A Death of Distinction (15 page)

Claudia Reynolds acknowledged the compliment with a quick smile, then said with characteristic directness, though with a certain resignation, ‘It's about my late-lamented boss you want to talk to me, I take it?'

‘I confess I'm interested to know what you really thought of him.'

‘Professional opinion, or a private one?'

‘Both.'

‘Ah.' Claudia, outside the confines of her job, leisurely shopping, prepared to enjoy coffee and a chat, was a different person, more likeable, more loosened up. Besides, she'd had time to think what to say, there'd be no accidental knocking over of glasses today, Abigail was certain.

‘I'd nothing against him at all, professionally. He was brilliant, dedicated, absolutely the right person to deal with the sort of young men we get sent to us. I didn't always agree with what he did – but that's just because my style's different. No, he totally deserved that OBE ... probably should've been a knighthood. But you can admire someone professionally without liking them very much. You're bound to hear, if you haven't already, that he and I didn't get on.'

She took cigarettes from her bag, recollected they were sitting in the no-smoking section and put them back with a shrug. ‘I'm ambitious, and a lot of people equate that with bitchiness in a woman – you must know that – but that wasn't why we didn't hit it off. It was certain aspects of his private persona I found hard to take.'

‘Like disagreeing with you over the new wing?'

‘Oh, that! That was just a blip, we'd have sorted it out eventually. He was ultimately quite reasonable and sensible over things like that. That's not what I meant.'

She hesitated, staring out over the view across the car park and the municipal gardens and the Gothic splendour of the Town Hall, to where the town sloped gently upwards towards the tree-crowned hills, high on the skyline.

Overcoming her hesitation, she said eventually, ‘Oh, well, here goes. He was a very attractive man, you know. Attractive to women. And vice versa. Not to me, though, he wasn't my type. Trouble was, he tended to think he was irresistible.' She smiled wryly. ‘I came to Conyhall because I needed to widen my experience, but not in that way. I started out working with your outfit, before I decided this was what I wanted to do.'

Abigail didn't feel it necessary to say she was already aware of this, that it had been their business to find out about everyone at Conyhall, including the prison officers.

‘I've worked now in nearly every kind of prison establishment,' Claudia went on, ‘but what I really want to do is work with women, which I hope will be my next move. A bit of how's-your-father with Jack Lilburne to help me get there was definitely not in the scenario.'

Some tough lady, Claudia Reynolds, no question.

An elderly waitress came to clear the next table, wearing the green and white striped uniform and peaked hat Catesby's had chosen as a concession to modernity. She was slow and careful, but Claudia waited until she'd loaded the heavy tray and moved away with it before continuing.

‘Anyway, that was one reason why he didn't like me particularly. Couldn't take the thought of any female saying no to Jolly Jack Lilburne.'

‘Do you think his wife knew – about his affairs?'

A moment or two passed before she answered, rather quickly. ‘It's hard to tell with Dorothea. She may have done. In fairness, I don't think they meant all that much to him. They were usually pretty brief. At least ...'

‘At least what?'

‘There may have been one that was more serious. I did a previous stint of working at Conyhall some years ago, but of course I was much more junior then, not so in touch with the governor ...'

‘But you knew about the affair.'

‘I put two and two together, from things I'd picked up, and what I saw. I'd a small cottage at the time, a few miles from Conyhall – I've always preferred to provide my own accommodation whenever I could. All that summer, I saw his car parked down a small lane which you could see from my bedroom window. It was there for hours at a time, and I assumed he was meeting someone. And then, suddenly, it stopped.'

Claudia stared down into her half-drunk coffee, which must have been quite cold by now. ‘Something was evidently very wrong with the governor just about then. Whether it was because of that, I don't know, but he was unapproachable, which wasn't like him, and looking rotten ... everyone noticed. Eventually, he put it about that his doctor had told him he was overworking and had advised him to take a long holiday. He went alone, walking in the Dolomites. When he came back, it was just as if nothing had happened.'

The Elgar cello concerto moaned softly through the room.

