A Death of Distinction

by Marjorie Eccles

  Mayo put his cup and saucer down on the small lace mat that had been provided. Abigail said, ‘Could it have been Marie-Laure, Mrs Johnson?’

  ‘Why, that’s right! That’s just what it was.’

  Abigail glanced at Mayo. He was perfectly still, but gave the impression that whereas before he’d been coasting along in neutral, he was now, suddenly, in top gear, as though the engine was running light and swift.

  ‘What sort of woman was Avril Kitchin?’ Abigail was asking.

  Mrs Johnson shrugged. ‘All right, you know. All right. I didn’t know her well. We hardly spoke, all the time she was here.’ As if realizing how she was damning the woman with faint praise, she added, ‘She was no trouble, and I can’t say more than that.’

  ‘What about visitors?’

  ‘We never saw any. Except maybe a young chap, a couple of times that I know of, but that was only when her friend was here. She had her own doorbell.’

  ‘Could you describe this young man?’

  But it had been dark the time Mrs Johnson had passed him on her way out, and the next time she’d only seen the back of him through the window. She’d only had a vague impression and wouldn’t commit herself to describing anything about him.

  Mayo stood up. ‘Thank you for your help, Mr and Mrs Johnson. You’ve been very cooperative. Sorry for all the disruption, we’ll try and let you get back to normal as soon as possible. If you need anything, any help, just ask one of my men.’

  The body would not be moved to the mortuary until the pathologist, Timpson-Ludgate, had seen it. He still hadn’t arrived, and now that fewer people were around, Mayo went back upstairs for a closer look, taking the stairs two at a time.

  He paused at the top, scanning the room, again from the vantage point of the doorway. A typical bedsitter, minimally furnished. Almost aggressively clean, the net curtains starched and white, the floorboards polished around the square of cheap carpet. Nothing personal to prettify the place, no photographs, no books. The cream-painted walls were bare, not even a Suzie Wong department-store picture. The yellow knitting hadn’t been removed and still lay on the floor, a complicated piece of work which appeared to be the almost-finished sleeve of a jumper, pulled free of the needle which had been plunged into the woman’s chest. Its companion was still stuck into the ball of fluffy wool. The killer hadn’t come armed with a weapon, then. Yet an opportunist thief, surprised in the act of filching the missing contents of the handbag, seemed an unlikely scenario, given the time of day, before people had left for work: miscreants didn’t normally enter premises when there was the likelihood of encountering anyone.

  Something in the thought set up an echo of a previous conjecture, but when Mayo tried to grasp it that was all it was, an echo, gone like lost footsteps.

  A quarrel, had it been, then? Better, though the Johnsons had heard no struggle, no sounds of anyone coming or going, they’d seen nothing. But he could sense violence in the room. There was something not only murderous, but vengeful, about that knitting needle.

  If the victim had been the knitter, she’d been clever enough with her hands to fashion an intricate piece of work, though they were stubby fingered, thick and clumsy looking. He studied her more closely. Alive, she couldn’t have been physically attractive. A sturdily built woman with heavy shoulders and muscly legs. A broad face with coarse features. Death had wiped away all traces of anything which might have moderated this impression. He was left with a strong, if unjustified, feeling that she’d been unlovely and unloved, a desolate epitaph for anyone. As always with murder, he felt an immense sadness at the waste of a life, a life in this case that had led a woman to a prison sentence and was unlikely to have been a happy one. He wondered what she’d been inside for, which prison it was where she had met Marie-Laure Daventry.

  He walked to the window and stood looking out over a narrow strip of back garden, bisected by a concrete path – flower borders and grass on one side, neat rows of vegetables on the other. Terminated by a six-foot wooden fence separating it from the back garden of the house in the next street. Hands in pockets, he watched a lean tabby cat strut between the rows of Mr Johnson’s cabbages and Brussels sprouts.

