An Accidental Shroud (24 page)

'Goodness!'

'Yes, indeed, but even that gives no real indication of what it's really like. You'd have to see it to appreciate the inspired engraving, the tender pink and cream shading of the enamel on the petals, the way the stems twine down and around the vase – well, what I can only call the sheer artistry of the composition.' Slightly overcome by his own lyricism, the jeweller coughed and added prosaically, 'What's more, it actually bears the initials of the workmaster, the man who created it, which is unusual. H.W. Henrik Wigstrom.'

'Any indication of its worth?'

The lengthy silence at the other end made Abigail feel she'd unknowingly transgressed some code of ethics. Finally, Macaudle said severely, 'A hitherto unknown Fabergé piece? How can that possibly be evaluated? There are things of more importance than money.' Relenting, he added, 'All I can tell you is that these flowers are extremely rare, certainly one of this quality, and that if sold I would confidently expect it to reach well into six large figures. Especially, I may say, with the very special provenance this one has.'

'Which was?'

Another weighty pause. 'Well, of course, I didn't see it, but I understood from Mr Fontenoy that there exists a document – a letter, written in Russian – proving beyond doubt the piece was commissioned from Fabergé and intended as a twenty-first birthday gift in June, 1918 for the Grand Duchess Tatiana Romanov from her father, the Tsar of Russia. I'm afraid the poor young lady was destined never to receive it, since by then the whole family were prisoners in Ekaterinburg, where they were later shot by the revolutionaries.'

After a moment for this to sink in, Abigail asked, 'And how did the piece come to be in Mr Fontenoy's possession?'

'Never ask an antique dealer that! I certainly didn't. Many of these things came out of Russia after the terrible events of the revolution, by various means.'

'You mean they were stolen?'

'Oh, undoubtedly some of them were, with all the looting and so on that went on, but as far as this one goes, who can tell?'

'It was in some sort of box, I understand?'

After the minutely detailed description of the jewelled honeysuckle spray, she wasn't surprised to receive a similarly detailed one of its fitted case, of white polished holly wood, with the name of Fabergé, in the Russian alphabet, stamped on the satin lining of the lid.

'I must tell you,' Macaudle said before their conversation was ended, 'that I had reservations – not about the authenticity of the piece, to be sure, but about this letter Mr Fontenoy spoke of. One would need to see it and have it expertly assessed, but I understand there was some slight difficulty over that.'

'What sort of difficulty?'

'I believe it wasn't actually in his possession at the moment, but held by someone else.'

'I don't suppose he said who that was?'

'I fear not, though he seemed confident of producing it. Without it, needless to say, the flower would be worth considerably less.'

After Mayo had been acquainted with this latest development, looking somewhat deep in thought, he followed Abigail down to the incident room to put the rest of the team in the picture, or those who were not out of the office. Coffee cups were filled, cigarettes lit to add to the already thick fug of tobacco smoke in the room. Mayo perched on the table in front of the blackboard. 'Go ahead, Inspector Moon.'

They heard her out, and she saw their faces registering varying degrees of incredulity, amusement, suspicion. With some justification, she had to allow. Cases involving jewelled birthday presents from the Tsar of Russia to his daughter had not hitherto featured very prominently among the day to day break-ins, rapings, muggings, drunk and disorderlies and domestic violence that formed the rich pattern of ordinary life at Milford Road nick.

'No kidding!' said Deeley, when she'd eventually finished.

'You'd better believe it, Pete. It's true as I stand here.'

Later, after the buzz of excitement had died down and the room had gradually cleared to leave only Atkins and

Carmody – apart from one or two uniformed staff dealing with telephones and word processors – with Abigail and Mayo, Mayo said, 'At risk of stating the obvious, this establishes two things – that this Fabergé object was almost certainly connected to Fontenoy's murder, and that what Fontenoy wanted from Naomi Graham, via Jake Wilding, was the letter of provenance.'

From Atkins's pocket had come his familiar pouch and his pipe, which he now proceeded to fill and tamp down. Having finished packing it, he struck a match on the sole of his shoe, put flame to tobacco and from behind the ensuing pall of smoke, remarked, 'Using Wilding's gratitude for this alleged favour he owed him as a lever?'

