Reflex (26 page)

C
lare came down on the train two days later to sort out what photographs she wanted from the filing cabinet: to make a portfolio, she said. Now that she was my agent, she'd be rustling up business. I laughed. It was serious, she said.

I had no races that day. I'd arranged to fetch Jeremy from the hospital and take him home, and to have Clare come with me all the way. I'd also telephoned to Lance Kinship to say I'd had his reprints ready for ages, and hadn't seen him, and would he like me to drop them in as I was practically going past his house.

That would be fine, he said. Afternoon, earlyish, I suggested, and he said “Right” and left the “t” off. And I'd like to ask you something, I said. “Oh? All right. Anything you like.”

Jeremy looked a great deal better, without the gray clammy skin of Sunday. We helped him into the back of my car and tucked a rug around him, which he plucked off indignantly, saying he was no aged invalid but a perfectly viable solicitor.

“And incidentally,” he said. “My uncle came down
here yesterday. Bad news for you, I'm afraid. Old Mrs. Nore died during Monday night.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Well, you knew,” Jeremy said. “Only a matter of time.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“My uncle brought two letters for me to give to you. They're in my suitcase somewhere. Fish them out, before we start.”

I fished them out, and we sat in the hospital parking lot while I read them.

One was a letter. The other was a copy of her will.

Jeremy said, “My uncle said he was called out urgently to the nursing home on Monday morning. Your grandmother wanted to make her will, and the doctor there told my uncle there wasn't much time.”

“Do you know what's in it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “My uncle just said she was a stubborn old woman to the last.”

I unfolded the typewritten sheets.

 

I, Lavinia Nore, being of sound mind, do hereby revoke all previous wills . . .

 

There was a good deal of legal guff and some complicated pension arrangements for an old cook and gardener, and then the two final fairly simple paragraphs.

 

“. . . Half the residue of my estate to my son James Nore . . .” “. . . Half the residue of my estate to my grandson Philip Nore, to be his absolutely, with no strings or steel hawsers attached.”

 

“What's the matter?” Clare said. “You look so grim.”

“The old witch has defeated me.”

I opened the other envelope. Inside there was a letter
in shaky handwriting, with no beginning, and no end.

It said:

 

I think you did find Amanda, and didn't tell me because it would have given me no pleasure.

Is she a nun?

You can do what you like with my money. If it makes you vomit, as you once said . . . then VOMIT.

Or give it to my genes.

Rotten roses.

 

I handed the will and the letter to Clare and Jeremy, who read them in silence. We sat there for a while, thinking, and then Clare folded up the letter, put it in its envelope, and handed it back to me.

“What will you do?” she said.

“I don't know. See that Amanda never starves, I suppose. Look after her, somehow. Apart from that . . .”

“Enjoy it,” Jeremy said. “The old woman loved you.”

I listened to the irony of his voice and wondered if it was true. Love or hate. Love and hate. Perhaps she'd felt both at once when she'd made that will.

 

We drove from Swindon towards St. Albans, making a short detour to deliver Lance Kinship's reprints.

“Sorry about this,” I said. “But it won't take long.”

They didn't seem to mind. We found the house without much trouble. Typical Kinship country, fake Georgian, large grandiose front, pillared gateway, meager drive.

I picked the packet of photographs out of the trunk of the car, and rang the front doorbell.

Lance opened the door himself, dressed today not in country gent togs but in white jeans, espadrilles and a red and white horizontally striped T-shirt. International film-director gear, I diagnosed. All he needed was the megaphone.

“Come inside,” he said. “I'll pay you for these.”

“OK. Can't be long though, with my friends waiting.”

He looked briefly towards my car, where Clare and Jeremy's interested faces showed in the windows, and went indoors with me following. He led the way into a large sitting room with expanses of parquet and too much black-lacquered furniture. Chrome and glass tables and art deco lamps.

I gave him the packet of pictures.