Mayo had taken it into his head to structure his listening – saturate himself in one composer so that he understood him more, and this tape was a new acquisition that he'd bought off a market stall. It had come to something, he reflected, when that was virtually the only place you could buy tapes now ... he'd have to succumb to the blackmail in the end, get himself a C D player.

After hearing the piece through, he decided he could have saved himself the money and left it on the market stall. Disappointing. A slow piece, which the conductor took even slower, it wasn't Elgar at his confident best. Downbeat, uninspiring, despite the occasional beauty of the solo cello, with none of the sweep and vigour and majesty of the Variations.

Alex sat on the floor, leaning against his legs, writing a letter to her mother, the pad propped on her knees, finishing off a Bounty bar. She had a very sweet tooth, which he didn't share. He
hoped
the letter was to her mother, squinting at the rapid, decisive handwriting, and not to her former lover, the execrable Liam, who had given her a bad time but still had a nasty habit of popping up when least wanted or expected. Ashamed of the aberrant thought – Alex wasn't like that, promises and decisions once made were kept – he got up and went to make a pot of tea. They'd had a lean and virtuous meal of steamed plaice for supper, with new potatoes and peas. He hated plaice, a tasteless fish, even with parsley sauce, which they hadn't had. Alex was still absorbed in Her letter when he came back and took her teacup from him, with a quick smile but not so much as a glance at the three-decker corned beef and tomato sandwich he'd made himself, dripping with pickle, mayonnaise, calories and cholesterol.

He felt more at one with the world after he'd eaten it.

Because the sofa, his favourite seat, was still missing, he sat in a chair opposite the rose pink chaise longue. The room looked different from here. Maybe it wasn't a bad idea, occasionally, to change your habits, you saw things from a different angle, got a different perspective. New perspectives were what was needed on this damned investigation. Lateral thinking. He reached for the scratch pad and the ballpoint beside the telephone and after a moment, he wrote, ‘Davis?' Then sat staring into the simulated coal fire, not thinking, as he usually did, of the money going up the chimney in wasted gas, but of the case for Dex having actually planted the bomb.

Alex twisted her head round and saw what he'd written. ‘Not satisfied that our Dex is the right one in the frame?' she asked. ‘He's a nasty customer, from what I saw of him, and so's his dad.'

‘He worries me – too obvious a suspect. Far too pat, too smooth.'

All right, the obvious suspect was very often the correct one, but Dex Davis seemed just too convenient. And so did the name of this man, this John Clarke Dex said he'd got the bomb materials for, a name Mayo was bloody certain Dex had pulled off the top of his head. ‘But he's suddenly acquired money from somewhere, or someone – to buy the Orion, for one thing. Nicked it may have been in the first place, but he didn't get it for nothing, even though it was through his dad. And there's still the question of the explosives.'

The possibility of subversive organizations being responsible for the actual placing of the bomb was fast receding in the absence of any claim being put forward, but they were the ones you'd go to if you wanted the know-how, the ones to give advice on what steps to take to obtain the necessary ingredients. ‘Dex must have Irish connections, through his mother,' he mused aloud.

‘Not everyone who's Irish sympathizes with terrorists.'

‘True, but some do – though I have to admit Carmody hasn't succeeded in turning up any in Lavenstock.'

He wrote rapidly on his pad for several moments, then handed it to Alex. ‘What do you make of this? It's a letter Jenny Platt turned up among Lilburne's papers, what I can remember of it, though I think it's substantially correct. Written on plain cream writing paper with a ballpoint pen. The handwriting was distinctive, spiky, a bit Gothic, feminine looking. Coinciding with the tone of the letter, which suggested to Jenny that it was from a woman.'

My dear Jack,
it had begun, followed briefly by the usual congratulations, and ended:
I have never ceased to regard you with affection, for what you did for me, and I have not forgotten our agreement, but the time has come when we should meet again to discuss what concerns us both. I will telephone you to arrange a time.

‘Any comments?'

‘Stilted, isn't it?' Alex said. ‘But I think Jenny's right, it is from a woman. And a bit peremptory, don't you think? Though I don't read any particular threat in it.'