  Marie-Laure. She seemed to have an unfortunate habit of being around when murder happened. It occurred to him also that the name Daventry was cropping up with rather too much regularity to be coincidental. First in connection with Flora Lilburne, now this. He suddenly recalled the letter to Lilburne, its precise phrasing. Non-English? The spiky-looking handwriting – Continental? From Marie-Laure, in fact? The same woman, perhaps, with whom he’d stayed at the Gravely Arms, the one he’d met behind Claudia Reynolds’s cottage? Mayo checked this unsupported theory before it ran away with him and turned back to Dexter.

  ‘Tell me what you’ve found so far, Dave.’

  ‘No prints, apart from the victim’s – not even on the needle, but we’d have been lucky if there were. Gloves, I suppose, but then, you don’t normally grab a knitting needle with your fingertips, and if you use it for what this was used for, you’d hold it in your fist.’ He demonstrated with a graphic, downward thrust of his balled fist.

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘Blood, possibly. And some contact fibres on her slip. Dark-coloured, but I wouldn’t care to say what type until we’ve had them analysed. And the knitting wool’s angora, which sheds hairs all over the place. The killer could hardly have avoided getting some on his clothing when he picked the knitting up. Maybe some of her hairs, too – she didn’t appear to have finished doing her hair – only one side’s fastened with a slide.’

  Mayo grunted. ‘First find your suspect – then hope he hasn’t got rid of what lie was wearing.’ Macabre, though – that last, intimate exchange, the close contact of bodies, that obscene conjunction which left something of the killer at the locus of the crime, and transferred to him some unsuspected trace of his victim. ‘Did she struggle?’

  ‘No apparent signs of it. Doc Ison says there were no bruises.’ Mayo thought it likely she’d been taken by surprise, looking at the position of the body where it lay, suggesting that the chair and table had been overturned as she fell.

  ‘Well, keep at it, Dave, keep me informed.’

  ‘That’s not all, sir.’ Dexter, who had a quirky sense of timing, had been keeping the best until last. ‘Looks like we’ve found the typewriter. An Olympia 66, anyway. Haven’t tried it out yet, of course, but at first glance, I’d say it fits the bill.’ Mayo peered through the film of polythene now enclosing it and discerned a shabby, leatherette-covered zipped case. He recalled his feeling that the two communications hadn’t been from the same person. But if Marie-Laure hadn’t sent the typed one, then presumably Avril Kitchin had.

  Where the devil did she fit into all this?

  Abigail was at the foot of the stairs, talking to one of the uniformed sergeants. A house-to-house call on the neighbours was being organized. It was routine, it would have to be done, but it probably wouldn’t yield much. In this street of houses turned into flats, bedsitters and student pads, strangers came and went, nobody noticed, or minded anyone else’s business. One day you had one neighbour, the next a new one, or several. Scarcely anyone knew who lived next door to them, or cared.

  ‘We need to trace Marie-Laure Daventry as a priority,’ he told her heavily. ‘You know where to start.’

  Hearing the tone of his voice, she threw a quick glance at his grim face and had no trouble in following where his thoughts were leading. She’d recalled the reports of the Daventry case as well, and she didn’t like the idea that they might have a repeat performance killer here any more than he did, but it couldn’t be ignored. Charles Daventry had been killed by his wife, named Marie-Laure. A Marie-Laure had been a friend of the dead woman, there was a similar M O in both cases.

  Within a couple of hours, they had the information they needed on Avril Kitchin. She had once been a nurse in an old people’s home – before she was sent to prison for using viole
nce against the patients in her charge.

  ‘And she wasn’t exactly a model prisoner, either,’ said Gillian Short, her probation officer, who’d offered, when Abigail telephoned, to make a few inquiries and then pop into the station for a chat. ‘They had to keep a watchful eye on her because of her anti-social tendencies – against the other prisoners and sometimes the screws, I gather.’ She was a fair-haired woman with a fresh complexion and perfect teeth, who looked like a tennis-playing head prefect, but Abigail had come across her before and knew her to be a woman of understanding and sympathy, who knew precisely how to deal with her probationers. ‘But she was in for a long time and I suppose eventually it occurred to her that she was forgoing most of the privileges accorded for good behaviour, and losing remission. At any rate, she calmed down. Eventually she was transferred to the low-security prison at Gormleigh.’

