The Company She Kept (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

Mayo would never have noticed the letter if it hadn't been for the fancy deckle-edged writing paper, shading from palest shell pink, through rose-colour to near-fuchsia. He wouldn't have seen it anyway if he hadn't popped into the CID room on his way to the morning discussion with the Super. It had been a mistake to turn aside from the stern path to the Upper Chamber. Whenever he did he invariably got nobbled by somebody. In this case it was a flutter of pink among the mundane piles of official forms and buff folders on Detective-Sergeant Moon's desk that caught his eye, like a frivolous piece of female underwear in an army surplus store.

‘Billy-doo from one of your admirers, Abigail?'

Abigail Moon responded with a warm smile, nice girl that she was. But then, Detective Chief Inspector Gil Mayo was also her boss and Abigail wasn't stupid. ‘Chance'd be a fine thing, wouldn't it, sir?'

Transferred from the adjoining division of Hurstfield, newly made up to sergeant, she was the latest addition to his team, a young woman with a vivid face and a heavy mass of wavy hair, the colour of Oxford marmalade, which she wore drawn back into a thick plait when on duty. Marked out as a high flyer and with a university degree which didn't impress him half as much as her level-headed, commonsense approach to the job, she was still regarded warily, and in some cases with resentment, by those she was bound to by-pass. But she was earning their respect because she mucked in, could take a joke and never expected concessions because of her sex. Most of them approved of her anyway as a decorative addition to a department not noted for pretty faces – young Jenny Platt, the only other female CID member, excluded.

Instead of leaving it circumspectly at that and going on his way with a smile and a nod, Mayo perched his bulk on the edge of Abigail's desk. Big, powerful and authoritative, fit and brown from a recent walking weekend, he picked the letter up and ran his eyes down it. Out of idle curiosity, he lifted the sheet of paper to his nose, from the look of it expecting it to be as vilely-scented as it was highly-coloured. But he could only detect a faint echo of perfume, as if picked up from a scent bottle in a drawer or a handbag, rather than having been purposely impregnated. Or perhaps it was Abigail's scent he had caught, delicate, subtle and infinitely preferable either to the waves of DC Farrar's
Eau Sauvage
which usually pervaded the CID room first thing in the morning, or the
parfum de nicotine
from George Atkins's detestable pipe.

But neither Farrar nor Inspector Atkins were yet in this morning, the room's only occupants being the two sergeants, Moon and Kite. This didn't necessarily mean the rest of the CID were late: the non-uniformed branch's hours tended to be bizarre, a state of affairs that gave some of them a nervous breakdown or a reason to apply for a transfer back to uniform. On the other hand, one which suited some of the more fly types.

‘Well, what's it supposed to be?' Mayo asked, mildly intrigued.

It was Kite who answered, flip as usual but without his usual grin. ‘Believe that load of rubbish and you'll believe anything. Unsigned, unspecific, damn near unintelligible. One of
those.
'

The Sergeant, lanky and in his late thirties, was propping up the photocopier, or maybe it was propping him up. His normally open, friendly face looked drawn, his eyes tired, maybe from working too many late hours. Whatever it was, it was giving him grey hairs. His type of blond hair didn't show the grey easily – but surely it was lighter at the temples? Grey hairs, thought Mayo, and Kite seven years younger. God, that was depressing. People were soon going to be looking twice at what he'd always thought of as the distinguished sprinkle of silver in his own thick dark hair and wondering whether it wasn't time he retired.

‘You'll see what he means when you read it, sir,' Abigail suggested, dispelling unwelcome thoughts.

Mayo was on Kite's side in the matter of anonymous communications, in so far as he'd no time either for anybody who wasn't prepared to put their name to what they wrote. On the other hand, anonymous tip-offs were a necessary evil to be accepted, even encouraged, with grateful thanks and without too many questions as to their provenance. Even though they were invariably from amateur informers, written out of spite, or a desire to get their own back, to shop somebody who'd done them wrong.

