More Deaths Than One (19 page)

Lois, now ...

From where he was sitting, he could see her face reflected in the glass, looking oddly different as faces do in a mirror. There was a brilliance about her, a shine to her eyes that he might have put down to fever had he not remembered she wore contact lenses. She had several flashing rings on her fingers and a big glittering paste brooch on her lapel, none of them pretending to be real, and he felt she might jangle if she moved, as if she were made of glass prisms. The shimmering image in the mirror made her look both unreal and uncertain, quite unlike the elegant, assured Lois he was used to. He felt suddenly sorry for her and the sharp unreal way of life to which she was committed, and turning away from the reflection to face the real Lois, he approached the matter of Rupert Fleming more obliquely than he felt naturally disposed to.

She blinked several times, as if needing to get him and what he was saying into focus. With a nervous laugh, she said, “There's no need to beat about the bush, please. I know you're dying to know.”

“What do you know I'm dying to know?”

“About me – and Rupert.”

He sat back, put his hands behind his head and stretched his legs. “All right, what are you prepared to ted me?”

She asked abruptly, “What time was he killed?”

“Difficult to say,” he answered, feeling as cagey and uncommunicative as Doc Ison. “Some time around midnight on Monday evening, we think.”

“He came to see me on Monday night.”

He sat up. “What time?”

“Half past nine. The news and weather forecast had just finished and I was debating whether to watch the next programme or have an early night when I heard the bell to the flat ringing. He must have been leaning on it and it rang and rang until I answered. It was very frightening, the way it went on and on like that. Terrifying, actually. I don't get many visitors that time of night.”

He didn't think she was overstating the case. Her face had paled at the remembered moment. Her cup rattled alarmingly on its saucer and Alex took it from her. Forestalling criticism, she went on hastily, “Yes, I did ask who it was before I opened the door. But I almost wished I hadn't opened it when I saw him.”

“Had he been drinking?”

“No, no. He was stone-cold sober. He never drank much, anyway. But he was in a state ... sort of wild and unbalanced. I'd never seen him like that before. He pushed past me and ran up the stairs. I asked him just what he thought he was doing and then – then he said he'd come to ask me to lend him some money.”

She began to fiddle with one of the flashing rings on her fingers, avoiding his eye. He caught Alex's carefully non-committal expression and knew that she was thinking the same as he was, that it was probably by no means the first time this had happened. She rushed on, with slightly heightened colour, “Naturally I asked him what he wanted it for, but he wouldn't say. And of course, I hadn't any, not the amount he wanted, not even in the till, because people usually pay me by cheque or credit card. I told him my cash was all tied up and that I'd get some the following day if it was that important, but he said that'd be too late. I gave him thirty pounds, which was all I had. Apparently it wasn't enough.”

“Not enough for what? Did he say why he wanted it?”

She shook her head and hesitated before continuing, looking at Alex as she spoke. “He began to go round the room, picking things up and stuffing them in his pockets, the snuff boxes and scent bottles, that old silver photoframe of Aunt Em's, my old china – what he called ‘nice disposable assets.' I could hardly believe it possible and of course I tried to stop him, but not too hard, I must admit, I was too frightened. He seemed to me a man at the end of his tether, as if he might tip over the edge. I told him to stop it. I think I said, ‘This is something you'll regret later,' or something like that, and he said, ‘Probably. It isn't a thing I usually do, darling, my friends' teaspoons are usually safe with me, but needs must when the devil drives. One day I'll pay you back.' There were too many things for his pockets so he took them out and asked for a bag to carry them and the bigger stuff in. I only had a Harrods one. He laughed like mad when he saw it. ‘Oh, very appropriate,' he said, ‘very Lois!' But it wasn't, all those delicate things jumbled together in the bottom of a plastic bag, without any protection.”

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 engaged 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.”