“She may have got more subtle about it,” said Eve. “I didn’t sense a bossiness.”
“Yes, sometimes people do get more subtle with age. But it’s the means that change, not the ends.”
In between sightseeing they visited the offices of the Australian Guardian, several drinking holes frequented by journos, and they ate well at John’s favorite restaurants and bars. Everywhere he found friends, and Eve wondered at the way he had Australianized himself in everything except his accent. He seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every sordid little deal or quid pro quo that national and state politicians kept well hidden from the general public. “He owes him one” was his favorite summing up of the relationship between two typical party politicos. Eve thought she was getting a brilliant overview of the underbelly of Australian statecraft.
On the night before she flew home, they arrived at the hotel to find the receptionist had attached a message to Eve’s room key. She looked at John and raised an eyebrow. She detached the paper and looked at it:
Evelyn Southwell found dead. Can’t wait to see you. OMKAR.
“Well,” said her father, “I said she’d done a lot better than May. The old sinner should be grateful for all those extra years.”
“I think there might be more to it than that, Dad. Omkar says ‘found dead.’ I think he was trying to tell me something without being too explicit.”
Whether or not the receptionist had registered the “found dead” she certainly had noted “Dad.” Till then she had put them down as lovers ill-matched in age. Eve only remembered what she had said when she was having a long bath in her room. Saying the word so naturally, without premeditation, pleased her. She was awarding John his place in her life. She was also staking a claim in his.
She had plenty of time to meditate on this the next day, when she caught her plane from Sydney and settled back into the attitude of cogitation that had been so difficult on her way out. Now at least she had two new subjects for meditation, and that of her father and the late establishment of links between them gave her unlimited satisfaction. In fact, she decided, happiness would be a better word. She believed he was a generous and civilized man, and even if he had not been her father, she would have been happy and proud to be his friend.
Then there was Evelyn Southwell. Her death certainly bore thinking about. She felt quite certain that if, say, she had died after a stroke, Rani would not have bothered to send her a telephone message. She decided she ought to get her thoughts in order. First she remembered back to their interview, and after she had focused on two or three things she recalled of the encounter, things Evelyn had said, she thought she had better be more ordered. She got out a notebook and pen and set down what she remembered, the subjects they had covered and the sequence in which they were discussed. Then she noted any memorable things that Evelyn had said. By the time she had finished, she felt she had the entire conversation fixed in her mind.
Then, after some thought, she added some notes on the subsequent conversation with Jean Mannering.
Why, she wondered, if there was anything suspect about Evelyn Southwell’s death, did she instinctively consider the possibility that Jean Mannering had anything to do with it? The only answer she could come up with was that years ago—three decades and more ago—the two women had apparently been in conflict over her mother.
And her mother, apparently, had not been attracted to either Jean or Evelyn in the way they had wanted her to be attracted. It was odd, but Eve had no evidence that Evelyn and Jean had ever done more than have brief encounters with each other. She seemed to be straying into the realm of, at least, the far-fetched.
Eve herself felt more dead than alive when at last, after two rotten films, several meals of tasteless food, insipid conversation and The Four Seasons on the music channel, they arrived at Manchester Airport. In so far as her spirits could rise at all they rose at the sight of Omkar waiting with a small knot of other people at the exit from customs. They kissed with all the enthusiasm Eve could muster and Omkar took her case.
“I did a double shift yesterday,” he said as they walked toward the car park. “It was sheer extortion on my part because in the second shift I was only thinking in bottom gear. But it means a colleague is standing in for me today.”
“Your meeting me is a wonderful service. I couldn’t ask for better. Excuse me if I give the impression of being half dead. It’s because I am.”
“Oh, I know the effects of journeys from Australia. I’ve had to meet people who were extradited and they’ve never been fit for questioning for forty-eight hours after they get back. You can go to sleep in the car.”
“It seems so ungrateful.”
“Much better than us trying to make conversation and you feeling like death the whole time. But before you doze off, I’ll tell you about Mrs. Southwell.”
“Please. At least that will prove I’m not a suspect. I gather you think she was murdered?”
“Yes, and you, my dear, were ten thousand miles away. As we proved by ringing your hotel.”
So as they drove through Southport, Omkar told her about the death.
“I expect you remember the setup at Autumn Prospect, don’t you?”
“Pretty much. Roughly three sides of a square, with all the flats having a view of the central square, and some over the wall to the road beyond, because the square is on a slope. The flats are grouped into five or six, and each group is cut off from the rest, and has its own door from the outside. This is probably to prevent it feeling like a jail or a boarding school. So each flat opens on to a corridor, but the corridor is blocked off at both ends to make the flats into a separate unit.”
“Very good,” said Rani approvingly. “So ideally any intruder would need keys to the appropriate door into the corridor, then one into the flat. One maid does the cleaning for one group of flats. Mrs. Southwell was found in the morning by the maid.”
“Was there only one cleaner’s visit a day?”
