Lindsay dragged forward a heavy wooden chair. The height, he felt, would give him a psychological advantage.
‘I see you have recovered from your injury, Mr Lindsay. Your left side anyway, wasn’t it? And you’re right-handed?’
Had Fleming said that pointedly? ‘Yes, I was lucky. I had to wear a sling for a few days. Any violent movement could have torn the stitches.’
She seemed unimpressed. ‘But you weren’t incapacitated? I see.’ She went on, ‘I gather your father was Czechoslovakian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you speak Czech yourself?’
‘A little. I can understand more.’ He couldn’t see where this was leading.
‘The murder victim was a Czech.’
Tone of polite interest. ‘Really? Well, it’s quite a big place.’
‘You see, we were puzzled that you should have gone outside at all on the night you were attacked, given that one of the local neds had it in for you.’
He shook his head, holding out his hands in a pantomime of incomprehension. ‘I’ve asked myself that, again and again, but—’
‘You see, I think we now know exactly why.’
Cue enthusiasm. ‘Really? That’s wonderful! Are you closer to discovering my assailant, then?’
Sylvia leaned forward. ‘That is just so clever! Was it this poor young man who has been charged with the murder of that other poor man?’
The inspector gave her a sideways glance; the sergeant, taking notes, didn’t raise his head.
‘No,’ Fleming said. ‘We can now say quite definitely that it wasn’t. And I am fairly sure that the person who attacked you was the man calling himself Stefan Pavany.’
‘Stefan Pavany – was that the name of the man who was killed?’ He sounded interested, though puzzled. They wouldn’t review this one, but it was possibly one of Marcus’s finer performances.
‘His assumed name. Mr Lindsay, we have evidence to suggest that after you opened the door and found there was no one there, someone called out something in a foreign language. It was after that you went round into the garden.’
‘Really? Do you know what was said – or even what language?’ It would be natural, wouldn’t it, to let just a hint of annoyance creep in, given the way the woman said it?
‘No.’
She didn’t like admitting that. It was his first small victory. ‘It would be helpful if you could find out,’ he suggested. ‘Might trigger something, you never know. It has to be in here somewhere.’
He tapped his head, smiling blandly. But just as he dared to think he might be winning, she moved the goalposts.
‘Mr Lindsay, what were you doing on Friday night?’
He stalled a little, artistically. ‘That’s a very pointed question! Let me think – Friday? Ah! Of course.
‘May I call on my principal witness, Miss Sylvia Lascelles?’ Maybe, just maybe, it was going to come out all right after all. ‘Miss Lascelles—?’
Sylvia had been looking shaky, but he could see her begin to enjoy herself. She took a sip of champagne from the glass at her side.
‘Inspector, I can confirm that the defendant and I were here together all evening engaged in a killer game of Scrabble until half past ten. Then, for some reason, the defendant didn’t think several hours more of losing at Scrabble would be amusing – though I disagreed – and he phoned the pub to rustle up some of the film crew to play poker instead. Though I’m afraid he didn’t fare any better with that.’
Marcus saw the sergeant stifle a grin and was encouraged. ‘I’m not at all sure what you’re saying here, inspector. I don’t suppose you’re really suggesting that, having for some unknown reason murdered a Czech whom I didn’t even know, we then called in colleagues to party round his body before dumping it in the pub car park?’
Fleming paused, then said coolly, ‘I don’t know how familiar you are with recent changes in the law, but when they’re determining sentence it makes quite a difference to the tariff if you have cooperated with the police.
‘We’re still at an early stage in the investigation, with a lot of evidence waiting to come in. So, unusually, I’m going to tell you our thinking, because I think this is a very unusual case.’
He composed his face into an expression of polite interest, but that was when he knew, quite definitely, that it was all over. Somehow, she knew.
‘Your father, a Czech, was married before he came to Britain during the war. Stefan Pavany was a Czech, but for some reason he was anxious to conceal this. I freely admit this is a wild guess – though of course it can be checked – but I thought it possible your father might have had a child, or children, there.’
