A Death of Distinction

by Marjorie Eccles

  Mayo nodded, resigned to accepting that this wasn’t going to be quick. ‘Sure. I liked him myself.’

  ‘I didn’t realize you knew him.’

  ‘Met him occasionally in the course of business. We had a drink together once or twice.’

  It was true that Mayo had liked Lilburne – within their limited acquaintance. He’d sent him a congratulatory note on reading the announcement of his OBE award, believing the distinction conferred on him was, in this case, well deserved. A hail-fellow-well-met type, Jack Lilburne, yet patently dedicated to his job. On the face of it, the last person to provoke enough personal animosity in anyone to make them put a bomb under him, to want to blow him out of existence. Maybe it had been a gesture of another sort ... an anarchical gesture, a declaration of subversion.

  Spurrier had pushed his chair back and walked to the window, standing with his back to them, looking out. The room was old fashioned, had seen better days. Cream paint was chipped and darkened to the colour of old yellow teeth. Thumb-tacked posters, visual-aid boards, were screwed on to one wall, contemptuous of what had once been fine panelling. A hole in the plaster indicated where the doorknob had crashed into it too many times. Files and books spilled on to the floor, a jacket was slung over a peg, with a bump poking out just under its collar. What would Spurrier, a psychologist, have made of the room, what construction would he have put on its owner’s character, had its occupant been someone else? That he was a bit of a slob, for sure – and he’d have been dead right, Mayo thought. Spurrier’s shoes were unpolished. (To Mayo, who had to be reminded to get his hair cut, and wore his own suits until they were only just this side of respectable, this was the ultimate sin.) More, Spurrier’s shirt was open necked and looked rough dried, his cords were baggy at the knees, as well as elsewhere, the lenses of his glasses smeary. About thirty, with worry lines on his forehead, and a slightly defeated droop to his shoulders. But his reactions were quicker than his procrastinating manner indicated and his eyes, behind the dim lenses, shrewd. Almost certainly, underneath the haphazard exterior, was a depth of understanding and compassion.

  He swung round and slouched back into his chair. ‘Look,’ he said eventually, ‘most lads in this establishment are between eighteen and twenty-one ...’

  ‘But quite capable of carrying out threats against the governor?’ Mayo supplied when he failed to finish the sentence. And giving him a further push, ‘Is that what you wanted to see us about?’

  Spurrier adjusted his slipping spectacles with a forefinger, hunched his shoulders, still unwilling to get to the point. ‘You know as well as I do the sort we get in here. Most of them are defiant and resentful when they come in, and we have to accept that a lot are still resentful when they go out. We aim to change attitudes, to prepare them for release in every possible way – and some of them do respond positively. We’re proud of our success rate, of the high percentage – relatively speaking – who go straight after they leave us. But some we haven’t a hope with, we know for a fact that eighty per cent will be back. You have to understand, they’ve already been conditioned by their past experiences, their background ...’

  Perhaps he was used to glazed looks from his listeners (though to do him justice, his conversation was relatively free from jargon), perhaps he saw a certain scepticism creeping in. At any rate, he checked himself and continued on a different note. ‘But yes, of course, threats are made, all the time, against all of us –’

  ‘By anyone specially?’ Mayo asked.

  ‘Oh, I can give you names, dozens, but mostly threats are all it amounts to. Empty threats, sounding off, trying to appear big. Not seriously meant. He wasn’t like that, the governor, not the sort of sadistic – well, he maintained there was hope for everybody.’

  ‘Never any serious threats?’

  Spurrier said reluctantly, ‘Well, maybe ...’

  ‘You’ve someone specific in mind?’

  ‘He’s out now, he’s done his time, no point in hounding him ...’ Mayo waited. At last Spurrier said, ‘All right, his name’s Davis, Derek Davis, better known as Dex. I hesitate to point the finger, but he’s consistently made threats – and he’s capable of carrying them out – though I wouldn’t have thought this was his style.’

  ‘What was he in for?’

