Dark Mirror (12 page)

‘What . . . I really don’t know . . .’ he gabbled. ‘Maybe, when I made the call, I may have pressed the wrong button. If you’ll just give it to me . . .’

‘This is important evidence, Mr Ogilvie. We’ll need this. What else have you got?’ There was a long silence as Kathy clicked back through the images. ‘Well, well.’ She pocketed the phone. ‘I think we need to talk about this.’

‘It’s nothing, it’s just—’

‘Not here. I want you to come with me to a police station to tell me all about it. And I want to caution you, that you don’t need to say anything, but . . .’

He stood in dismayed silence as she delivered the caution, then meekly followed her to the Reading Room to collect his belongings. As he gathered them up and fumbled them into his case, Kathy glanced across at Gael, who was sitting at her desk, surreptitiously taking it all in. Kathy gestured her over.

‘Ms Rayner, Mr Ogilvie and I would like to leave without drawing attention to ourselves. Could you let us out the back way?’

‘Certainly.’ She glanced at Nigel Ogilvie, whose head was bowed. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Fine,’ Kathy said. ‘Just fine.’

It was a short drive across Piccadilly to Savile Row and into West End Central police station, where Kathy arranged for Ogilvie to be shown to an interview room to sit alone for a while.

She wondered about phoning Brock, but thought better of it; he’d probably be tied up, and anyway, this was her case. She arranged for hard copies to be made of the images in Ogilvie’s phone, and sat down to study them. The earliest was of Marion sitting in the square, viewed from the Reading Room window,
before she returned to the library and collapsed. Kathy thought about this, then went in to interview Ogilvie, accompanied by a young woman constable from the station. He sat up with a jerk as they came in.

‘Look,’ he began, ‘you’ve got—’

Kathy interrupted, face grim. ‘We’re not quite ready to begin, Mr Ogilvie. Just some housekeeping first. Your full name, address and home telephone number, please.’

He complied, giving an address in Hayes.

‘Do you own or rent any other properties?’

‘No.’

‘What about your work address?’

‘Surely . . . surely you don’t need to involve them?’

‘Just routine.’

She left again, to make arrangements for a search warrant for Ogilvie’s home and office, then returned to the interview room and switched on the equipment, formally opening the interview. She spread the pictures out on the table. ‘I’m showing Mr Ogilvie eight prints of photographs found in his mobile phone camera, all of which show Marion Summers before and at the time of her collapse in the London Library on Tuesday last, the third of April, shortly before her death. Do you agree that you took these pictures, Mr Ogilvie?’

He bit his lip, a pained expression on his face, pudgy fingers fiddling with the corner of one of the pictures. ‘This is extremely embarrassing, but it’s not what you think. I had no . . . bad intentions.’

He gazed at her anxiously, searching for some glimmer of empathy, and saw none.

‘They gave me this phone at work, you see—insisted on it, so that they could keep in touch. My publishing director loves phoning me at odd times with his latest brainwaves—during
dinner, on the train, at weekends. I hate the damn thing, but I did find the camera quite intriguing, once I’d worked out how to use it. I thought at first that I could take pictures of pages from the books I was studying—I’ve seen other people doing that—but I found the quality not very good, and decided to stick to photocopies. But I did find it amusing to record incidents of daily life.’

‘Of Marion Summers’ daily life, you mean. Not your wife and kids.’

‘I don’t have a wife and kids. Marion is,
was
, a very striking young woman. I find most of the people at the library rather, well, predictable, but she was an intriguing mystery. She was very beautiful, like the Pre-Raphaelite women she was studying. I liked to speculate about her life, but in the most innocent way.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, I asked myself, did she have a husband? A lover?’

‘And did she?’

‘I don’t know. I never found out.’

‘Did you follow her home?’

He looked startled. ‘No.’

‘Do you know where she lived?’

‘No, no.’

‘How do you know she was studying Pre-Raphaelite women?’

‘Ah . . . I noticed the books she was reading and, er, I looked up her borrowing record on Gael Rayner’s computer when she was away from her desk.’

‘You were stalking her.’

Ogilvie winced. ‘No, please, it wasn’t like that. There was nothing predatory about it. I was just intrigued. She was so refreshing, a free spirit. And then, when she collapsed like that, it was so terrible, like fate . . .’

