It was the sort of ironic joke it amused Lois to tell against herself, in other circumstances. Now she wasn’t even faintly amused. Nor was Alex. “I thought your room looked bare,” was all she said.
“Because the next day I cleared everything else away too, so you wouldn’t notice the missing things, my love. What was left looked so stupid, somehow, on their own, just dotted about. Well ... it was quite a haul he got away with.”
“In money terms, how much?”
“Actually, about six and a half thousand, in all,” she answered after a pause.
“Six and a half – !”
“They’re mostly what I’ve picked up at sales, over the years,” she said defensively. “And I don’t suppose I’d ever get them back, but I’ve got records if you want to see them. And photographs, too. I’m prepared now because I’ve been burgled a couple of times before ... but never by someone I – oh God, I just feel so sick when I think of it.”
Alex murmured comforting things. Mayo said nothing. Questions were piling up in his brain. Why had Fleming come to Lois for money? Why hadn’t he borrowed from Georgina? Why had he needed it? Was it to pay off Cockayne, who’d maybe been trying a spot of blackmail, because he knew it was Fleming who’d killed Mitch? Or had he been going to make a bid to get away from Cockayne, for the same reason? But if so, why had he then gone on to the theatre, and once there, why had Cockayne plied him with the spiked whisky, driven him to Scotley Beeches, where he’d shot him and then made off, presumably with the valuables Fleming had stolen and the thirty pounds Lois had given him?
It made no sense. God dammit, nothing made sense, this case was getting on his nerves! It was giving him a bad headache, of the sort he hadn’t had in years. Nothing seemed to look the right way up, as if he were looking at a photograph printed the wrong way round, or Lois’s reflection in the glass.
He rubbed his hand across his face, all at once realizing how little sleep he’d had over the last week. But he was used to going without sleep, especially when he was on a case like this. The will to carry on, with just the occasional cat-nap, came from somewhere as long as you kept going along with it. It had been a mistake to stop and relax, he should have known that. But he shouldn’t be feeling this rotten. You only got like this when you couldn’t cope, he thought in disgust. Symbolic rejection, or something.
“You all right, Gil?” Alex was looking at him with concern.
“Just tired. Bushed, in fact. Think I’ll be making tracks.”
He’d leave his car and walk home, the brisk night air would revive him and he’d be able to think more clearly. Lois had been telling him something important and he needed to sort it out.
She stood up to leave. “Don’t go because of me, I need an early night anyway. No thanks, I have my car,” she said to Mayo, wrongly anticipating the offer of a lift. “Good night.”
He waited until Alex had seen her sister to the door. He appreciated Lois’s somewhat heavy-handed tact, and knew also this was going to be one of the nights he would be invited to stay with Alex, but he doubted if he even wanted to. He knew now, despite his tiredness, that he was in for a sleepless night. Probably fall into bed poleaxed, sleep for a couple of hours and that would be it. Wake in the middle of the night, turning the case over in his mind. Get up to make the inevitable pot of tea. But he had the strongest disinclination to leave his comfortable chair that he’d ever had in his life and when Lois had gone he sank back, bone weary, into it.
He woke during the night with a stiff neck and an excruciating pain in his gut, for a moment wondering where the hell he was, and only just made it to the bathroom before he threw up and lost his prawn sandwiches.
After that, further sleep was impossible. He lay stretched out on the sofa in the living room, waiting to feel less as though someone had kicked him hard with a heavy boot in the midriff. The last time this had happened to him had been on his honeymoon with Lynne, when they’d eaten oysters. The memory was still painful and humiliating enough for him not to want to think of it in relation to his present unhappy state. He thought, but of other things. About what Lois had said. About her distorted reflection and the series of images and discoveries that floated before him. And as if his mind as well as his body had been purged and emptied, and feeling better now that he knew his malaise had a physical cause, some of the answers to much of what had been puzzling him over Rupert Fleming’s death became clearer to him.
