A Death of Distinction (7 page)

‘The worst's probably still to come, for her.' Alex spoke from experience. She knew what it was to be the victim of violence. It had taken her weeks to recover physically after being injured when tackling a thief who turned out to be armed in a petrol-station heist, a long convalescence which she could see, however, in retrospect, as a respite, an opportunity to take stock of her life, just then at a crossroads, professionally as well as privately. Whether she'd chosen to take the right direction in returning to her job or not remained to be seen; what she was increasingly certain of was the rightness of her decision to make a real commitment in her private life, to have moved in here with Gil Mayo. Since she wasn't a person who undertook such commitments lightly, it had taken her a long time to make her mind up. She knew he thought she was fighting shy of marriage due to a conflict between that and her career. If it were only that!

And also, she'd known his wife, Lynne, very well. Despite the fact that it hadn't been a marriage of unalloyed bliss, mostly due to the exigencies of his job, Alex was by no means sure that he'd totally recovered from Lynne – that he still didn't have hang-ups, reminding him of the mistakes he'd made. She didn't want that kind of a marriage, with a man always looking over his shoulder. She needed to show him that theirs would be different.

‘Still nobody claiming responsibility for the bomb?' she asked as she poured his second cup of excellent coffee. Coffee she
was
good at.

He shook his head as he accepted the cup from her. ‘And I've a nasty feeling there won't be.' He half hoped his intuition would be proved wrong, that some subversive organization would call and say they'd planted the bomb, then the investigation would be in other, specialist hands; if not, it was likely to remain his responsibility ...

‘We've never begun an investigation with less to go on. No clues, no suspects, not even a body. No real leads at all, except maybe a so-called photographer who might, on the off chance that we can find him, turn out to be genuine. Oh, and a slim chance on one of the ex-inmates at Conyhall.' He wasn't, he realized, pinning many hopes on Dex Davis. Despite his record at the YOI, despite Spurrier's reluctant conclusions, and Claudia Reynolds's convictions.

‘Not even a jealous husband?' Alex asked.

‘A what?'

‘Well, Jack Lilburne was quite a dish, wasn't he? Very attractive.'

Mayo was taken aback. ‘If you say so. Must confess, he never turned me on!' But this added a dimension he hadn't so far envisaged. ‘Is that right? The sort to play away from home?'

Alex shrugged. ‘Maybe. The sort who couldn't help giving a woman the eye, at any rate.'

‘Well, well.' All the clocks in the flat reached the hour and joined together in a joyful noise, while Mayo thoughtfully finished his coffee and Alex waited patiently until they could speak again.

‘We may have more to go on when I've seen Mrs Lilburne tomorrow. And one or two of my lot should have reported in by the time I get back

It was going to be mostly legwork at this stage: all that interviewing at Conyhall... Farrar detailed to trace Dex Davis ... Jenny Platt with her ear glued to the telephone in an attempt to trace the photographer ... None of them fighting for the privilege of questioning Lavenstock's small but occasionally troublesome and always volatile Irish community. Although so far any local political affiliations with the Provisional IRA were unknown, they had to check whether any mistaken vestiges of sympathy remained, whether the violence had been channelled against the governor as a legitimate target. The task had fallen to the unenthusiastic Sergeant Carmody and DC Deeley whose names, it had been agreed by popular vote, would give them a head start. Deeley only got a big laugh when he protested that his ancestors had come from darkest Devon, and Carmody hadn't had a leg to stand on from the outset. He was Liverpool-Irish right down to his toenails.

Marc Daventry unhooked the clipboard from the iron footrail of the bed and read the notes carefully. Replacing it, he smiled at the patient. ‘Won't be long before you'll be home, I should think.'