This one differed from the usual run in that it was not only disconnected and incoherent but also, as Kite said, non-specific. It began without preamble:
‘
The night she died Dido came. Dido Elissa. There were bad vibes that night. And
Death for the old woman. She made out she was old and useless but could see everything without glasses and ears like a bat. The horrible red room. Babies' cremation urns. And the mask of Tanit wife of Ba'al. All-powerful. Death
.'
The text at this point was interrupted by a line of drawings, the same figure repeated again and again, a triangle surmounted by a circle bisected by two extended arms, in what appeared to be a crude representation of the female form.
She would not have died if she had stayed away from England. If he had kept his temper. I have kept my mouth shut for fourteen years and said nothing but I was wrong. Murder must be punished.
'

It was not signed.

‘See what I mean?' asked Kite as Mayo came to the end of this missive, turned the page over to see if there was anything more, but found nothing. ‘Dido, Elissa – babies' cremation urns! What in the name of God are we expected to make of that?'

‘Dido as in
Dido and Aeneas'
Mayo was able to inform them modestly, enlightenment having gradually dawned on him as he read.

Kite, however, looked blank and Abigail, who might have known what Mayo meant but had learned to be careful of appearing too clever, said nothing.

‘It's an opera. Maybe somebody saw it in London like I did, the other week. Over-stimulating to the imagination – that particular production at any rate.'

‘Oh, an opera,' said Kite.

‘Based on the legend of Dido, a queen of ancient Carthage, who ended up flinging herself into the flames when her lover Aeneas deserted her.'

Abigail couldn't resist that. ‘What man on earth's worth that, I ask myself. Her laugh almost took the acid out of it.

‘She was also known as Elissa,' Mayo said, tapping the letter. And Tanit was the moon-goddess of Carthage who demanded sacrifices of babies and small children.'

‘Sounds like a real fun evening!' Kite said.

‘Disappointing.'

Mayo had gone alone and was glad he had. Purcell wasn't much in Sergeant Jones's line. Alex and he shared their intimate moments when their off-duty coincided and would, if he had his way, share the rest of their lives, but the one area where their tastes didn't coincide was music. She liked hers soft and easy and could take it or leave it, whereas for him it was serious and at the centre of his life. The tragic opera had been memorable for more than the felicitous marriage of words and the most glorious musical instrument of all, the human voice. It had been a clever, arty production, a combination of opera and dance, and a horrifying subtext which had underlined the dark themes of superstition and betrayal and sacrifice. With its dramatic background of flames and fire, and frenzied, naked dancers, he had found it ultimately deeply depressing. It had haunted him, if that wasn't too strong. At any rate, made the hairs rise on the back of his neck ... just as this letter did.

He read it again and could make nothing of it. He decided it was probably from some poor soul who wasn't quite right in the head, or from someone who was having them on, with long odds on the latter. He'd learned to be cynical about these things.

Abigail said, ‘What shall we do about following it up, sir?'

‘What
can
we do, where do we start, without anything more specific to go on? There's no way this can be taken as material evidence of a murder. Even if we're expected, as I assume we are, to believe that years ago some old woman was murdered?'

She didn't appear to be too convinced, obviously believing there was some mileage in pursuing the idea. Her mouth was stubborn even though she knew he was watching her, judging her with the steady dark look that was capable of making potential suspects buckle at the knees. His gut feeling where Abigail was concerned was that she was good, and going to be better. She was young and as far as he knew had no ties or encumbrances, which was all to the good as far as her career was concerned. Tough going stimulated her; throw down a challenge in front of her and she'd pick it up and run with it – more than some of her male colleagues were prepared to do. But he thought briefly of last month's crime figures, this month's budget, his permanently overstretched team, shook his head and then dismissed the letter from his mind.

He flicked the pink paper back on to the desk. ‘Nasty overtones – but why stop there? If she really has something to tell, she'll write again. I doubt it, though, now that she's got it off her chest.'

