Emily was sitting in an armchair in her room in the private clinic, Kathy recording their conversation, Brock listening in silence. Her solicitor was seated at Emily’s side, silhouetted against the windows and a view of bright sunlight glittering on green foliage. But Emily seemed shrouded in a dark world of her own, her voice faint, eyes rimmed with shadow.
‘It was the first I knew about their affair. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know who to talk to. I couldn’t tell Mum, I just couldn’t. So I spoke to Gran. She said she’d suspected as much. She didn’t tell me what was in the book, but she said it was pure poison, and must never be found. She said Dad had got into a scrape like this once a long time ago, and that it was up to us to put a stop to it, as she had then. Marion was a parasite who would destroy all our lives, she said, but if we were strong enough we could put everything right, while Mum and Dad were in Corsica.
‘I thought, I really did think, that she meant we would confront Marion and make her leave Dad alone, maybe give her money, but Gran said that wouldn’t work with someone like Marion. She said there was only one way to stop her.’
Emily buried her face in her jumper and began to cry, soft, choking sobs. They waited, and waited, and she began again.
‘I said no, I couldn’t do something like that, but Gran said it was simple, she knew a way, but if I didn’t want to be involved she would do it on her own. Only she needed a little help with the preparation. I tried to argue with her-I did! But she had made her mind up. Well, you know Gran.’
By now Kathy felt Emily wasn’t talking to them any more, but instead to someone inside her head, her better half, perhaps, to whom she’d made this appeal many times before.
‘We’d talked about the wallpaper before. Gran knew the stories about old green Morris wallpapers containing arsenic, and we’d spoken about warning the decorators. She wanted me to find out how to extract the poison. When I refused, she said, oh well, she’d have to resort to some other method, take Mum’s car and run Marion down in the street, or push her under a train on the tube. She’d have tried, too, so in the end I looked up Grandpa’s old books in the belvedere and worked it out. I never thought we could make much, and I hoped it might just keep Gran quiet, but then I had to help her-I was afraid she’d poison herself with the fumes, boiling up all that wallpaper, night after night, after the workmen had left. I was amazed when we ended up with as much as we did.’
There was a touch of eagerness in this, as if the experiments, the trials and errors, had been rather exciting. Kathy imagined the two of them in the darkened house, witches preparing a deadly brew.
‘I spent as much time with Marion as I could, helping her, and I got to know her routine. I followed her home one day and found out where she lived, and Gran found a set of Dad’s keys in his study. I also knew about the packed lunch she prepared each day, always the same: a sandwich, a chocolate biscuit and a bottle of juice.
‘When it came to that last week before Mum and Dad came back, Gran said we had to act. On the Monday, while Marion was away at the library, we drove over to Rosslyn Court and let ourselves in. We found her bottles of drink in a kitchen cupboard and poisoned each one, then we returned later that evening and waited outside the house. We thought, if she drank one of the bottles that evening we could wait until it was all over, then go in and arrange the things to make it look like she’d done it herself. But she didn’t. When she went to bed we phoned her, pretending it was a wrong number, just to be sure. When we returned the next morning we saw her leave for the London Library just as normal, and when we went inside we saw that one of the bottles was missing.’
‘What about her computer?’
‘I borrowed it from her on the Monday, saying I needed to transcribe work I was doing for her, and on the Tuesday morning I took her spare hard disk from her study. Once we knew she was dead we threw both of them away.’
‘Okay. So after you realised she’d taken one of the bottles with her on the Tuesday, what happened then?’
‘I took Gran to St James’s Square, then returned to Hampstead. Soon after one o’clock she phoned me to say that she’d seen Marion having lunch in the square, and drinking from the bottle. Then she phoned again to say that the ambulance had arrived, and I went into the house and set up the things in the kitchen.’
‘And Tina?’
‘Ah…’ A sad, exhausted sigh. ‘I begged her to let me help her with what she was doing, because she was so determined to find out what had happened. She just wouldn’t leave things alone, trying to find that book. I could tell, that day at the British Library, that she’d found it. She wouldn’t say, but she was boiling inside. She said we’d soon have the answer, so I had to do something. I bought us a coffee, and… put stuff in hers.’
‘But Tina knew nothing about your father’s story,’ Kathy said. ‘The book she was searching for was the Haverlock diary, wasn’t it?’
Emily gave Kathy a despairing look. ‘I wasn’t sure. We felt that if she was following the same trail as Marion she was bound to find the book that incriminated Dad. We felt we had no choice, you see. I hated it, the whole thing. It made me sick to think of it, but I had to just shut my mind and do what Gran said, otherwise I knew it would be a disaster.’
But Brock wasn’t buying that. ‘You knew Marion was pregnant, didn’t you?’ The girl gave him a sudden sharp look.
‘No,’ she said softly.
‘You picked it up from the conversation you overheard.’ Kathy saw a moment’s consternation on Emily’s face and knew that Brock was right. ‘And you assumed that she was still pregnant when you killed her. How could you know otherwise?’ He leaned forward and said, ‘Your grandmother didn’t have to persuade you, Emily. You thought Marion deserved to die, didn’t you?’
Emily held his eye, silent for a moment, then whispered, ‘Yes.’
•
At the end of the following week Brock invited Suzanne and Kathy, along with Alex Nicholson and Sundeep Mehta, to dinner in a newly refurbished restaurant not far from Rossetti’s house in Chelsea. Both Joan and Emily Warrender had been charged with the murders of Marion and Tina, while Bren had arrested Keith Rafferty and Brendan Crouch on a string of burglary charges arising from the information passed on by Donald Fotheringham. It was important, Brock felt, to acknowledge the end of the business and move on, and while he might have done this with Suzanne alone, and no doubt would in time, for the moment he sought safety in numbers. Despite their good humour, there was, he felt, an air of mortality about the occasion, only heightened by the stylishness of the surroundings and the size of the eventual bill. Earlier in the day there had been a painful interview with Sophie Warrender, and her distress lingered on, for Brock at least, like a shadow in the background. She had reminded him of her comment when they had first met, that their work was similar, searching for the truth beneath the surface of things, but now she realised the bitter fallacy of the comparison. The difference between probing the past and the present was pain.
But Sundeep was in good form. The son of his friend, who had made the initial misdiagnosis, was off the hook, and during the course of vetting Colin Ringland’s laboratory, Sundeep had become friendly with the scientist, to the extent of agreeing to collaborate on the medical ramifications of the research into the poisoned wells. Now he was debating with Alex about the death of Lizzie Siddal, and whether the doctor who examined her could really have mistaken arsenic for laudanum as the cause of death. Alex had been reading up about the case and was intrigued by a number of aspects. What was the nature of the insanity that grew in Rossetti after Lizzie’s death? And why did he insist that he must on no account be buried in the same cemetery as her? But Marion’s theory about the involvement of Madeleine Smith/Lena Wardle was frustratingly elusive. No complete copies of Marion’s paper to Cornell had surfaced, and without Haverlock’s diary it was impossible to test da Silva’s claim that it was nonsense.
It was almost midnight when they left the restaurant and went t
heir separate ways. When Kathy got home she stripped the notes and images off her wall, then had a long shower. Only then did she look through the mail she’d picked up from her box. Among the envelopes was a letter from the UAE. It contained an airline ticket, first class, to Dubai and a very brief letter. Dear Kathy, it said, Forgive me. Please come and let me make it up to you. Love, Guy. She threw it in the bin.
Later, as she went around switching off the lights, she fished it out again, and looked at it for a while. Then she put it on the table and said softly, ‘Oh, what the hell.’
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Dark Mirror bak-10 Page 32