“If there was no reason for more. There are degrees of incapacity there. Also there is a night caretaker nurse who sees that everything is all right, and answers calls. Mrs. Southwell’s light was on at ten o’clock, which is unusual, and the caretaker went in to switch it off. She says Mrs. Southwell was alive and well then so far as she could tell. She was asleep, noisily.”
“You sound dubious. Is she reliable?”
“Reliable, but not the most capable of the staff there. The manager admitted that. But on the whole we believe her. She is very insistent that she saw the face clearly, and there were no signs of lividity then.”
“So she was killed—if she was—by an intruder at some time after ten?”
“Yes. It would not be difficult to get in during the evening because the porter potters around and answers calls, of which there were usually several, often old people just wanting a talk, or to air a grievance or to rake over a quarrel with one of the other inmates. He does a bit of inspection before locking the gate sometime around eleven. There’s a notice up to this effect on the door. He dozes or reads through the night—he has to be reasonably alert, because there are sometimes emergencies.”
“So between ten and eleven seems indicated?”
“Roughly. Right, I think that’s all you can take in for the moment. Anyway I just wanted to tell you the uncontested facts. I’ll leave the rest to someone higher up in the investigation. Now you go to sleep.”
And she did, and only awoke when Omkar shook her as they approached Crossley. As he kissed her good night at the front door and heaved her suitcase into the hallway, he said:
“Superintendent Collins wants to talk to you. I said you wouldn’t be human until Monday morning. Is that right?”
“At the moment I can’t imagine ever being human again. But yes—that’s right.”
She was on her way up to bed before she realized that she had not asked Omkar about himself and his situation. But then, for most of the journey from the airport, she had been asleep. She
slept for twelve hours, and when she awoke she rather surprisingly remembered Omkar’s remarks of the day before about Superintendent Collins. It was Saturday, but she rang his office and made an appointment for Monday. Then she washed her hair, shopped for fresh supplies of basics, had another long sleep, somehow got through the English Sunday, sacred to consumerism, and, through all this, put her thoughts in order for the next day.
Collins made it clear from the beginning of the interview that he wanted to talk about the case. He mentioned her visit to the victim, went on to detail the events of Evelyn Southwell’s last day, and the arrangements at Autumn Prospect.
“From a security point of view, they were all haywire. One could imagine a confused old resident getting out of the place and going walkabout without any difficulty. But Autumn Prospect doesn’t cater to that sort of elderly person—they find them a place in a nursing home when it gets to that stage. And you can’t blame them for not envisaging that a murderer will get in, kill one of the residents there and then walk nonchalantly out. That’s what seems to have happened.”
“So I gathered from Rani’s account. And perhaps there was an earlier visit too, to secure somehow the keys to Mrs. Southwell’s room?”
Collins’s face expressed uncertainty.
“Certainly there’s no sign of a break-in. On the other hand, the locks are simple Yale ones, at least the ones to the rooms are, with the usual simple locking device that can be slipped down on the inside, in other words by the old person, who may be feeling unsafe.”
“Not really adequate, I’d have thought,” said Eve.
“Security in places for old people is difficult: by definition they are closer to death than most, and staff need to be able to get to them easily in an emergency. But yes, we do think that somehow the key to Mrs. Southwell’s door had been obtained by the killer.”
“There is no doubt that it’s murder?”
“None now. We have the pathologist’s report. We’ll be announcing it to the media tonight. Suffocation is not something that’s easy to be sure of, but the signs were pretty conclusive.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“First of all background to the victim. Who was she, what had she done in her lifetime, what was she like. I knew her once as a head teacher. What was she like as a woman? Start with Mr. Southwell.”
Eve thought for some time.
“Mr. Southwell is probably not worth worrying about. Very short marriage early in life, dismissed as a mistake. Come back to that later. She was a teacher, as you know, and spent her working life in educational establishments. She was—you know all this, but I’ll say it for the record—my mother’s headmistress when she became teacher then deputy head at Blackfield Road. Evelyn Southwell later went on to be head of a school in Bradford. She seems to have been a good teacher, but as you remember she was showy, one who impressed her personality on children—rather a dated concept now, but I’d say it’s one way of being a good teacher.”
“Right. Now what about her personality?”
Eve, looking at his determined, downright face, thought he was quite as likely to have an opinion as she did.
“Egotistical,” she said. “A performer. Went through life thinking only of herself, though she could become fond of people, as she did of my mother. And by the way, coming back to her marriage: it could be that the reason why this was a mistake was that Evelyn had lesbian tendencies.”
Collins raised his eyebrows.
“Oh? Who suggests this?”
“My father. You know I’ve just been to Australia to see him? Okay, he could be biased, but he had good reasons to give, and they convinced me. So there could have been a sort of genteel battle for my mother’s affections. A battle which Evelyn lost.”
“Interesting. But a long time ago. A long, long time.”
“Yes. It’s difficult to be sure it’s relevant.”
“On the other hand, it could offer a pointer to more recent things that might be relevant.”
