More Deaths Than One (23 page)

“Guy Fleming, I'm surprised at you. Your own son! There was nothing wrong with Rupert, until he married that woman, nothing that wouldn't have righted itself, given time. Pull yourself together, Guy.”

The effect of these bracing words on him was immediate, though not perhaps in the way she would have wished. He seemed to be literally obeying her orders, pulling his shoulders back and sitting more stiffly upright. He said stubbornly, “Nothing could ever have put Rupert right. No, I shall speak, Muriel. The whole thing is too much for me at my age. He was always an unsatisfactory child, and nothing's changed. Expelled from school, failing his accountancy exams, losing the insurance position ...”

It was then that Mrs. Fleming began to show her mettle. “That's enough,” she ordered. “Quite enough. The Chief Inspector doesn't want to hear your prattle.”

She was wholly wrong. It was exactly what Mayo did want to hear. But it was too late. As if the effort had been too great, Fleming passed a hand across his face and subsided, and before Mayo could frame further questions, the door opened and a young woman stood there. Hesitating on the threshold, she waited until Muriel Fleming beckoned before crossing the room to sit beside her on the sofa. “I don't believe a word of it either,” she said as they exchanged looks, entirely in accord.

This, presumably, was “the girl” Mrs. Fleming had mentioned, who would have brought the coffee in, had they wished it. She still looked sad and solemn, but she'd discarded her dreary, penitential black for similar garments in shades of green, brown and ochre that looked as if they had been hand-dyed with vegetable colouring, and probably had. There was no mistaking her. It was Bryony Harper.

Mrs. Fleming was watching Mayo with a detached, ironic amusement while he recovered his momentarily scattered forces. Having the advantage, and with perfect composure, she beat him to it with a return of her vague smile and a slightly rambling explanation of Bryony's presence.

“This dear girl, whom I believe you've met,” she began, “wrote to us to offer her sympathy as soon as she heard about Rupert. Can you imagine anything kinder or more thoughtful? In her position? We'd never heard of her before, but we knew Rupert's marriage wasn't all it should be, so we weren't entirely surprised that he should have found someone else. Bryony mentioned her children and we thought” – a fleeting look of disappointment crossed her face –  “well, never mind, we took the car down to Lavenstock and brought her and the little boys back here with us. She'd made our son happy, it was the least we could do. And here she's going to stay, aren't you, my dear?”

The permutations of human beings and their behaviour patterns had long since ceased to be a source of amazement to Mayo, but this unexpected turn of events gave him a moment's pause, and an exchange of glances showed that Kite was equally taken aback.

“If I may,” Bryony was saying. “For a while, at least.” She explained to Mayo, “The boys are happy here. They love being spoiled and having other children next door to play with.” The two women looked at each other again, a certain complicity in their smiles. Their eyes were very alike, deep and dark, but whereas Bryony's were wide, naive and trusting, Mrs. Fleming's were observant and not easily fathomable.

Mayo cleared his throat and asked Bryony how much she'd overheard of what he'd been telling Mr. and Mrs. Fleming, hoping he wouldn't have to go over everything again.

“I heard you saying that it wasn't Rupert who was dead – and that you think he might have killed this other man, but” – and there was a world of misery in her face – “that can't possibly be true.” Her voice broke, tears weren't far away.

“I'm afraid we can't fly in the face of facts.”

“There must be some other explanation,” she whispered, shaking her head and adding with some inner logic that was not apparent to anyone else, “I
know
he's innocent.”

“If he is, then why has he disappeared?”

“Because he's in deep trouble ... oh, I know he must be involved somehow, and that's really bad, but it's crazy to imagine he'd kill someone and try to pass himself off as dead!”

He looked at her steadily and after a while her eyes dropped. He said sternly, with a growing conviction that he was on the right lines, “Isn't there something you ought to be telling me?”

“No! Yes, I – don't know ...” She looked frightened and turned her head, refusing to meet his gaze.

Mrs. Fleming uttered a quiet “Bryony!” while her husband, bewildered, looked from one to the other.

