The Edge

by Clare Curzon

  Beaumont shifted uncomfortably on the floor. ‘A rifle wouldn’t have been put away loaded. Someone had to find the ammo first.’

  ‘Apparently some .22 bullets were kept right there alongside. Hoad had failed to take full precautions,’ snarled Salmon.

  ‘His wife would know how to open the cabinet,’ Z reminded them. ‘She used to take part in their clay-pigeon shooting parties for her city friends. Why couldn’t she have been the one to remove the rifle?’

  ‘And accidentally shot her old man, mistaking him for a burglar?’ Beaumont demanded sarcastically. ‘Both of them wandering around in the dark because they’d heard a disturbance downstairs? This isn’t a Tom and Jerry cartoon.’

  ‘Imagine an intruder shocked into using the gun, finding he’d killed someone,’ Zyczynski suggested. ‘Wouldn’t he normally make off, not set about wiping out the whole family?’

  ‘Unless you were shit-scared out of your marbles,’ said Beaumont.

  ‘If only we knew how the bugger got in,’ Salmon complained, back to the original tangent.

  ‘At least we know what we need answers for. There’s plenty of scope for further enquiries,’ Yeadings promised, preparing to wind up the meeting. ‘Which is why the CC, in his wisdom, has called in a psychological profiler who will doubtless dog your footsteps and replicate what we’ve already discovered. However, in view of the case’s importance, I expect you to cooperate with him, or her, as far as you are able.’

  On this occasion denied the Boss’s excellent coffee, the two sergeants retired to the canteen for its lesser version and sugar-loaded doughnuts.

  ‘There’s one good thing,’ Beaumont considered, unloading their tray on the only free table, which Z had dived across to claim as they entered. She looked up at him expectantly.

  ‘The press will go to town on the profiling. Slavering over a shrink should keep them off our backs.’

  ‘Not if this one’s glued to us. Honey for the wasps.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope it’s not that starch-faced old biddy from Reading Uni,’ Beaumont prayed. ‘You wouldn’t remember her. It was before your time. Not content with early childhood memories, she was into exploring our sexual fantasies.’

  ‘I guess you fulfilled her requirements in spades.’

  He grinned impishly back at her. ‘That would take all the fun out of it, going public.’

  ‘So how did you handle her?’

  ‘Went all solemn, tried to press a copy of the Watchtower on her. She decided a lifetime wasn’t enough to get me sorted, so she gave up.’

  Z’s quick smile vanished as she tasted her coffee. ‘This is undrinkable.’

  ‘Yup. We have to get back in the Boss’s favour. Which means a return to the galleys and hard graft. I wanted to talk to the boy; get him to dig the family dirt. But I guess he’ll be left to the shrink. Who’s your target?’

  ‘The late Jennifer Hoad. Lovers, existence of; business skulduggery likewise. Just as the Boss said.’

  ‘So a day in London? Are the Oxford Street sales on?’

  She stood up, gave him a withering glance, hoisted her shoulder bag and left him to clear the used crockery.

  There was one duty she must perform before taking the train. She drove out to Fordham and called at the Manor. Mrs Pavitt answered the front door.

  ‘If you want the others they’re out by the caravan.’ She sounded put out, hardly the well-mannered family servant.

  ‘Actually, this other is right here,’ said Anna Plumley, stepping forward out of the hall’s gloom. ‘Good morning, Rosemary. I saw your car down the lane and managed to divert young Daniel. He’s not ready yet for dredging up family history. I assume that’s what this visit is for?’

  ‘Not my job. I just called in to ask how things were.’

  ‘More or less as expected.’ She turned to the housekeeper. ‘Thank you. Mrs Pavitt; don’t let us detain you.’

  They waited while she departed for the kitchen. ‘Come upstairs,’ invited the ex-Squadron Leader. ‘We can keep an eye on my grandson from his bedroom window. He’s out the back, splitting logs.’

  ‘Your suggestion?’

  ‘I said I fancied an open fire, and there was only big stuff available.’

