‘I mean, are you aware of anyone who had a grudge against the Starlings?’
‘Oh . . . Oh, I see. God, no, no. We don’t, do we, darling?’ He looked to his wife for help. She shook her head.
Kathy said to her, ‘Did Sammy say how long she’d be away?’
‘I don’t think so. He said something about this Sunday, I think, that she’d be back for her game this weekend.’
‘Did she discuss her London trips with you? What she did?’
‘She said she went shopping and watched foreign movies.’ Helen shrugged.
‘Did you believe her?’
‘Well, we had no reason not to. I mean, she never gave any hint that there might be a boyfriend or anything like that.’
‘That idea did occur to you, though.’
‘Oh, only as a thought to brighten up our boring lives, Sergeant. I mean, she was very pretty, and young . . . So it’s something you’re considering?’
Kathy didn’t respond to that. ‘And she would disappear for three or four days at a time.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she never mention a name, someone she bumped into in London, someone who went shopping with her?’
‘No, no one. We tried to pump her, but she didn’t chat with us like that. It’s hard to describe. We were never intimate in that way. She was totally uninterested in the kind of things we talked about, and didn’t share with us what she did.’
‘Sounds frustrating.’
‘It was, actually. Hard work, wasn’t it, darling?’
Fitzpatrick nodded obediently.
‘Do you mean that she didn’t settle here, like Marianna?
Was she homesick?’
‘I don’t think it was that. It was more a generation thing. We were all old enough to be her parents. She just didn’t open up with us.’
‘Weren’t there any younger people around that she could talk to?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘What about you, Mr Fitzpatrick?’
‘Me?’ He looked startled.
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Oh . . . I don’t know, really. Not for ages.’
‘It would have been at the Randolphs’, wouldn’t it, darling? Their cocktail party at Easter? The Starlings were there.’
‘Yes, yes, you’re probably right.’
Kathy looked at her watch. It occurred to her that Helen Fitzpatrick might be getting more out of this than she was—grist for the tennis-club rumour mill. ‘The thing we’re most interested in at the moment,’ she said, ‘apart from Eva’s recent movements, is any sightings of strangers in the area in the last few months.’
‘Yes, I was thinking about that,’ Helen said. ‘We do get people walking in the woods up here, up to the cairn on the hilltop, especially at this time of year, although usually they take the bridle path up the ridge rather than coming along Poacher’s Ease. We have our regulars—an elderly couple from Guildford, the scouts from Aldershot . . .’
‘The bird-watcher chap we kept seeing last year, with the moustache,’ Fitzpatrick offered.
‘I don’t remember, darling.’
‘Yes, you do! He talked to you about the roses on the front trellis. Said the soil was too acid or something.’
‘I’m interested in anyone like that,’ Kathy said. ‘I’d really appreciate it if the two of you could think about this and write down notes of anyone you can recall— descriptions, times, conversations, and so on. I’ll call back tomorrow and go over it with you.’
Kathy got to her feet to leave. The front door opened directly into the living-room, and just inside it were a row of coat pegs on the wall, a walking-stick stand, and a small table covered with the Sunday papers. Kathy stopped dead when she noticed among them the title of a magazine, partly obscured by junk mail. The Philatelist.
‘You collect stamps, Mr Fitzpatrick?’ she asked, picking it up and studying it.
Again that startled, vaguely confused look came over his face, and his wife answered for him. ‘Yes, he does. It’s your hobby, isn’t it, Toby? Like the garden is mine.’
‘I’m interested in stamps,’ Kathy said.
‘Are you?’ He looked incredulous.
‘Yes. Why not?’
‘Well, you’re . . .’
‘You’re far too sensible!’ his wife broke in. ‘It’s the most boring hobby devised by man.’
Kathy looked at her, seeing the alertness in her expression. Helen caught her look and immediately backed off, smiling blandly.
‘You must know that Sammy Starling is a big collector,’ Kathy said to Fitzpatrick.
‘Er . . .’
