Dark Mirror bak-10

by Barry Maitland

  ‘You may find some more pictures on the computer, now I come to think of it,’ he said stiffly. ‘It had slipped my mind. One afternoon I happened to see Marion get on a bus in Piccadilly. On impulse I hailed a taxi and told the man to follow the bus. I said my daughter was on board, and I wanted to make sure she got to her destination safely, without her being aware of me fussing. He probably didn’t believe me. We followed her to Hampstead, a pleasant little mews cottage. I didn’t stop. I took a picture and told the driver to drop me at a tube station.’

  ‘Do you know the address?’

  ‘Um, I believe I do recall. It’s 43 Rosslyn Court.’

  ‘Did you go there at other times?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘We shall find out if you’re lying again, Nigel.’

  They left to the twitch of curtains in the neighbouring houses, a heavy red sun sinking in the cold western sky, and made their way back into town, to the offices of the publishing house where Ogilvie worked. There they searched his desk and confiscated his computer. His work colleagues seemed rather excited to discover that dull Mr Ogilvie was a man of mystery, of interest to the police. Kathy waited with the team until it was finished, impatient to move on, to discover if they really had found Marion’s refuge at last. ten

  W hile the patrol car and van sped off back to West End Central, Kathy headed up to Hampstead. The mews was a secluded street not far from the heath, number forty-three a small detached two-storey, red-brick house with Victorian sash windows and ornamented chimneys.

  The bell tinkled faintly through the stained-glass panel in the front door. There were no lights on in the house. Kathy was fairly well hidden from neighbours by trees in the street and a trellis arch at the front gate, and the streetlights were dim and far apart; a discreet entrance. When there was no reply she used the bunch of keys they had found in Marion’s bag to open the door.

  The house had a mildly stale, musty smell, as if no one had opened a window for a while. Kathy trod softly down the carpeted hall, checking a room fitted out like an office on the right, then a sitting room and kitchen at the rear, overlooking the tiny paved courtyard. Then she went back to the stairs in the hall and quickly made sure there was no one in the two bedrooms and bathroom above. Everywhere she had an impression of brand-new, stylish fittings and furniture, and an almost obsessive tidiness.

  She returned to the ground floor, to the kitchen. It was small, but immaculately fitted out with the latest Miele appliances. She found a light switch, suddenly bathing the granite worktop in light. Everything was in its place apart from some things left out on the bench beside the sink-a six-pack of juice bottles, two removed, one of which stood open beside a half-filled glass of orange liquid, a saucer containing a small amount of white powder sitting on a set of kitchen scales, and a teaspoon. They were the only things in the whole house that weren’t neatly stowed away.

  She pulled latex gloves from her pocket and crouched to take a closer look. The powder was crystalline, more like fine sugar than flour. Would Marion have added sugar to the juice because of her diabetes? But there was something about it that didn’t look quite like sugar either. She straightened and backed away, then got on the phone for a scene-of-crime team. ‘I’ll wait outside in the car,’ she said, and made her way back down the hall, taking with her the half-dozen envelopes she found in the wire mail basket hanging at the back of the front door. They were all advertising material, only one, from a local hair salon, addressed to Ms M. Summers, the remainder to The Occupant .

  The forensic team had been on stand-by, and arrived quickly. Kathy briefed the Crime Scene Manager at the front steps. ‘This is the home of Marion Summers, the woman who was poisoned in St James’s Square on Tuesday. I’m interested to know if anyone else has been living here or visited her recently. Also, there’s some white powder and bottles of juice in the kitchen. I’d particularly like a chemical analysis. It’s possible there may be poisons here.’

  She put on disposable overalls along with the others, and showed them the powder in the kitchen.

  ‘Not sure what it is,’ the manager said, squinting at it.

  ‘No. I might phone our pathologist. He’s been looking into this.’

  ‘Good idea. We’ll keep out of here until he’s seen it.’

  Sundeep was very interested. ‘I’ll come straight over, Kathy. And you must be careful about fumes. Best you stay away until I get there.’