  Z smiled. That was good, keeping him occupied. ‘How is he?’ Anna Plumley hesitated before answering. ‘Confused and frightened. He – he’s more clinging than I care for. This is the first time I’ve been able to leave him on his own.’ They had arrived at the door to his room and went in.

  ‘Last night he was scared to go to bed, so I told him I’d leave my door open. He said he’d do the same, but did I mind moving to the other guest room. I’d put my things in the one nearer the main body of the house. The one he chose was only a few feet nearer his own door, on the far side. I did as he asked. I heard him tossing and turning all night. Then at about two in the morning he got up and shut his door. I heard him dragging a chest across to wedge it fast. At least then it left us both to get some sleep.’

  She crossed close to the window. ‘And now, dammit, that woman’s gone out to put him off his stroke.’

  Z joined her to watch. The boy had moved round the woodpile and spoke over his shoulder to the woman who followed and reached out to touch his shoulder. He swung round and shouted in her face. They heard the anger in his voice but the words didn’t reach them.

  Normal victim behaviour, Z thought. Sharing with her some of the survival guilt he felt for not having been here when it happened. However down-to-earth his grandmother’s approach was, the boy needed professional counselling. The profiler could provide that.

  ‘Isn’t anger a good sign?’ she asked. ‘Progress, of a sort?’

  ‘The victim’s second stage, yes. But I think this is something else. It’s personal. Those two are at daggers-drawn. I’m not convinced we need her around.’

  Z wasn’t so sure. Anna was just the absentee grandmother who had suddenly reappeared from his childhood days. Wasn’t she taking over too forcefully, under the circumstances? Pavitt, after all, was the more familiar, the only one left from his routine home life.

  ‘Don’t you think they’re suffering in much the same way?’ she suggested, ‘and that, once over the shock, they could comfort each other?’

  Anna Plumley grimaced. ‘Quite naturally Mrs Pavitt considers I’m usurping her position to some extent. But I am family. She’s not, however much he’s accustomed to her. I’m sure it’s not good for us to force Daniel into being pig-in-the-middle.’

  She grinned back at Z, quite unfazed by the younger woman’s presumption in questioning her wisdom.

  Beaumont sat a while in his car before starting off to interview the Hoad son. The survivor, he reminded himself. And only a kid really, for all his photo made him look older and quite sophisticated.

  He couldn’t avoid thinking of his own boy in the same situation. Suppose, by some mischance – though perhaps less likely in a policeman’s family than a gentleman farmer’s – someone had broken in at home, armed, and murdered his parents while the kid was out employing some testosterone. What sort of state would he be in when he eventually reached home and learned about it?

  Pretty shattered, he guessed, for all that they weren’t a demonstrative family. It was the sheer incredibility of it, the destruction of all known security, that would hit hardest. It would take a special sort of guts to keep him from falling apart.

  So the Hoad boy, Daniel, would barely be in a fit state to open up to an inquisitive outsider. Z could be right in dealing with him through the grandmother. His own best move would be to make it look as if he was calling to check up on her.

  A hundred yards into the narrow lane leading to Fordham Manor and farm, he turned a corner and came bumper to bumper with Rosemary Zyczynski’s blue Ford Escort. She wound her window down and leaned out, gesturing willingness to reverse, before pulling back in the gateway to a field.

  He drew level and lowered his own passenger window. ‘Thought you were off to La Be
lle Dame’s office in London.’

  ‘Had to pick up something here first. Mrs Hoad’s mobile phone. It should have been collected with the computer. For some reason it had got itself into a kitchen drawer.’

  Unlikely, but he didn’t doubt Z. He wondered if Jennifer Hoad had hidden it there or someone had later tidied it away. He waved thanks for being allowed past and went on down towards the Manor, driving round to the rear where he found the mobile home parked behind a 4x4 and Mrs Plumley seated on the steps reading a paperback book.

  He took his time getting out, conscious of her eyes following him. When he presented his ID she smiled. ‘I had you pointed out at the station. I’m sure you know who I am.’

  ‘Daniel Hoad’s maternal grandmother.’

  ‘Precisely. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Fill me in a little more about the family. Explain, if you can, why anyone should want to do this to the family.’