‘Fate?’

‘Yes.’ He reached for one of the last pictures, and drew it out with the tips of his fingers as if afraid it might burn him. It showed Marion on the floor, her red hair fanning out, surrounded by a sprinkling of wild blooms. ‘Don’t you see? Ophelia . . . You must know it, in the Tate, the Millais painting.’

Ophelia
. Kathy remembered that the name had been on Tina’s word list. Ogilvie looked at her blank face, then his expression crumpled. ‘Oh my God, this is a nightmare.’

Kathy, her voice softening a little, as if in sympathy at his predicament, said, ‘Please understand, Nigel, that we will discover everything. It is important that you are completely frank with me from the start, or else things will go very badly for you. Now, what part did you play in Marion’s death?’

He shook his head so hard his whole body vibrated. ‘No, no, nothing!’

‘Was it a prank, to get her attention?’

‘I swear, no.’

‘You put something in her lunch during the morning, didn’t you? Perhaps you just intended to make her a little unwell, so that you could be a good Samaritan and take her home. Was that it?’

Ogilvie moaned, gasping his denials.

‘You know how she died, don’t you?’

‘I’ve read the newspapers. People in the library have been talking about it.’

‘What’s your understanding of what happened?’

‘Well, I believe she went out to have her lunch in the square, as I told you . . .’

He stammered his account, and all the time Kathy was willing him to say the word that hadn’t been in the papers:
arsenic
. That would clinch it. But he came to the end without a hint of it, and no matter how she probed, he repeated only, ‘Poison, that’s what I read.’

She showed him the picture of Rafferty, and watched a twitch of alarm cross his face. ‘Do you know this man?’

‘Is he . . . Is he . . .?’

‘You recognise him, don’t you?’

‘I think I may have seen him—in the square. I thought he was watching Marion.’

‘You know him, Nigel. Did he give you the poison to put in Marion’s lunch?’

‘Oh dear Lord, no, no, a thousand times no!’

Kathy gave a deep sigh. ‘You took other pictures of Marion, didn’t you?’

‘Um . . .’ He frowned at the photos, as if trying to recall.

‘Before last Tuesday,’ Kathy prompted.

‘No, no. I don’t believe so. Really, I wasn’t in the habit . . .’

‘We have a witness, someone who saw you in the square one day, taking pictures of Marion with your camera.’

His eyes widened in alarm.

‘I warned you, didn’t I, Nigel, about lying to me? It means I can’t believe anything you tell me.’

‘I swear—’

‘Do you own a computer?’

His face was now as white as the sheet of paper in Kathy’s pad.

‘Yes.’

‘Where is it?’

‘At . . . at home.’

‘In Hayes?’

He nodded, jaw locked.

‘And at work, you have the use of a computer?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘On your desk?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you live alone?’

‘No. I live with my mother. She’s elderly, infirm. My father passed away, it was their home. I moved back when my mother became frail.’

‘I would like your permission to search your house.’

‘No!’

‘You refuse?’

A blush appeared on his cheek and he seemed to puff up a little in defiance. ‘Yes, I refuse. It’s out of the question. It would be far too distressing for my mother.’

‘Very well. I’m suspending this interview now. I’ll arrange for you to get a cup of tea.’

When they were outside, Kathy said to the PC, ‘I’m going to wait for the search warrant, but in the meantime I’d like you to go on ahead to his house. See if there’s going to be a problem with his mother’s state of health. Be gentle and reassuring. Say Nigel has given us some very helpful evidence and he’ll be along shortly. Get her talking. Has he had girlfriends? Does he experiment with chemicals? Does he have a lock-up somewhere? But don’t be too obvious.’

While she waited Kathy logged on to the Tate Britain website and looked up ‘Ophelia’. The image of the Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece came up on the screen, the demented young woman from
Hamlet
floating in the dark stream, russet hair spreading in the current, wild flowers in the water around her. He was right, Kathy thought. It was her. Apparently the model, Lizzie Siddal, later Rossetti’s wife and laudanum victim, nearly died of pneumonia posing for the painting in a bath.
Sex and death
, Kathy thought, imagining what Marion would have made of Lizzie’s story, suffering for her lover’s art.

