Last Nocturne (37 page)

Susan added, ‘Lovely young man, he was – good-natured and likeable.’

Lamb said, rather forcibly, ‘Yes, he was.’

‘Did you know him?’ Mrs Amberley asked in surprise.

‘Not as much as I wish I had now.’

‘We all feel like that when someone we love dies.’

‘Perhaps especially when the person is still young and has everything to live for, like Theo – and also, Miriam Koppel?’

‘That was a tragic accident.’

‘Tragic, certainly. But accident? Just supposing, Mrs Amberley, the police suspicions were correct – and it wasn’t an accident?’

‘It must have been. Bruno would never have killed anyone – not intentionally. He had a quick temper on occasions but he wasn’t in any way a violent man. It was all so unnecessary, they were too hasty in arresting him. The Viennese police…well, let us just say he had always had an obsessive fear of falling into their hands, and when they charged him I suppose he thought the evidence they would bring against him would damn him. It wasn’t entirely paranoia. The experiences of certain of his friends did not persuade him to believe otherwise.’

Lamb flipped through his notes. ‘Tell me about his brother.’

‘Viktor?’

‘We have reason to believe he may be in England, Mrs Amberley.’

She caught her breath. After a while she said, ‘That’s correct. He is – or has been – over here. I myself saw him about ten days ago.’

The attention of both men sharpened. Cogan paused with his pencil over his notebook. ‘Where can we find him?’

‘I don’t know.’ She told them of her glimpse of Viktor in Brook Street. ‘I only caught sight of him, quite by chance, in the street…he was on the other side of the road, so he didn’t see me.’

‘You didn’t speak to him?’

‘I had no wish to. I wanted to avoid him, in fact.’

‘Could you elaborate on that?’ Lamb asked.

She twisted a ring on her finger, a cluster of diamonds that winked brilliantly whenever the light caught it. The subject was obviously a painful one. Susan Oram rested a disapproving stare on him. ‘We came to England to get away from all that. We don’t need reminders.’

The scales began again. Cogan shifted in his seat.

‘Susan, will you ask Sophie if she’ll leave off her practising for a while?’ Susan hesitated, looking steadily at her, then she left and when she was out of the room, Mrs Amberley smiled. ‘Susan, I’m afraid, is inclined to be over-protective of me. She’s been with me since I was very young. But she is right – we’ve made a quiet, comfortable life for ourselves here and the last thing we need is for it to be disrupted.’

The relationship between the two women was evidently one of close friendship rather than that of mistress and maid; they appeared to live a harmonious and well-ordered existence. The small house was not ostentatiously furnished but lacked nothing in elegance and comfort, and the room where they now sat fitted her personality like a glove. He had noticed a small rosewood bureau in the corner which held a photograph in a handsome silver frame. From where he sat he was unable to distinguish it properly, but he could see it was of a man. Isobel Amberley’s eyes followed his and she flushed. It didn’t need much perception to know the photograph was of Eliot Martagon.

‘Mrs Amberley, why are you afraid of Viktor Franck?’

Her hands were clasped tightly together on her lap and he could see the tremble of her knees beneath the silk skirt. She hesitated, and then seemed to come to a decision. ‘The fact is, he believes Sophie to be his child – though her mother, Miriam herself, totally denied it. I’m afraid he must want to take her to live with him and I think – I
know
he would be prepared to take her by force, if necessary. Sophie knows nothing about it – must never know. He is a cold, unfeeling man and she fears him.’

‘Was it not
Bruno
Franck who was her mother’s lover?’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean to say… Yes, I’m afraid it’s possible.’

‘I see.’

He saw her glance at the little French carriage clock on the mantelpiece as it gave forth the quarter with a silvery chime. ‘It won’t be necessary to keep you much longer, Mrs Amberley. But it would be useful to our inquiries to know what the relations were between the Franck brothers and Theo Benton. I know he lodged with them, but how friendly were they?’

‘I doubt whether Viktor has any friends – in the real sense. But they weren’t enemies, if that is what you mean. Like Theo, he is an artist, but Theo was actually more intimate with his brother, Bruno. Bruno was an outgoing man, friendly towards everyone.’

There was much he still wanted to know, but he sensed she was a determined woman, and he believed she had reached the limit of what she was prepared to tell him. ‘Before we go, may I suggest we have a word with Sophie herself?’

