Killing a Unicorn (19 page)

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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

BOOK: Killing a Unicorn
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‘God, yes, that's what it amounts to, doesn't it,' he says soberly after a moment, adding, as he had before, ‘What a bloody mess it all is.' Then, ‘How's Ma taking this? And Chip, of course?' he asks, with a sort of delayed reaction.
‘You should ring them, your mother would love to talk to you.'
‘I already have, but the line's forever engaged.'
‘I expect that's Chip on to his office in London. He's frantic about some unfinished business he has on the go. The police have a direct line they've set up — Mark, they have an incident room in the library!'
‘The holy of holies? Did they get Jane's permission?'
‘With difficulty.' She laughs shakily. How liberating only a little laughter is. How it unravels the knots of tension inside. A minute before, she'd felt Mark was beginning to waver and now she seizes the advantage, pressing home all the arguments she can muster. She can be pretty persuasive, when she wants to be. In the end, he says, ‘Tell you what — we'll leave it until tomorrow and see what gives, OK? Surely they'll have found Armstrong by then.'
‘I'd feel much more comfortable if we did that, rather than you come charging over here to no purpose.'
‘Well, I still don't feel good about it at all, but as things are here …'
With a sigh, she replaces the receiver when they've finished talking. She hadn't, in the end, said anything to him about finding the letters and it has left her with a guilty feeling that perhaps she had in fact never had any intention of doing so.
 
 
Her stomach rumbles. Perhaps this downbeat feeling might be due, at least in part, to the fact that she's had no breakfast, nothing much at all, in fact, over the last two days. Shopping is clearly indicated when she examines the distinctly unappetizing contents of the fridge, consisting mostly of the leftovers from the meal she and Jonathan had eaten together. They look more depressed than she is, and are in any case more than a little suspect by now. Some bendy-looking celery and lettuce so wilted it's going slimy, smoked salmon that has dried and curled up, all ready to die, and several slices of avocado that are evidently in the final stages of the Black Death. The last morsel of the Brie that had been just ripe when Jonathan brought it has run and spread all over the plate on which it's been standing. It's still edible, however, and she scrapes it off and eats it, but she makes a clean sweep of the rest of the once-tempting offerings, which leaves only some scaly-looking Cheddar, a couple of rashers of bacon, half a pint of milk and two cartons of tomato juice. Oh, and the oranges, filling up half the crisper drawer. She takes two of them out, frowning. Again, that uneasy moment as she remembers coming into the house and seeing them on the table in the black dish. Determinedly, she shakes off the shivers the thought inexplicably induces and juices the oranges to drink while she makes herself a bacon sandwich and be blowed to the fat content.
She feels ready to face the Saturday shopping in Felsborough after she's eaten. Finding somewhere to park there will be a pain, but still, there are things she needs apart from food and it's a pleasant place to shop, a small country town with pretty buildings and some interesting shops off the High Street. Everything she wants can be found there, dispensing with the hassle of a safari to the big Tesco's on the edge of the town. Things like cheese from the specialist shop, fruit and salad from the Saturday market that lines the High Street. An hour should see it finished.
Papers, papers, papers! Chip, sorting, putting aside for the shredder. Being suddenly decisive, ruthless in clearing out the debris, the questionable, being very efficient about it, too. Making sure there could be no comeback, nothing that would connect, if ever it came to the crunch … not that it would, he'd hadn't actually done anything strictly illegal, yet. Not committed himself, thank God, either here or at his London office. He'd spent hours on the telephone and his affairs there were now as much in order as they ever would be, as were these here. Not a whiff of anything unsavoury left. He was clean as the day he was born.
‘What are you doing?' asked his mother, from the doorway.
‘Sorting out my life,' said Chip. Her face told him there was still no news.
‘Chip.' She came into the room. ‘My darling boy.' She sat down on one of the big, shabby chairs and waited, while her handsome son sat at his desk, amid the chaos of papers. She turned her head so as not to be caught watching him, and gazed out of the open windows. Not a cloud in the sky, a burning bright blue. Where, under that sky, was Jasie?
Chip swiped the drops of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, looked at the bottle on the sideboard, then at his mother, and decided not. At any rate, not before he'd told her what he'd told the police. He was sick of explanations, he absolutely didn't want to go through the whole bloody rigmarole again, but he couldn't dodge it.
She'd hear the story from Crouch, anyway, if not from him, and he owed her that much. She'd accepted Bibi, and Jasie, no questions asked. Which, for Alyssa, was a great deal, and now she had a right to know why she'd been asked to do it.
‘All right, Ma,' he said. ‘There's something you should know.'
He began to tell her the bits of the story she hadn't already heard — which was most of it, he realized, and at the same moment, wondered for the first time why there had been the need for all this secrecy. Bibi had been paranoic, that was why, unsure of herself. Even using the bloody stars to counteract her insecurity.
Alyssa knew, she always had known, when it was time to listen, when any of her boys had something to confess. Even before he began to speak, she felt instinctively that this wasn't going to be a small graze that could be made to feel immediately better by the application of an important-looking bandage. But when he'd finished, she wondered, with a flash of insight, how deep the hurt was — and how far Chip's commitment to Bibi's son would go. Even Alyssa could not envisage her son, on good terms as he was with Jasie, taking on the permanent responsibility of another man's child — always supposing the monster who called himself the father could be persuaded to release him.
 
