A Death of Distinction (25 page)

Dorothea Lilburne, he was sure, had lied about her husband being at home on the night of the murder.

He was familiar with all the vagaries of human nature but he'd never yet met anyone willingly prepared to serve a life sentence for something they hadn't done. So what kind of a woman would admit to a murder she hadn't committed? What kind of man would
let
her do that for him?

And what kind of son would not want revenge if he saw Lilburne getting off scot-free, while his mother spent the best years of her life incarcerated for something she was, putting the very best construction on it, only partly to blame for?

‘Please go on, Mrs Daventry.'

‘When he wrote and told me that the couple who had taken Marc had been killed in an accident, I thought – I
knew
– it was my duty to contact my son and see if I could help. I wrote to Jack, suggesting we should meet to discuss it, but he did not think it wise that my son and I should be reunited, and he refused to help me.'

‘What reason did he give for this?'

‘He would not explain. But his help was not necessary. In the end, it was Marc who found me.'

‘How did he manage to do that?'

‘By chance.' She told him how they had met, through Marc's encounter with Avril Kitchin at the place where she had worked.

He looked steadily at her when she had finished, knowing that this was the core of it, where it all began. They were a close pair, she and her son, and they both knew the truth of this whole business, even if they weren't telling it. He sensed some sort of complicity, though in a way which bothered him, and for some reason he couldn't define.

She said, ‘I wish to go now. You have no reason for keeping me here.'

She was right. He'd no cause to hold her at the moment. He said, ‘You can go presently, as long as you don't disappear again, Mrs Daventry. We shall need to see you again. But first, I want you to tell me more about your son – how much he knew of the circumstances in which your husband was killed.'

‘He knew nothing until after his adoptive parents were killed, when he found the papers relating to the trial.'

‘Nothing more than that?'

‘There was no more to know,' she answered, looking at him steadily.

‘These adoptive parents. What was their name?' he asked. He thought. Don't tell me, let me guess.

They showed Dex Davis a photograph, an identity photo taken by the hospital as part of their new safety measure campaign. ‘That's him,' Davis, now back in Conyhall on remand, said triumphantly. ‘That's John Clarke. Now will you believe me?'

The church of Our Lady of the Assumption was an unappealing Victorian edifice of soot-blackened bricks, with a tall steeple, its steps opening straight off the street. Marc waited across the road, loitering in a shop doorway until the priest had left the presbytery, watching him until he'd crossed to the church and entered by a side door. He waited another ten minutes before following him into the unfamiliar church.

He slipped in silently and stood in the flickering dimness near the stand of votive candles at the back, blinking slightly as he searched for her in the shadowed nave where she knelt alone, a solitary figure at the end of a pew, her head bent, kneeling upright, unsupported. A posture she could keep up without any seeming effort. You'd have thought she'd have had enough religion by now. But he'd known she'd come straight here after being questioned by the police: the woman at Catesby's, when he'd rung to speak to her, had told him disapprovingly where she was. He was impatient, but controlled it – if she'd already made her confession, it couldn't be long before she was ready to leave.

It wasn't a prepossessing church. Apart from a Burne-Jones stained-glass window, it had little of either architectural or ecclesiastical merit. Nor did it seem to be particularly well-cared for: there was a mingled odour of dust, damp, incense and burning wax tapers that was not wholly pleasant, but the riot of pre-Raphaelite yellows and browns from the window bathed the altar in a dappled glow which even now, when the light was beginning to fade, and the body of the church was dark, gave a spurious illusion of sunlight flooding into the interior.

Not yet ready for what he knew he must do, reluctant to approach the kneeling figure, Marc let his gaze rest on the source of the golden light, and a recollection, sharp and clear in its totality, came to him, of a bright morning long ago. A warm, early summer's morning and himself a child, running down the narrow, high-walled passageway that was a short cut from the High Street to the playground where the swings were. He'd run ahead of the other two, rejoicing in the freedom of wearing shorts for the first time that year, feeling the sun on his face and the air against his legs, wanting to skip, jump, climb trees, run ...

