by M C Jacques
Mountfitchet had been quite censorious regarding Matt, with whom he had collided on a number of museum matters in the past, long in advance of the murder of Sergeant Smith, but he had remained quite coy about Lisa.
McKay strained to recall the Wing Commander’s slightly inebriated observations from the later part of their meeting at Secret Rooms: ‘Quite a lass, as I recall. A bit flighty for my taste, if you catch my drift, Mark. Wouldn’t be at all surprised if she puts it about a bit, that one… younger men and the sort! And she’s got quite a lot to put about, I’ll tell you!’
McKay, of course, at this stage, could not possibly have appreciated the aptitude of his old friend’s observations and deductions about Mrs Lisa Fothergill, wife of the Director of the Royal War Museum. Tragically, he was unable to do so for quite some time, a fact he was to rue in the aftermath of the whole terrible business, and well into his later years.
In the there and now of the Cambridge Botanic Garden, on a herbaceously fresh summer morning, McKay’s own initial thoughts about Mrs Lisa Fothergill could be summarised thus: she had the disposition and candour of a younger married woman who, although disappointed by men, had not yet quite given up on them. He had remembered, however, to jot a brief note in his Psion: ‘Ask John F. to research Lisa Fothergill’s maiden name, etc.’
McKay often marvelled to himself as to just how the denizens of Cambridge and the surrounding areas were, to his mind. Even when bedecked by greyened skies as of late, but especially when scintillated by a marine blue heaven, a stroll along King’s Parade, that venerated promenade close by the old Market Place, could never fail to impress; King’s College Chapel, at once bold and imperious both inside and out, meticulously edged by pristine turf, cultivated through the centuries, hallowed by esteem and by the very gravity of dons and scholars past, not least of all by Alan Turing, code-breaker extraordinaire, the father of modern computing… victimised homosexual.
McKay always marvelled at the fact that a person’s whole visage could be near on completely transformed, when seen in different clothes and in a different context. Matt Fothergill had kitted himself out as if he were on holiday at the seaside: a striped shirt, unbuttoned nearly to his waist, post-knee denim shorts and auburn sandals, on the worn-out side, as were his denims, come to mention it. For her part, the copiously endowed Lisa Fothergill had chosen a pale green, loose-stitch pullover, sleeveless, and on the tight side. The silhouette of an enormous black bra peeped through the yawning, straining thread of the pullover, sufficiently so to cause scowling young lasses to rap the hands of their gawping partners on more than one occasion during the trio’s afternoon amble.
Lisa Fothergill had the apparent assuredness of a woman whose role and station in life would never be under threat. And, as the afternoon unfolded, she herself would go some way to account for this. Her father, Geoffrey Stamford, had died when he was fifty-seven and she was about twenty and in her second year at Loughborough Art College. Her dad had risen to the dizzy heights of Bursar at a top Cambridge college in his late thirties, an achievement virtually unprecedented at the time. Even though his young, admittedly precocious, daughter and he hadn’t always seen eye to eye, after his death Lisa inherited some of his extremely rare, and moreover valuable, manuscripts – an early Langland facsimile and a scarce, precious Victorian ‘Wycliffe’ facsimile among them.
Her search for prospective buyers of this collection, which had taken Lisa along a meandering route via some of her dad’s old university colleagues, eventually led her to a north London Hungarian Jewish literary antiquarian of some note. Indeed, this redoubtable collector and dealer had taken only a matter of weeks to raise a net figure for Lisa which was, in her own words, ‘In the upper six figure bracket’ – the manuscripts being promptly and variously dispatched to the outstretched hands of private collectors in Wolfsburg, Sochi, Vientiane, Zurich and a couple of other locations which, laughingly and with a wave of her fleshy hand, Lisa said that she was unable to recall.
During this particular part of the walk, Matt Fothergill had sought to look away, finger-pressing the occasional deeply verdant leaf of another exotic, rubbery plant as the threesome promenaded around and about the foliage.