 
Although Crouch believed it was all sewn up, now that Graham Armstrong was in the frame, and though Kate for the most part agreed, she thought there was an element of wishful thinking involved in his certainty. To her mind, there were still gaps to be filled and inconsistencies which were not going to clear themselves up as easily as Crouch imagined. She knew she would have to go on doggedly, as her police training had taught her and her nature compelled, with the business of talking to people, again and again if necessary, for as long as it took to get a clear
picture of what had happened on the day Bibi Morgan met her death.
The decision as to who should come first on her list was made when she saw Humphrey Oliver working in the small front garden of his house as she made her way through Middleton Thorpe, driving yet once more between Felsborough and Membery. She drew her car up on the road outside and went towards the gate.
There was nothing to distinguish Humphrey's house from its neighbours in the row, except that it was the end one, and a privet hedge limited its outer garden boundary. They were a row of three charming little houses with Gothic front porches and pointed windows in fretted frames. Gingerbread houses. Dolls' houses. You could amost believe the fronts would swing away to reveal all the rooms inside. The gardens of the other two houses were untidier, but prettier, than Humphrey's, with Dorothy Perkins clambering round the porches, and sweet peas, marigolds, rigidly staked dahlias, gladioli, rows of beans and tomatoes in clay pots growing happily together in old-fashioned confusion, with nothing so finicky as a plot of grass in the centre. Humphrey, on the other hand, didn't appear to go in much for flowers, but his square lawn was a tribute to mathematical precision and although the hedge was already barbered with military severity, he was trimming its stray hairs with garden shears to make it even neater. He looked up as her car door slammed and when he saw who it was he immediately put down the shears on the tiny lawn and came down the path to greet her, raising a panama that had seen better days. ‘There's news of the little fella?' he asked immediately, his face creased with anxiety.
His straight shoulders seemed to sag a little when she shook her head. ‘I'd like to have a few words with you, Mr Oliver.'
‘By all means. Come in.' He led her in through the oak-panelled front door with its old-fashioned iron knocker and into a tiny hall. He had to duck to avoid hitting his
head on a beam that crossed it. ‘Like a cup of tea? I was just about to put the kettle on.'
‘In that case, yes, I'd love one, thank you.'
He waved his hand to an open door. ‘Make yourself at home. Take a pew. Won't be a jiff.'
With a glance into a tiny, and what she guessed was a largely unused room, furnished with an unimaginative three-piece suite, a prickly cactus placed dead centre on a polished table, and smelling strongly of meadow-fresh furniture polish, she said, ‘I don't mind the kitchen, if you don't.'
‘Rather not. Where I live most of the time, anyway.'
She could see why when she followed him in through the door. Light came from a big window over the sink in the side wall. There were old-fashioned kitchen appliances, and the old coal range, comforting in winter, had been left in situ, but the far wall had been entirely removed to accommodate an extension that stretched half-way out into the back garden to form a big, light living-room, glazed by long windows, Gothic-arched like the ones at the front of the house. The other walls of the extension were almost entirely covered with shelves which held books, tidily stacked magazines, miscellaneous objects, some plants and a music system. A shipshape, masculine room, unpretentious and comfortable, with nothing extraneous in it. He waved her to a big chair, deep from back to front, with a remote control and the
Daily Telegraph
on the arm, directly facing a TV set, and while she hesitated between occupying the chair which was plainly his, or turfing off the enormous Persian cat that immovably occupied the other armchair, he busied himself with mugs and the kettle at the kitchen end. ‘Indian, or I think I have Earl Grey somewhere? Can't offer you any of that herb muck everybody seems to have taken to drinking nowadays, sorry.'
‘I actually prefer Indian, thanks.'
He nodded approvingly. ‘Sugar?'
‘No sugar, just a little milk.' She stroked the cat. It didn't even open an eye or twitch a whisker. Perhaps it was dead.
Not wishing to put it to the test, she perched on the edge of Humphrey's chair. He approached with two mugs, one in each hand, handed her one, then with a single economical movement he lifted the still-sleeping cat expertly with his free hand and sank into the chair it had occupied with it on his knee. It still didn't open its eyes.
‘So it's Jasie's father who took him away, and killed Bibi, eh?' He explained when she raised her eyebrows, ‘Alyssa rang me. Told me Chip had spilled the beans. Damn fool, first thing he should've thought of when she started getting those letters. All this might never have happened then. Wonder sometimes about Chip. Drinking too much, y'know, like his father, and
