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Family and Friends Page 24

by Emma Page


  ‘And I’d like to have a chat with Turner,’ Cottrell said. ‘Maurice Turner, he was my captain in the war, and Pierson’s captain too. Just a possibility that if Pierson is in any kind of trouble, he might have gone to see Turner.’ He saw Venn’s doubtful look. ‘A bit of a long shot, I know, but I think it’s worth a try.’

  ‘Well, if you feel that, go ahead,’ Venn said. ‘But I don’t want any of this to leak out to Yorke. Not just yet.’ If we do go aboard the Kyrenia, Cottrell thought, and find that Pierson never set foot on the ship or that if he is there he has a perfectly good explanation, if we can just clear Arnold out of the way, then we can get down to the real business–Owen Yorke. And his brother-in-law. And his brother-in-law’s wife. But my money’s on Yorke, he thought, feeling the exhilarating pulse of the chase. Yorke and Linda Fleming.

  ‘Just a moment,’ Venn said abruptly. ‘Maurice Turner.’ He frowned in concentration, remembering his wife holding forth to him in the car on their way home from the presidential ball. ‘My wife witnessed–or overheard–some kind of quarrel between Zena Yorke and a woman from British Foods, what was her name, Gibbs, a Miss Gibbs, at the ball, the Independents’ ball. Some fuss about a torn dress, the Gibbs woman had bought it at Underwoods, I don’t know all the details and anyway it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Ruth Underwood, Jane’s mother–or rather, stepmother–was there too, all this took place in the cloakroom, quite a set-to apparently, and in the course of the general insulting there was some suggestion of a carry-on between Ruth and her boss.’

  He raised his eyebrows at Cottrell. ‘And Ruth’s boss is Maurice Turner. The Gibbs woman implied, if I remember rightly what my wife told me, that Turner was an old flame of Ruth’s–or even a current flame–and that that was how she got her promotion.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘May be nothing in it of course. Probably only jealousy, one glass of wine too many all round, but you might just bear it in mind. Ruth Underwood’s a very good-looking woman. In fact she’s one of the most beautiful blondes I’ve ever seen outside the movies.’

  Cottrell felt a sharp tingle in his hands, the sensation prickled right up over his arms. ‘A blonde?’ he said casually.

  ‘Yes, she has the loveliest hair you ever saw. Masses of it. And one hundred per cent natural.’

  ‘I had been attending Mrs Yorke just before her death,’ Gethin said with a touch of impatience. ‘She’d been in a coma more than once in the last few years. I saw no necessity whatever for an inquest.’ He knows he’ll never practise again, Venn thought, he has no conceivable reason now not to tell the truth.

  ‘If I were you,’ Gethin said. ‘I’d watch where you are treading. Doesn’t always do in a town the size of Milbourne to go round looking under too many stones. I’m a retired man now, you’re not.’ He felt a vast fatigue sweep over him. All his professional life people had come running to him with their problems, every conceivable kind of problem; it had frequently seemed to him that he practised every profession but medicine.

  A nurse looked round the door of the private room. ‘Will you be much longer?’ She threw a significant glance at Venn. ‘Dr Gethin should really get some sleep now.’

  Venn stood up. ‘I’m just going.’ The nurse withdrew her head. ‘Do you think you’ll enjoy your retirement?’ Venn asked Gethin, thinking with yearning of that beacon light ahead of himself.

  ‘I’m going to look for a cottage in Scotland.’ Gethin smiled. ‘I intend to do some fishing.’ He’d been intending to do some fishing for forty years, perhaps at last he might be allowed to get on with it.

  ‘Won’t you be lonely?’ Venn asked, seeing the solitary figure of the old doctor huddled at the side of a loch, vast acres of heather stretching out under a harsh grey sky.

  ‘I sincerely hope so.’ Gethins’ eyes looked back at all the faces that had crowded into his surgery over the demanding years. ‘I hope to God I’ll be lonely. It’ll be a welcome change.’

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘No, Pierson hasn’t been to see me.’ Maurice Turner’s fingers played with a pencil on his desk. ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what this is about?’

