Next of Kin (6 page)

‘You have nothing to worry about, Stella,' said Montignac, stepping forwards and taking her hand in his. ‘You don't think for a moment that I'd let anything happen to you, do you? What I have…' He didn't go quite so far as to suggest that what he had, she had too, and she noticed this and let the sentence hang in mid-air between them.

Stella looked down and noticed the way his fingers slotted in perfectly between her own and welcomed the touch, the first time he had held her hand like that in many years now. Her eyes lifted and met his and he held them there for a moment before releasing her and turning away.

‘Anyway, I told him tomorrow morning would be fine,' she said to his retreating back. ‘He'll be here around eleven. I don't suppose it will take very long.'

‘Fine,' said Montignac, whose mind was elsewhere, lost in bitter memories. ‘I better go downstairs anyway.'

The two cousins stood and walked towards the door together. ‘I've never understood why we have to have wakes anyway,' said Stella. ‘Everyone gets so upset at a funeral that it seems like a pointless prolonging of the pain to invite people over for the next best thing to a party.'

‘I wouldn't have bothered if it had been down to me,' he said. ‘But form's form. People come over automatically. It's not as if we specifically sent out invitations.'

‘No.'

‘We should have lunch together tomorrow,' he suggested. ‘Just the two of us. After the reading of the will, I mean. To discuss plans. For the house and so on.'

‘Yes,' said Stella, nodding her head. ‘I think some of the staff are worried. Margaret overheard Annie complaining that she was going to lose her job.'

‘She would have lost it years ago if I'd had my way,' he said quickly. ‘She drinks more than anyone else in the house and smokes like a chimney. But we'll talk about it tomorrow, it's not important right now. We should go downstairs and start trying to get rid of some of these bastards or they'll never leave.'

Stella blinked in surprise. She almost never heard her cousin use language such as that—he prided himself on his elegance and gentlemanly behaviour—and it seemed particularly inappropriate for a moment like this, when they were almost close, when they were almost talking again like they did when they were teenagers. There was a violence to the sound of the word, an anger that reminded her of things she preferred to forget.

She stared at him now as he examined himself in the full-length mirror, pulling his jacket down to displace the creases. She remembered when he had first been brought to the house at the age of five, short for his age, slightly grubby, with freckles, buck teeth and a French accent. And that hair, of course, that unmistakable shock of snow-white hair upon his head that had made her mouth drop open in surprise when she'd first laid eyes on him. The way his blue eyes had seemed to pierce right through her. And now here he was twenty years later, master-designate of the Montignac estate, six feet tall, his naturally pale skin coloured slightly by regular exercise and healthy eating. He was as handsome now as he had been charmless then. He had changed in so many ways in the two decades in between that she could barely count their number. But she had welcomed him then, she and Andrew had both welcomed him, and had never made him feel like an outsider despite his insistence on placing himself in that very position time and again.

‘I wanted to tell you,' she said as they walked out on to the landing. He stopped short and looked at her expectantly. ‘I was very proud of you today. I don't think I could have got through it without you. I found myself missing Andrew terribly—the whole thing brought back such bad memories—but having you by my side, well it was a comfort. Of sorts.'

Montignac placed his tongue in the corner of his mouth and bulged it out slightly as he considered this, taking the compliment with a slight nod before stepping briskly down the stairs and leaving her alone at the top.

8

JANE BENTLEY MADE HER
way directly to the gallery of Court no. 1 at the Old Bailey, where she spotted her friend Eleanor Tandy sitting in the front row and took a seat beside her. Beneath them the phalanx of court reporters, solicitors, barristers and policemen were moving into position like the actors in a play before curtain-up and the crowds of interested spectators—the ones lucky enough to have secured a seat by arriving early—were settling into the stalls out front. The only things missing were an usherette patrolling the aisles with ices and the sounds of the string section being tuned up.

