Dead End (23 page)

‘But sooner or later Coleraine would have to come up with the money, wouldn’t he? I mean, when the boy comes of age, he’s going to ask where it is.’

‘Ah yes, now that’s the really interesting thing. Helena told me the trust went on until the boy was twenty-five, and Henry Russell is only twenty-three. Coleraine still had eighteen months to replace the cash – assuming for the moment he had taken it – and I think that’s what the oil paintings were supposed to do, to turn enough profit to fill the piggy-bank again. When he lost
them he must have been very, very worried; but he still had time, if he was clever. But then about six weeks ago, disaster struck. Henry Russell suddenly announced he was getting married.’

She grinned at him. ‘Oh, you have a lovely way of telling a tale. I liked the artistic pause there. What’s Our ’Enery’s nuptials got to do with it?’

‘While we were going through the filing cabinet, we found a photocopy of the actual trust deed. The trust ends when Henry is twenty-five, or on his marriage over the age of twenty-one, whichever is the sooner.’

‘Ah, I see! Nice one. Suddenly he’s got weeks instead of months.’

‘If it’s discovered he’s misappropriated the trust funds, he’ll be ruined. He’ll never practise again. And it’ll mean a gaol sentence, and gaol is not something people of his class can easily contemplate. He’d probably think his own death was preferable.’

‘Or better still, someone else’s death? You’re thinking he murdered Radek?’

‘Radek had millions, and it was all going to go to Fay anyway. He was an old man, it was only a matter of hastening him on his way. And it was generally believed Radek had a heart condition, and might pop off any time. I don’t know whether Radek himself put the story about, but Buster certainly believed it, and would have been sure to tell Coleraine – though the post mortem showed up no evidence of heart disease.’

‘What about the gun? Where would Coleraine get hold of a gun?’

‘Haven’t you heard that bit? I thought Atherton was keeping you up to date on all this.’

‘I don’t live in Jim’s pocket,’ she said with a sidelong look at him. ‘Besides, he’s got other fish to fry at the moment. Didn’t you know about him and Sue Caversham – principal second violin in my orchestra? They’ve been at it like crazed ferrets ever since they met.’

He tried not to feel relieved. He never really thought Atherton and Joanna were – but with Atherton one never knew. He was said to have the social conscience of a dog in a room full of hot bitches, and he and Joanna liked each other very much and had so much in common and – well, Sue Caversham
was a very nice person. ‘Yes, I remember her. She’s very nice.’

‘Almost nice enough for Jim,’ Joanna said disconcertingly. ‘So what about the gun, anyway?’

‘Radek’s own gun is missing. A Second World War trophy, and the bullet that killed him was the same sort as the ammo we found in his house.’

‘Poor old bugger. That’s a nasty twist, shot with your own gun.’

‘We haven’t found it yet, but we know Coleraine had the opportunity to take it. And he has no proper alibi for the time of the murder; and he sure as hell had a motive.’

Joanna nodded. ‘It looks pretty black. But what a silly way to murder anyone – in broad daylight in front of a hundred witnesses.’

‘Yes,’ he frowned. ‘But then, Coleraine was an amateur in the business, and he was in a state of mental and emotional turmoil. There’s a kind of loony theatricality to it that I can see might fit him. And it probably wasn’t planned, you know. He probably thought about it as a tempting way out without really meaning anything serious by it. Then he found himself in the situation and just did it on the spur of the moment. And probably immediately regretted it.’ He thought back over past cases. ‘People who murder their nearest and dearest generally do it in a very silly and amateur way. The cunning criminal covering his steps, your domestic murderer is not.’

‘So what’s the next step?’

He shrugged. ‘None of this is proof, of course. We have to grind on, verifying everything, and most of all looking for witnesses. That’s the footslog of the job. And we have to find the gun, of course. No gun, no proof.’

‘But you said the ammunition matched.’