•

When Kathy arrived at the house in Hayes, it was the constable who answered her knock. She shook her head, looking over Kathy’s shoulder at Ogilvie sitting ashen in the patrol car, the white van with the search team parked behind, and said in a murmur, ‘Alzheimer’s, I’m afraid. She’s cheerful enough, just can’t remember things. I had to remind her who Nigel was. She seemed to think he was still at school.’

The search of Mrs Ogilvie’s home made Kathy feel grubby. It was a small, anonymous detached house in a leafy suburban street, which gradually came to life at the intrusion of the police vehicles. The garden was meticulously groomed, the interior fastidiously tidy. If this is worthy of police time, it seemed to protest, then we’re all in trouble. And indeed the only guilty secret they found was a small and rather embarrassing collection of pornography in Nigel’s bedroom—he was something of a rubber fetishist, it seemed. Apart from that he seemed to lead a pretty boring life, Kathy thought; small wonder he’d found Marion Summers entrancing. They found no trace of chemicals, but there was the computer, of course, to be taken away and examined. Nigel watched from his bedroom window as it was carried out to the van, then abruptly turned to Kathy.

‘You may find some more pictures on the computer, now I come to think of it,’ he said stiffly. ‘It had slipped my mind. One afternoon I happened to see Marion get on a bus in Piccadilly. On impulse I hailed a taxi and told the man to follow the bus. I said my daughter was on board, and I wanted to make sure she got to her destination safely, without her being aware of me fussing. He probably didn’t believe me. We followed her to Hampstead, a pleasant little mews cottage. I didn’t stop. I took a picture and told the driver to drop me at a tube station.’

‘Do you know the address?’

‘Um, I believe I do recall. It’s 43 Rosslyn Court.’

‘Did you go there at other times?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘We shall find out if you’re lying again, Nigel.’

They left to the twitch of curtains in the neighbouring houses, a heavy red sun sinking in the cold western sky, and made their way back into town, to the offices of the publishing house where Ogilvie worked. There they searched his desk and confiscated his computer. His work colleagues seemed rather excited to discover that dull Mr Ogilvie was a man of mystery, of interest to the police. Kathy waited with the team until it was finished, impatient to move on, to discover if they really had found Marion’s refuge at last.

W
hile the patrol car and van sped off back to West End Central, Kathy headed up to Hampstead. The mews was a secluded street not far from the heath, number forty-three a small detached two-storey, red-brick house with Victorian sash windows and ornamented chimneys.

The bell tinkled faintly through the stained-glass panel in the front door. There were no lights on in the house. Kathy was fairly well hidden from neighbours by trees in the street and a trellis arch at the front gate, and the streetlights were dim and far apart; a discreet entrance. When there was no reply she used the bunch of keys they had found in Marion’s bag to open the door.

The house had a mildly stale, musty smell, as if no one had opened a window for a while. Kathy trod softly down the carpeted hall, checking a room fitted out like an office on the right, then a sitting room and kitchen at the rear, overlooking the tiny paved
courtyard. Then she went back to the stairs in the hall and quickly made sure there was no one in the two bedrooms and bathroom above. Everywhere she had an impression of brand-new, stylish fittings and furniture, and an almost obsessive tidiness.

She returned to the ground floor, to the kitchen. It was small, but immaculately fitted out with the latest Miele appliances. She found a light switch, suddenly bathing the granite worktop in light. Everything was in its place apart from some things left out on the bench beside the sink—a six-pack of juice bottles, two removed, one of which stood open beside a half-filled glass of orange liquid, a saucer containing a small amount of white powder sitting on a set of kitchen scales, and a teaspoon. They were the only things in the whole house that weren’t neatly stowed away.

She pulled latex gloves from her pocket and crouched to take a closer look. The powder was crystalline, more like fine sugar than flour. Would Marion have added sugar to the juice because of her diabetes? But there was something about it that didn’t look quite like sugar either. She straightened and backed away, then got on the phone for a scene-of-crime team. ‘I’ll wait outside in the car,’ she said, and made her way back down the hall, taking with her the half-dozen envelopes she found in the wire mail basket hanging at the back of the front door. They were all advertising material, only one, from a local hair salon, addressed to
Ms M. Summers
, the remainder to
The Occupant
.