Killing Me Softly (19 page)

It was on the small table by the bed, a razor-sharp, wicked-looking object, with a triangular blade of carbon steel, fastened into the black wooden handle with brass rivets. Identical to the one Ellie had been using to chop the onions.

‘Yes, it's one of ours,' Ellie said, when Abigail, holding it gingerly with a handkerchief, took it downstairs to show her. ‘One of those, look.'

There was in fact a whole battery of such knives in the kitchen, suitable for every possible function, ranged on various racks and blocks set down the middle of the long, central working surface, within easy reach of anyone working there. The knife found by Barbie's bed would have fitted exactly the empty space in one of the racks.

‘By the bed?' Ellie repeated. ‘Goodness. I suppose it might be a bit weird, being here on your own at night, but who'd have thought Barbie the type to be scared of intruders? It's more likely they'd have been scared of her.'

Abigail was beginning to have other ideas.

The knife looked surgically clean, but she wrapped it carefully and told Ellie she'd like to take it away. ‘You're not needing the flat at the moment, are you?'

‘Not unless we can get someone to replace Barbie immediately, someone who needs the flat. It's a good inducement. Why?'

‘We'll need to take a proper look round. I'd like to have the door sealed up, just in case. Meanwhile, did Barbie leave a forwarding address? There must be money owing to her.'

‘She said on the message she didn't know where she'd be, she'd let us know, and we could forward it.'

‘Where did she live before she came here?'

Ellie spread her hands helplessly. ‘We shall have the address somewhere, I'll have a look. Funny, but we never talked about her personal circumstances. She didn't give you much opportunity, you know. She kept the conversation jokey, she'd fool around, make fun of her size ... I'm sorry, it's a rotten thing to say, but I only looked on her as a bit of a clown.'

The fate of fat people everywhere. Sad, but true, that nobody thought, or cared much, about what was going on inside.

Col was having one of his better days. He woke Jem with a mug of herbal tea, then squatted on the edge of the bed, by which name the lumpy mattress on the floor was dignified, talking until Jem was forced to sit up and drink the tea, though he hadn't wanted it. It was only eight o'clock and he could've slept until lunch time, if he hadn't been disturbed, seeing that he didn't need to show his face at the job any longer. He'd jacked it in, it was all too much of a hassle, getting there on time, working late ...

But he drank the tea because he didn't want to upset Col, though he seemed rational this morning, or what passed for rational as far as he was concerned. It was sometimes hard to tell. He was vague at the best of times. He took the mug when Jem had finished the tea and began to potter about the room.

‘Looking for something?' Jem asked at last, irritated, knowing that if it had been anyone else he'd just have told them to piss off and let him go back to sleep. But he was wary of upsetting Col.

‘My library book.'

Col was moony and gentle-looking, and when he wore his glasses, half-way down his nose, he looked like the professor he could one day have been. He was a university drop-out, like Jem, which was where they'd met, only Col's drop out had been enforced, through his illness. He'd been reading PPE, and couldn't seem to get out of the habit of books. In spite of everything, he was never totally going to abandon the idea of returning and completing his degree course.

‘Had your pills this morning?' Jem asked.

He'd assumed responsibility for Col ever since he'd been released from the psychiatric unit. His father, who was divorced and on top of that had multiple sclerosis, needed care himself, and a son with problems like that was a responsibility he couldn't undertake. His mother, who'd left them when Col was ten, didn't want to know.

‘He can come and live here with us,' Luce had said at once. ‘His poor dad, as if MS wasn't enough! Life's a right cow, sometimes.'

The MS apart, the two couldn't have lived together. Their temperaments were totally incompatible, to begin with, and the wasting disease had soured John Denby's already none too sweet disposition further. But at least he kept in touch, and occasionally sent some money, though he'd little enough to spare, so he must have been grateful to them all for befriending Col and giving him somewhere to stay. Fortunately, he'd never been able, in his condition, to get down to the Bagots and see how his son lived. Even Jem could see that might have finished him off.

‘I said, have you had your pills?' he repeated when Col showed no intention of answering his question.

