More Deaths Than One (6 page)

Lois poured the coffee, Myra added sugar and milk to hers and settled for a gossip. “Terrible thing about that shooting, isn't it?”

“What shooting?” Lois picked up her own coffee cup and took a sip.

“Haven't your heard? Some poor bloke shot himself in his car up Scotley Beeches. Name of Fleming, Rupert Fleming.”

The cup slid from Lois's grasp and coffee poured in a dark stream right across the Chinese silk.

“Ooh, that's done it,” Myra said.

Lois seized a cloth and dabbed distractedly at the dark stain and succeeded in blotting most of it up before it spread too far. With trembling fingers, she picked up the scissors, snicked the selvedge and tore off the ruined half metre. “It could've been worse. Where ... did you hear about this, this shooting?”

“On the late news last night, and on the radio this morning.” Myra stared. “Here, you didn't know him, did you, love? Oh God, I'm sorry ...”

“No, I didn't know him,” Lois lied.

Myra looked at her shrewdly but said nothing more.

When the rest of the silk had been safely parcelled up and Myra had gone, Lois collapsed onto the nearest chair.

Rupert Fleming? She had let a demon into her life when she let him in, of that there was no question. But
suicide?

Rupert?

Kite was still feeling peaky the next day with the aftermath of his cold, but the harder he worked the better he felt, he decided. He set himself to find out what he could about Georgina Fleming's affairs, managing to muster up a surprising amount of energy. By late afternoon, when Mayo had returned from the inquest which had, as he'd fully expected, been adjourned for further police enquiries, he was able to tell Mayo first that the shotgun's owner had been traced, and secondly that he had the information Mayo had requested about Georgina Fleming.

The shotgun was registered in the name of John Culver, residing in a house by the name of Upper Delph, adjacent to Fiveoaks Farm and not much over a mile from Scotley Beeches.

John Culver, Georgina Fleming's father.

Mayo heard the news with interest. “Long-standing feud finally resolving itself? Is that what it is?”

“Is it going to be that simple?” Kite returned.

“It usually is, isn't it?” As with most murders, its solution probably lay in the obvious, with someone in the family, some relative, or someone known to the victim being responsible. “Never neglect the obvious, laddie. It
was
his gun.”

The big question in that case being what had John Culver and his estranged son-in-law been up to, meeting in Scotley Beeches at some ungodly hour of the night or morning?

“Let's go. You can tell me what you've found out about Georgina Fleming on the way.”

“She runs this business with a partner, another woman,” Kite informed him as they turned off the ring road and out onto the bypass. “In fact, it's an all women affair, no men at all. It's an organisation dedicated to showing small companies how to give their businesses a vital competitive edge. One which will help them achieve aggressive growth targets and a level of excellence ...”

“Spare me the sales patter.”

Kite grinned. “Translated, it means that all these new small companies who have a good product but just don't know how to market it properly, or run the business side of their affairs, need help. That's where Georgina Fleming wheels in. It's called business consultancy.”

“I know what a business consultancy is, but what qualifies Mrs. Fleming for it?”

“She took a degree in Business Studies and Administration, started out in a small way and worked her company up to what it is now. Like father, like daughter, seemingly. Nobody can keep up with her; they say she works twenty-five hours a day. One of those what they call hyperactive types, I reckon. No wonder she needs sleeping pills. No hobbies, except squash, which she plays to
win. ”

“She should play to lose?”

“No joke, even the men are terrified of her. She plays like a tiger.” Mayo, who half an hour previously had been speculating on insurances in specific relation to Georgina Fleming's late husband, said, “She's not short of a few thousand, then?”

“Ks. It's Ks, not thousands, in yuppyspeak. Serious money.”

“Oh God, come off it, Martin, give it me in basic English.”

“The answer's no, she isn't short. I guess she could easily have been supporting Fleming in the life to which he was accustomed and not felt a thing. But would she? I mean, they were evidently leading very nearly separate lives, weren't they? And don't forget that woman in the photo. Mrs. Fleming didn't strike me as the sort to suffer anybody being a drag on her.”

