The Company She Kept (3 page)

When it came to her memoirs, however, it became apparent that Kitty's normal exuberance and enthusiasm would need to be leavened with circumspection. Her personal life had been enlivened by encounters and friendships with all sorts and conditions of people; she had met princes and potentates and what she had to tell was quite often scandalous, sometimes libellous, and would certainly not be well received in the touchy climate of Middle Eastern politics. Even she began to realize that she must cut and prune and omit where necessary, something that went so much against the grain of her own nature that she began to lose interest in the idea.

It was Madeleine Freeman who suggested she employ a secretary. Madeleine was Kitty's doctor, a sensible and dedicated young woman whose advice was always sound, but it was only because arthritis was beginning to make it difficult to hold a pen or bang away on her typewriter without a good deal of pain that Kitty finally gave in.

Irena immediately came to mind as a candidate for the job: she was reasonably intelligent, had time on her hands – and she also owed Kitty a great deal. Intimating that she had been one of the political dissidents who had fled Czechoslovakia in the disillusioned years following the Prague Spring, she had descended without warning on Flowerdew six months previously. Her foot once in the door, she stayed, infuriating Jessie Crowther by invading her kitchen to cook heavy Slovak dishes, and upsetting the peaceful tenor of Kitty's life with all the Central European drama and temperament brought into it. She appeared to have settled in permanently, with no desire to find herself paid employment.

Why didn't Kitty send her packing?

‘But she's Milo's daughter!' she said, when asked. ‘I owe him that, at least. And –' clinching it – ‘Alfred would have wished it.' Besides, anyone could see that mixed with her exasperation was a reluctant affection for the gauche, clumsy, unattractive woman Irena was.

But whatever she felt about her, Kitty was adamant that she wouldn't do as a secretary: she was too excitable and unreliable, and just as likely to put down her own wild interpretation of events if such a thing happened to occur to her. A woman of her age, pushing forty, should be capable of keeping her mouth shut, but Irena was not. And there were some things, Kitty hinted, it was better she shouldn't know about yet, possibly never.

Felix she wouldn't consider, either, though he too was hanging around the house at present with nothing to do but help Tommo in the garden while waiting to go up to his university, a refugee from his parents' broken marriage to whom she had given temporary lodging. For one thing, Felix was a young man of no imagination and would be shocked at some of the things she had to tell; his self-protective good manners would prevent him remarking on what he learned – but possibly not from trying to make capital of it later. He was clever and already had a definite eye to the main chance, though you couldn't altogether blame him for that, poor boy. It came of having that dreadful pushy mother.

The one person Kitty would really have liked to work with her was Madeleine, but as a recently qualified and newly-appointed junior partner in the local medical practice, she was much too busy to ask.

‘You'll have to advertise,' said Jessie Crowther, putting her practical Yorkshire finger right on the button, as usual.

‘I'll do no such thing!' declared Kitty. ‘I want no strangers poking their noses into my affairs.' Jessie, who'd been Kitty's housekeeper for thirty years, said nothing, and waited. A few days later Kitty inserted her advert in the local paper.

What she wanted, she had decided, was someone who would enter into the spirit of the thing, yet know where to draw the line. Someone decisive and perhaps even a little bossy, who wouldn't let her go too far. Someone ruthless where she was overflowing.

What she got was Sophie Amhurst.

‘What a beautifully limpid creature you are!' were almost her first words to Sophie, when Jessie had conducted the girl through the rather spooky house towards the hooded basket chair in the garden where Kitty sat enthroned like an empress. And Sophie at eighteen, though not at all sure what this fat, bizarrely-dressed old woman with the lively dark eyes meant, decided to take it as a compliment – though how much better it would have been if the words had been juxtaposed: if she'd said ‘limpidly beautiful' rather than the other way round.

‘I just happened to see your ad and thought it might be fun,' she replied naively when Kitty asked what had made her apply, and indeed it could easily have happened that way. But the truth was that it had been Roz who had seen the advert and thought the job would be good experience for Sophie. Sophie had just left school and had decided she was never, ever, ever going to make plans, she was sick of being pushed around and was henceforth going to live spontaneously, be a truly free spirit. To which Roz retorted that was an assumption that depended on leaving other people to do the planning, otherwise the world would be in chaos. Roz, filled with practical common sense, liked her life to be ordered and disciplined; she'd taken responsibility for Sophie ever since their parents died. Despite her degree, she was engaged to be married to a policeman.