A reasonably early homecoming, a decent home-cooked meal with two helpings of pudding, the kids in bed and a quiet evening in front of the fire because there was only the usual rubbish on the telly ... it was Kite’s idea of heaven at that particular moment.
“If you’re going to go to sleep,” Sheila said, switching off another chance to see a situation comedy repeat, “I may as well go and do the ironing.”
“Have a heart! What else do you expect after a meal like that, brilliant conversation?”
“After not seeing you ad week, it’s not unreasonable to expect something. After making you that bread-and-butter pudding, against my better judgement. You’ll be getting fat, as well as losing your powers of speech.”
Kite stretched his skinny length and grinned lazily. “Not bad, that pud. You’re learning. Nearly as good as the one my mother used to make.”
Sheila aimed a cushion at his head, which he neatly fielded. “No stopping you when it comes to the compliments, is there, my lad? Well, aren’t you even going to ask me about Georgina Culver?” she demanded.
Kite sat up, blinking himself properly awake. He’d forgotten all about that. It seemed like a hundred years ago since she’d mentioned it. It wasn’t all that important, the fact that Sheila had been at school with Fleming’s wife, but it might be useful in giving them some background information on the investigation and he oughtn’t to have forgotten it. Anything connected with this screwy case which might throw some light into a dark corner would be welcome.
“What about Georgina Culver, then?”
Sheila hesitated before going on. “Martin, I know you never talk much about your work at home …”
“No love, I don’t. I come home to unwind,” Kite interrupted gently. “I’m hardly ever away from the job as it is, without bringing it home as well.”
She smiled. “I know, I’m not getting at you. But I’ve been thinking,” she said. She put another log on the fire, then sat on the hearthrug, hugging her knees, the lamplight shining on her rumpled curly brown hair. Her face needed doing and she looked about sixteen, the age she’d been when Kite had first met her, when she’d ridden her bicycle into the back of his ... typical of Sheila, if he’d but known it then, who’d been born accident-prone. Spontaneous, warm-hearted, energetic, her progress through life was attended by a series of minor mishaps. Even now, when she’d succeeded in carving out a career for herself in personnel management after the boys were old enough to be less of a tie, there was always something ... locking herself out of the house, giving a cup of tea and a sandwich to a tramp who then walked off with the electric hedge clippers she’d left out on the lawn ... setting fire to the vacuum cleaner by picking up an unused match, for heaven’s sake!
Kite grinned and reached out to the table by his side and held up the coffee pot. Sheila passed her mug and when he’d refilled it, she said, “I suppose you’re looking for somebody who might have had a grudge against Rupert Fleming?”
“That’s the general idea. Are you suggesting by any chance Georgina Fleming might have had one?”
“I’m hardly qualified to say that! Anyway, she wasn’t anyone I knew very well, she was younger than me, further down the school. She was in the netball team for a while when I was captain, though, and I remember her as very sharp and clever. You never knew what she was thinking.”
“Things don’t change,” Kite said feelingly.
“I don’t suppose they do. She was always winning prizes, expected to be brilliant at something or other ... it seemed to surprise everyone when she got enga
ged so young – apparently the Head was very disappointed. I’d left school then, but I remember hearing about it on the old girls’ grapevine.”
“But she didn’t marry Fleming until after she’d finished with college ... and it hasn’t stopped her from making a pretty successful career for herself.”
“I’m not talking about Rupert Fleming. I’m talking about Tim Salisbury. She got engaged to him when she was seventeen and they were going to be married. There was talk of her not going to college, even. But she did, and then married Rupert Fleming instead.”
“Tim Salisbury? Well, well. Yes, I see where your thoughts are tending. You think Salisbury might have been harbouring a grudge against Fleming for pinching his girl. But that’s a heck of a long time to bear resentment, and besides, Salisbury’s married to someone else – his wife’s a very beautiful woman. Anybody married to her isn’t likely to be sniffing around elsewhere, take it from me. He’s besotted with her. With very good reason, I might say.”