“There's more ways of getting rid of a husband than blowing his head off.”

“True. But whether she did it or not, I'll bet she feels it's good riddance.”

“One thing I'd never bet on, Martin, and that's what Mrs. Fleming might or might not be thinking.”

Grief comes in many guises. He remembered her reaction to the sight of the body. And also, that moment of softness when she'd been speaking of the Sunday evening she'd spent with her husband, and the conviction he'd had that she and Fleming had been making love. I was right about that at any rate, he thought, I was right.

Iron gates marked the beginning of Upper Delph's drive, a gravelled roadway which wound for nearly a quarter of a mile before it began to rise and they came in sight of the house.

“Stone me!” said Kite.

The ground rose even more steeply behind the house and a thick belt of trees climbed to the skyline. A hundred yards away was the old quarry, or delph, which had given the house its name, long abandoned and choked now with scrub hazel and gorse. The house had a grim and ancient appearance, a low rambling edifice with a few outbuildings straggling at the back, fronted only by a small paved garden inside a low privet hedge, with ivy scrambling to the slate roof, half-obscuring some of the windows so that it had a lowering, frowning aspect. To one side stood all that was left of a huge old conifer, its split trunk and remaining branches giving it the look of a one-armed sentinel, and at the other side a crumbling square tower, also ivy-covered, where rooks circled and cawed in the darkening afternoon.

By the time they had climbed the short flight of steps to the front door, Mayo was half-expecting to be met by the owner, armed with a shotgun. Instead, it was opened by a middle-aged woman, smartly dressed in a cherry red jersey suit that showed off a neat, well-rounded figure and complemented her plentiful dark hair and rosy cheeks.
Mrs.
Culver? Somehow, Mayo hadn't expected a wife.

He soon found, however, that she was not Culver's wife but his daily housekeeper, and that Culver himself was out, but expected back any minute. “He always takes a long walk this time in the afternoon, past the lake, but he'll be back for his tea.”

Mayo said they'd wait in the car. Her eyes were bright with speculation. He could see she guessed why they were there and, taking pity on her obvious curiosity, introduced himself and produced identification.

“Come in out of the cold, why don't you? Have a cup of tea yourselves while you wait. Shouldn't be many minutes now.”

Declining the tea – somehow Mayo thought it would hardly do for Culver to come back and find them sampling his hospitality before some rather stringent questions were put to him regarding his shotgun and his relations with the dead man – but accepting the offer to wait inside, Mayo and Kite followed Mrs. Stretton into a front room, where she poked up the coal fire to a bright blaze and switched on a lamp.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” she said, handing Kite a newspaper before closing the door behind her.

Left to themselves, Kite looked at the paper, saw that he'd already seen it, lost interest and offered it to Mayo, but he had already begun a perambulation of the room, and declined.

There were books everywhere, on a wall of shelves and piled up untidily elsewhere. A comfortable, slightly shabby room, a sort of study or den, the furnishings a mixture of antique and the merely old, chosen for comfort and use rather than their place in some overall scheme: a wing chair that had taken its owner's shape, an upright piano with a silk runner across its top, a Georgian breakfront bookcase in the corner with a television set and a stack of records in front of it. Curtains of an undistinguished dark green rep and a carpet that had seen better days.

Culver was taking his time. A Viennese wall clock ticked the minutes away slowly and the afternoon darkened a little more while they waited. The heaped-up fire made the room very warm. Kite, who hated waiting, yawned and fidgeted at the unplanned hiatus and began idly flicking through a thick sketchbook which lay open on a small table beside where he sat, with pencils, rubbers and a box of aquarelle pastels lying beside it.

Mayo had come to a pause before a small watercolour, an amateur though not, he thought, unskilled painting of the house as it had once been, the sort of painting done by Victorian young ladies of the family. It showed the ravaged tree outside the house in all its former glory and the now ruined tower attached to a wing that had once been part of the main body of the house. He concluded there must have been a fire or some such calamity which had destroyed most of the wing, leaving only the squat remains of the tower standing. If this was the case it must have been many years since, when the Paulings owned the house perhaps, for now there was a tree growing from the centre of the tower, overtopping it by twenty feet.