‘I was starting to worry about you,' said Eleanor, taking her bag off the adjacent chair and placing it on the floor beside her feet. ‘I wasn't sure how much longer I could hold on to your seat but I knew you wouldn't miss this for the world.'

‘How could I?' asked Jane. ‘It's like I said to Roderick earlier, simply everyone is going to be here today.'

‘Not everyone,' replied Eleanor with a knowing smile. ‘After all there are those who are conspicuous by their absence.'

Jane nodded. ‘The king, you mean? The Duke of York?'

‘Among others. They're staying well out of it, aren't they?'

‘Well do you blame them?' asked Jane. ‘The poor man's only been on the throne a few months, there's all this talk of the American woman he's going about with and now this. A killer in the family. All in all it's not a very auspicious start to his reign. It makes you wonder what the next forty years hold.'

‘They have strange blood, if you ask me,' said Eleanor.

‘The Windsors?'

‘Of course. You know they say that Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, might have been Jack the Ripper. And he would have been the present king's great-grandfather.'

‘Oh that's just conjecture,' said Jane with a laugh, who didn't enjoy mystery novels quite as much as her friend. ‘Quite unlikely, I think.'

‘There is a difference, I suppose. The Ripper chose tarts as his victims. The new king chooses one as his mistress.'

‘Eleanor, really,' said Jane, stifling a laugh. ‘Someone will overhear you.'

‘All the same,' said Eleanor. ‘It's hard to know who to trust, isn't it? This one, though, this Domson boy, he has the look of the late king, don't you think? Around the eyes, I think.'

Jane shrugged. ‘I haven't seen him up close,' she admitted. ‘Only in photographs.'

‘I've come every day,' said Eleanor. ‘Haven't missed a word. I practically gave up my life over these past few months to attend court. And Roderick's been awfully good.' Jane smiled and inclined her head a little at the compliment. ‘I don't suppose you can tell me in advance what he's going to say, can you?'

‘I don't think so, sorry,' said Jane.

‘But he'll be announcing it in a few minutes. There's no one I can tell.'

‘I'm sorry, no. There are certain secrets between a husband and a wife that must stay secret,' she said, despite the fact that she too had no idea whether her husband would be sentencing the boy to a lifetime in Brixton prison or a trip to the scaffold. ‘And what kind of a wife would I be if I divulged them?'

The case of Rex vs Henry Domson had begun six months earlier when police had foiled a warehouse robbery near a jewel factory beside London Bridge. Domson had been the brains of the operation and had they been successful they would have succeeded in stealing almost two hundred thousand pounds' worth of diamonds and other precious stones. However, one of the gang had been too loose with his tongue and the police had received a tip-off on the night of the incident. They arrested his three accomplices but Domson himself escaped and was chased along the docks until he was cornered by two policemen near a container lorry. When they moved in to arrest him, Domson pulled a gun from his jacket pocket and then shot the first officer—PC Peter Milburn, aged fifty-two—in cold blood. He would have shot the second too had his gun not stalled and he'd been overpowered in the ensuing struggle.

The newspapers had not made too much of the incident at first—crimes like this were two a penny after all—until it was discovered that Domson was a second cousin of King GeorgeV, and a third cousin to the Prince of Wales who, just after the trial began, had succeeded to the throne. Buckingham Palace had been conspicuously silent on the topic, refusing to comment except to say that no members of the royal family were either acquainted with Mr Domson or had ever even met him but the connection was enough for the case to constitute a scandal.

Throughout the trial several of the daily participants had become celebrated figures; the chief prosecutor, Mr Justice Harkman, his learned colleague for the defence, Mr Justice McAlpine, and of course the trial judge, His Honour Sir Roderick Bentley KC, in whose hands the case now lay.

Although it seemed like something of an open-and-shut case, Domson had pleaded not guilty and the trial had dragged on until the beginning of June when the jury had finally delivered a guilty verdict on the Thursday of the previous week. Domson had looked stricken in the dock when the announcement was made and there were those close to him who imagined he would disgrace his noble lineage even further by breaking down in tears but somehow he managed to keep control of his emotions, merely gripping the handrail in front of him for support.