But whatever Roz thought, Sophie knew it was her own decision to apply for the job. Flowerdew, or something like it, though she had never seen the house until she went along for the interview with Mrs Wilbraham, had always been there on the edges of her imagination, something like it had always featured in the distant landscape of her romantic mind. It's very name conjured up for her a kind of enchantment. Camelot's faery mythic towers, Avalon, Morte d'Arthur ... the heady stuff of legend and romance.

What had clinched the decision to apply, however, had been the fact that the Mrs Wilbraham who needed a secretary was a writer. A little disappointing to find, on inquiry at the library, that she was a writer of archaeological textbooks, but no matter. Sophie had decided some time ago that writing was to be her metier. She didn't need the money, their parents had left her and Roz dangerously free of the necessity to work for their living, but all her friends were deciding on careers and it seemed to her that being a writer sounded interestingly different and was just the thing to give her the untramelled lifestyle she so longed for. Without, of course, too many restrictions on her time or too much hard work. She'd learned to type, though somewhat erratically, and although she didn't yet know what she wanted to write about, this opportunity to pick up a few hints was too good to miss. Something must surely rub off on her!

If Kitty was thrillingly like Sophie's conception of a writer, with a rich silk scarf wound low on her forehead, her exotic jewellery and her rather grubby rubbed silk caftan embroidered with tarnished silver thread, Sophie was not at all what Kitty had envisaged. Thin, brown-haired and lightly-boned, she sat poised on the edge of her chair as if about to take wing, her clear hazel eyes filled with a gentle dreaminess, large and intelligent as the eyes of a deer. Following that bright expressive gaze, Kitty saw it fixed on the not too distant figure of Tommo, clearing pondweed from between the waterlilies at the edges of the lake – Tommo, dark and secretive, inscrutably keeping his own counsel, who had come to live in the cottage in the grounds under his own terms: handyman work around the house and garden in exchange for accommodation, a small wage and no questions asked about his personal life. Yet Kitty envisaged no trouble to come. True, the girl was young and doubtless impressionable and there were two presentable young men around the place, but Tommo was Tommo, and Felix – well, pooh, he wouldn't be the type to appeal to Sophie! Kitty had conceived an immediate liking for the girl and felt an empathy between them strong enough to decide to set her on, without even bothering to ask her about her qualifications.

‘That's it, then. I hope you like mint tea.'

‘I've never had it,' said Sophie honestly, thinking it sounded gruesome, ‘but I'll try anything once.'

‘That's the spirit! I can see you're a person after my own heart. We're going to get on splendidly!' Kitty beamed, and was rewarded by an answering smile that Sophie herself felt to spring from her very heart. She took all this to mean she was engaged, and hoped her typing would be up to it.

As for Kitty, she had no qualms. She knew instinctively that Sophie would fit in very well with the rest of the bright young people who had come in various ways to surround her and who made her feel as she had when she, too, was young, in her twenties, at Cambridge, a most luminous star in all that brilliant firmament. Before she had met and married Alfred Wilbraham. Or before her beloved Alfred had met, married and made her what she was.

The second Tuesday in March began for Mayo, after a mere three hours' sleep, with a puncture. As a consequence, he arrived late and in a bad temper at his desk at Milford Road Divisional Headquarters only to find that a material witness in the squalid child-pornography case he and Kite had been winding up had done a disappearing act. From then on, it was downhill all the way.

It was a foul day. Dark and rainy, the lights on all day. At ten p.m, having just finished interrogating another of the witnesses in the case with Kite – one who'd been acting like the three wise monkeys for three hours and who'd then suddenly decided to break his
omertà
– and having read the man's statement and filed his own report, Mayo sent Kite off home.

‘Call it a day, Martin.' He stretched, walked to the window and peered out into the rainy darkness. ‘Sheila will be wondering whether she has a husband at all.'