Mayo walked to the window, threw it open and sat on the sill, arms folded. 'Right, George. Wilding hasn't seen fit to tell us what this favour was, but it must've been a sizeable one. One he isn't anxious to talk about, either.'

'Forde Manor,' Atkins stated, unmoved by the broad hint, inured to offence where his smoking was concerned.

'What?'

'Speaking from hearsay, mind, but there was a lot of talk last year when Wilding nipped in smartish and bought Forde Manor, just before Save All's announcement they were going to build a hypermarket. And Nigel Fontenoy was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, which might or might not mean anything ... I'll say no more, and don't quote me.'

If Atkins, who knew more about Lavenstock than God, said so, it would be true. Mayo said, almost forgiving him his pipe, 'That's a better reason for Wilding agreeing to do what Nigel asked him than we've come up with so far, George, and one I'm inclined to believe. Right then, so we put him, and Matthew, on hold. It's possible that Matthew, for all he's denied it, knew about the Fabergé in the safe, and that his father did, too, for that matter, through Christine – but I think both are becoming long shots. Callaghan I think we can cross out. Leaving us with our latest suspect. Joss Graham. Who interests me very much. For whatever reason, he's deeply implicated in all this. It's quite possible he knew all about this Fabergé business and decided both objects would be better in his hands – if in fact the idea wasn't at his mother's instigation. Money like that would mean something to them.'

'Money isn't something that interests Naomi,' Abigail said.

'Money of that sort interests everybody,' Mayo averred.

'How come she had this letter in the first place?' asked Carmody.

'Maybe she lifted it when she worked for the Fontenoys, and that's what Fontenoy was so uptight about. According to Callaghan, they quarrelled over something or other just before she dropped out of the scene,' Abigail reminded him. 'But did Graham have to kill Fontenoy?'

'We don't know that he meant to go as far as that,' Mayo said, 'but who's to say, except him? I don't somehow feel the usual rules apply where Joss Graham's concerned. And there are deep undercurrents in all this. We need to have another session with him, immediately. At the moment, we're going too much on supposition.'

Yet no one knew better than he did that that was largely how it worked – putting forward a theory and then testing it out to see if it held water.

A telephone rang somewhere behind them. A WPC stood up and called out, 'There's someone at the front desk asking to see you, ma'am.'

'Sorry,' Abigail said. 'They'll have to wait, I'm busy.'

'She says to tell you her name's Lindsay Hammond, ma'am. It's urgent and she won't see anyone else.'

Abigail cursed silently but soon curbed her feelings of irritation at the interruption, realizing that Lindsay Hammond, of all people, wouldn't have come down to the station if what she had to say wasn't important. 'I'll be along to see her right away. Could you rustle us up some tea or coffee?'

Lindsay looked different in some unidentifiable way that was nothing to do with clothes or make-up, though she'd done something different to her hair and wore a neat blue suit that emphasized the colour of her eyes. Maybe it was the way she sat, not with her eyes lowered and knees and feet demurely together, but confidently, with her legs crossed.

She looked older. Nevertheless, she was finding it difficult to begin with what she had to say. Abigail helped her out.

'You're studying music, aren't you? Hasn't your term started yet?'

'I've been ill, glandular fever, it comes and goes. My tutor knows and in view of what's been happening ... well, anyway, I needn't go back yet.' She drank some tea, wrapping her slender-fingered hands round the thick white official china, and said suddenly, 'No, that's just something I made up, to account for ... I've been very depressed, and my mother worries about me. But she knows now that I – it's not true, about the glandular fever. Well, the truth is, I had an abortion.'

Abigail thought that explained a lot about Lindsay Hammond. Some girls might dismiss an abortion lightly, but not girls like her. That must've been rotten for you,' she said gently.

'It was dire.' The girl sipped more coffee, her eyes wide above the rim of the cup. 'But it's over. I wasn't the first and won't be the last, as they say.' Despite the flippant words, the pain, shame and despair were naked on her face, but then suddenly she smiled, a totally transforming smile that warmed and lit up her face and for a moment made her beautiful. It was her mother's smile and again Abigail noticed what lovely eyes she had, not the same blue-green as her mother's, but the same shape, grey with thick dark lashes. The illumination was as brief as it was beautiful. Then her face fell back into its habitual grave composure.

