A Species of Revenge (25 page)

Abigail hadn't been able to leave for Solihull until the late afternoon, but a telephone call had established that by the time she got there, Judith Ensor would be home from work.

She was dressed in pale blue this time, in a matching dress and jacket that only needed a picture hat to make it suitable for a wedding. Her enamelled make-up was flawless as ever, colour-coordinated pink-frosted lips and nails, like strawberry sorbet, hair like dark candyfloss.

‘Dermot and Lisa Voss?' At first it seemed as though she wasn't going to admit to having known them, but after a time it appeared to dawn on her that denial was pointless and she gave a grudging admission. ‘We used to know them, once.'

‘Used to?'

‘They lived near us. Then we moved down here and we lost touch.'

‘You mean you didn't see each other again? You didn't visit, or write?'

‘No.'

‘Not even a Christmas card?'

‘No.'

‘Had you quarrelled?'

She lifted one immaculate shoulder. ‘These things happen.'

‘Well. Did your husband ever lend Dermot Voss any money?'

‘He may have done. He didn't tell me if he did.'

She crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. Her expression was unyielding. It was going to be like drawing teeth. ‘Mrs Ensor, don't you
want
to know who killed your husband?' Abigail asked gently.

For a moment, it seemed that might have got to her. Her colour came and went. Tears appeared at the corner of her eyes. Then she remembered her mascara. ‘Would you like a glass of sherry?' she asked suddenly. ‘I would.'

Why not, if it would get her to talk? After the first sip of the sweet, brown liquid Abigail left the little crystal glass to one side, waiting while Judith drank hers.

‘How did you meet the Voss family? Were they near neighbours?' she prompted after a while, hoping the drink might have given Judith a bit of Dutch courage. Either it had, or she'd decided to give a little more. She began to speak, softly and quickly.

‘Near enough. Philip met Dermot at some airport or other when their flight was held up for hours and hours. They got talking and found we lived in the same place, and that was how it started. We played bridge together. I used to babysit for them when Dermot was home. A faint smile momentarily softened the hard little face in its frame of cloudy dark hair. ‘I liked the children. They were great.'

She sat elegantly on the settee, glass in hand, staring out of the window. ‘This other murder you mentioned, this young girl,' she said suddenly. ‘What's Dermot's involvement in that?'

‘I can't say that, yet,' Abigail replied cautiously.

She didn't say anything for a while, then seemed to come to a decision. ‘After you'd gone, the other day, I found something that might interest you. Excuse me while I get it, will you?'

When she came back, she silently handed over a packet of letters, enclosed with an elastic band. They were addressed to Philip Ensor, at his business address, handwritten in a stylish hand, with swooping loops and Greek Es. The ink was brown, the paper was thick, creamy-yellow, with a curlicued stylized flower in brown at the top right-hand corner.

Abigail skimmed through them. They were love letters, not of the most steamy kind, but love letters, all the same, and all from Lisa Voss. The writing paper interested her.

‘Very distinctive, this paper,' she said, putting the last letter back into the envelope.

‘Dermot got it for her. He used to buy her lovely things all the time – a new supply of these every birthday, and once a special pen to go with it.'

‘A fountain pen – with this same flower engraved on it?'

‘It's not a flower – it was her monogram. She drew her initials like that!' Well, yes, Abigail saw that with the curved downstrokes of the V joining together at the bottom, and the L curling extravagantly around it, it did look exactly like a flower. ‘He had the pen specially engraved to match. She didn't know when she was well off – a lot of women would've given their eye-teeth for a husband like that.'

Including Judith Ensor? She'd evidently liked Voss, which wasn't surprising. Good-looking, good-humoured, a good line in blarney. A way of talking to women that made them feel special ... whereas her husband had been, to her at least, a very different proposition.

‘She was like that, Lisa – always had to be different – her clothes, her house ...' She glanced round in a dissatisfied way at the pristine, conventional room which had everything that money could buy. ‘It was all right, if you didn't look beneath the surface – I mean, she wasn't too fussed about housework, for all she'd spend hours doing up old furniture and things.'