The girl sat twisting her hands together. “I'm sorry,” she said in a low voice to Mrs. Fleming. “I must. If I tell them, it may help them to find him.”

“I can't stop you,” Mrs. Fleming said, “but I hope you won't be sorry.”

To Mayo, Bryony said, “I've had a letter from him, you see. He wouldn't have sent it if he wanted everyone to believe he was dead, would he?”

The old man, giving an odd little grunt of shock, sank back into his chair with an air of defeat and closed his eyes, absolving himself from further involvement.

Mayo said woodenly, “I think you'd better tell me about this.”

“It came the day after you came to see me. It wasn't exactly a letter, just a note. He said he had to go away for a while, and he enclosed some money for me and the children. He obviously knew you were going to suspect him and that's why he made the decision to go away. I don't think that was very sensible, but it's understandable, isn't it? And ... and in the middle of all that he still managed to be concerned about me and took the trouble to send me all that money. That's not the sort of thing he'd do if he was the kind who'd do the things you're suggesting.”

There was no sort of logic in this, but logic has never played a great part where love is concerned, and of that Bryony Harper had no lack. He asked, as tactfully as he could, how much money there had been with the letter.

“An awful lot. About a thousand pounds, as a matter of fact.”

“Money doesn't go very far these days, Bryony. A thousand pounds isn't all that much.”

“It is to me,” she said simply.

Mayo felt the same mixture of exasperation and pity he'd felt at their previous meeting. Her complete trust in Fleming was amazing to him, especially since he was as convinced as he had ever been in his life that there was no basis whatever for it, that it was completely unjustified.

“Did you keep the letter?” he asked, without much hope. People hardly ever did, but there was just a chance that Bryony, with her incurably sentimental outlook on life, might have done so. He wasn't surprised when she said she'd thrown it away, but not sure whether she was telling the truth. It might have been that she simply didn't want to part with it.

“Do you still have the money?”

“Apart from a hundred pounds or so. I had bills and things to settle before I came here.”

“I'm afraid I shall have to ask you for it, at least for the time being,” he told her, explaining there would be tests to carry out on it. She looked dismayed, but Guy Fleming was heard to murmur unexpectedly from the depths of his chair that she need never be short of money while he was around and eventually she left the room to get it.

All this time Mrs. Fleming sat rigidly disapproving, her hands on the knob of the stick, saying nothing. There was, after all, little she could say. She roused herself to bid them a cool goodbye when they went, but it was left to Bryony to show them to the door.

As they drove away, he looked again at the envelope she had given him, addressed to her at the Morvah Pottery in Fleming's distinctive handwriting. It was postmarked Coventry, two days after his supposed death.

“So he's done it after all, he's got away, blast him. He must've already managed to sell the things he stole from Lois French,” Kite said with some bitterness as they drove away, unaware that part of the goods in question was at that moment being steadily contemplated by George Atkins through a wreath of his evil pipe smoke as it stood in a place of honour in a specially cleared space on his desk.

“I suppose it's possible.”

Otherwise, how had Fleming, who had apparently been casting around for any spare cash he could lay his hands on, been able to send Bryony Harper a thousand pounds in notes? Though perhaps he'd already had this money set aside, intending her to have it after his disappearance, and even though he'd been unable to drum up more, he'd sent it regardless. As a theory this was too unconvincing to appeal to Mayo. For one thing, why should Fleming destroy the myth of his own death he'd been at such pains to construct? For another, such selflessness and provident forethought seemed foreign to Fleming's nature as he'd come to see it.

And yet ... what did he really know of Fleming? What kind of man was he, to live the uneasy, divided life he had lived? Basically a self-destructive life, wilfully damaging to himself as well as to others, almost as though he had a death wish. Only Bryony seemed to have escaped the compulsion he seemed to have to destroy, to spoil, to wreck, perhaps because she was basically innocent, almost, one might be tempted to think, to the point of simpleness.

“A wondrous necessary man, my lord.”