'Do you want to tell me who it was?' Abigail prompted, thinking my God, not Nigel Fontenoy again.

'Does that matter?' Lindsay asked quickly, defensively. 'It wasn't anyone you know. Oh, I see! You think that's what I came about – that it's got something to do with Nigel's murder. In a way, it has, though not directly, I think.'

'Why don't you tell me what you have to say and let me judge?'

'I'm sorry, I've never been very good at getting to the point,' Lindsay confessed. She hesitated, then quickly plunged her hand into the large shoulder bag she carried and brought out a flat cardboard box, which she pushed across the table.

When Abigail opened it, she saw an amethyst and diamond pendant, fastened on to a gold chain, the clasp of which was broken. This seems to be one of the items missing from the Cedar House,' she said, after a moment. 'Where did you get it, Lindsay?'

'It was sent to me – as a present. Then after Nigel was killed, this came, with a note asking me to keep it safe.' Out of the bag came a screw of tissue paper. Opened, a heavy gold ring was revealed, set with a lapis-lazuli seal. Abigail picked it up and held it near the light and saw the bearded, two-faced god, Janus.

She looked assessingly at the girl sitting opposite. 'You realize this is the ring Nigel Fontenoy was assumed to be wearing when he was killed?' Lindsay gave a barely perceptible nod. 'You know who sent them to you?'

Lindsay bit her lip. 'She helped me when I needed it ... I was desperate and I hadn't a clue what to do, but she found out. She's only been in England a few months, and she's younger than me but she knows about things like that. I couldn't refuse to help her in return.'

'Who exactly are we talking about?' They had to be sure.

Lindsay swallowed. 'Cassie Andreas.'

Cassie. That dark, memorable face. That strong, butch girl. Everything that applied to her brother could equally apply to her.

Joss Graham walked very carefully down the narrow stairs and stood in the doorway of the little sitting room, watching his mother.

She knelt in front of the tin trunk which had stood in the middle of the room, half-packed, a nuisance to everybody, for days. Now it was almost empty, the contents strewn about the floor. He could see that wooden toolbox of hers, open, in the bottom of it. He sat on a chair arm and watched her as she pretended to tidy the already neatly assembled tools in the tray. It satisfied him deeply to see how nervous she was, that her hands trembled, that she was deliberately avoiding looking at him.

Finally, she put the tray on the floor, lifted up the false bottom and took out the leather pouch that he knew contained the gold bangle. 'I'm going to give this to Cassie,' she said, holding up the bangle so that it gleamed in the light. 'I've no use for it any more. D'you think she'll like it? It's quite pretty.'

He ignored the bright bauble. 'How did you know where they were hidden?' he asked conversationally.

She turned even paler than she'd been before, but he was glad to see that she wasn't going to make a pretence of not understanding that he meant the Fabergé flower, and the letter, because that sort of thing was liable to annoy him. And he was already angrier than he'd ever been in his life, except once, on that memorable day when Nigel had made the twin mistakes of disowning him, and showing them the flower.

'I just kept on looking until I did find them,' Naomi said. 'Under the floorboards was a fairly obvious place, anyway – and they're easy enough to pull up, God knows, with most of them rotten.'

'What made you think they were here at all, in this house?'

She raised her eyes to his, still kneeling on the floor, and he saw that the fear had left her. She looked sad and careworn in the dusty, tatty old black she was wearing, like an old Greek widow. 'Oh Joss, when I heard Nigel Fontenoy had been murdered and found that the letter had disappeared, there was nothing else I
could
think. What have you done, you and Cassie? What made you do it?'

He said harshly, 'The bastard deserved it.' And as he said it, he saw the scenes which had led up to Fontenoy's murder in fast-action replay: first, the night in the garden when she had told him he was not Jake Wilding's son, but Nigel Fontenoy's. And next, what had happened on the following day.

It had been Cassie's idea to go and see Nigel.

Joss's first thought had been to quit Lavenstock, to get away, forget the whole thing. Then he'd begun to agree with

Cassie, why should he leave empty-handed? Nigel Fontenoy wasn't rolling in it, but he wasn't exactly on the breadline.