‘Yes, of course we know.’ Helen again, firm. ‘Look, you wanted me to be frank with you about Sammy Starling, Sergeant, right?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, tell her, Toby!’
‘Tell her?’
‘Yes, about what he did to you. The penny reds!’
‘Oh . . .’ He grinned doubtfully and looked, somewhat embarrassed, at Kathy. ‘Are you sure you want to know?’
‘I’d be fascinated.’
He blushed. ‘You would? But why? I mean, is it relevant?’
‘It was a dinner party at the Randolphs’,’ his wife said. ‘You were talking to Dennis, telling him about your penny blacks, or something, and Sammy was listening to you. He was on his own, before Eva appeared on the scene. The next day he phoned up and said he wanted to see your stamps. We were both astonished.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Fitzpatrick said. ‘Very surprised.’
‘We thought he was just lonely,’ Helen said, ‘and wanted something to do.’
‘Yes, so I invited him up for lunch, and I showed him my albums and so on. I thought he was interested in starting the hobby himself and I talked about how he could go about it. He never gave the slightest indication that he was a collector already.
‘He seemed to have no idea about stamps at all, which surprised me, really. I mean, I thought most boys would have tried it at some stage—it doesn’t cost anything to cut the stamps off your mum’s letters, and collect sets and swap with your friends, and so on. I thought everybody did that. I suppose it appeals to some instinct to organise and classify.’
‘And acquire!’ his wife added. ‘That’s what interested him. He liked to acquire things—do you remember that story we heard about the shares in Marcus’s company? He wouldn’t stop until he had them all.’
‘Yes, well, it may have been that, but I wasn’t sure. He just sat there quietly and I explained how it works—philately, I mean.’
‘And how does it work, Mr Fitzpatrick?’
‘Do you really want to know?’ he said doubtfully.
‘Maybe just an outline.’
‘Well, once you get past the initial schoolboy stage, you realise that there are so many postage stamps produced that you can’t possibly hope to collect them all. So you begin to specialise. Maybe your father’s office has a branch in Germany, say, and he keeps the envelopes from correspondence for you, so you specialise in the stamps of that country. Or you may collect a theme, like stamps which have pictures of butterflies or astronauts, or something. I’ve never seen the point of that myself, but it’s very popular these days. My collection was started by my father, and he concentrated on Queen Victoria, and I’ve continued that. I . . .’ He paused. ‘I’ll have to show you, to explain about the penny reds.’ He got to his feet and disappeared for a moment, returning with a thick volume.
He rested the book on the window-sill and opened it to the first page of faintly gridded paper on which were mounted six identical plain black stamps.
‘Penny blacks?’ Kathy asked.
‘You do know something, then. This one belonged to my father, and that one he gave me for my eleventh birthday. I can still remember that moment, owning my own penny black . . .’
‘It’s a sort of cult object, is it?’ Kathy asked. ‘The penny black?’
‘That’s right. Because it was the first. They printed a
bout seventy million altogether during 1840, until early 1841, when they changed the colour to red, but most got lost or destroyed. It was some time before people thought about collecting them.’
‘Why would you want more than one?’ Kathy asked. ‘If they’re all the same stamp.’
‘Because he’s addicted,’ Helen said tightly. ‘He can’t help himself.’
He shook his head earnestly. ‘They actually aren’t the same. They printed the stamps using a number of engraved steel plates and there are slight differences between the plates. This one came from plate 6, and this from plate 1A, for instance.’ Toby Fitzpatrick was becoming articulate and animated.
‘But they’re all still penny blacks?’
‘Yes. That becomes another way of specialising, you see. To get into all the variations and types of just one stamp or group of stamps.’
‘And some people think flower arrangement is boring,’ Helen said, the attempt at humour defeated by the strain in her voice.
He turned over the thick leaves of the book, showing Kathy three pages full of stamps of the same design as before, but now a deep reddish brown. Every stamp looked identical, except for their postmarks.