“Oh, and by the way, after I’d visited her and spoken about the past, I rang up Jean Mannering to put her in the picture.”
“I see. Rani has told me about her. Why did you do that?”
“I wanted to be clear in my mind about how much Jean would admit to knowing about my father’s—let’s call it disappearance to Australia, because that’s what it virtually was. Now, having talked to him about it, I can say pretty definitely that Jean was lying.”
“I see. And the truth?”
“That Jean was the prime mover in his going there, a rather subtle form of blackmail.”
“Right. Let’s come back to that later. Can you give me the gist of your conversation with Mrs. Southwell—all the way through?”
“Yes. I’ve gone over this in my mind and made a few notes.” She took them from her handbag. “We began with the courtesies. Evelyn revealed that she thought I’d gone to Blackfield and been one of her pupils. I think she subconsciously assumed this so that she could talk about herself rather than my mother, who I’d told her I wanted to talk about. I didn’t put her right about the school, but I did make it clear I wanted to talk about my mother. And my father.”
“What was her reaction to your mentioning your father?”
“Vague. She clearly didn’t know him well, or have any feelings for or against him. But she went along with my idea that he might not be dead. Going through what she said and how she said it, I think it’s unlikely she was involved in the plot to get him out of the country, and out of the marriage, but I think we should leave open the possibility that she knew about it.”
“Point taken.”
“We got on to why my mother would lie about his death and that led the conversation on to sex. She was rather disappointed when I mentioned Jean Mannering. She wanted to surprise me on that subject, and she found I’d already met Jean and had some ideas of my own.”
“She didn’t mention any competition with Jean for your mother’s affections?”
“No, certainly not. We didn’t talk about her sexual orientation at all. She just said that after meeting Jean my mother became erratic and unreliable, which my father says is untrue. She also mentioned that Jean landed up in the Church of England, which she seems to regard as a proof of eccentricity.”
“Dear, dear. Though eccentricity does sometimes come as a result,” said Collins, grinning.
“I’m rather out on a limb where religion is concerned. I wasn’t brought up to have one, merely to conform when necessary. Anyway we talked about whether there was an affair between Jean and my mother—she thought not, but thought the friendship was destroying my parents’ marriage. Then she mentioned my father’s taking off to Australia, which she thought might be due to Jean Mannering: she used the word ‘trick,’ which was close enough to what actually happened to make me think she knew a lot about it.”
“Your mother could have told her.”
“I don’t think that was likely at that stage in the relationship.”
“Maybe not. What about your mother and Jean after your father disappeared?”
“It was the end of their closeness. Absolutely the end. I think what was done was so bad, so outside the limits to my mother that she wanted nothing more to do with Jean.”
“Can you tell me what was done?”
“I think so. It’s a long time ago, and my father says he’s never coming back to this country. Jean got together a stack of child pornography involving young girls and put it into my parents’ house after they had both gone off—May to Birmingham, John to Glasgow and London. Jean rang him at his London hotel, said there was a one-way air ticket to Australia waiting for him at Heathrow, and threatened that if he didn’t take the plane the next morning, the police would be called in, alerted to the porn.”
Superintendent Collins took some time to think this over.
“Neat. It could have been the deathblow to his wife’s career, as well as his own.”
“Exactly. And Jean was supposed
to be in love with my mother. I can’t work out whether she would have carried out her threat or not.”
“If I was him I’d have brazened it out.”
“But what Jean knew was that the marriage was close to being on the rocks, though my dad still had a lot of love and respect for Mum and love for me. I think he half-welcomed the chance to escape from all the emotional mess, though I don’t suppose he liked the tail-between-the-legs aspect of the whole business.”
“It says a lot for Jean Mannering’s nerve and cheek, that’s for sure.”
“That’s what I think. And my guess is that Evelyn was, in a way, jealous of that in-your-face daring.”
“How would you sum up Evelyn’s attitude during the talk you had with her?”
“I think she was playing with me,” said Eve promptly. “I think initially she welcomed the attention—any attention was sweet, I suspect—but got annoyed by the fact that I already knew a lot of what she was going to hint at or tantalize me with. I would guess that if she had lived she would have called me back and started dribbling out further bits of information, claiming she had ‘just remembered’ them, or not told me out of consideration for Jean or my mother’s memory.”
“All very interesting. And when you talked to Jean Mannering afterward?”
“I think I may have let slip, just from my tone of voice, that I didn’t necessarily believe her account of the vital weekend. And I certainly talked about the possibility of Evelyn coming up with more ‘revelations.’” Eve decided to be frank. “I wish I hadn’t now. I have to face the possibility that—”
Collins put up his hand.
“Don’t stray into the realms of distant possibility, and don’t blame yourself. The person to blame for murder is the murderer. We can none of us foresee every remote possibility of consequences for our actions.” He stood up. “I’m sure you’ll understand that on the other matter we talked about, we can’t proceed any further at the moment—not till the matter of Mrs. Southwell is cleared up.”
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