“What d'you think of this?” came Kite's voice from behind him, as he held out the sketchbook.

It was nearly full, every page replete with drawings of trees, in all seasons, at every stage of growth and decay, all carefully labelled with their correct botanical name as well as their common one. Each one was, as far as either man could judge, competently drawn and subtly tinted, but more than that, there was a liveliness and vigour, a feeling for life about them that sprang from the page. Some were Arthur Rackham trees, wild and witching, others mere abstracts in their spareness and quickness of line. On one page there was a plane tree with big, maple-like leaves, the light shining on its flaking, moss-encrusted bark, making on it a diamond pattern of ruby and green. Flanking it on the next page was a group of slender silver birches with daffodils blowing beneath, under the pendulous branches. The last drawing in the book was of the crippled tree by the side of the house –
Cedrus Atlantica
, its ribbed corky bark and its one living branch investing it with a threatening air, like some ogreish wood demon.

“Wish I could draw like that!” Kite exclaimed, obviously impressed. Although he didn't know anything more about art than knowing what he didn't like, he was willing to give anyone who could hold a pencil the benefit of the doubt. “Culver, d'you think?”

“I don't know about that, but it looks like a man's work, to me.”

Mayo, not much more knowledgeable than Kite, didn't know why he thought so, except that there was some strength of line about the drawings that suggested an indubitably masculine hand. But if they were Culver's, they had a sensitivity that didn't square with the hard man conjured up by that conversation with the Salisburys. Perhaps they were in for a surprise.

At that moment, they heard the man and the dog approach the house and enter by the back door. Mayo turned the pages back to where they had been left open. Not that he had too many scruples about intruding, even into something that was obviously intensely private. Scruples were something neither he nor his suspects could afford to have. But he didn't want Culver to know they'd been looking at his work.

The man's voice could be heard, evidently speaking to the housekeeper. “Still here, Molly? Whose is the car? All right, leave it ready and then you must get off.” And then he was in the room with them, a tall, heavy-shouldered old man. Coarser-featured than his daughter, with a deep-clefted chin, lively dark eyes and strong bones, yet within that leathery countenance was contained a strong resemblance to Georgina Fleming. The similarity of feature was indeed quite striking, and when he spoke there was something of the same abruptness, though he was civilly polite, offering tea and, when it was refused, asking them shortly what they wanted.

The sergeant, with whom Mayo had arranged to start the questioning, began without preamble. “Do you own a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun, Mr. Culver?”

“I own several shotguns.”

“Have you checked recently that they're all there?”

“On Sunday. Why d'you want to know?”

Kite countered with another question. “Did you know that your son-in-law, Rupert Fleming, has been found dead?”

“Yes. They said on the news he'd committed suicide.” Strength and power emanated from him as he stood with his back to the fire, his dog curled at his feet. He was a harshly-spoken man, economical with words and smiles, but decisive and to the point, forceful and used to the upper hand. “Doesn't surprise me. Typical cowardly way out.”

“I have to tell you the gun found by his side was traced to you.” The old man's eyes flickered, the hand holding his tobacco pouch paused. “
My
gun? How's that possible? I haven't seen him for at least seven years, nor wanted to.”

“Is that so? Would you care to tell us what exactly was the trouble between you?”

Culver smiled grimly. “I've no objection. The answer is I just didn't like him. Oil and water, probably, but I also felt he wasn't good enough for my daughter – most fathers' initial reaction, I suppose. Only in his case events proved me right.
As
I predicted, he went from bad to worse, never amounted to anything, never would have.”

“How do you account for your shotgun being in his possession?”

“I can't, I've just told you. If you're right and it is mine, I can only assume he must have stolen it, somehow. That would've appealed to his warped sense of humour, to have it traced back to me.”