Her lips pursed together as if she'd been sucking a lemon.

The female half of the Voss partnership, at least, had cut no ice with her.

Abigail snapped the elastic band round the letters Judith had conveniently ‘found', while Judith drank her sherry and poured herself another, and stared at the carpet while tears gathered in her eyes. ‘You see how it was,' she said. This time she didn't bother about her mascara.

‘May I take these with me? I'll give you a receipt.'

‘I don't want them back, I never want to see them again. You can keep them.' Her voice tinkled like icicles.

Abigail understood what she meant. In Judith's position she wouldn't have wanted them back, either. They explicitly charted the progress of Lisa Voss's affair with Philip Ensor, the secret meetings when Dermot had been away and Ensor supposedly on business elsewhere, the growing angst about not being able to be together permanently. Then the tone of the letters changed. Despite the care they'd taken to keep their affair secret, Dermot had somehow found out, and was taking it badly, refusing even to discuss a divorce, becoming abusive ... it was in the last letter that Ensor was told that Lisa was pregnant.

‘How did Dermot find out about Lisa and your husband, Mrs Ensor?'

She shrugged. ‘How should I know that?' She avoided Abigail's eye.

Jealousy was an ugly word. An ugly emotion. Maybe it was an assumption on Abigail's part, though she didn't feel it was unjustified, that Judith Ensor was not childless from choice. How cruel then, to find out that her husband's mistress, with two children of her own already, was pregnant with her own husband's child. She said gently, ‘Was it before or after Lisa Voss died that you moved here? Whose suggestion was it, yours or your husband's?'

‘It was before, but does it matter? We both wanted to leave the place behind.'

That was understandable, on Judith's part, at least. Who would want to live within spitting distance of reminders of her husband's infidelities? But it also implied that she'd known what was going on, and that it was probably the cause of the split between the families.

Standing up, ready to leave, Abigail asked Judith Ensor, ‘Why didn't you tell us this before?'

She sat in her baby-blue suit on her flowered settee, a sparkly little brooch in the form of an arch-backed cat with green eyes on her neat lapel, her beautiful grey eyes wide and unblinking. ‘I always liked Dermot, he was good fun, and if he had killed Philip – well, it was only what Philip deserved, wasn't it?'

Down at Milford Road Police Station, Fitzallan was being shown into the nearest room, which happened to be one of the interview rooms. He'd appeared at the front desk with a curt request to see the senior officer on the Patti Ryman case, stating that he had something important to say. When the request came, Mayo shrugged on his jacket, adjusted his tie, drank the dregs of yet another coffee, and went downstairs. Summoning a PC to join them, he introduced himself, saying, ‘I believe you've already answered the questions my officers put to you – is there something you've remembered?'

He spoke more impatiently than he knew. The whole station was alive with activity and tension, events were piling up, occupying his thoughts and his time – notably this latest worrying development, the disappearance of the little girl, Allie. He couldn't see how, yet, but if it was a coincidence, unconnected with the other happenings they were working on, then he was a Dutchman. He was in no mood to put up with time-wasting grumbles from the public, wherever they came from.

An abrupt man with deep-set eyes, not given to smiling easily at any time, now Fitzallan positively glowered. Tall and broad-shouldered, in a casually expensive suit, he dominated the cheerlessly functional surroundings, throwing himself on to the hard chair offered without seeming to notice its comfort or otherwise. Then he startled Mayo by asking abruptly, ‘First of all, do I need to go into my personal background? Are you familiar with what happened to my wife some years ago?' He added tersely, ‘The officers who've already questioned me seemed to know all about it.'

‘It's part of their job to know. I remember the case, too.'

‘Yes. Well. I only mentioned it because I think it has some bearing on what I've come about.' He took a moment to organize his thoughts, and Mayo, beginning to be intrigued by the man and his purpose in coming here, didn't push him.