  ‘I can’t. Nor can I understand how anyone could even consider such savagery. It defies belief.’

  The round eyes in his wooden-puppet face were taking her all in. He didn’t miss the title of the book in which she was marking her place with a surprisingly elegant forefinger. One of those portly women, he recognised, blessed with shapely legs ending in dainty feet, and with small hands to match.

  ‘So you’re reading up on the subject?’

  ‘Ah, this.’ She wagged the paperback casually. ‘Found it in the boy’s bookcase. Quite some years since I read it myself. An interesting study. Do you know it?’

  ‘Not the book. Know the case, of course. Who doesn’t? Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate murders.’

  ‘Yes. A period crime classic. Music, Mayhem, Murder. The book gives a rational assessment of the man: obsessed by Beatlemania, stoned out of his mind, fed on pseudo-scientific, quasi-mystical superstition. Guru to a team of degenerates, LSD freaks, he was the prophet of doom, convinced a black uprising would end in rape, terror, carnage of the whites. Wanted to be the one to save creation, whether as Christ or Antichrist didn’t matter. Simply the evil of the crazed, overblown self. At base a frustrated, pathetic soul soured because he felt his music was under-appreciated.’

  ‘I guess I know more about what he finally did than what he was.

  ‘Which is how we all feel about the Twin Towers perpetrators. Every now and again stuff happens, as the saying goes. We face horrific deeds, fail to comprehend what possesses human creatures to commit such inhuman acts.’

  ‘And that’s how you feel about what happened here? I was hoping you could shed some light. Was there no way at all you could see this coming?’

  She laid the book down on the steps and stood up, coming towards him. ‘Sergeant, I am almost as much a stranger in this place as you are. I should have kept in touch. They were all that was left in this world of my blood. It is too late even for regrets. My business now is to stand by my grandson, do what I can to support him.’

  ‘Was there some reason you kept away?’

  ‘A long-standing difference with my daughter. She considered I always took her husband’s side and opposed her.’

  ‘So it was a divided marriage, husband and wife at loggerheads?’

  ‘Not openly. There were differences of emphasis, of standards. Frankly, my daughter was a wanton. Freddie deserved something better than to be used as a chequebook, but he accepted the way things were. Not that I ever believed their lives could end in such a tragic way.’

  ‘End because of their differences?’ He wasn’t sure that she had implied that.

  ‘Oh no. This is something else. What happened arose from some totally unrelated cause. I’m convinced of that. I wouldn’t have spoken out otherwise.’

  ‘Does your grandson think the same?’

  ‘He doesn’t know what to believe. He’s avoiding thinking at all at the moment. I was just going to call him in for some coffee. Will you join us?’

  She went to fetch Daniel while Beaumont riffled through the pages of the paperback. The boy arrived with his hands still wet from rinsing them under the garden tap, and there were fragments of bark clinging to his sweater. ‘Been topping up the kindling for Gran,’ he excused himself. His palms were red and sore-looking.

  Beaumont kept his questions to a minimum, mainly concerning the date he’d booked for scout camp and who ran the show.

  ‘Do you have to bother them?’ the boy demanded. ‘I’d rather they weren’t dragged into family matters.’

  ‘Probably shan’t need to,’ Beaumont allowed. ‘We already know where you were that weekend. Routine questions we’re obliged to ask everyone. Even your grandmother, while I’m at it.’

  She shrugged. ‘My alibi? I don’t think I’ve got one. Home alone. My husband’s down in Devon, fishing. I never go along. Sitting on a bank and waiting bores me to distraction, and he deserves a little time on his own.’

  ‘Can you remember phoning anyone? Watching some TV programme?’

  ‘I’d a heap of ironing to do. I’d left it to Friday night, and ran a couple of CDs while I was at it: Mahler and the Max Bruck Violin Concerto. Then I had supper and went to bed, sleeping through until almost four when the height of the storm reached us. It brought a tree down across the road about fifty yards from the house. Quite a crash.’ Her gaze swept the caravan’s interior. ‘Thank heaven it missed this.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Zyczynski was met at Miradec Interiors, Knightsbridge, by the person she had spoken to on the telephone. Until then she was uncertain as to his sex. His name was Hilary Durham, sleek and practised by voice, but less so in appearance.