  She rang Brock, then began a closer inspection of the house, starting with the ground floor room at the front, which Marion had clearly been using as her office or study. The walls were white, the furniture and fittings modern pale timber and chrome, functional, elegant, and very new. In front of the tall sash windows overlooking the front garden and street there was a large table, on which were several neat stacks of books and papers. One of the other walls was lined with shelves of books, volumes of poetry, art and history, among which she noticed Tony da Silva’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  A third wall was dominated by a large pinboard covered with postcards, photographs and stick-on notes, circled and connected by threads and felt-pen lines of various colours. The notes bore names, with brief comments and dates, mostly from the nineteenth century, and Kathy assumed that they were people connected with Marion’s thesis; several of the names were familiar from Tina’s list. A portrait drawing of Rossetti, looking poetically windswept, was pinned in the centre, with the dates 1828-82, and connected by red lines to several women’s faces, as well as to William Morris, 1834-96. A number of the small photographs were postcards of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, including, she noticed with a small buzz, the Millais Ophelia. Alongside it Marion had written neatly, Lizzie Siddal 1852.

  She began searching drawers and shelves for a personal address book, but without success, then moved on to the rear sitting room, a cosy little room with Victorian patterned wallpaper and curtains and a marble and black cast-iron fireplace. There was a small dining table there, with only two chairs facing one another across the polished mahogany.

  Upstairs there was a similar contrast between the styles of the front and rear rooms, the front bedroom plain and modern with white walls and blinds, the other plush and period, right down to the ornate gilt frame around the huge mirror on the ceiling over the bed. Kathy stared at it, wondering. It reminded her of another such mirror on the ceiling of the bedroom in a flat a boyfriend of hers had once borrowed. It wasn’t how she’d imagined Marion at all.

  The scene-of-crime officer working in that room gave a chuckle and said, ‘Yeah, bit of a challenge if you’re not young and beautiful. Looks like there were two completely different people living in this house-Plain Jane at the front, and Naughty Nancy back ’ere. Take a look at this stuff.’ She showed Kathy a drawer of lingerie.

  Another female voice came from the en suite bathroom, a very plush affair with marble tiles and an elaborate double spa unit. ‘I’d have said this one might have been an expensive hooker, except there ain’t no condoms. There’s always boxes of condoms.’ She sounded as if she knew what she was talking about.

  ‘Maybe she only had one client,’ Kathy offered.

  ‘Yeah, that’s a possibility, I suppose.’

  ‘So you think there were two women living here?’

  ‘Well no, that’s the thing. According to Gerry the fingerprints in both rooms are the same. He’s only found one person’s prints in the entire house so far. There’s a hairbrush in each bedroom and the hair looks identical in each-long, deep red.’

  There were no men’s clothes or toiletries. The whole place, they noted, was immaculately clean and tidy. ‘In fact,’ one of the SOCOs said, eyeing the other, ‘we think it’s a bit suss.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Like someone’s gone over it all, every square inch.’

  ‘A cleaner?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘A searcher. A pro, so careful we can’t really be sure.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

 
The woman took her to a chest of drawers against the wall and kneeled, pointing to compression marks on the carpet, not quite aligning with the corner of the furniture. ‘Looks as if it’s been moved recently and the carpet lifted. And in the dust on top of the wardrobe, finger marks of someone feeling, but no prints-they were wearing gloves.’

  After she was dead? Kathy thought about it. Yet they hadn’t touched the stuff on the kitchen benches. ‘She only moved in a few months ago. She would have shifted stuff around.’

  ‘Hm, maybe.’

  Kathy went to the window of the back bedroom, and looked down on the small courtyard and the gate to a secluded car park to the rear. Another discreet entry.

  Sundeep arrived and was shown through to the kitchen. Kathy stood in the doorway with him and pointed at the saucer of white powder, feeling uncertain.