Was there any connection with the scrap of paper found in Lilburne's breast pocket – which had also suggested a meeting? Mayo didn't think so, he didn't think it was even written by the same person.

‘No address, either, and it's unsigned, which suggests that Lilburne might have had some sort of relationship with her that neither would want made public.'

‘Ye-es ... But it's not really a lover-like letter, is it? Not the sort of love letter I'd want to get, at any rate, please note,' she added with a grin. ‘But if they did have some sort of relationship going, the inference in the text is that it was some time in the past.'

‘Abigail's looked into it, and she says that if the writer did ring to arrange a meeting, Lilburne must have taken the call personally, because neither his secretary, his wife nor his daughter remember him being telephoned by anyone they can't identify. I'm not sure how relevant this letter is, yet, if at all. It may well turn out to be crucial to the bombing, but ...'

‘How about revenge for an affair gone wrong? Hell hath no fury ...'

‘Unless we're talking terrorists, bombs aren't usually a woman's weapon.'

‘Two people, then?'

‘Well, it's possible ...'

At the moment, he felt that anything was possible. He scarcely remembered ever having been quite so much at sea with a case.

After that first visit, in January, to the home Marie-Laure shared with Avril Kitchin, there began a strange period in Marc's life. Now that he'd found his mother, he was so overwhelmed he didn't quite know what to do with her, so to speak.

He couldn't – he wouldn't – bring her to his own grotty bedsitter, but time spent with her and Avril in their poky flat was something of an endurance test, the three of them squashed together for a whole evening, and not even a television set. He wanted to take her out, to see her have fun, to make her smile a bit, and was disappointed when she refused. There was the age gap, of course, which meant she wouldn't want to hang around the pubs and clubs he and his acquaintances frequented, but she wasn't the sort, anyway, he could see that. She spent all her spare time reading, the newspaper, or books from the library – dull, heavy stuff: religious subjects, and books she said had been short-listed for the Booker Prize. Whereas Marc never read anything, apart from motor magazines and the textbooks he'd had to read to get through his exams. The truth was, though it was a bitter thing for him to have to admit, they didn't seem to have much in common.

‘You don't have to feel responsible for me,' she said gently. ‘I'm quite happy as I am.'

He found this hard to believe. Her life was no big deal. She and Avril occupied their weekends with shopping, going to the library, walks in the park. Their evenings were spent cleaning the flat, cooking their supper, reading. Marie-Laure went to church a good deal, and Avril knitted.

She never sat down without a piece of knitting in her hands. She was an expert, able to keep an intricate pattern in her head and to work rapidly and evenly without looking at what she was doing, without dropping a stitch, her round stare fixed on Marc and his mother as they talked. Marie-Laure explained that Avril knitted samples for a woollen manufacturer: they would send her wool from the factory, and a pattern, and she would test it out for accuracy, sending back a perfect, unflawed garment. The rapidity with which she worked meant that she was able to knit for herself and Marie-Laure as well; plain sweaters and cardigans in neutral colours for his mother, the lacy things which she evidently preferred for herself, like the pink top she'd worn on his first visit to the flat. She was very fond of pink.

Despite the awkwardness, and the cramped conditions, Marc came to Coltmore Road as often as he could in his off-duty hours, since Marie-Laure wouldn't go out with him, except for an occasional walk. But the evenings were still dark and with the coming of February, they'd embarked on a period of miserable, rain-sodden weather when it was wiser to stay indoors. Marc considered it was worth it, if he could persuade Marie-Laure to talk, in her almost faultless English, about her childhood in Strasbourg, where she'd grown up, the daughter of a museum curator and his wife, about her work as a teacher in Besançon, where she'd worked until she had met Charles Daventry, a wine importer ...

Reminiscences stopped when they got to Charles Daventry.

And the questions which Marc burned to ask but couldn't, because he feared the answers, remained unasked: why had she ever taken that last, inevitable step? Why had she given him away, allowed him to be adopted? What had really happened?