The newspapers had been debating the matter back and forth ever since. Murder was a capital crime, often punishable by death. The murder of a policeman, killed in the line of duty, was even more heinous and there had never been a conviction in such a case leading to anything other than the death penalty. However, there had also never been a trial quite like this one before either. The majority of the newspapers believed that Judge Bentley would suspend the death penalty and sentence Domson to a life of hard labour on account of his royal connections. Indeed, such a given was it that editorials had started to be written about the injustice of such a sentence and how the class structure was as relevant to crime as it was to normal, everyday life. Unbeknown to anyone in the courtroom
The Times
had already prepared a leader for the following day's edition attacking Roderick and calling for his removal from the bench, questioning whether the sentence would have been as lenient had the murderer been a poor, unemployed lad from Walthamstow rather than an ex-Etonian with dubious connections to higher powers.

‘Where's Denis?' asked Jane, looking around for her friend's husband. ‘I would have thought he'd be here, considering he's a solicitor himself.'

‘He's at a funeral today,' explained Eleanor. ‘Peter Montignac's. Did you know him?'

Jane narrowed her eyes and tried to remember when they had last met. ‘A little,' she said. ‘Not at all well. I used to know his wife, Ann, socially but we were hardly friends. Just people who sometimes got invited to the same functions.'

‘Ann was a dear woman,' said Eleanor. ‘Very witty. An excellent mimic.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes. Quite the girl to have at a party in her younger days. Lost a little of her sense of humour after her son was killed, of course.'

‘Well that's to be expected,' said Jane, trying to stifle a laugh.

‘Oh I know, but she dragged it on a little too long if you ask me,' said Eleanor. ‘Grief's grief but it doesn't do to dwell on it. It only embarrasses other people. Anyway, he died last week and Denis was his solicitor so he's attending the funeral.'

‘I see,' said Jane.

‘He's staying down there overnight for the reading of the will in the morning so remind me to telephone him when we leave here to let him know the sentence. He's been following the trial too and is distraught that he's going to miss the climax. It's like sitting through an entire murder mystery play and then being summoned away because the children are sick just as the curtain rises for the final act and all the characters have been gathered together in the living room to unmask the killer.'

Jane smiled; Eleanor Tandy was nothing if not colourful.

‘I presume you'll be glad when this is all over,' said Eleanor after a lengthy pause.

‘Roderick will, that's for sure,' said Jane. ‘We're all sick of the reporters camped outside. And I'm sure that one of our neighbours, Catherine Jones, is preparing a complaint for the police.'

‘And you?'

‘Well,' said Jane, considering it. ‘It's taken its toll on Roderick, that's for sure. I'd like him to take a holiday, if I'm honest. It would be nice if we could spend a little more time together now that the trial is behind us.'

‘He should have sentenced him immediately after the verdict came through. I do think it was wrong of him to wait this long. It was all I could think about over the weekend.'

After the verdict had been declared by the jury the previous Thursday, Roderick had announced that he would delay sentencing until Monday morning to give him time to consider his decision. Most commentators had agreed that he had been seeking advice on the legality of commuting the standard sentence to something less harsh and were poised to condemn him; but not only had he given himself a few days to think about it, he'd given his critics time to prepare their assaults too.

‘He was only doing what he thought right,' said Jane, who was often critical of her husband in private but would be damned if she'd allow anyone else to be. ‘After all, a boy's life hangs in the balance.'

‘I doubt it,' said Eleanor. ‘It would take enormous courage to hang him.'

Jane opened her mouth to take issue with the implication but as she did so the clerk of the court called for silence and a hush fell around the courtroom while Henry Domson was led into the dock for the last time.

9

‘IT'S A GOOD
JOB
the old man's dead,' said Charles Malroy, chalking his cue and squinting with his bad eye to get a better view of the black. ‘Although I imagine he'd be turning in his grave if he knew what was going on.'