‘I'll be off then, if you say so,' Kite replied, unusually compliant.

‘You all right, Martin?'

‘Shagged out, but I'll no doubt live! G'night then, see you in the morning.'

‘Mind how you go,' Mayo said, watching the cars below slide like fish through an aquarium. ‘I wouldn't turn a dog out in this weather.'

Neither of them had seen their beds yesterday until the small hours and now, tired to the point where nothing was making much sense any longer, he swept his own desk clear and followed Kite. He drove home through the rain-pelted streets, parked his car in the garage, fell over Moses, his landlady's cat, and found a letter waiting for him from his daughter, Julie, who was en route to Australia, having jettisoned her catering course in favour of learning about life. He worried and fretted over his motherless child as only a father can, imagining her in the sort of perilous situations only a policeman would. The measure of his exhaustion was that he decided reading the letter could wait until the morning.

He had a shower, the stinging hot water succeeding in washing away the tension and partially clearing his mind.

He was morosely viewing the uninspired contents of his fridge and wondering whether he could be bothered to eat or not before bed, when the telephone rang. In his present mood he was ready to contemplate not answering it but his flatmate, Bert the parrot, wished on him by Julie for the duration of her travels, had other views. In several misguided moments, Alex had taught him to shout ‘Shop!' every time the phone rang. Bert had quickly reached the peak of his learning curve, but this had proved no bar to his strong streak of exhibitionism. Ignoring him made no difference. In the end Mayo had to answer the phone in self-defence.

It was Kite. ‘Sorry about this. We have a body. Woman found by a lorry-driver in a lay-by on Hartopp Moor. I'm there now and I've done all the necessary, contacted the coroner's officer and so on. Doc Ison's here and Timpson-Ludgate's on his way.'

‘Right, Martin, I'll be as quick as I can.'

After pulling on his clothes and downing a cup of black coffee in the hope of getting the adrenalin going again, Mayo manoeuvred his car out of the garage and started up with as little noise as possible in order not to wake Miss Vickers and her brother, both of them seventy-plus and light sleepers.

The wipers sluiced the torrential rain across the windscreen, the wet road stretched like an oil slick before him as he slid round the base of the hill that led up on to the moor. Seven miles from Lavenstock and it might have been on the moon, a desolate landscape with nothing for miles except bare hills, a few stunted trees and outcrops of rock.

Rounding the corner of the hill, he came to the police ‘Slow' signs and a scene familiar to him from dozens of other occasions: beetle-like figures scurrying about in shining wet capes, the temporary lighting revealing a clutch of police cars, a scenes-of-crime van, plus a huge multi-wheeled low-loader truck with a Birmingham registration number pulled in to the lay-by. The pathologist had beaten him to it; his vintage Rover was parked behind Doc Ison's car and the truck. Headlights suddenly sliced the darkness as several cars coming the other way swept into view, slowing and craning to see what was going on before being waved irritably on by one of the caped figures.

Martin Kite came forward to meet him as he got out of his car. ‘Over here, sir.'

The Sergeant led him behind a mass of red sandstone outcrop that jutted out from the moorland, where plastic screens had been rigged to provide a rough shelter and Ison and the pathologist were waiting for Sergeant Napier, crouched underneath it, to finish with his cameras. Both men looked up and grunted a greeting, the pathologist's normally cheerful and rubicund face morose under a dripping fisherman's hat.

The rain drummed on to the plastic as Mayo ducked under it. A woman's body lay on the sedge, one leg in a stiletto-heeled shoe lying at a grotesque angle. Prepared as he was for the sight, his gorge still rose, his stomach tightening into its accustomed knots. Death had not been merciful. He looked down at her with pity. However attractive she'd once been, she now looked repulsive, her face congested and bloated, the bruises on her throat making an obvious statement. Most of the make-up she'd worn had been washed off by the rain, leaving only the sticky-looking lipstick intact, a ghastly slash of scarlet across the naked, cyanosed face. A slackness under the chin revealed her as no longer young, the hanks of bleached hair were soaked with rain, its darker roots pitifully revealed. There was no dignity in this sort of death: the short skirt was ruckled up above the thighs, the tights and red silk knickers half pulled down.