  ‘It’s probably bicarbonate of soda or something, but I thought we’d better be careful.’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘Though it wouldn’t make any sense…’

  Sundeep put on a mask, then opened his bag and very carefully began taking samples from the saucer, glass and opened bottle. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s all really. They haven’t been through this room yet.’

  Together, she and Sundeep opened drawers and cupboards. In a corner of one they came across a screw-top jar, unlabelled, containing traces of what looked like more of the white powder. Sundeep took a sample then said, ‘I’ve got enough. They can move in here now.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  He gave her a grim smile. ‘Hardly any time. The lab’s too slow, so I set up my own apparatus. Care to take a look?’

  She wanted to spend a lot more time in the house, but later, when the forensic team was finished. She left, telling them to phone her if they came up with anything interesting.

  •

  Sundeep had set up a small laboratory in what had once been a darkroom along the corridor from his pathology suite in the basement. Despite a powerful fan that he switched on as soon as they went inside, the smell of chemicals had permeated the benches, on one of which was rigged an assembly of glass tubes and vessels held in clamps.

  ‘All right.’ Sundeep rubbed his hands in anticipation and handed Kathy goggles, mask and gloves. He put on the same and began to open jars from a shelf above the bench. From one he took a piece of metallic zinc, and dropped it into a fat test tube, then added a few drops of blue fluid from another flask with a pipette.

  ‘Copper sulphate,’ he muttered. Again, with a little tug of nostalgia, Kathy was taken back to her schooldays. The chemistry mistress had been stern and grey-haired, she remembered, formidable in her attempts to stop the boys from blowing themselves up or gassing themselves. What had become of her?

  Sundeep was adding a small amount of his first sample, of the white powder they’d found in the saucer.

  ‘Now, hydrochloric acid…’ He took the glass stopper out of a bottle and poured the acid into the test tube, the mixture foaming up as he sealed it. After a few more adjustments, he held a cigarette lighter to the end of a thin glass tube connected to the test tube, and a flame leapt out. ‘Hydrogen gas,’ he said, voice muffled by his mask. ‘And, if there’s any arsenic present, arsine gas too.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Watch.’ He took a pair of pincers and lifted a glazed porcelain dish to the flame. As they watched, a silvery black mirror was formed on its surface. Sundeep’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes! There it is. That’s arsenic, Kathy.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘This is my version of the Marsh test. It’s very sensitive. It’s what eventually put a stop to arsenic poisoning in Victorian England. Before this you could never really tell. There’s your culprit: arsenic trioxide.’

  Kathy stared at the dark mirror, seeing a blurred image of herself in its depths.

  Sundeep repeated the experiment with each of his samples. They all contained arsenic.

  Kathy rang the Crime Scene Manager at Rosslyn Court to let him know.

  ‘Yes, we took precautions. Funny thing though.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We’ve lifted clear prints from the dish, the spoon, the juice bottle, the scales and the screw-top jar, and they match the ones we’ve found all over the house. I had them email Marion Summers’ prints from the path lab to my laptop here. They match. They’re all Marion’s.’

  •

  ‘No sign of a forced entry?’ Brock was standing in Marion’s work room, taking it in.

  ‘No.’ Kathy had just arrived back from Sundeep’s laboratory. ‘Everything looks completely undisturbed.’ But the word jarred a little. Was that really the impression it gave? More that it was frozen, the house holding its breath as if waiting to see whether they would discover its secrets. She told Brock about the SOCOs’ notion about a careful searcher.

  He shrugged. ‘They get bored, the repetition. Sometimes their imaginations run wild.’

  The Crime Scene Manager put his head around the door. ‘We’re on our way out. I’ll try to get them to hurry up with the DNA results.’

  ‘Thanks, I’d really appreciate that.’ But Kathy was already resigned to what they’d find. ‘You’re quite sure about the fingerprints on the stuff in the kitchen though, are you?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re all hers. No sign of anyone else’s.’ He saw her disappointment and added, ‘Sorry, luv.’

  ‘It just wasn’t what I expected.’