his
father too, I hear. Always been a curse in that family, drink, they haven't the head for it, but they can't leave it alone. Pity he isn't more like his mother — one glass after a hard day in the garden and she can hardly keep her eyes open!' He grinned engagingly. ‘Don't tell her I said that. And don't get me wrong — wouldn' t go so far as to say Chip was a tippler, but he's bending his elbow more than's good for him. Understandable, in a way …' He broke off, then added, almost as an afterthought, ‘Bibi too, on occasions, she could knock the gin back … Ah well. Jasie's father, eh?'
‘That's what we're working on at the moment.'
He regarded her shrewdly. ‘Not certain, though?' She inclined her head non-committally. ‘You'd hardly be questioning me, if you were,' he said.
‘We're simply trying to get a clearer picture. We might think we know, but nothing's certain until we've got him in our sights, and even then we shall still need witnesses, hard evidence. Meanwhile, we're anxious to eliminate as many as possible from the enquiry.'
‘And that includes me, does it? Am I a suspect?'
She smiled and drank some of her tea. ‘Not unless you've been fiddling the evidence — which doesn't seem likely.'
He'd been in Cornwall to attend his daughter's Silver Wedding. The day before returning home he'd visited the
Eden Project with a nephew who was a keen gardener. Their tickets were timed and docketed. On his journey home, he'd filled up with petrol twice, and kept the receipts, both of which were dated and timed. One filling station was near Taunton, another nearer home. ‘Noticed the petrol was two pee a litre down, so I thought I might as well fill up,' he'd said, producing the receipts. There was no possibility that Humphrey could have been near Membery when Bibi Morgan was killed and Jasie taken away.
‘Then if it's not me, you're here to talk about the others,' he answered her shrewdly.
‘Well, I suspect you know more about the Calvert family than anyone else.'
He gave a short bark of laughter. ‘If that's what you're after, it's Jane Arrow you should ask. Not much she doesn't know about the family, one way or another.'
Of course. All those photos crowded in her sitting room when she and Crouch had called on her the morning after the murder, before they knew Jasie was missing. The Calvert boys at every age, on every occasion. Dozens of them.
‘No family of her own,' Humphrey went on, ‘Alyssa and the boys mean everything to her. Surrogate sons, isn't that what they say?'
She was beginning to like Humphrey. She'd suspected before that his bumbling stereotype was all a bit of an act and that his initial remarks when he'd arrived at Membery to be told of the murder hadn't been simple gaffes — he might not have said them intentionally, but they were what he had been thinking. He was a shrewd observer, seeing, and interpreting, far more than he saw fit to let everyone think. He might turn out to be a very good witness indeed, she thought, as she met a direct glance from very blue eyes.
She said, ‘What did you make of Bibi's arrival at Membery? Didn't you think it odd that there was this conspiracy of silence about her past?'
‘Yes, I did, but that was her business — and Chip's. Nothing to do with anyone else. Let them get on with their lives, that's what I told Alyssa. Didn't affect anyone else, anyway.' He paused as if to consider his next words. ‘Let me just say — don't believe all you hear. All that about everyone loving her. Largely a myth. Created by her, if you ask me. Bit of a troublemaker on the quiet, even allowing it wasn't always intentional.'
‘Give me an example.'
After a moment, he said, ‘For one thing, she was trying to persuade Alyssa it was time to get rid of the garden, and move out.'
‘Move out of Membery?'
He reached out a hand to one of the shelves behind him and picked up a pipe. He stared at it hard for a moment or two then put it back. ‘Gave it up three months ago, mustn't start again now.' Hunching himself forward, he folded his long stork's legs up into a more comfortable lap for the cat, which he began to stroke compulsively instead.
She continued to wait patiently for an answer. As a reformed smoker herself, she understood the temptation, but she wondered why he'd needed the prop at that particular moment. It had been to cover his embarrassment, she decided, as he finally said, ‘Fact is, Membery isn't Alyssa's. Left in trust for the three boys. She can live there as long as she wants to, but it doesn't belong to her. There's no reason for her to stay there, she could move in with me. Get married,' he finished gruffly.
She had guessed at something of the sort between them.
‘It'd make sense. She could sell the garden, or better still, get a manager in, still make herself a tidy little profit. Can't understand why she won't. She had a hell of a life with that husband of hers, and I've been a widower over fifty years. M'wife died in childbirth, the child too. Sort of thing doesn't happen much, nowadays.'
‘I'm sorry.'
‘It was a long time ago. Water under the bridge.'
‘So, in fact, Bibi was actually on your side, persuading her to move out?'

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