“I’ve heard that on the grapevine too,” Sheila responded rather coolly. “But is she besotted with him?”
“Ah. You mean Susan Salisbury and Rupert Fleming? And Tim Salisbury murdering Fleming out of jealousy ... for taking first Georgina, then Susan?” Kite shook his head. “Complicated. And it won’t do. That aspect of it – I mean the possibility of Susan Salisbury and Rupert Fleming being connected – it was one of the first things we checked up on. And discounted.”
“Oh well, it was just a thought. Silly, really.”
“No, it’s not, love. I’m glad you mentioned it, but I doubt if it’s going to make any difference at this stage.”
FOURTEEN
“I could not get the ring without the finger.”
MAYO LEARNED NEXT MORNING, with that slight sense of victimisation and injury of the unfairly afflicted, that although both Lois and Alex had eaten the shell fish, neither had been affected. Only one, though, he thought sourly, it needed only one. The one he’d eaten.
He still felt as though he might, with very great probability, die, but a day at home at this stage in the investigation, as Alex suggested, wasn’t on, not even to be contemplated. Nothing would have kept him away from his office now, anyway. He went in as soon as he decently could and told Kite briefly of the new developments, arranging to discuss them more fully with him later, ignoring the sergeant’s quizzical glance at his whey face. There were still things he wanted to get clear in his mind which he felt better able to deal with alone than with Kite hovering sympathetically at his shoulder.
Out of interest, before he left Mayo alone in his office, Kite told him about his conversation with Sheila the previous evening. “If we’d known there’d been any connection between Salisbury and Georgina Fleming in the first place, it might’ve saved a lot of bother checking it out, but it’s academic now, seeing it’s Cockayne we’re after.”
Mayo doodled thoughtfully on his scratch pad. “I don’t know, I think I’d still like to have a word with him. He was once attached to Georgina, and maybe we shouldn’t ignore that. We haven’t got hands on our murderer yet.” He stared down at the papers on his desk in so preoccupied and concentrated a manner that Kite was obliged to clear his throat to remind his superior that he was still in the room. “All right, yes, let’s have a talk to friend Salisbury – but we’ll do it here. I don’t fancy trying to get anything sensible out of him while he’s got one eye hovering over that wife of his.”
He spent the next hour apparently doing nothing, and then sent for his sergeant again, who came in bearing a stack of new reports and said that he’d put out a trace for the items Fleming had stolen, though without much hope of results. They might, or might not, turn up sometime later, but where was anybody’s guess. If Cockayne now had them, as seemed likely, he wouldn’t have tried to get rid of them until he was well clear of Lavenstock, if he’d any sense, and by now he’d be miles away, his car probably abandoned ...
Kite broke off and gave Mayo an anxious look. “Excuse my saying so, but wouldn’t you be better at home and in bed?”
Mayo saw that Alex had told Kite what had happened, who as a recently recovered invalid himself, and having had the benefit of a good night’s sleep, probably felt entitled to be concerned, but Mayo wasn’t having any. “No thank you, Martin, I would not be better at home and in bed.”
“We can manage for the rest of the day, surely. You look terrible.”
“I’m all right, dammit!” Mayo rubbed a hand over his face, then smiled faintly. “As a matter of fact, though I may still look like death warmed up, I’m on top of the world.”
“You reckon?” Kite replied sceptically.
“Halfway up Everest, anyway. Look, get hold of Dexter and ask him what the hell he’s doing with that fingerprint report –”
“Funny you should ask, he’s on his way over with it, he wants to see you.”
“Does he? About time, too. Send him up as soon as he arrives. And come in yourself, I think you might find it interesting. Meanwhile, I do believe some hot tea and a bit of toast wouldn’t come amiss.”
Dexter was a thin man with sparse sandy hair and a misleading air of anxious uncertainty that concealed extreme efficiency and positiveness.
“You’ve got the report for me? Good, sit down then, Dave.” Dexter placed his little bombshell on Mayo’s desk, sat down and waited.