  ‘How could you?’ Brock said at her side, studying the notes on the pinboard. There was a china ornament on the mantelpiece below that looked oddly out of place, a figurine of an old woman selling balloons, and he picked it up and turned it over, examining the name, running his finger around the hollow interior. ‘A young, attractive, intelligent woman, apparently doing well, carefully measures out a heavy dose of arsenic trioxide into a bottle of juice and goes off to the library. After working through the morning she goes out into the square where she eats her sandwich and washes it down with the poisoned drink in full public view. Then collapses and dies an excruciating death. It’s hard to fathom.’ But Kathy could recall other public suicides she’d encountered, histrionic and manipulative, extravagant acts of self-destruction that had filled her with a mixture of despair and disgust.

  Kathy unfolded the list of key words that Tina had given her and showed it to Brock, pointing out Suicide/suicide pact. ‘I spoke to a science student at the university who’d met Marion at a party. When she discovered that he was doing chemistry, she told him that she was interested in arsenic, and when he asked why, she said she wanted to poison someone. He thought she was joking. So did I.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I had developed this picture of her in my mind. I felt I was coming to understand her.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Her early home life was a mess, no father and a promiscuous drunk for a mother, things looking bad until her aunt took her in. She settled down, won a scholarship, escaped to London, worked hard, did well. Very organised, independent.’

  Brock turned and looked pointedly at Kathy. ‘Sounds like someone else I know.’

  She coloured slightly. ‘Oh… no. Not at all. No, I was just so sure she was the innocent victim of some creep like Keith Rafferty or Nigel Ogilvie. It seemed so tragic, so unfair-but now this. The SOCOs thought she might be on the game, or at least was being kept by a rich lover. Well, you saw the mirror on the bedroom ceiling, and then there’s this house. The rent must be pretty steep. It just wasn’t how I imagined her.’

  ‘Where could she have got the arsenic from?’

  ‘She’d been getting information from a chemistry lecturer at her university, who is also a friend of her PhD supervisor. She told him it was for her research into Victorian painters. She wanted details of different compounds and doses. And there’s arsenic in the laboratories there. I got him to show me around, and he insisted no one could steal any from there. It did seem quite secure.’
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  ‘From the way you describe her, she was a pretty determined and resourceful character. I dare say she would have found a way if she really wanted to.’

  ‘You agree it’s suicide, then?’ She still half hoped he’d suggest some other way of looking at it.

  ‘I’d have preferred a note, but maybe she sent that to the boyfriend, who’s keeping his head down. It’s hard to see any other explanation, if the fingerprint and DNA results are confirmed. Alex Nicholson has a taste for poisoners, I remember-she might be interested in this one. I could give her a ring.’

  The forensic psychologist, Kathy knew, had recently returned to work in London after a spell at the University of Liverpool. Brock got out his phone and dialled. When he rang off he said, ‘She’s free at the moment. Says she’ll come over. Anyway, it may not be the result you expected, but it looks like you’ve cracked it, Kathy, on your own. I’m sorry I’ve given you so little support on this one, though it seems you didn’t need it. You’ll be able to take the weekend off after all.’

  ‘Oh.’ She gave a pained smile. ‘I was supposed to be going to Prague, but with all that was going on, I cancelled.’

  ‘Of course you must go. Especially after last night. Best thing.’

  ‘What’s happening to Rafferty and Crouch?’

  ‘CPS won’t touch it. The charges have been dropped.’

  They were silent for a moment, then Brock said, ‘Prague in the spring… I’m told it’s looking good these days. I’m jealous.’ He smiled at her, a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘With Nicole Palmer, in Criminal Records.’

  ‘Hm.’ He turned back to the pinboard, the little smile still on his face.

  •

  Twenty minutes later Kathy saw Alex Nicholson step out of a cab at the front gate. She opened the door and went to meet her.

  Alex shook her hand and looked up at the building. ‘This is cute. A gingerbread house. Just the sort of place you’d expect a fan of William Morris to live in. I’m envious. Pricey neighbourhood.’