The conversation had been of good accord until a certain point. McKay recollected later that the mood had started to swing whilst Matt Fothergill was conducting a verbal tour of the museum’s Executive Staff, circling their various likes, dislikes and foibles. Even this, McKay had noted at the time, had been undertaken in a rather nonchalant, informal manner, either thoroughly genuinely or else fiendishly cleverly in an effort to allay any suspicion of discord or shady goings-on.
Whatever, Matt Fothergill’s mobile phone rang after they had been about forty-five minutes into their perambulation of the breathtaking gardens. The call could barely have been fifteen seconds long before Fothergill coughed out, at once flushing and with the deportment of a man about to choke to death, “What, in Christ’s name?” Upon hearing her husband’s tone, Lisa Fothergill’s body motion froze, too, and her oblong face hardened in the direction of her husband. “It’s Jilly.” His eyes shot across only to hit his wife’s stark glare. “Hell! So that’s the Comet, the Chieftan, the Centurion and now even the damned Challenger all disabled and now all out of commission for this Sunday’s ‘Tank Fest’! What the hell is going on around the place, Jilly? What did Graham Locke say? My head will be on the slab over this; you realise that, don’t you?” Lisa’s glare intensified still further around this point and her lips pressed together like a crimson vice.
After a tepid pause of some twenty seconds or so, Fothergill began to encircle the other two, his phone hard-pressed into his right ear lobe. “He said what? We won’t be able to put it through its paces? Well, that’s a lot of help! Of course we can’t put it through its paces when it’s had sand put through its bloody engine! Aren’t tanks protected against that sort of thing, for desert use and all that?” Another restless pause. “The filters have been removed or pierced… depending on their type – who the hell is doing this to us, Jill? We’ve got one hell of an evil skunk amongst us and he’s causing an awful stink!” McKay noted the allusion and the alliteration.
For her part, Lisa, whose eyes had flared at Matt’s employment of the first person, plural pronoun, looked down, muttering, “For heaven’s sake, you’re on the phone with it! You’re talking to it!”
Her husband jerked his index finger on to a key and terminated the call. McKay thought that he may even have cut off Jill Prestons in mid-sentence. “Turn your damned back for one day, take your eye of the ball for one wretched second – do you know how many days, weeks’ leave I’m owed, McKay? Have you got any idea, eh?” His busy index finger whipped the air between himself and his now silenced companions.
Catching a deep breath, Fothergill looked over at his grimacing wife. “Sorry, Lizzy, I must go. You stay, both of you… enjoy the rest of the walk and what’s left of the morning! I’ll need some time to deal with this on the ground. Jill’s snowed under, doesn’t know where to turn. Need to see if we can call in a few reserves on this one. Jesus!” McKay eyed him blandly. “As many questions as you like, Mark, but later, if you don’t mind.” McKay nodded his agreement sympathetically and the riled, flustered Museum Director strode off back to the Fothergills’ car, parked in a nearby church car park, McKay had noticed on his way to the Botanic Garden’s main entrance. Having checked that her husband really had departed the park, Lisa’s expression softened and her walk seemed to quicken a little, McKay thought.
Lisa Fothergill had once, McKay allowed to himself, been a reasonably attractive woman. He supposed that the weight had started to pile on to her pear-portly frame after the true value of her father’s bequest had become realised in hard, plentiful mammon. Her walk, now lively enough, involved quite a significant transfer of gravity from one leg to another as she trundled along. A solid, safe middle-aged walk, reasoned McKay, and the type of w
alk he had assiduously tried to avoid developing since he had even begun to approach his fortieth birthday.
“You see what it’s like, Mr McKay, being a down-at-heel wife to a Museum Director? Never a dull moment and never any precious ones either.” McKay deemed that her words carried greater import than was obvious from their immediate cogency, but let it pass for the time being. “And the only thing Jill Prestons is likely to be under today will be Matthew’s duvet! You know, when she first arrived at the museum she was quite tubby, stout! It’s remarkable what a gymnasium can do, isn’t it?” Glancing down disapprovingly at her own midriff, Matt’s wife did little to hide her contempt for her husband’s closest work colleague.