“You'd better look at them,” I said. “To make sure they're all right.”

He shrugged. “Why shouldn't they be?” All the same, he opened the envelope and pulled out the contents.

The top picture showed him looking straight at the camera in his country gent clothes; glasses, trilby hat, air of bossy authority.

“Turn it over,” I said.

With raised eyebrows he did so, and read what Mrs. Jackson had written:
This is the tax assessor
 . . .

The change in him from one instant to the next was like one person leaving and another entering the same skin. He shed the bumptiously sure-of-himself phony; slid into a mess of unstable ill will. The gaudy clothes which had fitted one character seemed grotesque on the other, like gift wrap around a handgrenade. I saw the Lance Kinship I'd only suspected existed. Not the faintly ridiculous poseur pretending to be what he wasn't, but the tangled psychotic who would do anything at all to preserve the outward show.

It was in his very inadequacy, I supposed, that the true danger lay. In his estrangement from reality. In his theatrical turn of mind, which had allowed him to see murder as a solution to problems.

“Before you say anything,” I said, “you'd better look at the other things in that envelope.”

With angry fingers he sorted them out. The regular reprints and also the black-and-white glossy reproductions
of Dana den Relgan's drugs list and the letter I'd found on the diazo paper.

They were for him a fundamental disaster.

He let the pictures of the great film producer fall to the ground around him like ten-by-eight colored leaves, and stood holding the three black-and-white sheets in visible horror.

“She said—” he said hoarsely “—she swore you didn't have it. She swore you didn't know what she was talking about.”

“She was talking about the drugs you supplied her with. Complete with dates and prices. That list which you hold, which is recognizably in her handwriting, for all that it was originally written on cellophane. And of course, as you see, your name appears on it liberally.”

“I'll kill you,” he said.

“No, you won't. You've missed your chance. It's too late now. If the gas had killed me you would have been all right, but it didn't.”

He didn't say, “What gas?” He said, “It all went wrong. But it didn't matter. I thought it didn't matter.” He looked down helplessly at the black-and-white prints.

“You thought it didn't matter because you heard from Dana den Relgan that I didn't have the list. And if I didn't have the list, then I didn't have the letter. Whatever else I'd had from George Millace, I didn't after all have the list and the letter. Is that what you thought? So if I didn't have them, there was no more need to kill me. Was that it?”

He didn't answer.

“It's far too late to do it now,” I said, “because there are extra prints of those pages all over the place. Another copy of that picture of you, identified by Mrs. Jackson. Bank, solicitors, several friends, all have instructions about taking everything to the police if any accidental death should befall me. You've a positive interest in keeping me alive from now on.”

The implication of what I was saying only slowly sank
in. He looked from my face to the photographs and back again several times, doubtfully.

“George Millace's letter—” he said.

I nodded. George's letter, handwritten, read:

 

Dear Lance Kinship,

I have received from Dana den Relgan a most interesting list of drugs supplied to her by you over the past few months. I am sure I understand correctly that you are a regular dealer in such illegal substances.

It appears to be all too well known in certain circles that in return for being invited to places which please your ego, you will, so to speak, pay for your pleasure with gifts of marijuana, heroin and cocaine.

I could of course place Dana den Relgan's candid list before the proper authorities. I will telephone you shortly, however, with an alternative suggestion.

Yours sincerely,
George Millace

 

“It was typed when I got it,” Lance Kinship said dully. “I burned it.”

“When George telephoned,” I said, “did he tell you his alternative suggestion?”

The shock in Lance Kinship began to abate, with enmity growing in its place.

“I'm telling you nothing.”

I said, disregarding him, “Did George Millace say to stop supplying drugs and donate to the Injured Jockeys' Fund?”

His mouth opened and snapped shut viciously.

“Did he telephone?” I asked. “Or did he tell you his terms when he called here?”

A tight silence.

“Did you put something from your store cupboard into his whisky?”

