More Deaths Than One

by Marjorie Eccles

  And yet, it had never been money itself that had motivated him, rather the simple need to achieve success at whatever he attempted.

  If there had ever been any other passion in John Culver’s life, it had been for Georgina. On her he had lavished all the love of which he was capable, though rarely showing it. Motherless, she had turned to him and they had been constant companions throughout her childhood and early adolescence. When, shortly after her return from college, she announced she was going to marry Rupert Fleming, he had been at first incredulous, then furious.

  Fleming had been everything John Culver was opposed to. He had had a privileged education and thrown it away. He had had several attempts at a career and been successful at none of them. He was that unforgivable thing in John Culver’s book, a dilettante, though this was not the term Culver used. His judgement was couched in much earthier terms. But Georgina, who had inherited a will as implacably averse to opposition as his own, refused to give up Fleming. Her father had spent several fruitless months while his anger mounted, trying to make her see sense, then washed his hands of the pair of them. If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out, had always been a maxim he’d lived by.

  He was dimly aware that he’d done more damage to himself than to either Georgina or Fleming by this act, but he was not a man to go back on his decisions, once made. From a distance he watched her progress in the world of business with pride, grimly sticking out the loneliness, and sometimes despair, knowing that as her father’s daughter she wasn’t a complete fool, convinced that one day she must see the man she’d married in his true colours and come back to him.

  It had taken Rupert Fleming’s death for that to happen. John Culver would not have thought that too high a price for the return of his daughter.

  SIX

  “Think what a torment ’tis to marry one

  Whose heart is leap’d into another’s bosom. ”

  THE POST-MORTEM RESULTS, when they came in, were straightforward enough, but for one thing.

  In the report Rupert Fleming was described as a well-nourished white male, about thirty-five years of age. There were no congenital deformities, tattoo marks, old scars, or other marks of violence on the body, other than those to the head. Internal examination showed that he was in good health, that he had not eaten for some hours before he died. Death was due to cerebral lacerations caused by being shot in the head with a twelve-bore shotgun and, in the opinion of the pathologist, the wound could not have been self-inflicted. He had been dead for approximately eighteen hours when found.

  The ballistics report wasn’t yet available, giving an estimation of the exact distance and angles of the exit and entry wounds, nor the forensic report on the car which would amongst other things reveal the extent of any damage to it, but Timpson-Ludgate’s opinion was good enough for Mayo to be going on with.

  The one thing which was unexpected about the report was the presence in the body of traces of barbiturates and a considerable quantity of alcohol.

  “The alcohol’s understandable enough,” Mayo said, “but barbiturates as well? Somebody must have slipped one to him. But I ask myself why. Why should anyone take the trouble, Martin?”

  “You mean the killer needn’t have bothered with the shotgun, when enough of the pills and the booze would have done the trick? It would’ve looked like suicide just the same ... more so.”

  “The trick being, of course, to know when enough’s enough. And that’s it – whoever killed Fleming would have to make sure he was good and dead. Wouldn’t do for him to be found before he was dead, and carted off to hospital to have his stomach pumped. As it was, the drugs would have knocked him out sufficiently for him to be moved into the driving seat before he was finished off.”

  “Barbiturates,” Kite said. “Sleeping pills. Georgina Fleming takes sleeping pills.”

  “So she does.”

  “And it was her father’s gun.”

  “And they cooked this up between them?”

  “They could have,” Kite said.

  “Hm.” Mayo rubbed the side of his nose with his forefinger, and thought. “That gun. I think it’d be as well to have a word with Culver’s housekeeper and find out –” The telephone went. “Hold on a minute.”

  “Someone on the line for you, sir. She won’t give her name and won’t speak to anyone but you. Says she has some info on the Fleming case.”

  The young constable on the switchboard had been wary of passing the message direct to Mayo, rather than some lesser being, but fearful of his wrath if he didn’t do so and the woman rang off, as she’d threatened. He was new and very green, but he thought she sounded nervous enough to do so. On the other hand, there’d already been the usual crop of those sure they had important information, all needing to be dealt with in case their stories happened to be true or relevant – some genuinely believing they could help, but a lot of them time-wasters, and not a few nutters. He wouldn’t be thanked for wasting the D.C.I.’s time with any of those. He was relieved when Mayo told him to put her through.

  “You don’t know me, but my name’s Bryony Harper.” The soft voice came over with the hint of a West Country burr, sounding young and uncertain. “It’s about ... Rupert Fleming, that appeal you put out for anyone who’s seen him recently ...” The voice stopped, faltered.

  “Take your time, Miss Harper. Presumably you have some information about where he was on Monday?”

  “He was at home, here, with me and the children.”

  “With you?”

  “Well, where else would he be? He lives here, doesn’t he?”

  This was the woman in the photograph. Now that the connection was made, the voice and the face seemed to fit together, like the foot in Cinderella’s slipper. “Miss – Mrs. – Harper, I don’t want to deal with this over the telephone. I’d like to see you.”

  “Yes, I expected you would, but I’m afraid you’ll have to come here, I can’t leave my children.”

  “We’ll be with you as soon as possible.”

  The housekeeper would have to wait for the time being.