  ‘And that’s where she met Marie-Laure Daventry?’

  ‘Who was serving the last years of her sentence there, yes. Strangely, they seemed to get on well – though they weren’t particularly close. Over-close friendships aren’t encouraged, for all sorts of reasons, as you know. The psychologist in charge of her case was certain there were no lesbian tendencies on Marie-Laure Daventry’s part, though as far as Avril Kitchin went, I gather nobody would have been surprised at anything.’

  When Avril was released, Mrs Short had found her the Coltmore Road flat and an interview for a job at the house agency. Search and Sell, whose owner was enlightened enough to take a chance on her. ‘She didn’t disappoint him, I’m happy to say. She was always conscientious, though she kept herself to herself and didn’t associate with any of the other employees out of working hours.’

  ‘What about her husband?’

  ‘She wasn’t married, presumably she thought the “Mrs” added respectability. People like her have a very low self-esteem, you know.’

  ‘And Marie-Laure Daventry?’

  Marie-Laure, it seemed, had been released under licence five years before Avril, also having served a reduced sentence, with remissions for good conduct. After her probationary period, when a close eye was kept on her, she was more or less free to do as she wished.

  ‘Do you know where she’s living now?’

  ‘She’s out under life licence and therefore required to keep her probation officer informed of any change of address, and she’s well out of order if she doesn’t, so yes, I can find out where she is for you.’

  But she rang later to say there was no recorded address after that of Avril Kitchin’s flat in Coltmore Road. ‘So where was she before that?’ asked Abigail.

  ‘A nunnery?’

  ‘A convent.’

  Semantics. What difference did a name make? If Abigail had said Marie-Laure Daventry had been living in outer space, Mayo couldn’t have been more taken aback. He knew no more than the next person about nuns, those anonymous black-clad figures, subjects of ribald bar-room jokes about their unnatural life, a life against nature. And like most people, he couldn’t begin to comprehend religious convictions so strong that human beings were led to shut themselves away from the world. Call it ignorance, but the very idea was to him slightly suspect.

  And an ex-con, a murderess, living in a nunnery?

  ‘But it’s not an enclosed order, it’s actually a convent boarding school,’ Abigail corrected. ‘And she wasn’t exactly a nun. I suppose she worked there in a lay capacity,’ she added vaguely. She didn’t know a lot more than he did about the religious life.

  A lay capacity? And what was that supposed to mean, Mayo wanted to know. If she hadn’t taken vows – wasn’t that what they called it? – then why had she chosen to be there at all? As a form of penance? To hide? Had she become so institutionalized that she’d seen this as the only viable alternative to life outside? It was something quite outside his ken, but anyway, it was for the moment irrelevant. The question which was paramount was, where was she now?

  17

  ‘Well, whether she should have reported her new address or not, the fact remains she hasn’t done so.’ Mayo swung his spectacles irritably by their arm. ‘Which is a fat lot of help to us.’

  ‘I’ve not yet seen Marc Daventry,’ Abigail said, mentally docking another week or two off the life of the specs. ‘He should know where his mother is, surely? We can but try.’

  Mayo put his specs down and rasped his hand across his chin. He’d had his usual shave and shower first thing that morning, but he felt an urgent need to repeat the performance, as though it were a necessary ritual cleansing to purge himself free of the contamination of murder. And then to consume a large hot meal and a dram of the malt. All of which were unlikely to be fulfilled for some time.

  ‘You say he works at the hospital? Let me know how you get on with him – no, have him brought in. I’m interested to see this young man.’

  He sent out for a sandwich, and it was Carmody and Jenny Platt who were detailed to seek out Marc Daventry at the County Hospital.

  They were directed – after a careful scrutiny of their warrant cards, a routine established after one or two scares about unauthorized people getting on to the wards – to the Pargeter wing, a newly built extension dedicated to a local industrialist, the better part of whose fortune had enabled it to be built. They followed signs through the crowded waiting room, with its tea and sandwich bar, along corridors to satellite waiting areas designed to accommodate smaller numbers of people, and were finally filtered to a three-seat area, not in use that day, outside a consultant obstetrician’s door.