‘Yeah,' he replied, so definitely that Jem knew he hadn't. Sometimes, he would admit to the necessity for his medicine, but at other times, when he was feeling well and co-ordinated, he would angrily reject any idea that he needed treatment.

‘You have to keep up with them, you know that.'

‘And
you
know how I feel about pumping drugs into my body, I've told you often enough.' This was true, he wouldn't touch anything if he could help it, he was very puritanical in some ways, and he desperately needed to believe he could be well without constant medication. He stirred an amorphous pile of clothing on the floor with his foot and screwed his face up. ‘I want to talk to Luce.'

‘So do I. Morgan says she told him to get them out – Ginge and his woman – but I think it's just Morgan who wants it.'

‘Oh, he does, does he?' Col scowled. ‘Well, he won't get my co-operation. They're asking for trouble – Ginge, anyway, but that's up to him. I wouldn't want anything – well, nasty – to happen to anyone else. One thing leads to another, before you know where you are.'

He wandered to the window, opened it and leaned out, squinting along the mist-shrouded river's length. The smell of the river rushed in, cold and damp and heavy, with a hint of decay. Jem shivered exaggeratedly and slid down between the grimy blankets and stained pillows. Col pulled the casement closed.

‘Water level's down,' he remarked. It had gone down in the cellar, too, as Jem had found out on his inspection last night. ‘We shan't be flooded.'

Jem's only reply was a grunt, and Col mooched around the room, hands in pockets, lifting things up and dropping them.

‘Did Luce lend it you – my library book, I mean? I can't find it anywhere and I think it's overdue.'

‘Ring her and ask her,' Jem said from under the bedclothes.

‘We don't know her number.' He added doubtfully, ‘I suppose I could try directory enquiries, but we don't know her mother's address, either.'

It would be simple enough for him to find out by asking Morgan, but he wouldn't, of course, he never spoke to Morgan if he could avoid it.

Jem gave up the attempt to get back to sleep and sat up. ‘Forget it. It wouldn't be a good idea, the way her mother feels about us,' he warned. And Morgan wouldn't like anyone else trying to contact Luce, either. Especially Col. There was a lot of tension between those two. Mainly, thought Jem, with some perception, because Morgan knew that during his lucid times, Col could always win in an argument and had better ideas than he did about almost everything, and that the others listened to him. Morgan didn't like that. And when Morgan didn't like anything, he could act very, very weird. Jem often wondered if he wasn't madder than Col.

‘We need her here, as well,' Col was muttering in his self-communing, introverted voice. ‘It's too quiet without her.'

Luce was a great talker. She'd rattle away to anybody. Hind legs of donkeys flew around in all directions when she was about. Sometimes, you wanted to tell her to give her tongue a rest, but he knew what Col meant. He, too, missed the sound of her voice and the sight of her slim, quick figure and her cropped blonde head. ‘You know Luce. Her mum gets on her nerves, but she wouldn't leave her in the lurch.'

She rebelled against society in general but, like Jem, she had this feeling of responsibility to people, even to the family she reputedly despised. Until the advent of Ginge and Sheena, the house had been clean, no drugs ... apart from the odd spliff, but that didn't count. She even made Col, when he was in a condition to do so, go home once in a while to visit – though apart from the bit of stuff he took his father, for medicinal reasons, to help his condition, that did neither of them much good.

Col's own condition was unpredictable, that was his problem. One day, happy and full of excited, intelligent ideas, the next in a black, faraway mood. When he was like this, he had a compulsion to go for long tramps, walking the streets or going further out into the country, sometimes coming back soaking wet, as he had the other afternoon. But Col never seemed to notice things like that. His dad, before his illness, had been a gamekeeper and he'd been brought up in the country. Col could have got them an occasional rabbit for the pot, he said, if they hadn't all decided to go vegetarian. At the thought of skinning a rabbit, Jem, the one who would have had to cook it, turned green.

The knife had been sent down to the lab, though what she was expecting it to reveal, if anything, Abigail wasn't sure. Meanwhile, she'd showed the newspaper clipping to Barry Scott, with instructions to obtain a copy, pronto. ‘And the text that accompanied it, all the relevant data.'