  There was a sign for the Morvah Pottery on the Lavenstock Road, four miles out of Coventry, Bryony Harper had said, and here it was, a rather amateurish rendering: ‘Morvah Pottery, 100 yards. Please come and look around,’ with an arrow pointing the direction.

  Kite manoeuvred the car down a lane so narrow that passing places had had to be constructed to allow the passage of vehicles coming from opposite directions, though they met no oncoming traffic. Nor did there seem any reason for any to be there, since there was no sign of any habitation whatsoever, not even the pottery. When they had gone for about half a mile and were just beginning to think they had missed some turning or other and Kite was muttering about the back of beyond, another sign loomed up. Welcome to Morvah Pottery, it said, and there it was, a ramshackle Victorian brick cottage with some outbuildings at the side, one of them rather grandly announcing the fact that it was the Factory Shop.

  It was a bleak spot, as unwelcoming as the cold wind that sneaked round the house. As Mayo and his sergeant climbed out of the car two little boys, warmly wrapped against the cold in a random selection of woollen garments, stopped their playing in a small muddy garden mostly given over to vegetables and came to stare, in the dispassionate way of small children. When their mother came out of the doorway the elder of the little boys lost interest and ran away to clamber onto a swing suspended from the bare branches of an old apple tree. The smaller one clung to his mother’s skirt and stuck his thumb in his mouth, until she bent and spoke to him, removed his thumb, wiped his nose and tucked his hair under his woollen cap.

  He looked at her doubtfully for a moment, then ran off to join his brother.

  The girl – she was little more – led the way into a warm, untidy kitchen, where the window was almost obscured by climbing green plants. “If you don’t mind waiting a minute. I’m making bread and I can’t leave it at this stage. Sorry I can’t offer you a chair.”

/>   It was more of a scullery than a kitchen, unmodernised in any way, with a cracked ceramic sink and an old coal-fired range. A mound of dough was in the middle of a scrubbed deal table and she began kneading it in a gentle, haphazard sort of way that seemed part of her but didn’t promise well for the finished loaves. She wasn’t giving it a hard-enough time, Mayo could see, leaning against the doorpost. He remembered his grandmother making bread, punching and turning the dough energetically, leaving it in a large yellow earthenware bowl to rise, making the ancient sign of the cross in the middle, covering it with a clean tea-towel ...

  Presently she put the dough in a similar bowl and left it on a shelf above the range and then took them into a front room where the freezing cold was even more apparent after the steamy warmth of the kitchen, though she didn’t seem to notice, and the furniture was Oxfam second-hand, stuff so cheerless and depressing it was hard to see how anyone could have designed, never mind bought it, in the first place. But by now Mayo felt he could hazard a guess that this was mandatory to the girl’s way of life, whether she could have afforded anything else or not, a way of saying she wasn’t interested in material things. She was short and plumpish and her abundant hair wasn’t as dark as it had appeared in the photograph, more of a rich, glossy deep chestnut. Wide brown eyes regarded them, full of misery. She would have been pretty if her face hadn’t been so blotched with crying, if she’d bothered to dress herself in something other than a long, draggle-tail black cotton skirt and T-shirt, both greyed with too frequent washing, and a big droopy cardigan which dipped at the front.

  She went away and came back with coffee in thick stoneware mugs, presumably Morvah ware, and biscuits. Both were abominable, the coffee tasting as though it were made of ground acorns and the biscuits of chipboard shavings, or worse. Mayo wished he’d accepted the tea she’d offered as an alternative until she poured some for herself and he saw that it was a herb tea, red like wine, and smelling strongly of flowers.

  “Mrs. Harper –”

  “It’s not Mrs., it’s Miss, but please call me Bryony.”

  Bryony. Had she become what she was because of her name, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy? Or was it the other way round – a case of adopting the name for herself to go with the life she lived? Either possibility seemed likely; she was a left-over flower child, too young to have been of that generation, but surely a spiritual descendant.

  “He really is dead?” she whispered. Tears welled up again, large and heavy. “Oh, I’m so stupid, of course he is – only, I can hardly believe it. What made him do ... what he did? After living with him for nearly two years, that’s the one thing I’d have sworn he’d never do.”

  “Two years?”

  She’d caught his swift, involuntary glance outside, to where the children were chasing round, shouting and laughing now, their cheeks rosy with the cold air. “No, the boys aren’t his. He didn’t want babies, not yet. Their father ... I had this relationship with someone, you see, we started the pottery together. I was lucky he didn’t want his share back when he left,” she finished simply.

  How much would his share have amounted to? Not enough for him, whoever he’d been, this potter, to have given a second thought to leaving it behind when he departed, it seemed. Barely enough, one would have thought, to support the girl and her two children. Mayo said gently, “Can we begin by establishing the last time you saw Mr. Fleming?”

  “It was about half past seven on Monday when he left. He had to get over to Lavenstock to meet someone.”

  “Did he say who?” She shook her head. “Or what it was about?”

  “No, I just supposed he was covering some sort of story, though he did seem excited about it. He said he’d be back as soon as he could make it.”

  “Did he often spend days away like that?”

