A Species of Revenge (7 page)

He couldn't tear himself away from the window. He hadn't been able to bring himself so much as to look at a child since it had happened, but now he indulged himself, watching the three energetic bodies in the garden, the brown limbs flashing. From this distance Sarah could have been an older sister. She wasn't pretty until she smiled, then she was enchanting. Allie had the same quality.

He'd never before painted a living figure, but the desire to do so was suddenly overwhelming – a kind of catharsis? He doubted whether he'd even ask for permission, he'd look such a bloody fool if it should turn out badly, as it might well do.

Sarah called a halt, declaring it was too hot for more, and all three of them flopped down in a laughing heap on to the grass. Fitzallan found the beginnings of a smile in himself, too. It felt to have been a very long time since he'd last smiled, and stranger still that he welcomed it. In the last few years he'd gone through his own private hell, but now he was suddenly sick of himself and what he'd become. He wanted to rejoin the human race.

Rodney Shepherd returned home with his wife from his holiday in the Canaries with a fine deep tan, several bottles of cheaply acquired wine in his baggage and a few extra pounds around his waistline which he could have done without. Despite this last, he was well pleased with life. He remarked to his wife, as they picked the Rover up from the long-stay car park at the airport in Birmingham and drove home, that their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration holiday had been one to remember. They'd escaped both sunburn and travellers' trots, the hotel had been brilliant – two swimming pools – that foreign food hadn't been half bad, really, but it was great to be home and how about some good old fish and chips from Fryer Tuck's for supper –?

‘What the hell does that fool think he's doing, parking there?' he demanded, braking hard after manoeuvring the car down the narrow entry and around the corner to the back of his premises.

Rodney was an electrical supplier, he and Moira lived in the flat above the shop in Colley Street, and the only parking space he had was in the tiny yard behind the shop. It was awkward enough to get into at the best of times, the access lane behind being so narrow, but now a dark-red car was carelessly parked just before the double gates, leaving several feet of its front end protruding across them.

‘You'll not get the Rover in. Rod,' Moira said, unwisely.

‘You see if I damn well won't,' answered Rodney, his bonhomie quickly evaporating, macho instincts taking its place.

‘You'll scratch the paintwork.'

‘Not mine, I won't. He gets an inch off his, tough! No way am I going knocking on doors halfway down to Lavenstock to find who it belongs to. Some buggers'll park anywhere for free.'

But it was the three gins he'd had on the aircraft talking. Rodney wouldn't have dreamed of damaging any car if he could help it, no matter whose it was, never mind a car like that. He'd more respect for a good paint job, and with some fancy manoeuvring, and a lot of swearing, he successfully squeezed his own car past, though he'd no space to turn into the yard, the access being to his premises only, and ending at the point where high chain-link fencing separated it from the supermarket car park next door.

‘Professor Kendrick, Cambridge? Good Lord. Surprising world we live in!' declared Dermot that evening, once more having arrived home too late to see the girls before they went to bed. He wasn't used to what he called ‘office hours' and had evidently made up for it by spending the intervening time somewhere convivial. ‘Professor Kendrick!' he repeated. His eyes were bright with malicious amusement.

‘I don't know about professor,' Sarah said, ‘but yes, I think he
was
at Cambridge.'

‘Then it's sure to be the same one. He was a lecturer there we went out to do a story on some scandal he was connected with, years ago – though I only remember vaguely what it was.'

But there'd been nothing vague about Dermot's reaction to the name. He hadn't needed to think, and Sarah was sure he hadn't forgotten the circumstances, either. Dermot rarely forgot anything to do with his work. She wondered what his reasons were for keeping it to himself, but she didn't press him in view of what she might have to tell him later.

He said, with a pretence of casualness, ‘Well, I shall probably know him when I see him – it's tomorrow we're bidden to this welcome shindig, isn't it? God, how suburban!'