She'd appeared before him like some great black bat, her arms outstretched to catch him, blocking his way, cackling, her face contorted with crazy laughter: the madwoman who walked about the town, strangely dressed in voluminous garments, talking to herself, waving her umbrella. The old woman they called Mad Motty, the one all his class at school jeered and laughed at – though from the safety of the other side of the street. He'd screamed in terror, and run. But the stony alleyway was slippery, his rubber soles had skidded on the loose, flinty pebbles and he'd fallen, bloodied his knee and cracked his forehead painfully. For a moment he lay, winded, on the upward slope of the path, then he began to roar, never mind that he was seven and big men didn't cry. And in a moment his mother's arms were round him, his head was pillowed against her soft bosom, shutting out the horrible sight, he was safe, nothing could hurt him any more.

‘It's all right, lovey, it's all right, she doesn't mean any harm.'

To the deranged old woman, uncomprehending of why the child had been so afraid of her, when all she'd wanted was to scoop him up and cuddle him, and who was now trying to pat him and wanting to kiss him better, his mother said kindly, ‘Leave him, Miss Mott, leave him to me, he'll be all right. You be on your way, now.'

The madwoman finally went, and June mopped him up and tied a handkerchief round his knee, and his father hoisted the wounded soldier on to his shoulders, the bright morning came back and terror receded, to be forgotten altogether until now.

June. His mother. His
mother.

The pain he'd never felt when she'd died, when Frank had died, pain obscured by anger, now ripped through him like a knife, so that he swayed and had to hold on to the back of the pew in front of him. The dizzying revelation of what he'd tried not to acknowledge over the last few weeks came to him in full that the dark figure kneeling in the pew in front was as unreal as the figure of the Madonna in the niche by the altar. She'd given him birth, she'd passed on physical characteristics – but nothing more, except that one thing, so monstrous that his mind blotted it out.

His mother, in everything that mattered, had been June. His father had been, not the unknown Charles Daventry, but Frank.

Simple, uncomplicated, kindly people. Unimaginative, but well meaning. Too late, he felt regret – for not appreciating the love and happiness of their home, the kindness, the careful nurturing, everything that he'd taken for granted as a child – for things he'd sometimes despised them for, as a self-centred teenager. Their only failure had been, not a deliberate attempt to keep him ignorant of the true facts of his birth, but an inability to know how to tell him what a fearful heritage was his, a lack of the necessary insight. It was true, he knew, that he'd been a difficult child to communicate with. He wasn't like them. A cuckoo in the nest. Perhaps they'd been a little afraid of him.

And he'd been seduced by an idea, a mistaken concept of what his true mother was, by a romantic myth of suffering and martyrdom. He saw now how wrong he'd been, how bitterly he'd been let down. She'd never really wanted him, not after she'd given him away. The years between had made her into someone who had no need of, or no wish for, personal relationships. Duty had made her acknowledge him, but they could never have anything truly meaningful to say to each other. After all he'd done for her, she was too occupied with the dark, inimitable forces within her.

It was that part of his genetic inheritance which he didn't want to think about, not now, not ever again.

He'd come to the church before leaving, intending to ask her to walk in the park near the river with him, thinking he might find it easier there, in the dark, with the distant sound of traffic and the rush of the weir nearby, to say so many of the things he had to say, all of which he now saw as pointless.

He left her kneeling there and went out as silently as he'd entered.

A squad car sped off to Branxmore, to the address Marc Daventry had given. Farrar drove. Kite had a warrant in his pocket. Deeley and Tip were there as back-up. While it was on its way.

Mayo conferred with Abigail, looking at the profile they'd already drawn up of the putative bomber.

A man of middle height, who wore size-8 trainers – Reeboks, well worn, the pattern on the sole worn smooth at the inner edges, with a probable drawing pin embedded in one heel.

A man who drove a car whose tyre tracks should match up with the ones found in the field.

Someone who committed his crimes in the early morning ... because he had been working during the night previous to both crimes. Someone, like Marc Daventry, who worked shifts, irregular hours.

