly be – a wedding?’ he said uncertainly. ‘I think Paula must eventually have given in.’
A MEETING OF MINDS. Copyright © 2003 by Clare Curzon. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
www.minotaurbooks.com
First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby Limited
eISBN 9781466823457
First eBook Edition : June 2012
EAN 978-0312-31874-1
First U.S. Edition: August 2004