‘This is the penny red, which was used between 1858 and 1879. They’re much easier to find.’
‘How many have you got?’
‘One hundred and fifty.’ He pulled a magnifying glass out of his pocket and gave it to her. ‘Have a look at that scrollwork on the right-hand side.’
She looked, and eventually managed to distinguish the numerals 1, 7 and 1, hidden in the decorative edging along one of the red stamps.
‘Plate 171. Each one is different.’
‘You’ve got one gap.’ Kathy pointed to a space on the first page of the reds.
‘Yes. I’ve managed to find a copy of every plate except 77.’
‘It’s rare, is it?’
‘Extremely. I go to stamp fairs and so on, hoping to come across a copy that everyone’s missed, but there’s not much chance of it.’
‘And valuable?’
‘Yes. Most of these would have a catalogue value of anything from a few pence to a few pounds. You could probably pick up the lot in an auction for a couple of hundred. But an example of plate 77 could be worth up to twenty thousand if it had been used, twice that unused.’
‘Ah!’
‘Yes, that’s what Sammy Starling said, as I remember.’
‘That impressed him?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Just tell the story, darling!’ Helen broke in impatiently.
‘Sorry. Well, anyway, he went home, and then, about a week later, he called in again. Said he had something to show me. It was a brand new album, crisp new pages, empty, I thought. Then he showed me the first page. In the centre of it was a single stamp, a penny red. And I thought, Well, that’s a nice start, he’s been down to the stamp and coin shop in Farnham and got himself going with a nice little album and he’s bought his very first stamp, a penny red, fifty pence worth. I said, “It’s got a nice neat postmark, Sammy. What’s the plate number?” He didn’t say a word, and I got the glass and had a look, and there it was, plate 77.’
‘I thought Toby had had a stroke,’ Helen said. ‘I came into the room at that moment, and he was standing over there, gawping at nothing, looking like he’d just seen God.’
‘It was a bit of a shock,’ Fitzpatrick conceded.
‘Actually, it was cruel,’ she said, turning to Kathy. ‘The way he did that to Toby. Like the school swank, showing off. Toby had been collecting those penny reds for years. He’d got them all—all except the one that he knew he’d never own. And Sammy just waltzes off and buys the one, worth far more than the whole of the collection that Toby and his dad had built up over fifty years. It was very cruel.’
‘I don’t think he really meant it like that, Helen. You read that into it. He was just a bit out of my league, that’s all, when it came to resources. He admitted to me then that he’d been collecting for years. He’d been having me on. It was his idea of a joke.’
‘Well, it certainly took the shine out of stamp collecting for you for a while, darling, didn’t it?’
He hung his head. ‘Yes, it did rather.’ He met Kathy’s eyes and added, ‘He gave it to me.’
‘Plate 77?’
Fitzpatrick nodded. ‘He just handed the album to me, and said, “Go on, you have it,” and I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to say. He said that wasn’t his area of interest, and it had been worth it just to see my face.’
‘An expensive joke,’ Kathy said, and thought, Like sticking valuable stamps on ransom notes.
‘I suppose I should have felt incredibly grateful, but somehow it felt all wrong—I just felt humiliated.’
‘And did he show you his collection after that?’ Kathy asked.
‘Oh, yes. It’s fantastic. Makes mine look pathetic. I still squirm every time I think of that day, showing it off to him.’
‘For him it was like buying stocks and shares,’ his wife said dismissively. ‘An investment. He didn’t do it for love. You grew your collection, darling. He just bought his.’
Toby Fitzpatrick sighed. ‘I suppose so.’
Helen walked with Kathy to the gate. The smell of the pinewoods was heavy in the warm sunlight, the murmur of bees coming from her cottage garden. ‘It’s pretty sad, really,’ she said. ‘Sammy Starling had all that money, and a lovely wife, and that fabulous house with the stunning view, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile once. Even when he was showing Toby his latest philatelic triumph, he just looked . . . impassive. As if he couldn’t afford to show pleasure. How could you not be happy in a place like this?’