Flora said nothing, just turned her head and stared out of the window. Marc looked at the pale, lovely profile and, despite himself, felt a stirring of pity for her. She'd been told what had happened, her memory of it had come back and she was taking it badly, though everyone kept repeating that it was a miracle she should be thankful for, that she'd escaped with barely a scratch and was still alive. Marc understood and sympathized. He knew from intimate experience how bad she must be feeling: he could recognize the numbness and the unwillingness to believe what had happened – only for him the shock had been twofold, and a long-drawn-out agony, because, unlike her father, they hadn't died immediately, the two people he had until then loved as much as he'd loved anybody. An icy road, a drunken motorist taking a corner too wide, too fast, with the result that they'd ended up in hospital, he in a coma, and she still conscious but attached to a blood drip.

A malign fate had decreed that Marc had been on duty, working overtime, when they'd been brought into Accident and Emergency at the hospital where he was working. Of course, he wasn't allowed, when it was discovered who they were, to continue working in the theatre, and he understood and accepted that. They told him sympathetically to go home, another ODP would take his place in the support team, they'd let him know when there was any news. But he waited at the hospital, his nerves twitching – this time an anxious, waiting relative on the other side of the fence, drinking endless cups of coffee from the dispensing machine. They couldn't keep him, later, from their bedsides.

He hadn't, until then, known their blood groups; there'd been no reason why he should. June, he read on her chart, was A negative – and Frank, he later saw with a shock that still sent tingles down his spine, was also A negative. While he himself, their son, was B positive.

It wasn't possible. Two A-negative parents with a B-positive child. He'd done his haematology stint during his training, and knew it couldn't be. Something was seriously wrong.

Frank died the next day, and it was to June that Marc spoke, even though she was so ill.
Because
she was so ill. He was all too aware how little time there was left, and he had to know the truth. He'd felt no compunction at pressing her, since any explanation must be so cruel to himself that he felt he was absolved from any necessity to spare her. All the love and kindness between them was forfeit after what those two had done. One of them was not his true parent. Or perhaps neither.

‘Tell me the truth,' he demanded, ‘that's all I want. Am I adopted, or what?'

She was sensible enough to give him a painfully whispered answer, to beg his forgiveness. ‘We should've told you ... we always meant to ... but it wasn't a story for a young child ... then somehow ...'

Through stiff lips, he asked, ‘What do you mean, not a story for a young child? Why not? Who am I?'

But she'd passed beyond him, spent, and though she lingered for several days, she was never able to speak coherently again.

Marc went to their double funeral, a quiet ceremony attended only by himself and a few shocked friends. There were no relatives, and for the first time his total lack of any aunts, cousins or grandparents struck him as peculiar. He'd always been told that both June and Frank were orphans, and accepted it, but now he wondered if that were false, too. He endured the ceremony with stoic indifference, which his parents friends remarked on as courage. It was anything but. Those two people, whom he'd loved and trusted, had suddenly become nothing to him. They'd lived out a lie, and had forced him, unwittingly, to live one, too. They'd robbed him of his birthright.

Who am I
?

The question had hammered and throbbed in his brain until he'd thought he was going mad. Why had they kept the facts from him? He'd always thought they were truthful, sensible people, who would surely have recognized the well-publicized dangers of not telling a child he was adopted. Remembering June's last words, he could only conclude bitterly that there had been something too shameful or disgraceful about his birth to discuss.

He looked now at the patient on the bed, at Flora. She looked so pale and pure, like a nun, with the coif-like bandage around her forehead, and he felt another stab of pity for her, and an impulse to touch and comfort her, an innocent, accidental victim, through no fault of her own. Then a different, painfully pleasurable but unwelcome emotion took him by surprise as he found her looking at him with wide, hazel eyes.

With long working hours and all his spare time occupied with what had come to be an obsessive search for his true identity. Marc had found little time for women – or to develop personal relationships at all, for that matter. He had rather a lot of acquaintances, but almost no real friends. His intensity was inclined to put people off from getting too close, and if they had, he wouldn't have reciprocated. He'd had brief encounters with women but nothing more. The deep stirring of sexual desire he felt now as he looked at the innocent, virginal figure in the bed, the urge to touch and fondle her, filled him with self-disgust. He drew back. Emotional complications he could do without. He had enough on his plate at the moment. She had to remain what she was, a stranger to him.