THE LITTLE COALPORT TEAPOT, pretty enough if you liked that sort of thing, sat on Atkins's desk, giving little indication of its value. It was simply a small, frippery object, according to Kite hardly big enough to make a decent-sized cuppa. “Strewth!” he exclaimed on hearing its estimated value.

“Like a lot more things, size has nowt to do with it, lad,” said Atkins. “It's quality that counts.”

Mayo recognised it immediately. It had stood on a little round table that was covered with an antique silk shawl, not the most valuable of the things Fleming had appropriated, but to the uninitiated the flamboyance of its gold decoration might easily have made it seem so.

“
Who's
this yobbo you said was trying to flog it, George?” Kite was asking.

“Name of Sampson. Wayne Sampson. His dad has that car breaker's up the by-pass ... and you know who that used to belong to, don't you?”

Kite cast his mind around until light broke. “Of course, I'd forgotten that.”

“Sold it a good few years back, mind, but it'd be the first place he'd think of, wouldn't it, in the circumstances?”

“Is this a private discussion, George,” Mayo said, clearing an airspace through Atkins's tobacco smoke with a waft of his hand, “or can anyone join in? Who's that you're talking about? And for God's sake, do us a favour and put those old socks out, will you?”

“I was forgetting. Before your time, that'd be.” Atkins obligingly knocked out the noxious dottle of his pipe, thus creating an additional dimension to the odour already created, and explained: “Sampson's yard used to be owned by John Culver till he sold it sometime back, maybe eight or nine years since.”

“
Culver?
” All at once it began to seem possible that several unrelated elements might be part of the whole. “But the fact that Culver once owned the yard doesn't explain how this little thing, lifted by Fleming from Mrs. French's flat, could have got into the hands of someone like young Sampson.”

Atkins said, “We should be about to find out. Farrar's already there.”

D.C. Keith Farrar was indeed there, in this graveyard for the aspirations of the affluent society, picking his way fastidiously through the debris. His blond hair was neat and shining as ever, his shoes impeccably polished, his face clean-shaven and cheerful, his eyes alert. Nobody would have guessed that at least half-a-dozen worries skittered about beneath that debonair surface ... whether his wife Sandra might be pregnant or not, the unforeseen rise in his mortgage, the non-event of his promotion, Sandra's fear that he might cop it one day, like Mitch, the very present danger that he might get oil on his good suit ...

None of this showed, and presently he stopped and looked around but could see nothing that moved. The yard was unusually quiet, apart from the noise of a battered lorry, stacked with car bodies crushed flat like silver paper, idling in neutral. To one side, a crane reared its jib, the temporarily unemployed huge stone crusher suspended from it by four chains. Canyons created by the towering piles of rusting scrap bodies waiting for its attention led off in all directions. Farrar peered around a stack of used tyres and, backing away, skidded on a patch of thick black oil, nearly losing his balance. “The hell with this for a lark!” he muttered and stood where he was. “Anybody home?” he shouted. “Anybody home?”

An unsavoury figure with a spotty face, greasy hair and highly unsuitable winkle-picker boots with elaborate silver buckles and toe-caps appeared reluctantly at the end of one of the canyons and watched him approach apprehensively. Wayne knew who Farrar was, having had him pointed out once by one of his mates as somebody to watch, and therefore having a good idea what he'd come for.

Didn't look much of a menace, poncey type like that, but you never knew with the fuzz. He decided he'd better not tell any more lies than he had to.

“Going into the antique business, I hear, young Sampson?” Farrar began when they were within talking distance.

“Dunno what you're on about,” answered Wayne, predictably enough.

“Come on, lad, you were flogging a valuable bit of old china down the market this morning, and don't bother to deny it. Where'd you get it?”

“Found it.”

“Thousands wouldn't believe you.”

“It's bloody true!”

“I thought you said it belonged to your gran?”

“Well, I mean …” said Wayne.

“
What
d'you mean? You mean you nicked it?”

“No, I never! You got no right saying that.”