‘Right, ma'am,' said Scott, an idle so-and-so if his interest wasn't caught, but on the ball when it was. In this case it was, and very shortly he'd come up with a faxed copy of the newspaper report which had accompanied the photograph. This was an account of the last day of a trial at the Old Bailey, two years previously, when Mr Justice Orpington had sentenced a young man named Paul Matthews to seven years' imprisonment. Scott had also obtained the earlier reports, which traced the case back to its beginnings and led up to the sentencing.

Matthews had been a young City whizz kid, the financial brains of an investment company set up specifically to advise on pension schemes. Pensioners had fallen over themselves to invest their savings on the strength of wild promises. When the venture had crashed, Matthews had been the one to take the rap, while two of his fellow directors, also accused, namely Timothy Wishart and Anthony Pardoe, having engaged first-class lawyers to defend them, had been exonerated on a technicality, getting off with little more than a wigging and their futures and fortunes still intact.

There was a silence when Mayo had finished reading the last report, which told how Matthews, six months later, had hanged himself in prison. An open prison, this had been, since his was a white-collar crime and he hadn't been deemed a dangerous criminal. But he hadn't been able to take even that degree of incarceration, or perhaps it was the shame and disgrace that had got to him, and the fact that all the blame had been laid at his door.

‘You're sure it's the same woman?' Mayo tapped the newspaper photo. ‘This is the Barbie Nelson you know?'

‘Couldn't mistake her. She's a bit slimmer in the photo, better dressed, and she must be wearing contact lenses, but it's her, I'd swear.'

He went to stand at the window, hands in pockets, a favourite position. He could see little besides the bulk of the Town Hall, but knew every inch of what lay beyond it, and most of the criminal activity that went on there. ‘So what do you make of it?' he asked, over his shoulder.

Lowering skies were again the order of the day, and Abigail could see his desk-light reflected in the dark window. His office was one floor nearer to God than hers, but he had the same view of the same damned pigeons, a row of them now huddled together on the parapet. She thought about the wood pigeons cooing on the bare branches at Clacks Mill, and Wishart's body slumped on the bridge. ‘If a man can use a shotgun, so can a woman.'

‘Revenge? OK, but why Wishart? She might just as easily have picked on Pardoe.'

‘Except that Pardoe's a different kettle of fish – but who knows? He might have been next on her list. I think Barbie Nelson took the job with Miller's Wife deliberately, with something of that idea in mind, not just by chance.'

The way he folded his arms across his chest and looked steadily at her showed he wasn't entirely convinced. Though he'd long since ceased to be surprised by the unlikely, incredible things people did all the time, solid facts were what he preferred to work with.

‘Especially when put together with that letter in Wishart's desk,' Abigail said. ‘If we take it seriously, it must constitute a prelude to some sort of blackmail, sooner or later.'

‘There's nothing to support her having sent it.'

‘The trial report alone shows pretty conclusively that she had a big grudge against Wishart, no better motive for finishing him off, in fact.' She hesitated, wondering if his mood was receptive enough to go further – but Mayo, give him his due, always listened. Even if he didn't always act upon what he heard.

‘Go on.'

‘Ellie Redvers says they were friendly – Barbie and Wishart, I mean. He was nothing if not susceptible and she was a very sexy lady, take my word for it. You mightn't have thought it at first sight, and this photo doesn't give much indication of it, but –'

‘Oh, I don't know,' Mayo said with a grin. ‘Big, buxom, beautiful.'

‘Well, you see what I mean, then. The idea being to get friendly enough with him to be in a position where she could kill him.'

‘And that's where the knife comes in? Mm.' Mayo pushed out his lips.
Another
weapon which could have killed Wishart, as well as the gun which had actually done so? The gun that hadn't yet turned up, though a ballistics report was on his desk saying that Wishart's own gun had definitely not been the one which killed him. Along with a frustratingly inconclusive SOCO report which revealed how little evidence had been turned up at the crime scene. Nothing more than some scuffed footprints under the trees near where the cartridge case had been found. ‘So what made her change her mind, then?'