Mayo scanned the report quickly; then he read it again, more slowly. He leaned back and stared at the wall opposite. Then he smiled at Dexter and handed over the report to his sergeant, watched while Kite read. “Well?”
“Hell’s bells,” said Kite.
“You’re sure about this, Dave?” Mayo asked, but only for form’s sake.
“Yes,” said Dexter.
Dexter was an expert. He could read fingerprints like other people read faces. They believed him without question, without need of the proof positive before them in the shape of the official report complete with diagrams, photographs and the rest, when he said the prints in Cockayne’s office and in his home, all over his personal belongings – his papers, his toothbrush and razor – were identical with the fingerprints of the dead man in the car.
“Well,” Mayo said.
All feelings of still being vaguely unwell had gone. Some colour had reappeared in his cheeks and excitement lit his eyes, making them silver-grey, like mercury. His thoughts were clocking round at a furious rate. It was not too much to say that he suddenly felt born-again, or at the very least as if he’d spent a week at a health farm. What Dexter said confirmed the conclusions he’d groped towards during the small hours. At last he knew the cause of his own unease with the case. The photograph had appeared to be the wrong way round because he’d been looking at it back to front. The shot victim was Ashleigh Cockayne, not Rupert Fleming. And it might justifiably be assumed, therefore, that it was Fleming who was the murderer, not only of Cockayne, but of Mitch too.
“I need a boot up the backside for not thinking of it before,” he admitted to Kite, when Dexter had gone. “There was something that wasn’t quite right, something offbeam about this whole set-up, even from the beginning. I’ve been a blithering idiot not to have seen it before, because I think I had some sort of inkling right from when I picked up that jacket at the scene of the crime.”
“What had that to do with it?” Kite asked.
“I ought to have spotted earlier that it didn’t belong to the dead man. Whoever he was, he must’ve been a heavy smoker – his fingers were deeply nicotine-stained, Timpson-Ludgate remarked on it – but the jacket didn’t smell of cigarette smoke. It would’ve reeked if it had belonged to that body. And remember what Bryony Harper said about Fleming being so health-conscious? Is it likely he’d have smoked and run the risk of lung cancer? And I think we shall find that the forensic report will give us a bit more,” he went on. “Whoever wore the jacket had been sweating profusely. Not Cockayne’s sweat, I’ll bet. Nor his hairs on the collar, or his skin flakes on the fabric.”
&
nbsp; “Fleming,” Kite said. “Good grief, yes, it has to be. He of all people would’ve known how to get hold of Culver’s gun ... and it explains the pills and the booze. They may’ve been Georgina’s pills, ten to one they were, but it wasn’t Fleming who drank the whisky.”
“Right. He was the one who made the suggestion that Cockayne should take young Trish out to look for a taxi to take her home. He’d also suggested a drink to Cockayne – who, one gathers, wouldn’t need much persuading – and he’d know where Cockayne kept his whisky. Easy enough then to pour two glasses, while Cockayne was down below, doping one of them, then when Cockayne began to feel drowsy, to suggest driving him home. And instead drive him to Scotley Beeches. Despite what Underwood thought he saw, I’m satisfied Fleming wasn’t drunk, only staggering from holding Cockayne up, already woozy. By the time they reached the forest Cockayne would be out for the count. So all Fleming had to do was drag him out of the passenger seat and into the front one, leave his own jacket on the other seat, substitute his own wristwatch and his wallet for Cockayne’s, and then shoot him with the gun he’d pinched from Culver, turning Cockayne’s head first towards the window. He was shot directly in the face to make sure his features were obliterated to the point where he was virtually unrecognisable. Not possible for anyone to have done this from outside the car if he was sitting facing forward. And of course, the suicide note on the dash would’ve been left by Fleming himself. As far as getting away went, there’d be his car – Cockayne’s car, that is, which he’d driven there earlier in the day, left somewhere accessible, ready for getting away.”
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