‘Are you a doctor?' she asked suddenly, aware of his intense scrutiny.

‘Not exactly,' Marc said.

Far from it, really, though he would like to have been, if the long years of training before he would be qualified hadn't deterred him. He'd been working as a hospital porter when he'd heard about Operating Department Practitioners, or ODPs, as they were known, who worked in the operating theatres and assisted the surgeon and the anaesthetist. The idea appealed to him immediately, and it turned out to be almost as good as being a doctor: he'd studied subjects allied to surgery and anaesthetics during his two-year training, which wasn't too long, though it was rigorous and needed a lot of study and application. But because this was something he really wanted to do, he'd passed both practical and theoretical exams with flying colours and would soon be on the second grade, a senior ODP, and could, theoretically, rise to Assistant Chief, or even Chief, though he wasn't sure he wanted that. It involved too much administrative work for his taste, whereas he enjoyed the practical side – setting up the technical equipment, checking that the ventilators were working, even monitoring the patient, occasionally, when the anaesthetist was called away. He liked the responsibility and power it gave him, particularly the feeling of having control over life and death: if he were to make a mistake, or failed to anticipate the anaesthetist's needs, if he allowed his attention to wander, no doubt about it, the patient could very easily die.

Josie Davis, small and very slim, with short, bleached, neatly cut hair, wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, was whipping round the weekend chores with her usual brisk efficiency.

Every Saturday morning the small house was blitzed from top to bottom, windows cleaned, floors vacuumed, furniture dusted and polished, while the week's washing was whirling around in her new combined washer and tumble dryer. Nobody was going to get the chance to say she didn't keep her home nice, though it was bloody hard work, keeping it spotless and looking after the children, besides working full time in the mail-order office. But if she hadn't had the job, never mind that it bored her out of her mind, there wouldn't
be
a house, not to mention the little luxuries she felt they were all entitled to. They'd taken on a bitch of a mortgage, dependent on their combined wages, hers and Barry's, to buy it. The house was brilliant, a new one on a small estate, better than the last grotty old shack – or anything she'd ever lived in before.

She was hoping to get the ironing done before getting the bus into town to shop for some clothes – you couldn't go on wearing the same things day after day in the office, the other girls would look down their noses – and to buy some ready-prepared meals from Marks. Dear, but you had to pay for conveniences when the twins let themselves in from school all they had to do was to microwave boeuf bourguignon or chicken tikka masala to eat while they watched
Neighbours.

She rubbed the windows even more vigorously, cheered by the idea that she might buy herself something smart this afternoon that she could wear that night. Being Saturday, they'd a sitter coming in so that she could go down the club with Barry.

Busy, busy, busy, every weekend the same.

So she wasn't exactly delighted to see two men walking purposefully up the path beside the handkerchief-sized lawn. Especially when she recognized them immediately for what they were.

She told them grudgingly that they'd better come in, evidently on tenterhooks that the neighbours might see and hear. It was a fear Martin Kite often played on to his own advantage – getting the door banged in your face earned you no medals. He smiled seraphically in the face of her scowl and allowed her to lead them indoors.

Two neat little girls of around ten, as like as two peas, slightly darker editions of their mother and dressed almost identically to her in jeans and T-shirts, with knowing little faces and gold sleepers – smaller versions of their mother's earrings – in their ears, were doing what looked like homework on the table in the dining end of the living room.

‘Go out and play,' their mother ordered, ‘this won't take long. Don't forget your coats.' They exchanged sulky looks, but after a silent debate, did as they were told, and presently could be seen, clad in shell-suit jackets in vivid fluorescent colours, rather desultorily bouncing a ball about on the front lawn. Smart wench, this, approved Kite, knew how to keep her kids in line, at any rate – he should be so lucky with his own lads. DC Farrar was thinking he wouldn't have argued, either. Sharp-faced madam, Josie Davis, with a tongue to match.