Fitz looked down at his hands, breathing deeply. He was fully aware that he wasn't one of the world's best communicators, and this was something he'd never yet been able to talk about freely, not to anyone: those reasons why it had been necessary for him to have the attic flat at Edwina Lodge as a bolt hole, where he could paint, and leave behind for a measure of time the woman who had been his wife, his responsibility, his burden but ultimately, as he'd continually reassured himself, his enduring love.

Elspeth, cool and beautiful when he'd married her, neurotic and unstable within a few years, bringing the structure of their lives crashing down. Her illness, a disturbing and little understood dysfunction with an unpronounceable name, had made her impossible to live with, impossible to abandon. It had resulted in a steady erosion of their marriage, problems with drink, drugs, suicide attempts. There were those who'd urged him to have her ‘put in care' but, hellish though life had become, it would have shamed him not to cherish her as he had in the days before her illness, at least to try and love her and care for her as much as when she'd been well, and whole. All the same, when eventually she did manage to take her own life in that monstrous way, he blamed himself for not listening to the advice.

That day, she'd pumped into herself a cocktail of drugs and drink, taken her car out and driven it at speed along a busy road, with the inevitable conclusion: an appalling pile-up, with the people in the other car, an eight-year-old boy and the driver, his mother, being killed instantly.

‘Mr Fitzallan?'

He blinked rapidly, then opened his briefcase and passed a sheet of grey drawing paper across the desk. ‘I think you should look at this.' It was a child's drawing. There was a silence as Mayo studied it.

‘Who drew this?'

‘Allie, Voss's little girl. I'm doing a portrait of her, trying to, and she likes drawing, so I usually give her pencils and paper and let her draw while she sits for me. Can't expect a little girl to sit unoccupied for any length of time.'

It was a drawing in thick crayon, not remarkable for its talent. It was crude and childish, but it made the hairs on the back of Mayo's neck stand on end. The sheet of paper was large, and the simple outline filled it. A staircase in profile, with a man at the top, standing with arms outstretched. At the foot of the stairs lay a woman, flat out, arms and legs stretched out like a fly. Against the grey background, the crayoned lines were slashed on to the paper, heavy and thick, the chosen colours angry deep red and black. The circle that represented the man's face had been furiously scribbled over in black.

‘Why did you bring this here? You said you thought it had some relevance?'

‘You're familiar with art therapy? The theory that you get disturbed people to paint or draw, in the hopes that they'll bring out their anger, or fear, or whatever's hidden inside and troubling them. Something like that, anyway – a simplistic way of putting it, no doubt, but I'm no expert. My wife had years of therapy, it was one of the things they tried ... But it wasn't deliberate on my part when I gave Allie a paper and pencil, it was only for her to amuse herself while I painted her.' He paused, eyeing them from under his brows. ‘I suppose you knew that Voss's wife died from a fall down the stairs?'

‘She fell downstairs?' Mayo had known only that Lisa Voss had died during pregnancy, there'd been no reason to assume her death hadn't been caused by some condition arising from that. ‘What are you suggesting?'

‘I'm not suggesting anything. Only that Allie's apparently had a history of sleepwalking and nightmares since her mother died – and you must agree, it's a pretty morbid subject for a child to choose. And now that she's disappeared …' He left the rest of the sentence unsaid.

After a moment or two, Mayo said, ‘Right, Mr Fitzallan. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Leave it with me, if you would.'

Fitz stood up. He hadn't expected it to be any better received. He wasn't sure whether he ought to have spoken at all, whether he'd made a fool of himself or not, uneasily aware that this policeman might well think the picture nothing more than a childish scrawl, and himself some sort of crackpot amateur psychiatrist. He hesitated, then decided to say nothing more, took his leave and strode out.

When Fitzallan had gone, Mayo took the drawing back to his office and then stood in front of the window, staring out. The sky was a soft, heavy pearl-grey, one of those still, windless, moody evenings of late summer. It would be dark in an hour. A pigeon sat on the sill of one of the Town Hall windows opposite, listening to the grinding of gears at the traffic lights, the hiss of air brakes, looking too bored to move. The top of a red double-decker bus cruised past ...