‘Yes, but it could have been fired from any compatible gun. The proof comes from the marks the gun leaves on the bullet and cartridge case when it’s fired. Those are unique, like a fingerprint.’

‘How so? I don’t understand.’

He smiled. ‘You should ask Norma about guns. Atherton thinks she’s got a fetish. Penis envy, he calls it.’

‘I’d sooner ask you. Norma hasn’t got your looks.’

‘It’s jolly kind of you to say so. Well, you know what rifling means, don’t you?’

‘Going through someone’s drawers?’ He stirred in his seat. Had she spotted the dog trying to see the rabbit, then?

‘Pay attention! A rifled gun barrel has spiral ridges all the way down the inside to guide the bullet. If you like, it’s like a screwdriver turned inside out.’

‘How graphic! Yes, I did understand that part.’

‘All right. Now a bullet is slightly larger than the minimum width of the barrel, and the metal it’s made of is slightly softer. So as it’s forced down the barrel by the charge, the ridges make marks on the bullet – striations, they’re called.’

‘Gotcher.’

‘And different makes of gun have different arrangements of ridges – the Webley automatic, for instance, has six right-hand thread grooves, while the Colt .45 has six left-hand grooves, and so on. So you can narrow down the type of gun a bullet was fired from. But in addition each individual gun has tiny variations in the rifling which are unique to that actual weapon. The same with the cartridge case – that will bear the marks of the breech-block and firing pin, which are never identical in two separate guns. So if we can find the gun, fire another bullet from it, then compare the marks on that bullet and on the one that killed Radek, we can prove that was the gun that was used.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Then we only have to prove it was Coleraine who pulled the trigger.’ He was silent a moment in thought. ‘One thing, though: it does look as if you were right, that it wasn’t a musician who murdered Radek.’

‘Of course not. We couldn’t do it. We’re fools to ourselves, though. If anyone needed removing it was him.’

‘Don’t say that,’ he said. ‘I know it’s only a joke, but don’t say it.’

She looked at him quizzically. ‘You really mind, don’t you?’

‘Someone has to care.’

‘But nobody even liked him.’

‘Buster did. Somebody has to avenge him.’

She shook her head. ‘It isn’t that, though, is it?’ She studied his face for a moment. ‘It’s holding back the chaos, isn’t it?’

He looked at her warily, like a cat eyeing a thermometer. He was about to have his soul probed, and after the events of the
last four months it was already feeling delicate. Though she was right, of course. ‘I suppose it is.’

‘We all have our own ways of doing it. My mother bakes.’ It was the first time she’d ever mentioned her mother to him. ‘When I left home, for instance, she made a huge batch of shortbread and packed it in a tin in my suitcase, and it wasn’t because she thought I might be hungry. Whenever she feels threatened she makes cakes and biscuits and buns – and she’s terrific at it, they’re always beautiful, symmetrical, really professional-looking. Of course there’s only my father at home now to eat them, so mostly they end up feeding the birds, but still she bakes. When she lifts a steaming tray of perfect, golden fairy cakes out of the oven, she knows that she’s in control and the Devil is still on the other side of the door with the bolt shot home.’

He thought of Irene, cleaning things that weren’t dirty, plumping cushions no-one had leaned against. Why had he never thought of that before? Oh Irene! He felt a surge of sad, guilty compassion, fierce as canteen heartburn. But what could he ever have done, except what he did do?

‘Yes,’ he said comprehensively.

She went on, ‘Do you know that poem by Auden? “The glacier knocks in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed, the crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead.”’

‘Nasty. There was a wardrobe in my bedroom when I was a kid—’ He shuddered.

‘For me it’s always been music, of course. When I play, I know there’s order, symmetry, the things of the light. I can believe the guys in the white hats are going to win and the floor under my feet isn’t going to suddenly yawn and tip me into the pit – all common experience to the contrary.’

He smiled at her. ‘My father always liked you, you know.’

