A Death of Distinction (20 page)

‘Morning, Henry.'

Ison, the police surgeon, was kneeling on the floor beside the body of a woman, half-dressed beneath an open dressing-gown. A sticky red stain spread across the front of her pink slip. She lay on the carpet, across the front of a bed-settee. A gas fire fixed to the wall had evidently been left on. Though now switched off, it had left the small room unbearably overheated. The smell of death was nauseating, the feeling of violence palpable.

Ison flapped a hand in greeting. ‘Be with you in a minute, Gil. Thought you were T-L. Taking his time, isn't he?'

‘He'll be along shortly. Finishing off a PM, I'm told.'

Abigail and Mayo stood bunched awkwardly at the door, careful not to touch anything, looking in at the room, every detail of which was visible from the doorway: the bed-settee, taking up a lot of the available space, two wooden-armed, upholstered chairs with splayed legs, one of them overturned, coffee table ditto, a small sideboard, a curtained alcove with the curtains drawn back, revealing a neatly made bed and a single wardrobe. A door at the opposite end of the room presumably led to a kitchen of sorts. The open door of a shared bathroom and lavatory was behind them on the landing.

‘Who is she?'

‘Avril Kitchin. Worked at the house agent's in Lorrimer Street, Search and Sell. Lived here about twelve months.' Abigail paused. ‘Before that, she'd been doing time.' Mayo raised his eyebrows. ‘The flat was found for her by her probation officer.'

‘How was she discovered?'

‘Mr Johnson downstairs, the landlord, found her. He came upstairs to start redecorating the next flat, presently empty – the attic flat's occupied by a single girl, but she's off with her boyfriend somewhere just now – and saw the door wide open, with her on the floor, as you see her.'

‘Somebody broke in and attacked her, hm?' Mayo could see her handbag, lying on the floor beside her, the contents spilling out.

‘Not so much
broke
in. The outside door at the bottom's never locked after the milk's been taken in at about seven-thirty, apparently. No sign of forced entry up here – so this door wasn't locked, either, or else she let in whoever did it. Or they had a key. But more likely they were after money – purse, cheque book and credit cards seem to have gone missing from her handbag.'

Ison snapped his bag shut and got to his feet, removing himself out of Dexter's way. ‘OK, I've finished, Sergeant. You can have a bit more leg room now. Straightforward stabbing,' he said to Mayo as he reached the door. ‘In or near the heart. Difficult thing to achieve, to hit exactly the right place without catching a rib. So the killer was either lucky, or knew what he was doing.'

‘The weapon?'

‘Steel knitting needle, left on the floor.'

‘Here, sir,' Dexter said, holding up a tagged plastic bag with the grey enamelled needle inside it, and indicating a bundle of fluffy yellow knitting, resembling a dead chicken, lying on the carpet in front of the bed-settee.

‘Size twelve needle, fairly thin, which is why there isn't as much blood as you might expect,' added Ison. ‘Though there was probably a good deal of internal bleeding.'

‘Has she been raped?' The victim appeared to have been dressing when she was interrupted. A coral-coloured blouse and a light brown skirt were draped over a chair. What clothing she was wearing appeared to be undisturbed, apart from her pink, fleecy dressing-gown being unfastened. But it was a question that had to be asked, nowadays, whether the victim was eight or eighty.

‘Not interfered with at all, as far as I can tell. She was spared that.'

‘How long –' began Mayo.

‘A matter of an hour or thereabouts, probably not much more. She's still warm. Say around eight o'clock. Difficult to say exactly with the gas fire on. As for anything else, I'm only here to certify life's extinct, you'll have to wait until Timpson-Ludgate opens her up for the drama – though I doubt there'll be any surprises. Right, I'll leave you to it and see what I can do for Mrs Johnson downstairs. She's understandably a mite upset. Give me a buzz if there's anything else I can do.'

Brisk, bespectacled, like a small beaver, he inched past them and clattered down the stairs.

‘I just don't know,' Mrs Johnson sighed, in the spotless surroundings of her downstairs sitting room, after Ison had left. She was calmer now, dispensing home-made ginger cakes and pouring tea – not, Mayo noticed to his satisfaction, into mugs (what the hell did you do with the spoon?), but into violet-sprigged china cups with matching saucers. ‘I don't know, you think you're doing right, trying to help, and then this happens. I won't do it no more, I tell you that.'