Although the sun shone brilliantly through the high tree canopy, there was a growing heaviness in the air, and a rim of clouds towards the west that hinted at an approaching change.
As they reached the gate a car swerved fast around the bend in the lane to their left, and sped on towards the Starlings’ house, over the spot where Eva’s head had lain.
‘Idiots!’ Helen glared after them.
‘It might be ours,’ Kathy said, ‘or it could be the press. They’ll be here soon enough. This story is nasty enough to get a lot of interest, Helen. You’d better be prepared.’
9
Approaching Thunder
Kathy followed the route of the car up the fifty yards of lane that separated the Fitzpatricks’ cottage from the Crow’s Nest. She rounded the last curve of rhododendron bushes and saw the vehicle halted at the wrought-iron gates, behind two others standing there under the eye of a uniformed man. It was the press, she saw, and hurried past the loose knot of people forming by the lead car.
Inside the house, Kathy put on the nylon suit that one of the SOCO team offered her and went up the stairs to the master bedroom, and from there through the dressing-room to Eva’s sitting-room. Leon Desai was still there, working on hands and knees in a corner of the room with another man holding an ultraviolet lamp. The man was red-faced and sweating inside his overalls, unlike Desai, who rose gracefully to his feet on seeing Kathy and came over to her.
‘I’m on my way to see Brock in Farnham,’ she said. ‘I wondered if there was anything here I could pass on.’
‘Nothing definite,’ he said briskly.
‘So there was nothing in here that Sammy was trying to hide from me?’
‘No bloodstains, if that’s what you mean. But take a look at this.’ She followed him to the window, seeing the clouds in the far distance creeping forward from the western horizon. The glider was up again, a tiny pale cross against their darkness, working its way up a thermal, apparently oblivious to their threat.
Desai pointed to the security bolts, which had been drilled into each timber window-frame. ‘Sammy is very security conscious, of course,’ he said.
‘So?’
‘Only that we can’t find the key that opens them. It’s certainly not in this room. Same in the bedroom next door. That’s
odd, don’t you think? You’d normally keep it somewhere handy. All the other rooms do.’
He pointed to a door that connected the sitting-room with the corridor. ‘That door is locked, no key. And that one . . .’ he led her through the dressing-room and pointed to the door leading from the master bedroom to the corridor ‘. . . has a key, which we found in the lock, but on the outside.’
‘The outside?’
‘Right.’
‘You’re saying that this suite of rooms is like a prison.’
He shrugged. ‘The windows are double glazed, sealed, the house heated and cooled by ducted air. All very snug and tight.’
Kathy looked round the room, thinking. ‘Anything else? Any signs of violence?’
‘Just one.’ He went over to the door connecting the bedroom with the corridor, and pointed out a shallow depression in the timber panelling on the bedroom side. ‘Recent, we think, and there were slivers of porcelain in the carpet beneath it.’
‘Somebody threw an ornament at the closed door?’
‘Or at somebody standing in front of the closed door, yes.’ He turned away, brisk. ‘Nothing much, really. We’ll keep looking.’
Farnham divisional police station was experiencing its busiest Sunday lunch-time in years. More uniforms had been called in to secure the grounds of the Crow’s Nest from the photographers and camera crews who were now roaming through the surrounding woods, attracted by the first reports of the sensational nature of Eva’s death. The small canteen was filled with sweating men and women, hips loaded with equipment, trays loaded with chips, exchanging cheerful banter. Kathy went down to the interview rooms in the basement. She found the recording-room and went inside to watch the interviews in progress on the monitors.
Brock was on the left of the screen, sitting forward in his chair, contemplating the man in front of him in silence, rubbing the side of his beard with the index finger of his right hand. Starling faced him across the table, stiffly upright, features expressionless. Only his slender fingers, clenching and unclenching on his lap, gave any clue to his internal state.
‘You’re sure you’re up to this, Sammy?’ Brock said, with what sounded like genuine concern.
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