Abigail looked enigmatic at his choice of pronoun, but it hadn't only been the pink scented paper and its matching envelope, lined with deepest rose, that was suggestive of a woman writer. There was also – he had to say it – the hysterical tone. And the handwriting, which was loopy and irregular, increasingly illegible towards the end, with backward-curling down-loops and sentences only half-completed. And the erratic syntax and punctuation, which
could,
of course, apply to either sex. But the general tone of the letter struck him as unquestionably female.

He went on his way at last, certain they had heard the end of the whole thing. A prediction which could hardly have been more wrong.

When Sophie first came to Flowerdew in 1978, a sepia photograph had stood on the walnut lowboy in the drawing-room: a snapshot of Kitty Wilbraham when young, a small but gallant figure in a safari jacket and divided skirt, wearing a pith helmet with a wealth of richly curling hair tumbling from under it. Around her were the stone ruins of Carthage, beside her a monumental fallen column, its mighty head in the dust. Two men were pictured with her. One of them was her husband, Alfred, a stout, bearded, elderly figure reminiscent of King George the Fifth, and clad – inexplicably under that bright harsh sun – in tweed plus fours and a stiff collar. The other man was Milralav Bron, another archaeologist who had been working with the Wilbrahams on the same dig. He was taller than Alfred, and very dark, sporting a bold moustache, a regrettable shirt and a louche smile. But then he was, after all, a foreigner.

The departed Alfred Wilbraham seemed to have been an unimpeachably virtuous figure whose integrity, erudition and wisdom Kitty never ceased to extol. He had died in Tunisia from a fall of rock upon his unprotected head after an inexplicable failure to keep to his own rules and wear a helmet when working. He left no issue but to Kitty he had willed Flowerdew, a largeish house about a dozen miles from Lavenstock, named for the Elizabethan adventurer who had built it. The place had belonged to Alfred's family for generations and was shabby through a continued lack of interest in spending money on its maintenance. It was also extremely inconvenient by modern standards, but he hoped she would continue to use it as a retreat in the intervals of grubbing about in the sand.

Kitty, Sophie gathered when she began to piece the bits of her life together, had done as Alfred wished and kept the house as her base whenever she was in England with the exception of the war years, when she had enlisted in the ATS in the hope of being sent abroad. In view of her intimate knowledge of the Middle East, however, she was immediately put on to secret work at the War Office, where she was kept for the duration. Obliged to make the best of it, she worked off her ferocious energy in the little spare time she had by writing books about her work on the excavations of Carthage, which were published with some success after the war. Not even the publicity this brought her (which she was not slow to play up to by adopting a flamboyant style of dressing) could keep her permanently from her life's work in Tunisia, however. When the flush of fame had died down she returned there, until age and arthritis forced her to retire permanently to Flowerdew. She put on weight, grew more bizarre than ever, drank quantities of sweet mint tea all day long and became obsessed with the idea that she was about to die and that she must write her memoirs before she did.

It would give her something to occupy herself with, she announced and besides, the money would come in useful. Flowerdew had never recovered from its sad neglect before and during the war; it had now reached the age where it was threatening to fall into complete ruin if it were not propitiated by having vast sums of money spent on it. Money didn't have the same value as it had when Alfred died; she was growing poor. Nobody believed this. Alfred had left her what was a comfortable fortune by any standards but, open-handed in other directions, she was certainly canny with money.

Writing had always come easily to Kitty and despite her belief in her imminent demise the flow was unstemmed. She had a trained mind well-honed by her days at Girton, her notes had always been meticulously kept and arranged, she had an excellent memory and she was blessed with a prose style that was sharp and entertaining and not at all what might have been expected from her dusty subject. Her lightness of touch was frowned upon by other academics
– Funerary Customs and Sacrificial Rites in Phoenician Carthage,
the title of her latest book, and the Punic Wars, in which field she was an acknowledged expert, were after all no laughing matter – although no fault could be found with her scholarship. They were only jealous, Kitty retorted, because her books continued to sell well. And not only as textbooks for serious students but to armchair archaeologists who preferred to take their doses of culture sweetened by a little lightness and humour.