‘Now then, Pearl!' Her husband put an arm around her plump shoulders and squeezed. ‘She's upset,' he explained apologetically. ‘We offered to take Mrs Kitchin in when we was asked, we try to do the best we can, you know. Pearl, these people need help, you know that.'

The Johnsons were a Jamaican-born couple of late middle-age who had struggled for twenty years to keep up the mortgage on their house. When their four children had left home, they'd converted the bedroom and attic floors into three flats in order to pay off what they owed to the building society. Through their local church, they'd been approached to take in occasional released prisoners as tenants. ‘And up to now, we've had no trouble of this sort, no trouble at all,' Mrs Johnson said.

‘Be fair,
she
was no trouble, neither. Pearl,' Leroy Johnson gently reminded her. ‘Kept herself to herself and no bother.'

‘Well, that's right,' his wife conceded. ‘I have to say that. The bathroom always left nice and clean, and no wasting the hot water, even when that other one was here.'

‘What other one was this, Mrs Johnson?' Abigail asked.

‘The friend who stayed with her.'

‘Never did think we should've allowed that, you know,' put in her husband, ‘that flat's not big enough. Not to say they was getting two for the price of one! But we reckoned, if she was another one down on her luck, we'd turn a blind eye for the moment, especially as Mrs Kitchin – Avril – seemed so happy to have her here. Never saw her smile until her friend came. Well... anyway, she left a few weeks ago.'

‘What was her name?'

The couple looked at each other. The husband frowned. ‘Not sure. We hardly saw her, never mind spoke to her.'

‘Mary Lou,' said Pearl Johnson suddenly, ‘That's what Mrs Kitchin used to call her – Mary Lou, or some such. She wasn't English.'

‘American?'

‘No, oh, no, not American. More like French or something, I'd say.'

Mayo put his cup and saucer down on the small lace mat that had been provided. Abigail said, ‘Could it have been Marie-Laure, Mrs Johnson?'

‘Why, that's right! That's just what it was.'

Abigail glanced at Mayo. He was perfectly still, but gave the impression that whereas before he'd been coasting along in neutral, he was now, suddenly, in top gear, as though the engine was running light and swift.

‘What sort of woman was Avril Kitchin?' Abigail was asking.

Mrs Johnson shrugged. ‘All right, you know. All right. I didn't know her well. We hardly spoke, all the time she was here.' As if realizing how she was damning the woman with faint praise, she added, ‘She was no trouble, and I can't say more than that.'

‘What about visitors?'

‘We never saw any. Except maybe a young chap, a couple of times that I know of, but that was only when her friend was here. She had her own doorbell.'

‘Could you describe this young man?'

But it had been dark the time Mrs Johnson had passed him on her way out, and the next time she'd only seen the back of him through the window. She'd only had a vague impression and wouldn't commit herself to describing anything about him.

Mayo stood up. ‘Thank you for your help, Mr and Mrs Johnson. You've been very cooperative. Sorry for all the disruption, we'll try and let you get back to normal as soon as possible. If you need anything, any help, just ask one of my men.'

The body would not be moved to the mortuary until the pathologist, Timpson-Ludgate, had seen it. He still hadn't arrived, and now that fewer people were around, Mayo went back upstairs for a closer look, taking the stairs two at a time.

He paused at the top, scanning the room, again from the vantage point of the doorway. A typical bedsitter, minimally furnished. Almost aggressively clean, the net curtains starched and white, the floorboards polished around the square of cheap carpet. Nothing personal to prettify the place, no photographs, no books. The cream-painted walls were bare, not even a Suzie Wong department-store picture. The yellow knitting hadn't been removed and still lay on the floor, a complicated piece of work which appeared to be the almost-finished sleeve of a jumper, pulled free of the needle which had been plunged into the woman's chest. Its companion was still stuck into the ball of fluffy wool. The killer hadn't come armed with a weapon, then. Yet an opportunist thief, surprised in the act of filching the missing contents of the handbag, seemed an unlikely scenario, given the time of day, before people had left for work: miscreants didn't normally enter premises when there was the likelihood of encountering anyone.