Someone who had negotiated to buy explosives and had made them into a bomb – and whom Dex Davis was prepared to identify. Not exactly the best of witnesses to produce in court, but the best they had.

‘But where did he get the money?' Abigail asked. ‘And why Lilburne? Did he really believe he killed his father? And why, for God's sake, Avril Kitchin?'

‘That's what he's going to tell us when we bring him in,' Mayo said grimly.

But he wasn't happy that all the links they had so far were with the Lilburne murder. What about Avril Kitchin's? Apart from the fact, on his own admission, that he hadn't liked her, there was nothing to say Daventry had murdered her, too, or why. Her killing, whether Marie-Laure was implicated or not, seemed entirely pointless.

The keys Marie-Laure had handed over had been dusted for prints but the surface, according to Dexter, was too rough to provide anything useful. The enamel tag on the key ring, however, was a different matter, with two distinct prints, one of them matching up with Marie-Laure's, taken while she was at the station. The other print wasn't Avril Kitchin's. It might, with luck, prove to belong to Marc Daventry, but as evidence of murder, it was inconclusive.

The squad car turned into Evesham Street.

Although it was only a short distance away from Coltmore Road, the respectability was several degrees lower down the scale, the flat itself being no better. It was on the ground floor of a small terraced house, whose minuscule front garden was a repository for everything representative of a throwaway, takeaway society. They rang the bell marked ‘Garden Flat' and, receiving no answer, didn't bother with a second ring but went round the back. Another tiny garden, rank with weeds, a tumbledown shed leaning drunkenly against the back railings. No answer to their knock.

‘Give it a push, Pete,' Kite said. But the rickety-looking wooden door was remarkably resistant to Deeley's buffalo-charging fifteen stones. ‘Try the window.'

The scullery window splintered glass into the sink below, already full of dirty washing-up water and crockery. With Farrar's usual luck, he was the one delegated to climb through, the most finicky of the four but also the slimmest. Avoiding the sink as best he could, he presently opened the door, an expression of extreme disgust on his face, as though there were a bad smell under his nose. The place was clean enough, however, if in a bad state of disrepair, with the half-done washing up appearing to be there simply as a result of the occupant having been in a hurry when he left.

Almost all his personal possessions had gone with him, with only some dirty linen remaining, stuffed into the bottom drawer of the big, old wardrobe. A couple of shirts, underclothes, and an Arran sweater which Deeley held up inquiringly. Kite shook his head. ‘Probably not. It's something dark – maroon – we're looking for.'

Everything else appeared to have been cleared out.

‘Done a runner, hasn't he?' observed Deeley after a few minutes' more unrewarding search, which blinding statement of the obvious was rewarded with a terse instruction from Kite to check the other occupants of the house.

He came back with the news that none of them appeared to be at home, but in the back shed, amongst garden implements which hadn't been touched for years, hidden under a pile of old sacks, he'd found a biscuit tin, full of electrical equipment, mercury tilt switches. Kite's reaction wasn't the jubilant one he'd expected.

‘Take a look at this, Sarge,' Farrar had said, a minute or two before.

Kite was now staring at what had been revealed when the DC had unhooked a long mirror, hanging somewhat lopsidedly inside the back of the wardrobe door, with something protruding from behind. The mirror had been hung over a pinboard, easily visible from the bed if the door were left open. Drawing-pinned to it were dozens of photographs. All blown-up snaps of the same girl, taken outdoors and seemingly when she was unaware of the camera, a tawny blonde with an amazing figure and short skirts revealing long legs.

‘Very tasty,' Deeley remarked.

Farrar said, ‘Could Daventry be our happy little photographer? If so, maybe the gardener will identify him.'

‘These are Flora Lilburne,' Kite said sharply.

His eyes travelled over the snaps and fell on one different from the rest. It was a shocking invasion of her privacy, more so than the others, taken when she was asleep in what was obviously a hospital bed. One arm was flung outside the bedclothes, a large dressing was on her forehead. ‘What the devil –?' And then, looking at the last of the pictures, Kite added softly, ‘My God.'