  Spurrier said with an unexpected touch of humour, ‘The first time, he was the getaway driver, what else, in a wages snatch. You wouldn’t believe how many of them we have in here, nearly as many as those who’ve been stitched up by the police! They’re never the ones who’ve done the job, who’ve done the smacking. The second time he smashed a night watchman at a clothing factory on the head with a hammer. Lucky for him it wasn’t murder.’ He sighed. ‘Always a difficult lad – poor home background, a history of anti-social behaviour as a child – bunking off, exclusion from school, and then the usual story when he left – no chance of a job, started getting into real trouble, nicking cars, thieving ... He became a right tearaway, no holding him down, a hell-raiser –’

  Breaking off suddenly, he jumped up, and dived into what appeared to be a pile of wastepaper on the floor, emerging triumphantly with the missing file. Having retrieved it, looked at it as though he didn’t know what it was, he then dropped it on to the paper-strewn desk, where there seemed every chance of it disappearing as completely as it had before. He seemed to have lost the thread.

  ‘How long is it since Davis was released?’ Abigail prompted.

  ‘What? Oh, four months. Mid November.’

  That was exact enough to tell Mayo that Spurrier, despite his initial reluctance to name Davis, had been sure enough of his suspicions to have checked the records and to have had the dates at his fingertips. ‘What did you mean about this not being his style?’

  Spurrier thought for a moment. ‘I suppose I meant it wouldn’t have been enough for the governor to go out, bang, just like that. Dex would’ve had to see to it personally. He’d have chosen some other way, preferably sadistic, where he could see Jack’s reaction when he realized it was Davis, taking his revenge.’

  The telephone rang at that moment and Spurrier sprang towards it. His hand fumbled, lifting the receiver, but he caught it before the second ring. ‘Yes? Thank God. She hasn’t? I see. Yes, I will. Thank you, Mrs Lilburne.’ He put down the receiver and sat looking blankly at it for a minute. When he looked up, his glasses were misted. ‘They’ve examined Flora and found nothing wrong with her except for cuts and bruises – and shock, of course. She’s been heavily sedated and hasn’t come round yet. That was her mother, would you believe? – Flora’s mother, ringing from the hospital to let me know.’

  He sounded almost as shocked by that as by the news that Flora herself had escaped death by a hair’s breadth. Mayo speculated, as they left him, on how the governor and his wife had regarded what had all the indications of a heavy relationship between Spurrier and their daughter. And what Spurrier might feel if their reactions weren’t favourable.

  5

  The chaplain had driven Dorothea to the hospital with every intention of staying with her until Flora came round. But Flora was still sedated, and though he disliked the thought of leaving Dorothea on her own, he gave in when she insisted.

  ‘You’ve been so kind, Dick, so kind, but I mustn’t stop you from going about your business any longer.’

  ‘My dear, who else but you is my business at this moment?’

  But perhaps she really wanted to be alone, he thought, even needed it, now that she’d talked herself silent. Although they’d always got on well together, in a quiet way, and his wife Meg was the nearest Dorothea had to a close friend, during the last couple of hours she’d talked to him more than in the whole seventeen years of their acquaintance, as if she needed to spill out things she might now be regretful of saying.

  Why? Why Jack Lilburne? And who? Who could have contemplated doing such a thing to Jack? Jack? Everyone was asking the same questions. Everyone except Dorothea and the Reverend Dick Felden.

&
nbsp; As a prison chaplain, he was a man tolerant of behaviour in all its forms, non-judgemental, hopeful of goodness and repentance, but nevertheless with an unshakeable belief in the very real existence of evil and its occasional manifestation in the human soul. It was not at all beyond his capacity to believe that one of the youths who had at one time been under his pastoral care had planted the bomb.

  And Dorothea was too shocked as yet to be looking for blame, indeed, too shocked for real grief. He found it in himself to wish she hadn’t taken so calmly what was by any standards nothing short of disaster. A storm of cleansing tears would have been better, would have started the healing process. Even anger would have helped. This too-calm acceptance that Jack was dead, that Flora, but for a split-second miracle, might very easily have been dead, too ... It was all wrong.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, it’ll be harder for her, my poor child, they were always so close,’ she’d said at one point, almost to herself, as if she’d forgotten he was there, gazing out of the window of the little annexe to Flora’s room, at the end of the corridor. Staring, unseeing, at a view of the hospital’s old-fashioned boiler house, whose minimal interest had long since waned.