  “If he had a story to follow up. But he never spent more time away than he had to. He used to say he could relax here with me and recharge his batteries.”

  She went to pull aside the window curtain, ostensibly to check on the children in the garden, but really to make use of a wad of tissue pulled from her pocket. Presently she came back, nervously plucking off the leaf of a tradescantia that tumbled from a shelf above the table while contemplating her feet, shod in flat black lace-ups with thick crepe soles, worn with black woollen stockings. There was a smear of flour on her cheek. “You know he was married?” she asked suddenly in a choked voice, looking up and flushing. “Yes, well ... he hasn’t seen her for years, but she wouldn’t divorce him, you know, she’s a strong Catholic. Not that marriage would have made any difference to us, we didn’t need to make any public vows to prove our commitment.”

  Her naivety was so simple it was nearly unbelievable. Her gaze travelled from one to the other, her eyes beseeching them to believe her, as if this might allow her to believe Fleming’s lies too. She must have known there was nothing to stop Fleming divorcing Georgina if they’d been separated for years, as he said, regardless of either Georgina’s wishes or her religious beliefs, real or invented. Fleming had spun Bryony a tale, just as he’d spun Georgina one. And neither woman had believed him, though both had pretended to, for their own reasons – so what had it been about Rupert Fleming, apart from his arrogant, haughty good looks, that had made his women go along with the doubtful game he played and sorrow for him when he was dead?

  “I once saw her, you know. I got someone to look after the children for the afternoon and I got a bus into Lavenstock. I went to that place where she works, where she has her business, and I saw her.” She didn’t seem to realize she had just sadly, pathetically confirmed what he suspected. She hugged her arms across her chest as if the cold of the room had at last got to her and said without a trace of envy, yet looking very young and vulnerable, “She’s very – good-looking, isn’t she? And very power –” She hesitated, fumbling for the right word but not finding it. “Well, anyway, that’s just what he couldn’t stand about her. Her being so pushy and so unfeminine, the way she made everyone else feel such a fool, it was everything he despised.”

  So much so, thought Mayo sardonically, that he had returned from this rural slumming when it suited him to that smartly-furnished flat, his stylish wife and his expensive suede jackets. Whatever his feelings for Bryony Harper, they hadn’t stood up to sharing her lifestyle permanently, though it seemed to have suited him to put up with the simple poverty of this life for short periods of time. Perhaps because she was everything his wife was not: pliable, warm, loving, undemanding ... but demonstrably unlike his wife in that she was not well off. If he had left Georgina and gone to live permanently with Bryony, how would they have lived? His own earnings hadn’t amounted to a row of beans. He wondered what Bryony had made of the Porsche, the suede jacket, the Rolex.

  And so Fleming had had the best of both worlds, and divided his life between them.

  “To die like that after all the care he took of himself!” She was weeping unashamedly again, unable to stop the flow of tears. At last she abandoned herself totally to the flood, mopping up with the soggy tissues. He waited patiently until it had abated before asking her what she’d meant.

  “Just that he was always so fussy about himself,” she sniffed. “Nothing but wholefood, organic vegetables, things like that. He hardly ever drank – well, not often – and he had a very strict exercise programme. He wasn’t a hypochondriac, don’t think that, but he’d never do anything to injure his health. He so hated the thought of being ill – and dying, well! ... he was terrified of it, really.”

  He said, “Bryony, did you know any of his friends or his associates?”

  As he’d expected, she shook her head, but then she said, “Oh, he did mention once the people connected with that theatre in Lavenstock, what’s it called, the Gaiety? He used to do reports on their productions for the local papers. I think he was writing a feature on it as well, something like that, but I don’t remember any names.”

  “Did he ever mention anyone, however casually, who
had reason to dislike him?”

  “I knew hardly anything about his life outside these four walls. But he wouldn’t have killed himself just because someone didn’t like him, would he? Oh goodness, what are you saying? Are you saying he didn’t kill himself?”

  He could tell her now. It would soon be public knowledge, anyway. “I’m afraid that’s what it looks like.”

  But his cautious answer, rather than distressing her further, seemed to calm her in some strange way. “Poor Rupert,” she said, sounding suddenly vastly older and more experienced. “But I’m so thankful he didn’t have any reason to take his own life.” She lapsed into silence. The voices of the children outside were raised in an excited game. “But he wasn’t really happy, you know. He had such a lot of anger in him. He said I was helping him to learn to let it go and I think I was.”

  “Anger? What about?”

  “The unfairness of everything, the way things never seemed to go right for him, not for long.” She shook her head. “I don’t know, it was all tightly locked up inside him, he could be so secretive. It made him hard and distrustful sometimes, too, but he couldn’t help himself. He was good to me – and he loved the children.” Her voice caught on another sob. “What am I going to do?” she ended desolately.

  Mayo felt exceedingly sorry for the hopelessness of her situation, but at the same time he wanted to tell her to shake herself and get out into the real world, and knew it would do no good, she would take no notice. She was naive and incurably romantic, she would always be at the mercy of her emotions; there’d be another potter, another Rupert Fleming, in time. Life, he was afraid, would always do this to the Bryony Harpers of this world.