Marcus felt his heart beginning to race. He looked at Sylvia; she never had a lot of colour, but she looked worryingly pale and she was breathing faster.
‘I was at the film set when Stefan Pavany came to speak to Kasper Franzik. You had been in costume, acting an older man, and for a moment I thought he was you. Was Stefan Pavany your half-brother?’ Fleming waited for a response, but he only looked back at her.
‘You see, I think he tried to kill you. Revenge, inheritance – I don’t know, but again, we can find out. Just as we can find out whether there are fibres from this room on the clothes Pavany was wearing.’
Sylvia gave a little gasp, almost a cough. Marcus saw the sergeant look at her anxiously.
‘It was Pavany’s shoes being missing, you know. It may have seemed clever to remove them, but it made me ask questions. You were the only person who had talked to Dr Madsen, who knew how much the footprint evidence could tell him, and you couldn’t afford to have Pavany associated with the attack on you.
‘And the knife that was in Pavany’s back – you found it in his pocket, assumed it was his, wiped the handle and put it there after you’d killed him. You’re familiar with forensic science; it’s my guess that you thought we wouldn’t know whose knife it was but would assume the same man was to blame for both crimes. But rigging evidence isn’t as easy in real life as on television, you know. Pavany didn’t take the knife we think he used on you to the meeting you agreed; he had one in his pocket anyway that he’d taken from Kasper Franzik.
‘Did he fall against that fender there? We can match it up with the wound on his temple. Did you, even, strike him first with that?’ Fleming’s eyes were very bright and hard as she gestured towards the cane with its heavy silver handle which was propped by Sylvia’s chair. ‘If so, we can tell that too. All the evidence we need to convict you is right here in this room. We only need to look for it. You know that.
‘So why did you do it, Marcus?’
There was a long, long silence. It was Sylvia who broke it, leaning forward in her seat, trembling with rage, and Marcus knew the play was over. They’d had the denouement; now they were only waiting for the curtain to fall.
‘It’s your fault!’ she cried, her husky voice cracking with emotion. ‘If you were going to throw away the key because he tried to kill Marcus, that would have been all right. But you wouldn’t – you admitted it yourself. He’d have been in prison for a couple of years at most, and he’d have come back. He would always have come back, until he did what he meant to do last week. Marcus could never be safe. This was self-defence, that’s all. Anyway, why should he have anything?’
‘Sylvia,’ Marcus said, but there was no stopping her.
Her lips had a blue tinge. ‘Laddie was so proud of Marcus – his wonderful, beautiful son! His first wife trapped him into marriage because she got pregnant and he was young. She was a peasant, and her son was like his mother – coarse, not worthy of him, he said. That man had a peasant’s greed – greed to the point where he would kill!’
She was gasping for breath. Alarmed, Marcus said, ‘Sylvia, stop this. You’ll make yourself ill—’
But she went on. ‘I knew what Laddie would do. He was a man – he was—’
Then Sylvia’s face changed. She jerked, knocking over the table beside her. The champagne glass fell to the floor and broke as her hand went to her chest. ‘Oh, God! Oh, Laddie!’ She spoke as if the two were one.
It was the sergeant who moved first. He was on the phone, almost before Sylvia had slumped forward, shouting, ‘Ambulance! Priority!’
The inspector moved fast, beginning resuscitation, but Marcus knew there was no point. With exquisite pain, he heard the last rasping breath of the woman who had meant more to him than his own mother. His adored nemesis.
‘I know what forensic science is able to do,’ Marcus Lindsay said, his voice flat and toneless. ‘Few better, after all these years on
Playfair’s Patch
. Every contact leaves a trace – you only have to know where to look . . .’
The man looked – extinguished, Fleming thought. But then, MacNee, with stubble growth on his cheeks, looked as if he’d slept in a ditch, and she was exhausted. She felt grubby too, grubby in soul as well as body. MacNee was barely speaking to her, and she didn’t blame him. She had let her triumph at disentangling the web of confusion surrounding Pavany’s death betray her into something worthy of
Playfair’s Patch
, and this tragedy had been the result.