  Cottrell shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I can’t.’ After all these years he still felt the impulse to address Turner as Sir, but he managed to restrain his tongue. ‘I’ve always been rather baffled,’ he said abruptly, ‘at the way life in the prison camp affected Pierson, it seemed to alter him completely.’ It suddenly struck him that Arnold would never have committed a murder, he would never under any circumstances have run the risk of being shut up again behind bars.

  Turner spun the pencil in his fingers. What was it Zena Yorke had said that evening at the ball when Pierson’s name had been mentioned? ‘A hero!’ she’d said with contempt, implying some knowledge of her own. Zena had been beautiful once, Pierson had danced to her tune in those far-off pre-war days. As Turner very well knew, there were things a man would say to a beautiful woman that he would not utter to another living soul . . . and surely Zena had still been beautiful when Pierson had come back to Milbourne after the war, haunted by his prison ghosts. He sat up abruptly.

  Ghosts, he thought with a little shiver of recollection. There had been that terrible business of B Company, pretty well wiped out in an ambush. Zena had said something–what was it? He struggled to remember. ‘One of your precious companies.’ He sat staring down at his hands. Was it possible? The men of B Company–could those have been the ghosts that walked beside Pierson through the Milbourne streets?

  ‘They gave Pierson a pretty severe going-over, if I remember,’ he said slowly. ‘The Japs, when they questioned him. I seem to recall–’ he passed a hand across his mouth–‘he was in bad shape for a good time afterwards.’ He gave Cottrell a direct look. ‘Do you happen to remember exactly when that would be? It wouldn’t by any chance have been shortly before that B Company business?’

  ‘Good God,’ Cottrell said after a short pause. ‘I believe you’re right. That would explain everything.’ He felt a moment’s vast compassion for Pierson, a raw boy, caught up as they all were in that horrifying coil of events. ‘He was only a lad,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t made of iron.’

  Turner stood up and walked over to the window, he stood looking out at the road, the pavements, the pleasant to-and-fro of secure suburban life.

  ‘The ambush had nothing to do with Pierson. I stayed on in the army for a year or two after the war, I learned one or two things we didn’t know in the camp. I know the story behind the B Company slaughter.’ He shook his head. ‘Pierson may have talked his head off, but he wasn’t responsible for the deaths of those men.’ He shook his head again, slowly, in useless sorrow at the years of torment that must have crawled by for Pierson. ‘When you come across him, tell him to come and see me. If he refuses to come, phone me and let me know where I can get hold of him. I’ll talk to him.’ A bit late in the day but it was all now that could be done.

  Cottrell could have dropped his head into his hands and wept for the boy who had been his friend. ‘I’ll tell him,’ he said. He remembered Arnold at school . . . in the army . . . pushing Emily Bond out of the path of the car . . . A man was all of a piece, he couldn’t believe him a murderer, a poisoner, a killer by night. He got to his feet and at the same moment the phone rang on Turner’s desk. As Cottrell let himself out he heard Turner say, ‘You’d better put this call through to the annexe, Mrs Underwood’s working over there this afternoon.’

  Even though it was nearly half past five there was still a suggestion of lightness in the air as Cottrell turned his car into the road where the Underwoods lived. A freshness and vitality, a sense of the passing of winter, the first hint of approaching spring. A disturbing season for a man in middle age, Cottrell thought; the spring seemed to threaten him nowadays with a kind of painful beauty that held more melancholy than joy.

  From the other end of the street a car came towards him. As it drew nearer he could see the face of a woman, pale and indistinct. She halt
ed the car outside the house, opened the door and stepped out, stood looking at him as he sat behind the wheel. A rather tall woman with a mass of hair the colour of flax, piled up on top of her head; she was wearing an expensive-looking fur coat, almost the same shade as her hair.