  He had tried hard. The suit was right, his silk shirt expensive, but despite that his efforts with them were incompetent. His collar bagged at the neck, the tie was knotted too tightly, his cuffs – too long – showed old stains inexpertly laundered. And then there was his hair, the colour and texture of straw, mostly greased flat but defiant at the crown, so that he reminded her of a tufted duck.

  He apologised for the absence of Jennifer Hoad’s PA, delayed in Paris, tying up loose ends. Mrs Hoad’s death had been so unexpected they were all caught out, so to speak.

  ‘So there’s a French connection,’ Z commented with apparent innocence.

  ‘We have an office in France, yes. It deals with continental art imports. Not my department. I’m responsible for the planning and overseeing of work in hand. Well, I trained as an architect, but never sat my finals. Too much accountancy and law involved. Wanted to get to the nitty-gritty, if you know what I mean. Mrs Hoad called me her “Ideas Man”.’

  ‘She valued you, then.’

  ‘I like to think so.’ For all that, he looked uncertain. Z had never seen a man actually wring his hands but Durham was on the brink of it, clasping them together now as the words tumbled out, then beating one fist into the other palm until jerking them nervously apart like a small child reprimanded for a nasty habit.

  ‘And what was Mrs Hoad’s own function?’

  ‘She made the contacts and ran the business side. She was very good with the clients. And she had wonderful taste.’

  Z could believe that: the office was proof of it. An elegant archway led into a salon with off-white leather sofas and three giant screens, presumably for viewing videos of decor on offer. The walls were covered in matt paint: one jade, one turquoise, one muted orange. Vegetation overflowing high-gloss ceramics suggested rape of a tropical rain forest.

  ‘Did Mrs Hoad have a business partner?’ Z asked. ‘I mean, who’s in charge now?’

  He turned a tortured face to her. ‘There’s nobody. That’s what we need to know. What’s going to happen to the company? We could all be out of a job.’ His long, unhappy features flickered with angst.

  ‘Don’t worry. The executors will arrange to keep everything going until they find what arrangements Mrs Hoad had made.’

  But were there any? Jennifer, fully occupied with the enjoyment of life had had no intention of yielding to untimely death. So what
need for contingency plans? So far there had been no will lodged with their solicitor in Aylesbury.

  The phone rang on the smaller of the two executive desks. Stuttering excuses, Hilary Durham scuttled towards it, halted with a hand over the instrument and seemed to pull himself straighter before venturing to answer. He took a deep breath and produced the sleek, practised voice Z too had heard over the phone.

  He seemed to know his subject. Without consulting any catalogue he reeled off details of ornamental coving and fireplaces, gave advice, and appeared to placate what had been a doubtfully aggrieved client with a promise to visit next day.

  Leaving him to it, Z moved into the salon and gazed through the broad, smoked-glass window into the road outside. A silver satin-finish Porsche had just driven into the vacant parking place opposite and a young man got out, flipped his jacket from the passenger seat and dived through the doorway of Miradec Interiors. His quick glance around took in the situation. He beamed on Zyczynski. ‘How may I help you?’

  May, not can: Z liked that. His appearance was as studied as his choice of words. Even as he slid his arms into the sleeves of his impeccable jacket it was for effect: boyishly caught out being casual, almost intimate.

  ‘You may tell me a few things I need to know about your company,’ she told him, opening her wallet to display her ID.

  ‘Police. Oh God, Jennifer! It’s about her, then?’ His dark, handsome face crumpled.

  ‘And whatever you can tell me about the business.’

  He stared past her, considering. ‘That’s the simpler part. Jennifer herself was more complex. Look, take a seat. I’ll get Hilary to run out for some coffee now he’s stopped wittering on. There’s a Starbucks almost next door. How do you like yours?’

  ‘A large espresso, please.’

  ‘Good. Two, then. I can’t stand all that foaming milk on my lips that you get with cappuccino. Danish or muffin or something creamy?’