McKay’s thoughts, also picking up on the Director’s stuttering vocabulary, tumbled into a hideous depiction of Jill Prestons and Matt Fothergill twisting and turning on some large, dark leather divan at The Old Forge. The tumble was, mercifully from McKay’s point of view, remarkably brief.
“I mean, we all know that there’s no such thing as a truly happy marriage, but if you can scrape… achieve contentment, then you’ve done better than most, I’d say. Don’t you agree?” McKay tilted his head slowly, inferring rather than expressing accord.
“Always on call… He’s always on call,” she went on, staring blankly ahead of her towards a grove of tropical plants, completely immune to the wide-eyed expressions of two passing university lady dons, one of whom had inadvertently delineated the shocking proportions of Lisa’s dark brassiere, and its contents, against its paler backdrop. “For certain people more than others, of course.” A laugh. A snigger. A cough. “But then that’s the way of it, I suppose, Mr McKay, isn’t it? Are you married?” McKay shook his head ruefully, not really knowing what to say next.
“Any kids?
“Divorced, no children,” tendered the faltering McKay gently, whilst being all too aware, somehow, perhaps through empiricism, of the kind of scrutiny the married woman, standing to his left, was now subjecting him to.
A short amble, a little further along the meandering pathway, the full noonday sun was now pounding down on his forehead and the very cusp of his upper right cheek. She inched closer to him as he stood regarding some large yucca type of plant spaded in a dusty, fine soil and, for the first time, he was just able to detect a florid scent of an exquisite perfume. McKay then felt the unmistakably firm, outer extremities of the married woman’s vast right breast swelling against his left elbow as she leaned towards him, purportedly to share his view of the arid, yet inscrutable plant. Suspending his ruminations, he turned square on but then at once fractionally backwards as he momentarily felt both of her breasts, now blatantly thrust out, press against his chest. Her face was still angled at the plant but a warm grin had surfaced on her angular, yet unquestionably once pretty, face. So, McKay telegraphed to himself, this is the Lisa Stamford school of how to seduce men – quite literally a walk in the park!
One evening, some years later, when relating these happenings to an old friend at the cosy Falls of Dochart Inn, during the most fearsome and relentless of winter storms, McKay submitted that, for one brief moment at least, something might have happened that day, that afternoon: the club, the hotel, the sex. But Lisa Stamford was, in fact, Lisa Fothergill and McKay didn’t quite fancy her enough to fracture both his professional and personal protocol. Matt Fothergill told a completely different story, mind, to his golfing colleagues that Saturday night in the clubhouse bar, swearing that his wayward, lecherous wife had been romping with ‘that sod’ McKay until the early hours of Tuesday morning. But that was before events took a much darker turn and he found out the terrible truth about what had really happened later on Monday and in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
31
Tuesday morning in the Warfare on Land Hall
After a fraught, hectic day at work, exactly what Jill Prestons had been doing in the Warfare on Land Hall between six-thirty and seven p.m. on Monday evening was to remain a mystery, even in Mark McKay’s unsettled mind, for quite some time to come; actually, it was to chill and to haunt him far into the future, long after the time when Matt and Lisa Fothergill, Sarah Millar and all the others had become merely slight waning blurs in that vortex of accumulating memories comprising the human brain.
So McKay’s mind was in mild turmoil as he pushed his dad’s old Scimitar southwards under the ashen-red, day-breaking skies of Tuesday morning. Twisting from the A14 onto the M11, McKay hoped against reason that his relocation to the White Hart at Tuxford might restore something of his former sleep patterns. For now, though, he felt as though he was being whisked around in a tornado of disparate and uncontrollable currents. Vital links were missing and, so far, any convincing motives were altogether wanting.