  Waiting for Marc to arrive, there was nothing to do but sit staring at the decor, which was dispiriting, considering how new it was. Porridge-coloured walls. Grey carpet tiles. Old magazines. An exhausted Swiss cheese plant drooping in the corner, as though waiting for urgent resuscitation techniques. Cardboard boxes of brightly coloured plastic toys for children.

  ‘Jeez, how long do they expect patients to wait?’ Carmody said, casting his eyes up at a bookcase full of paperback novels.

  Mercifully, their own wait wasn’t long enough for him to get through more than the first three pages of The Reluctant Heart before Marc arrived.

  He’d been in the theatre setting up preparations for the next operation when he was summoned. He hadn’t been told it was the police who wanted to see him, but he guessed that was who they were, even before they introduced themselves with a polite request that he should accompany them to the station so that Superintendent Mayo might clear up one or two matters.

  ‘What sort of matters?’

  ‘Couldn’t say, sir.’ The spokesman, a detective sergeant, was a pessimistic-looking character with a Scouse accent you could cut with a knife, a big bloke you’d be stupid to argue with. His sidekick was a smiling young WDC with a mop of curly hair and a china-doll complexion, but Marc wasn’t fooled by her, either; she could probably have your arm locked behind your back and break it in two seconds flat.

  ‘I can’t come at the moment/ he objected, indicating his theatre garb, his green top and trousers, white shoes, his paper cap and the mask dangling below his chin. ‘Mr McNulty’s list isn’t finished.’

  ‘They tell me somebody can take over your duties, sir.’ The Liverpudlian was unmoving, stolidly communicating to Marc that there was no point in prevaricating, or letting himself be angry.

  ‘Give me a few minutes to change, then.’

  They made no objection to that, and within ten minutes he was sitting in the police car, the sergeant driving, the girl sitting next to Marc on the back seat. There was a bald patch on the back of the sergeant’s head, the steering wheel looked like a toy in his big hands. The girl was wearing a short navy jacket and a pleated plaid skirt, and her ankles underneath it looked neat in low-heeled pumps and navy tights. She wore a light perfume smelling of spring flowers. No one spoke as the car covered the short distance to Milford Road.

  He was taken into a small room where the sergeant stayed with him until presently the superintendent joined them.
Marc was confronted by a big, unsmiling man with a quiet, no-nonsense air about him, a penetrating gaze and a direct form of speech in which Northern vowels were apparent, as he told Marc his name and asked the sergeant to remain, sitting himself down opposite Marc.

  Mayo, in his turn, saw a slim young man of middle height, well-dressed, presentable, a handsome lad, but taut and guarded, obviously ill at ease, though that conveyed nothing. Most people were uncomfortable, however innocent they were, when being questioned by the police. Mayo poured a little of the tea he’d requested – stipulating a pot, if you please, with cups and saucers – inspected it and, evidently finding it satisfactorily strong, filled two of the three cups and pushed one across the desk before shunting the tray across to Carmody to help himself. ‘Sugar, Marc?’

  ‘Two, please,’ Marc said, and shovelled four in. Nervous. Had to swallow twice before he could get out the question as to why he’d been brought here.

  ‘Yes, of course you want to know, Marc. We’ve asked you here because it’s possible you might be able to help us on a case we’re working on at the moment. There’s been a fatality, a sudden death –’

  ‘Whose?’ The cup clattered slightly as it was put back on to the saucer. Marc Daventry was pale, but he’d been pale when he came in, possibly it was a natural pallor.

  ‘You’re acquainted with a Miss Avril Kitchin, of Coltmore Road?’

  ‘Yes. What’s happened?’

  ‘I have to tell you she’s been murdered.’

  Shock registered on his face – astonishment, shock, horror. None of which cut a lot of ice with Mayo, since it might or might not be genuine. They were all accustomed, at Milford Road, to dealing with suspects, guilty as hell, acting out the role of innocent or injured party. Some of them were good enough to apply for an Equity card.

  ‘When?’ Marc asked. ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘This morning. We think about eight o’clock.’

  ‘I was at the hospital – I’m on standby and working a split shift this week.’