Something in the thought set up an echo of a previous conjecture, but when Mayo tried to grasp it that was all it was, an echo, gone like lost footsteps.

A quarrel, had it been, then? Better, though the Johnsons had heard no struggle, no sounds of anyone coming or going, they'd seen nothing. But he could sense violence in the room. There was something not only murderous, but vengeful, about that knitting needle.

If the victim had been the knitter, she'd been clever enough with her hands to fashion an intricate piece of work, though they were stubby fingered, thick and clumsy looking. He studied her more closely. Alive, she couldn't have been physically attractive. A sturdily built woman with heavy shoulders and muscly legs. A broad face with coarse features. Death had wiped away all traces of anything which might have moderated this impression. He was left with a strong, if unjustified, feeling that she'd been unlovely and unloved, a desolate epitaph for anyone. As always with murder, he felt an immense sadness at the waste of a life, a life in this case that had led a woman to a prison sentence and was unlikely to have been a happy one. He wondered what she'd been inside for, which prison it was where she had met Marie-Laure Daventry.

He walked to the window and stood looking out over a narrow strip of back garden, bisected by a concrete path – flower borders and grass on one side, neat rows of vegetables on the other. Terminated by a six-foot wooden fence separating it from the back garden of the house in the next street. Hands in pockets, he watched a lean tabby cat strut between the rows of Mr Johnson's cabbages and Brussels sprouts.

Marie-Laure. She seemed to have an unfortunate habit of being around when murder happened. It occurred to him also that the name Daventry was cropping up with rather too much regularity to be coincidental. First in connection with Flora Lilburne, now this. He suddenly recalled the letter to Lilburne, its precise phrasing. Non-English? The spiky-looking handwriting – Continental? From Marie-Laure, in fact? The same woman, perhaps, with whom he'd stayed at the Gravely Arms, the one he'd met behind Claudia Reynolds's cottage? Mayo checked this unsupported theory before it ran away with him and turned back to Dexter.

‘Tell me what you've found so far, Dave.'

‘No prints, apart from the victim's – not even on the needle, but we'd have been lucky if there were. Gloves, I suppose, but then, you don't normally grab a knitting needle with your fingertips, and if you use it for what this was used for, you'd hold it in your fist.' He demonstrated with a graphic, downward thrust of his balled fist.

‘I see what you mean.'

‘Blood, possibly. And some contact fibres on her slip. Dark-coloured, but I wouldn't care to say what type until we've had them analysed. And the knitting wool's angora, which sheds hairs all over the place. The killer could hardly have avoided getting some on his clothing when he picked the knitting up. Maybe some of her hairs, too – she didn't appear to have finished doing her hair – only one side's fastened with a slide.'

Mayo grunted. ‘First find your suspect – then hope he hasn't got rid of what lie was wearing.' Macabre, though – that last, intimate exchange, the close contact of bodies, that obscene conjunction which left something of the killer at the locus of the crime, and transferred to him some unsuspected trace of his victim. ‘Did she struggle?'

‘No apparent signs of it. Doc Ison says there were no bruises.' Mayo thought it likely she'd been taken by surprise, looking at the position of the body where it lay, suggesting that the chair and table had been overturned as she fell.

‘Well, keep at it, Dave, keep me informed.'

‘That's not all, sir.' Dexter, who had a quirky sense of timing, had been keeping the best until last. ‘Looks like we've found the typewriter. An Olympia 66, anyway. Haven't tried it out yet, of course, but at first glance, I'd say it fits the bill.' Mayo peered through the film of polythene now enclosing it and discerned a shabby, leatherette-covered zipped case. He recalled his feeling that the two communications hadn't been from the same person. But if Marie-Laure hadn't sent the typed one, then presumably Avril Kitchin had.

Where the devil did she fit into all this?

Abigail was at the foot of the stairs, talking to one of the uniformed sergeants. A house-to-house call on the neighbours was being organized. It was routine, it would have to be done, but it probably wouldn't yield much. In this street of houses turned into flats, bedsitters and student pads, strangers came and went, nobody noticed, or minded anyone else's business. One day you had one neighbour, the next a new one, or several. Scarcely anyone knew who lived next door to them, or cared.