“Damn and blast,” thought McKay and said Burrows at around half past nine on Tuesday morning. “Did you have any inkling that this was likely to happen, Mark?” McKay stared down, shaking his head slowly and slightly. “I mean, am I missing something basic? You would have said something, if you’d had any idea about this, wouldn’t you?” McKay, looking up, nodded his head slightly and slowly.
“We are all missing something basic, Paul,” a dull McKay finally answered. His head lowered again to witness a frenzy of medical activity around the horizontal corpse of Jill Prestons, Manager, Royal War Museum, Tuxford who had, sometime shortly after twilight, during the infant hours of darkness, ceased breathing, and a couple of minutes after having arrived on the scene, at nine-seventeen to be precise, Foulds, the pathologist, had pronounced her to be clinically dead.
“Quite a spectacle, this one,” the surly woollen-tied gent spat grimly. “Two bullets, quite different calibres; one wound in the neck, one smack through the temple. Never seen anything like it. Blood still seeping from the one through the head. Tricky one this. Will run more tests, many more, in the lab. Will be in touch. Oh, and we’ll give that note a good going over, too. See what it’s made of and all that. Pleasant day, gents. See ya.” His final syllable stretched with resignation, Foulds then marched off briskly and Burrows nodded his compliance to a young bespectacled scientist, eager to please her surly boss and to see Jill Prestons’ corpse’s prompt delivery to the path lab.
“We’ve found this, sir!” WPC Sutton’s voice erupted with hope and exuberance as she thrust a plastic wrapped note, A5, torn down one side, so presumably A4 standard office issue originally, into Burrows’ cavernous palm.
Glancing at McKay, Burrows fixed on his bubbling junior. “Steady, girl! Steady on there! Remember, this might have to be used in court!” Sutton did not flinch.
“SOCA need it back, sir. I just wanted you to be aware of it… so you can plot the next move, sir!”
“Okay, Sutton, come on; what’s it all about?” He peered at the white note, squinting slightly and repositioning the thin parcel as he attempted to deflect the reflected light of the note’s plastic covering. McKay looked over and caught sight of some printing on the paper. The note was printed rather than handwritten.
“Well, sir.” Sutton drew breath, her hands clutching each other behind her high waist. “What you have in your hands would appear to be a note from Sarah Millar to Jill Prestons, demanding to meet her here, after work last night. There’s no reason given as such, but what Millar does say is, words to the effect, that she knows what’s been going on between her, Prestons, and Matt Fothergill, and is ready to spill the beans to Lisa Fothergill and to the committees!”
“Who are the committees, exactly?” demanded Burrows.
“The Governors and the Friends of Tuxford, I’d imagine,” chipped in McKay. Sutton nodded promptly and, as she did so, McKay even imagined that he’d caught sight of a brief grin, quite a saucy one actually, dispatched in his direction.
“Well, I must say, this puts a very different complexion on matters! It looks like you might’ve been right about this Sarah Millar character all along, Mark. Still, better get the
hounds after her now, though, and any of her cronies who might be implicated. Better round them all up. Get uniform on to that please, Sutton, pronto!”
The sprightly WPC shot off towards the entrance to the Warfare on Land Hall as McKay gathered his thoughts.
“I’m not convinced that Millar is a simple murderer, Paul. It’s likely to be far more intricate than that if these supposed connections with fundamentalist terrorist groups from the Maghreb are genuine. You might find that there are other agencies just as keen to get their hands on her and, as you put it, on her ‘cronies’ at CID!”
“Oh, don’t worry yourself on that score, Mark. I’ll handle those chappies and lassies! At the moment, Sarah Millar is in deep stuck with the Cambridge Constabulary, I can tell you! I mean, it looks as though she’s murdered a member of the British public here! Sergeant Smith, too? Well, that’s got to be a possibility now, as well! True, we don’t have a motive yet, as such – although the possibility stroke probability of some sort of love tryst with Prestons and Fothergill (not necessarily in that order, of course!) cannot be ruled out – but, my word, she’d got abundant opportunity, with her skulking around here at all hours, and the means, judging by some of the highly dubious company she keeps around town!”
