Dark Mirror bak-10

by Barry Maitland

  ‘All right there, love?’

  Kathy looked up, startled by the security guard’s voice. ‘Yes, thanks. Fine.’

  ‘Ready to go, or are you staying all night?’

  ‘No, I’m finished. I’ll just leave a note of what I’m taking.’ She gathered up the contents of the buff envelope and put them into a second plastic bag, then wrote out an official docket, ripped off the top copy and left it in the centre of da Silva’s desk.

  ‘Don’t suppose he’ll be best pleased when he gets that in the morning,’ the man said.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I don’t suppose he will.’ twenty-three

  W hen Kathy arrived at the office the next morning DC Pip Gallagher brought her a cup of coffee.

  ‘You look as if you need this,’ she said. ‘Late night?’

  ‘Yes. Good one, though.’

  ‘Aha.’ Pip gave her a wink. ‘I’d heard rumours.’

  ‘What?’

  Pip just smirked.

  ‘Pip! What are you talking about?’

  ‘Nothing. Just when the Summers case is hotting up too. I wish I was back with you again. What I’m doing now is dead boring.’

  ‘Well, you could help me with something if you’ve got a bit of time to spend with Google.’

  ‘Sure, what is it?’

  Kathy gave her a copy of the dedication written in the front of the da Silva book. ‘See if you can trace the quotation, assuming it is one.’

  ‘Any clues?’

  ‘It could be from a Pre-Raphaelite poem, Dante Gabriel Rossetti maybe.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll have a go.’

  She wandered off and Kathy got down to work. There were test reports to wait for, and in the meantime CCTV footage from the British Library to check. Some of the witnesses who had been there the previous day would have to be reinterviewed to see if they could identify da Silva.

  Towards noon she got a call from Brock. ‘He wants to see us with his lawyer.’

  ‘Julian Fenwick?’

  Brock laughed. ‘He didn’t say. Two o’clock, all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  When she went out to a nearby cafe for a sandwich and drink, Kathy was aware of herself gingerly tasting each before she ploughed into them. She suspected that all across London people were doing the same.

  •

  Tony da Silva’s lawyer wasn’t Fenwick. Instead he’d come with a female solicitor Kathy had met a couple of times before, and she wondered if it was a deliberate choice for someone on the point of being accused of murdering two women.

  ‘Yes, Dr da Silva?’ Brock began. ‘You want to add something to our interview last night?’

  Da Silva didn’t look as if he’d slept, his face pale and puffy, his voice limp. ‘When I went to my office at the university this morning,’ he said, ‘I found this.’ He unfolded Kathy’s docket in front of them, as if hoping it might still turn out to be a mistake.

  ‘Yes?’

  Da Silva glanced at his lawyer with a look of desperation, and she frowned and said, ‘My client is anxious to have his property returned. The material listed on this paper is of academic interest only and of no relevance to your inquiries.’

  ‘Of very considerable academic interest, I would have said. And highly relevant to our inquiries. But perhaps Dr da Silva could enlighten us as to how they came to be in his possession. The book, for instance?’ Brock lifted it from his bag and thumped it down on the table between them.

  Da Silva’s eyes opened wider, staring at it in its clear plastic bag. ‘I am the author of that book,’ he said, his voice unsteady and slightly hoarse, as if his throat was dry. ‘It is one of my copies.’

  ‘Really? Your handwritten dedication at the front is addressed “To M.” Who’s that?’

  Da Silva swallowed and shook his head.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Can’t recall,’ he whispered, almost inaudible.

  ‘Well, let me help you,’ Brock said. ‘You see the tear at the top of the cover on the spine? And the crease lower down, across the R in Rossetti?’ He reached again to his bag and brought out two packets of photographs. From the first he selected a picture of Marion’s bookshelves. ‘Scene-of-crime photograph taken at Marion Summers’ home at 43 Rosslyn Court, Hampstead, on Friday the sixth of April. See the date at the bottom?’

  The solicitor was leaning forward, adjusting her glasses to see the photo. Da Silva didn’t move.

  ‘And on the shelf here…’ Brock pointed, ‘a copy of that very same book, with identical tear and crease on the spine cover.’ He gave the lawyer time to examine it. She glanced back at da Silva, who didn’t meet her eyes.

  ‘And here is another photograph of the same bookshelves, taken on Tuesday the tenth, four days later. The book has disappeared, from a locked house.’ Brock reached out and spread his hand on the plastic pouch. ‘And now here it is, in the possession of Dr da Silva, its pages covered from back to front with the handwritten notes and fingerprints of the dead woman, Marion-“M”.’

  The silence stretched painfully, and the solicitor finally snapped it with a crisp, ‘I’d like a break to discuss matters with my client.’

  ‘No.’ Da Silva shook his head, hunched between his shoulders. ‘I want to explain.’ He took a deep breath, eyes fixed on the table in front of his fingers. ‘Nine months ago Marion came to me with some ideas about Rossetti and Madeleine Smith. She had noticed a resemblance between Madeleine and some portraits painted by Rossetti. No one had ever made such a connection before, and the dates of the portraits were significant, because they were painted before either Rossetti or Smith were married. Rossetti was famous by this stage and a notorious womaniser, and Marion speculated that the chemistry would have been irresistible to each of them, for their own reasons. Madeleine, you remember, was an infamous figure, more or less in exile from her home and loved ones, and desperate to make a new start in London.