  They’d always left her behind, those two, Jack and Flora, Flora and her da. She wasn’t agile-minded enough for them, too slow to catch their jokes, to share their laughter. There was nothing new for Dorothea in that situation. She’d been the youngest of a boisterous family of three boys and two girls, and it had been the constant cry of her childhood, as she ran on her short legs after the others, ‘Wait for me, wait for me!’

  It had taught her to be good at waiting. To find consolation in her beloved garden, in something she alone excelled at. To bide her time until things worked themselves out, as they almost always did, in the end, if you were patient enough and prepared to accept what you couldn’t change. Even though you were hurt to the point where it threatened to tear you apart.

  ‘Jack always said,’ she observed now in a detached voice, ‘that it’s important you don’t rock the boat, though I’m afraid he didn’t always follow his own advice. “Just wait until something tells you what you can do about a situation,” he used to say, “and then have the courage to go ahead and carry it through, no matter what the consequences.”‘

  ‘My dear,’ Dick Felden repeated, giving her a worried look and receiving in return only an absent smile. Finally, he, who’d helped countless numbers of people through the agony of bereavement, was forced to leave, with a wretched feeling that he’d been no help to her whatever.

  After the talk with Spurrier, Mayo and Abigail were escorted by a member of staff from the administration offices, where an air of tense and feverish excitement pervaded the atmosphere, into the main body of the prison, where Miss Reynolds was presently occupied. Their guide was a woman prison officer whose badge gave her name as PO Corsham. ‘Make it Sylvia,’ she smiled, a young woman with a mop of dark hair, buxom arms beneath the short sleeves of her white uniform shirt and a cheerful line in chat. Although evidently agog with curiosity, she quickly took the hint when Mayo parried her questions about the bomb.

  The old house was separated from the newer sections – the sprawl of buildings that had gradually grown up to form the various wings and functions – by a long zigzag walkway with high windows either side and a succession of doors, each one opened with the big key hanging from the prison officer’s belt and relocked behind them.

  The crisp, blowy morning, glimpsed through the corridor windows, appeared cold and fresh in the bright sunshine. Mayo had a sudden urge for the joy of stretching his legs across miles and miles of open moors, a favourite addiction he’d certainly have to forgo until this investigation was over, but one he could look forward to. The key turned in another lock and the thought was abruptly killed. Behind these locked doors nearly four hundred healthy, aggressive, anti-social young males were shut up from the outside world, a perplexed and guilty society’s only answer to dealing with the crimes, from petty to horrendous, they’d committed. But it wouldn’t do to think too much about freedom, about the tensions and ugliness of prison life, its confused, recalcitrant and sometimes despairing inmates. It was counterproductive, as well as depressing.

  Food trolleys and an institutional smell of stew indicated that lunch was in the offing. Some of the inmates were receiving their portions to take back to eat in their cells, but several of them were hanging around in the vicinity of a small office in one of the wings. ‘Any of the lads have problems, they can see Miss Reynolds,’ Sylvia had told them. ‘Home leave, parole boards, anything really. She’s pretty good at getting them sorted.’

  How many of them had legitimate calls on the deputy governor’s time, Mayo wondered, how many of the requests were fabricated? There was, after all, plenty of time to think up ways of relieving the tedium.

  And Claudia Reynolds was nobody’s idea of a prison officer. A small, cool, elegant blonde, she was wearing a smart rust-coloured suit that showed her figure to excellent advantage, hair pulled tightly back into a knot from a classically featured face, big pearl and gold studs in her ears. Noting the expensive-looking cream leather shoes that did a lot for her legs, Mayo added another reason to the list of why the inmates might try to wangle time to see her.

  ‘How can I help you?’ she asked, having briskly dealt with the preliminaries, without wasting too much time on expressions of shock or horror – or sympathy, either, he noticed. Have you any ideas about the bomb, so far?’