It was six in the morning. The drama and the formalities of Sylvia Lascelles’ death had taken hours; they were only now in an interview room beginning the questioning under caution.
‘There’s no point in fighting it, in the endless lying,’ Lindsay was going on. ‘I’m too tired.’
‘Do you want to make a formal confession, Mr Lindsay?’ Fleming said. Everything was going to be straight by the book this time.
He didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes. Oh God, yes. The strain, waiting and waiting, expecting something to go wrong – worse than a first night.’ He gave the ghost of a smile.
He had a very charming smile but, looking at him now, Fleming could see the lines of weakness clearly marked.
‘I knew nothing about my half-brother, except that he existed. To my knowledge, my father never had any contact with them after the divorce. When there was no one at the door that night, I did think immediately of the wretched youth in the pub. I was going to shut it hastily when a voice shouted in Czech, “I am your brother Stefan. We need to talk about Vikova.” ’
‘Vikova?’
‘It was my father’s old home. To be honest, I never believed his stories – what money there was in our family was my mother’s and most of that’s gone now – but the Czech government has started paying reparation. Sylvia talked about it, suggested finding out, but I wasn’t ready for the legal fees and the hassle.
‘But Stefan had done it, only to find the authorities knew I was the legal heir. I’m a young man – it would be unlikely that I had made a will and he was next-of-kin. So he came after me. Pretended to be Polish so there would be no connection made.
‘Most of what I told you was true – I genuinely remember nothing after I went round the back of the house to meet him. I only found all this out on our – our second encounter.’
MacNee had been brooding and withdrawn. Now he said in the tone of one anxious to disbelieve, ‘So how come you knew it was Pavany – or where to find him for what you like to call “your second encounter”? Or “his murder”, as the rest of us would call it.’
‘Sylvia saw him attacking me. He looked up as he ran away, and she said it was like a nightmare – she was looking at a distorted version of Laddie’s face. And when she said that, I remembered the man who’d turned up at the filming. I’d looked at him, thought he was familiar, somehow, just as you did.
‘It was Sylvia who wouldn’t let me tell you. She didn’t trust the system. She said Stefan would only get a token sentence, that he would never give up, that he’d shown already that he had our father’s ruthlessness, even if I didn’t. When he got out of prison he would come after me; I’d be forever looking over my shoulder and one day he’d get me.
‘To be honest, I thought she was mad at first. I argued with her. In fact, I even put in a call to our legal expert on
Playfair
, pretending it had given me an idea for the series, to ask about a probable outcome, and he confirmed that unless there was major injury it would be all but impossible to get a conviction for attempted murder.
‘So I had a choice. I could go around for the rest of my life, being afraid of the knife in my back, or I could do one terrifying, risky thing and live in peace. And she was utterly convinced we could stage it and get away with it, that all I needed was a little bit of courage – and I was Laddie Lazansky’s son, after all. “Do you want to die because you’re too much of a coward to defend yourself?” That was what she said.’
‘Now I’ve heard bloody everything!’ MacNee exploded. ‘All her fault, is it – a gracious old lady that you’ve killed with what you’ve done?’
Lindsay’s own grief was clear in his face. ‘I killed her with what I
didn’t
do,’ he corrected. ‘I didn’t have the courage to stand up to her, and do the right thing.’
With a warning glance at MacNee, Fleming said, ‘As your father, perhaps, would have done?’
Lindsay gave a short laugh. ‘Laddie? He’d have knifed the man without a second thought. He was a total bastard, but I idolized him. He was pure magic as a father, glamorous, amusing, indulgent. Oh, I know just how much there was to disapprove of in his life – the way he treated my mother, for a start, having Sylvia as a
maîtresse-en-titre
. But when he died, the colour went out of my life too. Everyone else, apart from Sylvia, seems grey and boring. Including me – oh yes, particularly me. I look like a faded version of him, and I think I am.’