‘It's a way of getting to know people. I think it's very nice of the Kendricks to take the trouble to introduce us – well, you,' Sarah said primly and rather pointedly. Though it had been Imogen Loxley who'd first telephoned to issue the invitation, who'd responded with alacrity to Sarah's suggestion to come over and join her for coffee, who'd afterwards donned a borrowed overall to cover her elegant casual clothes, picked up a paintbrush and spent an hour helping Sarah finish off the woodwork in the breakfast room. And a very nice small sitting-dining room it was now, thought Sarah – the walls a warm apricot, the paintwork a sharp white, Lisa's collection of porcelain plates on the walls, the smell of a summer evening drifting through the open window.

‘I can recommend you an interior decorator,' Imogen had said, after being shown round the rest of the house and empathizing immediately with the enormity of the problem.

‘One who doesn't want paying?' Sarah had laughed.

‘Well, no, but she'd advise you on wallpapers and curtains, if you bought them from her. I'll ask her along to meet you when you come over. She's Lois French, of Interiors, that shop at the corner of Butter Lane, just off the Cornmarket.'

‘Oh, I've seen it! Much too grand for us.' But Sarah looked forward to meeting the woman. Dermot could use all the help and advice he could get.

‘It doesn't matter to me, of course,' she told him now, as a preliminary to approaching the subject of her departure, ‘but you'll still be here when I'm gone. You can't live in a community and not be part of it.'

‘I don't see why not,' Dermot shrugged, but Sarah knew it was only a token objection. He was too gregarious not to want to meet his neighbours, especially now that Francis Kendrick's name had cropped up and sparked his interest. Dermot had a certain capacity for mischief, and she sensed he was ripe for it. She devoutly hoped he'd have the sense not to make waves at the party, or at any other time.

The antiquated telephone shrilled distantly from the hall. ‘That'll be Simon.' She went to answer it with a certain amount of foreboding. She'd never been a match for Simon when he was feeling aggrieved, and if he started being really persuasive, she might well give in. She was feeling decidedly fed up with acting as Dermot's dogsbody, with the whole crackpot set-up here. If it wasn't for the children ... well, if it wasn't for the children, she wouldn't be here at all.

By the time she got to it, the telephone had stopped, probably having been ringing for some time before they'd heard it and Simon having lost patience. She stood undecided, debating whether or not to ring him back, when there was a knock on the door, and when she opened it, there was the dark-browed Fitzallan on the step. He'd come downstairs from his attic eyrie to ask permission to have a bonfire in the garden, he informed her abruptly.

‘A bonfire? There's a spot at the end of the garden that Dermot was using the other day, if you must – but I have to tell you I regard bonfires as extremely antisocial.'

He looked at her as he digested this, saying nothing for a while. ‘Perhaps I should find some other way of disposing of my rubbish.'

‘Perhaps you should.'

They stood looking at each other. He finally spoke. ‘Look. Please don't be uptight with me. I apologize for the other day. I'd had a right old morning, unexpected meeting called, when all hell was let loose. No excuse, none whatever, but please – let's be friends.'

He obviously couldn't exactly bring himself to smile, but equally obviously, in his own way, he meant to charm, and she was at least appeased, despite herself. She always found it faintly ridiculous to take umbrage, anyway, and he seemed to be wanting to make amends for his behaviour on her first day here. ‘What is it you want to burn, Mr Fitzallan?'

‘Fitz. It's James Fitzallan, but Fitz is what everyone calls me. Come and see for yourself how much there is before you allow me to commit it to the flames – and incidentally, you can take a look at that view – though I warn you, it's not all it's cracked up to be.'

She followed him upstairs and there was the famous view, from the famous window.

You
could
see the Rotunda, just – if you were pointed in the right direction and told what to look for. Otherwise, what you saw was a panoramic view of sky, and the tops of trees just below, and beyond them, between lights winking palely in the early evening, the seemingly endless, undulating landscape of houses, factories, blocks of high-rise flats and roads leading towards several blobs on the horizon, one of which he said was the Rotunda.

And behind her, on the walls of the room, a continuing cyclorama, in the paintings which covered them: the great sweep of skies and trees portrayed on the canvases hung, stacked and laid flat on the floor, all of them unframed.