‘I think not, Mr Lamb.’ She rose and held out her hand. As far as she was concerned, the interview was at an end. Cogan snapped his notebook together, but Lamb said, ‘Please sit down, Mrs Amberley.’

She said in some agitation, ‘It would not be helpful, for Sophie. She is beginning to get over what happened to her mother and I will not have her disturbed again. I do not in any case see how it would help you regarding Theo’s murder.’

‘Perhaps not. But please consider this. The least little thing is important in a murder case. One never knows where it might lead. We would not have thought at first, for instance—’ He broke off and gave her a long, considered look and then said suddenly, ‘I believe you were acquainted with the late Mr Eliot Martagon?’

What little colour she had in her face drained away. ‘That is so.’

‘It would have seemed at first in this inquiry that his unfortunate death and the murder of Theo Benton had nothing in common. But we are now beginning to believe each may throw some light on the other.’

‘How can that possibly be?’ Her hand groped for the chair behind her and she sank into it. ‘What are you trying to tell me? Are you saying that – Eliot – that he may
not
have taken his own life?’ Her French accent had grown more pronounced. ‘That
he
may have been murdered?’

‘The possibility cannot be ruled out.’

There it was again – relief. The same relief Joseph Benton had shown, that the stigma of suicide had been lifted. He saw it in her eyes and understood precisely why it was there. Ever since Martagon’s death she had been living with the knowledge that he might have taken a gun and blown out his brains rather than carry out and embrace the consequences of what they had planned to do together.

‘But it is not possible! Who could have wanted to take away the life of a man like Eliot?’

‘That I can’t tell you, yet. But think about what I’ve said, Mrs Amberley.’ He stood up. ‘Anything whatsoever that you, or the child, or anyone else can recall may be the one thing which leads us to the murderer. I tell you, I am constantly amazed at how the emergence of one small, significant detail eventually leads to solving the mystery.’

She nodded in a dazed kind of way. She had lost what little colour she had, and Cogan said, ‘Shall I ring for your companion?’

‘No, thank you. I would like to be alone for a while.’

Lamb said solemnly on leaving, ‘Thank you for your time, Mrs Amberley. Take care, but have no fears that Viktor Franck will succeed in abducting the little girl. If he does come here, there will be someone ready to intercept him. Unlike you, we are very anxious to talk to him.’

The breeze blowing up from the river was stiff and Cogan squashed his bowler squarely over his forehead as they walked down the street towards it after leaving Mrs Amberley. Reaching the narrow embankment which ran along the river at that point, they stopped by mutual consent and leant against the railings. Not so much commercial traffic here as down river and at the port of London, heavy cargo ships and the like, but it was still busy with pleasure boats and Thames barges plying their route and delivering merchandise: coals, or brandy for one of the riverside inns or grain for the flour mills. The day was overcast, with a capriciously cold wind, as often in May, cracking the sails of the sailing boats. The water was choppy and lapped at the stones of the embankment with vicious little slaps.

‘Well, we’re a stride or two further forrard, aren’t we, sir?’

‘Are we, Cogan?’

‘Seems to me, in spite of what Mrs Amberley thinks, Benton discovered something when he went out again that night. And I reckon what he discovered was that Viktor Franck had killed the Koppel woman. That’s why Franck’s come over here, to shut Benton up.’

‘Her body was found streets away. And why should he have waited until now?’

‘Maybe Franck didn’t want her found too near his own house and dragged her to where she was found to get her out of the way. Maybe Benton didn’t want to get mixed up at first. Likely he was afraid of Franck – and with good reason, seemingly. But it bothered him. Everyone we’ve spoken to seems to think he’d had something on his mind for some time. And there’s that letter Franck sent him. Maybe he told Franck he was going to spill the beans.’

‘That’s a lot of maybes.’

Lamb spoke absently. He wasn’t giving his sergeant the attention he ought; he was too busy trying to recapture something that was floating on the edge of his consciousness, like a leaf in the wind glimpsed from the eye corner. Something that had been said during the course of the interview with Mrs Amberley, a word or two that had brought back something else from one of the letters she had written to Eliot Martagon. Only the more he tried to catch the fleeting memory, the more maddeningly it slid from his grasp.