  He didn’t want to speculate at this stage, mainly, he reflected gloomily, because there wasn’t much to speculate on. ‘The usual suspicions when a bomb goes off – terrorists, subversives, idealistically motivated groups, someone with a personal grudge ...’

  ‘Such as one of our disaffected ex-inmates?’

  ‘Possibly. Or someone connected with one of them.’

  ‘We’ve nobody here with extremist connections, not that I’m aware of ... though we’ve a fair sprinkling of ethnic minorities, a lot of them with axes of some son to grind. A good percentage of Irish, come to that, although I suppose that shouldn’t be a consideration since the ceasefire.’

  ‘Did the governor have strong political views that might have been the cause of him receiving any threats recently?’

  ‘If he had, he didn’t tell me. Or make them public in any way. I should think it extremely unlikely.’

  ‘Then we can’t rule out revenge, the need to settle a personal score. At any rate, it’s something we may need to follow up. In which case, we shall need access to records, of course. As well as interviews with inmates – and staff.’

  She gave him a sharp glance, but said, ‘Sure. May I ask if you’ve anyone particular in mind?’

  ‘Mr Spurrier’s suggested we look at a Derek Davis, released about four months ago, for one.’

  ‘He’d be top of my list, too,’ she said crisply. ‘Along with a couple of dozen others.’ Mayo raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh, don’t let their age fool you. We’ve some really evil types in here. In for far worse crimes than nicking cars – and Dex Davis was one of them. The governor put a lot of effort into his rehabilitation programme during his last few months – without much success, needless to say. Not the sort to respond to the softly-softly approach, our Dex.’

  Meaning what? Mayo asked himself. That this kind of approach was one she didn’t approve of – and therefore, by association, hadn’t been a member of the Lilburne fan dub either? He might not have thought of this if it hadn’t been for Spurrier’s surprising last words: Don’t attach too much importance to what Miss Reynolds says about the governor,’ he’d said, as they were leaving him. ‘They didn’t get on too well, never mind what she might say.’ And when Mayo had asked him to clarify this, he’d answered cryptically. ‘About a lot of things – but the new wing was the touchy subject of the moment.’

  ‘Why did Davis make these threats? Did he have a special grievance?’ Abigail was asking.

  ‘They all think they’ve a grievance,�
�� she answered drily. ‘But he was an incorrigible troublemaker, and a bully. He was segregated more times than you’ve had hot dinners. He’s always had a general intolerance of any kind of authority, a total non-acceptance of his need for punishment. Another who thought he was being discriminated against.’

  The profile seemed to fit. An anarchic personality, a bomb. ‘Is Davis capable of holding on to a grudge?’

  She laughed shortly. ‘Oh yes, more than most. Vindictive – and deep. He’d wait for his chance, all right.’

  It was the sort of vengefulness most people connected with the law encountered. Mayo had come across it himself, more than once. ‘I’ll get you for this, one day,’ was a threat he’d heard more times than he could count, down the years. Maybe he was just lucky that so far it hadn’t materialized.

  ‘Hm. Tell me about this proposed new wing, if you will. I gather there are objections to it from outside.’

  She took the change of direction in her stride, though he sensed she was less comfortable with it. ‘Not only outside! I wasn’t for it, myself, because as I see it, it’s only a cosmetic answer to the problem. It would help, but not much. Frankly, the whole place needs a bomb under it, and rebuilding.’

  It was, in the circumstances, an unfortunate turn of phrase, and she made a rueful face. But if there was compassion – and he wasn’t necessarily questioning that – it was well hidden. He said merely, ‘Is that likely? Rebuilding, I mean.’

  ‘Unfortunately, no, at the moment, and as long as we contrive to make do with this sort of piecemeal solution, it never will be. Funds won’t be made available for anything better. Mr Lilburne didn’t agree with that, however. He was more inclined to go for what I see as the short-term advantage.’

  ‘Half a loaf?’ Mayo suggested.

  ‘And look where that sort of thinking in the past has got us. A hotch-potch of buildings –’ She broke off, spreading her hands.