‘Do you do this for a living?'

‘Good God, no! I'm not a professional, as you'll see only too well, if you look closely. I run a design consultancy. You could call this a hobby, if that's a word you'd use, though I wouldn't. Let's just say it's served its purpose.' She looked quickly for that flash of raw pain which had struck her before, but his face was closed. ‘Obsessive as to subject matter,' he went on, ‘but it's the only thing I can do. I'd like to try a human figure, but I'm not sure ... At any rate, I think I've painted myself out of this as a subject by now, hence the bonfire.'

She was shocked. ‘You can't!'

His brilliant eyes lit with something which might possibly have been amusement as he followed her glance to the scores of canvases. ‘As a painter. I'm a damned good designer. But maybe burning them is a trifle Draconian, what do you think? No.' He held up a warning hand. ‘Don't answer that. I'd honestly rather not know.'

She wanted to laugh, having a suspicion that he'd never had any intention of putting all his work on the bonfire, it was simply a contorted way of arriving at an apology. ‘It's no good asking me, anyway, I've no qualifications to judge. You should ask my – the man I work for,' she amended hastily. Bringing Simon into this was, she realized, the last thing she wanted to do, only she'd been thrown by James Fitzallan, his change of attitude. She'd written him off, but now, against all odds, she found she might be warming to him.

‘What about you? What sort of work do you do?' he was asking. ‘Sit down, if we can find you somewhere among all this, and I'll make some coffee while you tell me the story of your life.'

When she left half an hour later, she realized this was more or less what she'd done, while he'd skated the surface and she'd learned practically nothing about him.

Rodney Shepherd's mood couldn't be described as best pleased when he woke up the next morning to find the strange car still blocking his entry, when he was expecting customers and deliveries. He picked the telephone up and rang the police in a rage, ordering them to come and tow away this sodding BMW that was blocking his entry, or he wouldn't be responsible for the consequences.

The offending car was removed from behind his premises by the police with a speed which satisfied even Rodney.

The details having been input in to the National Computer, within minutes it was found to be registered to a Philip James Ensor, with an address in Solihull. The keys in the pocket of the man who had died at the Colley Street allotments were found to fit the car, and his prints corresponded with those all over the inside. A jacket was neatly folded on the back seat and his wallet was locked in the glove compartment. Jubilation all round at Milford Road Police Station was tempered by a telephone call Abigail made to his home which disclosed the presence of a wife who had thought he was still abroad on a business trip. Lord.

‘I've made an appointment with Mrs Ensor over at Solihull,' she told Mayo. ‘I'm taking Martin Kite with me, OK?'

She was impatient to be off. She'd convinced herself that she'd done all that was possible, and felt that the trail had gone cold, and now here was the break she'd needed, out of the blue.

‘That's it, you stick with it, now that you've got a lead,'

Mayo advised crisply. ‘Get over there as quickly as you can the wife doesn't know yet?'

‘Wish she did – but I didn't think it was the sort of thing to tell her over the telephone.' He nodded his understanding. Apart from breaking it gently, in a case like this, you had to take advantage of the situation to grasp anything that might give a possible clue as to why someone had taken Ensor's life.

‘What kept us?' Abigail asked, inside half an hour later, as Kite eventually slowed down and began to thread his way competently through the built-up suburban areas on the outskirts of Birmingham. She'd have preferred to do the driving herself, but Kite was a Class One police driver, and proud of it, and she decided it wasn't worth trampling on his masculine ego this time. She relegated herself to navigating from the map spread across her knees.

‘No point in hanging around.' Kite's watchword. He should channel his energies into getting his inspector's exams, she thought. But Kite insisted he was happy where he was, and he was a damn good sergeant, very like Mayo, in that things moved when he was around. He ran his cases competently, without the need for flourishing trumpets.

It was a change, working with him, rather than the lugubrious Sergeant Carmody, who usually doubled up with her when she needed partnering. He was at present on leave, no doubt bored to death on the Costa Brava with his wife and his mother-in-law, counting the days until he got back to work.