‘You are a master of the non sequitur,’ she said. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You know what it means.’ The moment seemed to have arrived unannounced. ‘I love you. That’s such an inadequate sentence, but there doesn’t seem to be a word for the way I feel about you, which I think you know anyway.’ He quickly forestalled whatever she might have said then. ‘I know that I put you through two years of hell, though I never meant to hurt you,
but please, now that we can be together properly and openly, without hurting anyone at all, won’t you take me back?’

‘You think it’s as easy as that?’

‘That wasn’t easy,’ he said, a little hurt.

She grew impatient. ‘Oh don’t pout at me! Tell me, do you really,
really
not understand why it’s impossible?’

‘No. It doesn’t seem impossible to me. All the obstacles have been swept away. Now there’s only us to please. Why shouldn’t we?’

She looked at him broodingly for a while. But when she spoke it was quite gently, as though there was no point in being angry, which on the whole he thought rather a bad sign. ‘In the beginning you fell in love with me – so you said. You said you couldn’t live without me, but you kept on managing it. You had a wife and children and responsibilities, and I understood that, I honoured you for taking them seriously. But still in the end you didn’t choose me. You chose to stay with them. And the fact that you’re free now is still not because you chose me, but because you got thrown out. I’m not going to come second with you, because it’s too important for that. You should have marched out for me with banners and trumpets and elephants. I’m not going to be your consolation prize.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ He looked at her despairingly with the recognition of an absolute gulf. Was this a man-woman thing? Or was it just him and her? It was like one of those stories in which someone goes and dies for a completely pointless principle, and you admire their courage and integrity, but you still think they’re barmy. How could she want to throw away being together for the rest of their lives for the sake of hurt pride? ‘It isn’t like that,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you
because
Irene’s left me. And actually I did choose you—’

‘You could have fooled me.’

‘It was just a matter of timing. I mean,’ as she looked about to interrupt, ‘the way the end bit happened was an accident of timing. Please, listen to me. That last time we met, up in the city, when I was at the Old Bailey and you were at St Paul’s—’

‘Yes, I remember,’ she said tonelessly.

‘You said then that I must choose, and on the way home in the car I thought it all through and came to my decision. I realised I’d been procrastinating, and I decided I was going to speak to
Irene as soon as I got home, and sort it all out. I was going to tell her I was leaving. But when I got there
he
was there, Ernie, and she got her news in first.’ He studied her face. ‘You don’t believe me?’

‘Would you? It’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’

‘But I was going to leave. I was going to tell her that very evening.’

‘You said that to me before, on many occasions, and nothing came of it.’

‘But I really
was
going to that time,’ he said, his fists clenching with frustration.

She looked away. ‘Well, we shall never know, shall we?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘At least, you won’t.’ She looked at him again. ‘Do you think that I don’t remember how I felt that day? Or that I’m deliberately lying to you now? A cynical manipulation to get my own way? If you think that, then you don’t really believe I love you, because you know I could never do that to you.’

She said awkwardly. ‘No, I don’t think that. But still, you didn’t tell her.’

‘Only because I was forestalled. History prevented me, that’s all. I would have done it. And now that it can’t be proved one way or the other, you have to give me the benefit of the doubt, because it would be unfair not to.’

She went on staring at him, completely at a loss.

‘Jo, you must still want to be with me, or we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.’ He paused to let her deny it, but she didn’t. ‘And if it’s the only thing that’s holding you back, I swear to you, I swear that I did choose you, and that I was going to tell her that night.’ Pause. Nothing. ‘You either have to believe me, or tell me I’m lying.’ He held her eyes. ‘Am I lying?’

‘I don’t want to be unhappy any more,’ she said in a low voice, and while he was still trying to work out what that meant, they were interrupted by the oven timer going off in the kitchen. ‘Saved by the bell,’ she said, jumping up.

He couldn’t believe it. ‘Leave it,’ he said, annoyed.

‘Leave it? Don’t you know what that was?’