  He was aware of the ridiculous way his heart was thumping inside his chest, he drew a deep breath and turned the handle of the car door. The blonde goddess, he thought foolishly as he walked towards her, Mrs Neil Underwood, married less than a year. And this is how I meet her at last, with one hand thrust into my pocket, feeling for the warrant card.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said in a pleasant, formal tone. ‘Detective Sergeant Cottrell.’ He held out his card in the fading light. ‘Mrs Underwood?’ She nodded, he could read no expression on her face, she appeared totally calm, at ease. ‘I wonder if I might come inside and have a word with you and your husband. Your stepdaughter called in at the station at lunchtime—’

  She gave a tiny sigh. ‘Oh dear, I’m afraid she’s rather been letting her imagination run riot. Yes, do come inside.’ She glanced at the house, at the lights shining from between the curtains of a downstairs room, ‘Jane is probably at home.’ She turned her head and looked up the street. ‘And I don’t think my husband will be long.’ A car turned into the end of the road. ‘That may be him now.’

  As Cottrell followed her up the path a thought suddenly strayed into his mind; why were we all so sure, Jane, Venn and myself–and presumably Owen Yorke as well–that Neil Underwood didn’t call in to The Sycamores after all on the night of Mrs Yorke’s death–before he came up this very path, opened this door and let himself into this house?

  ‘There has been a certain difficulty with money in recent months.’ The bank manager looked discreetly at his watch, Venn had caught him at the end of a busy day, just as he was about to leave for home. ‘Underwood is not by nature very careful about his finances.’ He spread his hands. ‘And a new wife, one is tempted to be extravagant at such times. But I had a little chat with him.’ He gave a faint prim smile. ‘He’s agreed to try and stick to a more realistic budget. We’re tiding him over for the present. I understand there’s a legacy coming to him from his sister’s estate.’ A suggestion of enquiry in his tone; he shot a glance at Venn’s impassive face. Nothing unpleasant in the wind, I hope, the manager’s eyes said, shouldn’t care to see an old customer mixed up in police enquiries.

  Venn’s features remained stolid. ‘If I could just see a few figures,’ he said. ‘And dates. Just to get an idea. I won’t keep you long.’

  The manager sighed, he stood up and crossed to a filing-cabinet. Not going to get much out of Venn, he thought, I wonder exactly what’s going on.

  ‘An absurd little quarrel,’ Ruth said lightly. ‘Quarrel is really much too strong a word for it. Anthea Gibbs works with me at British Foods. I know her quite well, she’s the type that lets people walk over her and then suddenly bursts out into a show of resentment, then it’s all forgotten and you hear nothing more about it.’ She smiled. ‘She’s a spinster, lives at home, gets things out of proportion sometimes.’

  ‘And you never heard anything more about the dress?’ Cottrell asked casually, aware of the intense concentration with which Neil Underwood was following the conversation, although he said very little.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ Ruth said slowly. ‘Anthea did stop me in the corridor at work the other day, she told me with a great deal of emphasis that she’d been in to Underwood’s and made a fuss about the dress. She said she’d got her money back, all of it.’ She raised her shoulders. ‘But quite frankly, I wasn’t altogether inclined to believe her. Zena had discussed it with me and she certainly had no intention of refunding the money.’ She gestured with her hands. ‘Anthea would like me to believe she’d come out top in that little encounter.’

  ‘There is another little matter,’ Cottrell said, striving for delicacy, wishing that Underwood would see fit to remove himself from the room for a brief interval but realizing that he had no intention of doing so. ‘I understand that Miss Gibbs made some accusation–’ he thought better of the word, deciding to substitute another–‘some suggestion that your recent promotion–’ he caught the way Underwood moved in his chair, the way Ruth’s shoulders dropped as if she were consciously relaxing herself–‘was not entirely made on merit.’ He cleared his throat; Ruth tilted her head back and looked at him levelly. ‘Some mention that Mr Turner might have used his influence.’

  Neil frowned. ‘Precisely what are you insinuating?’ he asked coldly.

  ‘I don’t know that I’m insinuating anything. I’m merely trying to understand Miss Gibbs’s state of mind.’

  ‘I worked with Mr Turner in London, of course,’ Ruth said easily. ‘I believe he thought well of my work. But my appointment was made by the board in Milbourne, they’ve always expressed themselves as satisfied with the way I’ve done my job.’