“Prove it!” he said with sick triumph.

One couldn't, of course. George had been cremated, with his blood tested only for alcohol. There had been no checks for other drugs. Not for, perhaps, tranquilizers, which were flavorless, and which in sufficient quantity would certainly have sent a driver to sleep.

George, I thought regretfully, had stepped on one victim too many. Had stepped on what he'd considered a worm and never recognized the cobra.

George had made a shattering mistake if he'd wanted for once to see the victim squirm when he came up with his terms. George hadn't dreamed that the inadequate weakling would lethally lash out to preserve his sordid life style, hadn't really understood how fanatically Lance Kinship prized his shoulder-rubbing with a jet set that at best tolerated him. George must have enjoyed seeing Lance Kinship's fury. Must have driven off laughing. Poor George.

“Didn't you think,” I said, “that George had left a copy of his letter behind him?”

Form his expression, he hadn't. I supposed he'd acted on impulse. He'd very nearly been right.

“When you heard that George had blackmailed other people, including Dana, is that when you began thinking I might have your letter?”

“I heard—” he said furiously “—I heard . . . in the clubs . . . Philip Nore has the letters . . . he's ruined den Relgan . . . got him sacked from the Jockey Club. Did you think . . . once I knew . . . did you really think I'd wait for you to come around to
me
?”

“Unfortunately,” I said slowly, “whether you like it or not, I now have come around to you.”

“No.”

“Yes,” I said. “I'll tell you straight away that like George Millace I'm not asking for money.”

He didn't look much reassured.

“I'll also tell you it's your bad luck that my mother died from addiction to heroin.”

He said wildly, “But I didn't know your mother.”

“No, of course not. But there's no question of your ever having supplied her yourself. It's just that I have a certain long-standing prejudice against drug pushers. You may as well know it. You may as well understand why I want what I want.”

He took a compulsive step towards me. I thought of the brisk karate kick he had delivered to den Relgan at Kempton and wondered if in his rope-soled sandals on parquet he could be as effective. Wondered if he had any real skill or whether it was more window-dressing to cover the vacuum.

He looked incongruous, not dangerous. A man not young, not old, thinning on top, wearing glasses and beach clothes indoors in December.

A man who could kill if pushed too far. Kill not by physical contact, when one came to think of it, but in his absence, by drugs and gas.

He never reached me to deliver whatever blind vengeful blow he had in mind. He stepped on one of the fallen photographs, and slid, and went down hard on one knee. The inefficient indignity of it seemed to break up conclusively whatever remained of his confidence, for when he looked up at me, I saw not hatred or defiance, but fear.

I said, “I don't want what George did. I don't ask you to stop peddling drugs. I want you to tell me who supplies you with heroin.”

He staggered to his feet, his face aghast. “I can't. I
can't
.”

“It shouldn't be difficult,” I said mildly. “You must know where you get it from. You get it in sizeable quantities, to sell, to give away. You always have plenty, I'm told. So you must have a regular supplier, mustn't you? He's the one I want.”

The source, I thought. One source supplying several pushers. The drug business was like some monstrous
tentacly creature: cut off one tentacle and another grew in its place. The war against drugs would never be won, but it had to be fought, if only for the sake of silly girls who were sniffing their way to perdition. For the sake of the pretty ones. For Dana. For Caroline, my lost butterfly mother, who had saved me from an addiction of my own.

“You don't know—” Lance Kinship seemed to be breathless. “It's impossible. I can't tell you. I'd be dead.”

I shook my head. “It will be between the two of us. No one will ever know you told me unless you yourself talk, like den Relgan did in the gaming clubs.”

“I can't,” he said desparingly.

“If you don't,” I said conversationally, “I will first tell the policemen investigating an attempted murder in my house that my neighbor positively identifies you as having posed as a tax assessor. This isn't enough on its own to get you charged, but it could certainly get you
investigated
for access to chemicals and so on.”