That those letters in the bundle Mrs Martagon had handed over to him were love letters was without doubt, not by any means flowery effusions, though here and there a loverlike phrase crept through. ‘
I exist for the time when we can be together forever,’
Isobel Amberley had written at one point,
‘though I know you are intent on doing the right thing for your wife – and above all for Dulcie.’
References to
‘her dearest Sophie’
cropped up regularly. In one letter which, although it was undated, he thought might have been the last, she had written:
‘The sleepwalking is continuing. I must get her away from him. Remembering what he did to Miriam once before, I can have no doubts.’
And then,
‘That impossible night, after Julian left me – it has marked us all, especially Theo. He has left for Paris. Viktor is inconsolable over both deaths.’

He stared at the khaki grey Thames, then slapped the washleather gloves he held against his palm. ‘And where does Eliot Martagon come into all this?’

‘Martagon?’ Cogan barely suppressed a sigh. ‘Well, he wouldn’t be the first, nor the last, to have got himself into a tangle over a woman, would he? All fine and dandy, talking of giving up everything for love and sailing away for a new life and leaving his responsibilities behind. Then when it comes down to it, it don’t look so rosy, eh? But he’d got himself into a cleft stick – damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.’

‘Hmm.’

Cogan took out his pipe and as he turned from the breeze to light it he saw someone approaching them. ‘Miss Oram! What can we do for you?’

She had a shopping basket over her arm and was slightly out of breath. ‘I’m glad I’ve caught you.’ She hesitated, seeming not to know quite how to begin. Then she said abruptly, ‘I doubt she’s told you everything. Mrs Amberley, I mean.’

Lamb regarded her gravely. She wore a nice grey coat trimmed with sealskin cuffs and collar. Her matching hat was prettily decorated with a bunch of velvet violets, but wasn’t perhaps at the neat angle she would normally wear it, as if had been thrust on without the aid of a mirror, and strands of blonde hair escaped from it. He said gently, ‘I didn’t think she had.’ There was a wrought-iron bench just behind them, facing the river. ‘Please, sit down.’ He extracted a spotless handkerchief from his pocket, flicked it over the seat and waited while she seated herself, then sat beside her, while Cogan stood with his back against the railings, puffing at his pipe, facing them.

‘You mustn’t blame her. She’s not been well, you know. Someone very close to her died fairly recently, and it nearly broke her heart. She’s better now, but she could do without all this worry about Sophie, and that man.’

‘As far as Viktor Franck goes, I’ve already told Mrs Amberley we will set someone to watch the house immediately.’

‘I should hope so, too! The man’s a murderer! Miriam Koppel and – and most likely poor Theo, too.’

Cogan took his pipe from his mouth. Lamb said, ‘Mrs Amberley seems to cling to the theory that Mrs Koppel’s death was an accident.’

‘Well, I don’t think so – and I don’t think she does either. Has she told you about Sophie sleepwalking?’ He nodded and she looked down at her feet; her next words came in a rush. ‘Well, Sophie’s been close as an oyster ever since her mother died – won’t say a word about it – so we don’t rightly know if she was frightened by something she saw, or imagined she did. She’s a child that scares herself with her own imagination, but I fancy she and Theo both saw somebody they recognised. Though maybe Theo wasn’t absolutely sure and that’s why he never said anything. He wouldn’t, you know, if he wasn’t sure.’

A paddle-steamer packed with Londoners returning from a day out to Greenwich or Kew was passing, the passengers huddled together on deck. It hooted dismally. Not much fun on a day like this.

‘Sophie had nightmares for a long time after the night her mother was killed, you know. And Isobel – Mrs Amberley – blames herself. She thinks if she hadn’t gone out that night, Sophie would have slept in her little room with us as usual.
Our
doors were always kept locked and she couldn’t have strayed out into the snow like that. But if anyone was to blame it was me. She was feeling depressed and I was the one who persuaded her to go out with Mr Carrington. He was going back to London the next day and wanted to take her out to dinner, and I thought it was time she had a bit of enjoyment.’

‘Carrington?’

‘Mr Julian Carrington – he’s a great friend of Isobel – Mrs Amberley. It’s plain as the nose on your face he hopes she’ll marry him one day, only there was someone else, this person who died – and there’s Sophie, you see. She’s wary of people, poor lamb, and he…well, he’s a good man, but he isn’t used to children, and it makes her shy of him. And you can’t expect him to be able to change his ways at his time of life.’ She stood up. ‘What if Viktor does come for Sophie?’