  ‘I should like to know where all this is leading,’ Neil said with a sharp edge to his voice. ‘Just because my daughter takes it into her head to go running to you with some hysterical tale—’ he threw a look of displeasure at Jane who was sitting with her head lowered, staring down at her clasped hands. He turned an angry glance on Cottrell. ‘I could do the same myself if I wanted to engage in nonsensical invention. Emily Bond could have poisoned Zena, then she could have poisoned herself.’ He sat upright in his chair, he spoke with fierce contempt. That’s another hare for you to go chasing after.’

  ‘Mrs Bond certainly didn’t leave any kind of suicide note,’ Cottrell said calmly.

  ‘Hardly likely she would have done,’ Neil flung out. ‘The woman could barely write her name. I don’t suppose she wrote more than half a dozen letters in her whole life, she’d scarcely start on a literary career in her last moments.’ He got to his feet and began to walk about the room. ‘It’s just as sensible a notion as anything you’re implying. Whatever you are implying. God knows, it’s all beyond me. But I’ll thank you to leave my wife out of it.’

  There was a ring at the front door and Jane jumped at once to her feet, her face bright with relief. ‘That will be Kevin.’ She ran out into the hall. They came into the room a few moments later, the boy with his arm round Jane’s shoulders, protective, affectionate.

  ‘This is my boyfriend,’ Jane said with an air of loving pride. She smiled as she introduced him to Cottrell, then she sighed. ‘He came with me to Emily’s cottage.’ Cottrell stood up and took a step towards the door. Time was getting on and it didn’t look as if he was going to get much more out of Ruth Underwood. Or Neil.

  ‘I’ll be in touch again, later on, if anything further crops up,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve no doubt you will,’ Neil said provocatively. ‘But if you’ve anything more to say to my daughter, I’d just as soon it was said in front of me. Bear that in mind.’

  Cottrell nodded, he turned in the doorway and said something by way of farewell. Kevin Lang was still standing with his arm round Jane, she was smiling up at him, neither of them seemed aware that there was anyone else in the room.

  ‘Mrs Fleming hired a car for her weekend in Seahaven,’ Venn said to Cottrell. They were back in his office again, sustaining themselves with coffee and sandwiches. ‘She could easily have driven back to Milbourne from the Cliff View Hotel. She maintains, by the way, that she had no idea Yorke was going to be at the hotel for the weekend. She says they had dinner together and that was all.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t altogether know what I make of her. Seems a gentle, charming woman, anxious to be co-operative, made herself out to be mystified at what I was doing there at all, asking questions.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘But I don’t know, I rather got the impression there was a little more to her than appears on the surface, I imagine there’s a backbone of steel inside that pretty figure.’

  ‘Did you find out if she’s seen anything of Pierson lately?’ Cottrell asked. He hadn’t forgotten Arnold’s presence near Mrs Fleming’s house on the evening of Emily Bo
nd’s accident. Arnold worked for Underwood’s and Mrs Fleming kept a shop in the same line of business, it was quite conceivable that she had been into the factory, had met Arnold there.

  ‘She made no secret of the fact that she knows him.’ Venn reached for another sandwich. ‘Or that he’s interested in her. But she says he hasn’t been near her lately, she hasn’t heard anything from him for a week or two. She appeared rather concerned when I mentioned him, tried to prise out of me if he was in trouble but of course I didn’t enlighten her.’ He chewed thoughtfully at his sandwich.

  ‘Is it likely,’ he said suddenly, ‘that Owen Yorke would do such a damn fool thing as murder his wife? It seems to me a totally fantastic idea. President of the Independents’, owner of a thriving business, he’s a shrewd, calculating man, he would never take such an insane risk, throw away everything he’s always worked for.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I just can’t see it.’

  He felt tired and vaguely angry, more than half inclined to drop the rest of the sandwiches into the waste-basket, go home and eat his hot supper like a sensible man, let the whole ridiculous boiling simmer itself back into oblivion. He heartily wished young Jane Underwood had stayed in Austria and let them all get some peace.

  ‘Yorke could have banked on producing exactly the reaction he has produced–in you at least,’ Cottrell said. ‘A perfectly sound business reason for his trip to the coast, pure chance that Mrs Fleming decided she needs a little holiday at the same time. And if he makes up his mind to get married again in a year or so, what more natural? But I do ask myself why such a sensible man would go off and leave his sick wife by herself over the weekend.’

 

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