  ‘What appealed to Marion about this, of course, was the sensational nature of Madeleine’s past, the arsenic murderess. Which I suppose was exactly what did not appeal to me. It was all flimsy speculation, based on a supposed resemblance of portraits. My book was in the final page-proof stages, every word and image finalised, and it was out of the question for me to hold things up to include Marion’s far-fetched ideas. I told her to forget it and concentrate on her topic. She didn’t, of course. Quite the opposite. She became more and more obsessed with the implications of a murderess acting as a kind of hidden agent within the Pre-Raphaelite circle, previously unrecognised. As with any historical story, even one as thoroughly researched as the Pre-Raphaelites’, there were plenty of gaps and contradictions if you cared to look, and she wanted to explore them all.

  ‘Then she came up with her theory about Rossetti murdering his wife. I was horrified. I told her I would have to reconsider being her supervisor if she wouldn’t be guided by me. Her response was to hide what she was doing. She became secretive, postponed our meetings. Then I got a call from Grace Pontius in Cornell. She said she’d confirmed an invitation to Marion to present a paper in the summer, and asked me what I knew about this amazing new body of research that she was going to reveal at the conference. I was shocked. I knew absolutely nothing about it.

  ‘So I tried to contact Marion, and I discovered that she’d moved, and nobody knew where she was living. She wouldn’t answer my phone calls or emails, and when I saw her once in the library she hurried away before I had a chance to talk to her. I began to think that some really big scandal was brewing-that Marion, out of stubbornness and spite at my refusal to consider her theories, was planning to challenge my reputation as a scholar in the most public and damaging way imaginable. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, picturing myself turning up at Cornell and sitting through a paper by my own student about which I knew nothing, destroying the basis of my book, my work, my career.’

  ‘No,’ Brock murmured. ‘Well, you couldn’t let that happen.’

  ‘What could I do? I tried appeal
ing to Grace. I said that Marion’s research really wasn’t ready for public exposure, and it would be a kindness to her to make her wait. But Grace smelled a rat. She said that Wallcott at Princeton had heard something about Marion’s work from one of his colleagues who met her by chance in the university here, and Grace was afraid Princeton might publish her first if she cancelled. I was beside myself.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Then I remembered that I’d met Marion’s mother. She turned up uninvited to a faculty tea party for students and their relatives, a year or more ago. Appalling woman. When she learned I was Marion’s supervisor she cornered me. I think she was half drunk, horribly flirtatious, and I had to listen to the story of her life before Marion realised what was happening and dragged her away. But I did remember her name, Sheena Rafferty, and the fact she lived in Ealing somewhere. She was in the phone book, and I went to see her. I assumed she’d know where Marion had moved to, only she didn’t. Her husband, Keith, was there, and when I left he came after me and said he might be able to find out where Marion lived, if I made it worth his while. He asked for fifty quid in advance. I suppose he was testing me, to see how badly I wanted to know. Maybe he sensed I was desperate. So I paid him and he said he’d get in touch.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About a month ago, the middle of March.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing. He didn’t get back to me. I was going to contact him, but then I heard the terrible news about Marion and did nothing until Inspector Kolla told me last Monday that Marion had been living in Hampstead. I tried to find the address from the phone book but couldn’t, so I phoned Sheena Rafferty again. She wasn’t in, but her husband was. I told him that Marion had some papers of mine that I wanted back, and asked if her mother had access to the house.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have asked us that?’ Brock objected.

  Da Silva bit his lip. ‘I did ask DI Kolla, but she wasn’t cooperative, and she pretty much gave me the impression that I was under suspicion, so I didn’t press the point. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, you see, and wanted time to search.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Rafferty said he probably could now find out where the house was, and also get me a key, if I was prepared to pay.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A thousand pounds.’

  ‘Really? And you agreed?’

  ‘I tried to haggle, but he wouldn’t have it. I think he believed there was something going on between Marion and me that I wanted to cover up, an affair or something. In the end I agreed, and within a couple of hours he came back to me. We met at a pub; I paid him the money and he gave me an address and a key. That evening I went to the house and removed the things you found in my office.’

  ‘Will Rafferty confirm this?’

  Da Silva looked squeamish. ‘Unlikely, I should think.’

  Brock sat back in his chair, linking his fingers over his chest, and turned to Kathy. ‘What do you make of that, DI Kolla?’

  ‘Bullshit, sir,’ Kathy replied evenly. She reached forward and took the book out of its plastic bag, opened it to the title page and read:

  ‘ He sees the beauty

  Sun hath not looked upon,

  And tastes the fountain

  Unutterably deep…

  ‘That’s your handwritten dedication to her, isn’t it, Tony? You saw the beauty, did you? You tasted at the fountain, unutterably deep?’

  He reddened. ‘It’s from one of Rossetti’s poems.’

  ‘Called “Dream-Love”, yes.’

  ‘It was one of her favourites,’ he blustered. ‘We’d discussed it in a tutorial some time ago. I was being… ironic.’

  A muffled snort came from Brock.