An Accidental Shroud (25 page)

Cassie went with him. They had simply walked into the shop, found Nigel alone, and told him who they were and what they'd come for: Joss demanded either recognition as his son, or enough money to make it worth his while to go away. At first disbelieving, Nigel had eventually lost his temper and said contemptuously that he would never in a million years get anything from him, what proof was there that Joss was his son?

'Because my mother says so,' Joss had replied.

'Oh? And how would she know? How many other candidates d'you think there were?'

Joss's temper was slow to catch fire, but unquenchable once it did. He had nearly put his hands round Nigel's throat then and there, in the shop, in broad daylight, strangled the life out of him and knocked the supercilious smile from his face for ever. But something inside him said no, wait. The bugger deserved to die, but not before he, Joss, had found some way to benefit from it.

The possibility opened up even before they left the shop. They'd prepared to leave then, suddenly, Nigel's attitude had changed. 'You do something for me,' he'd said, 'and I'll make it worth your while.' He went on to tell them about the Russian letter, which he swore Naomi had stolen from him, and had even shown them the Fabergé flower to add authenticity to his story when they looked dubious. If Joss could get the letter from his mother, he would not find Nigel ungenerous. 'And to show I'm in earnest,' he'd added, 'take this, it's worth a bob or two.' And he'd tossed to Cassie an amethyst and diamond pendant that was lying on his desk, waiting, with one or two more things, to be picked up by the man who did his repairs. 'It only needs a new clasp.'

After a few minutes' silence, Joss had promised, with apparent docility, that he would do his best to get the letter.

Nigel was looking very pleased with himself as they left. No doubt he thought he'd made a good bargain, but then, he didn't know Joss. Joss had been absolutely livid. A mouldy old pendant that didn't even fasten properly, like throwing a bone to a dog! And giving it to
Cassie
. Cassie, who despised wearing any kind of jewellery. It was another thing to add to the list of what he'd make Nigel Fontenoy pay for.

Just how wasn't clear, but bigger obstacles than this hadn't stopped Joss before. He'd never admitted to being thwarted by anything, whatever he'd ever wanted to do in his life, and he wasn't about to start now. He began to brood on how he could get even.

Once back home, they'd searched for the letter, and found it under the false bottom of Naomi's toolbox, an obvious place, where she had always kept such treasures as she had, like the gold snake bangle.

The letter had not, however, been taken to Nigel as promised, because long before then, Joss and Cassie had begun to talk of getting the Fabergé for themselves as well.

'Why did you do it?' Naomi's voice rose to a despairing wail. 'Why did you have to kill him? He
was
your father, after all.'

'What has that got to do with anything? He was your lover once, but he was prepared to cheat you out of what was yours. He wouldn't acknowledge me as his son, but he was prepared to use me, to buy me off if I'd get that letter for him. It was his own fault. I wouldn't have killed him if he'd done what I asked.'

She closed her eyes, then, gripping the edge of the trunk for support, got to her feet.

'Don't waste any more of my time,' he said through his teeth. 'I want to know what you've done with them – the flower and the letter.'

'They're where you'll never get at them,' she said. 'I've put them in safe hands.'

'I thought you might've been stupid enough to do something like that.' She was really a very stupid woman, his mother. Useless. If she'd played her cards properly, she could've had anything she wanted. As it was, she deserved everything that had ever happened to her, just as Fontenoy had. He felt power surge in him as he swooped to the toolbox. Hardly knowing how it had got there, he was aware of the smooth, remembered feel of the wooden cap of the needle-sharp engraving tool in his palm.

She grabbed his wrist with bony fingers that were surprisingly strong and tried to force the burin away. They struggled, swaying to and fro. He couldn't hear her, under the din of the train rushing through the cutting, but he could see her, her face contorted in a parody of that painting called The Scream'. He hadn't heard the roar of Cassie's motorbike, either, had no idea she'd come in until he saw her standing in the doorway.

As when Abigail had called at the ramshackle brick house before, there was no response when she knocked. This time she tried the door.

It wasn't locked. The knob turned and she stepped inside to a scene that would remain with her for the rest of her life. Nothing she had yet encountered had prepared her for this. Her hand went to her mouth. The gorge rose in her throat, she felt sick. She backed away and knocked into Carmody, a couple of steps behind her. She took several deep breaths, reminded herself that she was trained and able to cope with this, and forced herself to look again.

'Hell's bells,' Carmody said.

Blood everywhere. Three bodies.

Naomi Graham was lying on the floor, grey hair fanned half over her face, with what looked like one of her own engraving tools driven into her chest. Her son was lying beside her in a pool of blackening blood, a small, sharp chisel on the floor beside him. Cassie slumped in a chair, eyes closed. The room stank like a slaughterhouse.

Cassie's eyes opened. Slowly, as if they were being forced to against her will.

So there were only two dead bodies. And one severely shocked girl, alive but in a near-catatonic state. Only one dead body, it soon emerged, since Joss Graham was also still alive, though only just.

At the Cedar House, the lamps were lit and a small coal fire smouldered in the hearth. It was a mild day, though dark and heavy.

'You're my second visitors today. Christine's just been here. We were talking about reopening.' Frail and slightly tottery, George Fontenoy bent dangerously forward to attack the sullen coals, finally succeeding in coaxing the fire to spring into flame.

'You are keeping the business going, then?' Abigail asked.

'I couldn't cope with it alone, but I've spoken to Christine and she's more than willing to come back and run the shop for me, with a view to an eventual partnership. I intend to buy Matthew out – the share of the business my son left to him. As you've probably gathered, he lacks any attachment to it.' George watched the flames and smoke leap up the chimney; if he was disappointed, he'd clearly no intention of letting it show.

'Pity he's not interested,' Mayo said.

'From my point of view, yes, but not from Matthew's. He's come to his senses and is doing what he should've been doing all along, working with his father. I'm not speaking of any obligations to Jake, it's simply right for Matthew. He'll make a success of it, you'll see. He's very like his father. But that isn't why I asked you to come here. I would have been in touch with you before, but –' He hesitated. 'Are you at liberty to tell me about – about what happened, Chief Inspector?'

'If it won't upset you too much.'

'That doesn't matter. I'd rather know.'

Mayo couldn't even begin to imagine how it would feel at George's age to discover you had a grandson you'd never known to exist, then to find out he'd killed your son, his own father. It was an insupportable situation which must already have placed obligations and burdens on him he didn't need. Yet he'd a right to know what had happened, to have the chance to come to terms with it. Swiftly, Mayo gave him what facts he ought to know. What seemed to puzzle the old man most was how Joss Graham had got into the shop that night.

'Nigel let him in because he was told Joss now had the provenance he wanted, although he must've been surprised. It'd been several weeks since he'd put the idea to Joss and nothing had transpired, so presumably he'd thought the deal was off. Time was running out, Naomi was on the point of leaving Lavenstock, and that, I suppose, was why he'd pressured Jake Wilding into trying to get the letter for him.'

What Mayo didn't say was how much the randomness of the whole thing had struck him – that the circumstances of Fontenoy's death had seemed almost accidental, that Joss Graham had planned only as a notional concept, trusting mostly to luck. It was the sort of single-minded, blinkered approach to any crime, the criminal's unquestioning belief in the success of his actions, the reckless disregard for the usual cover-ups, that put the fear of God into Mayo whenever he encountered it, because no amount of applied logic could make any sense out of a plan which had never existed in the first place.

'So he simply walked in, killed my son, and took the Fabergé from the safe with Nigel's own keys.' Only a slight tremble in George's voice betrayed his feelings.

'That's how he said it was, and his sister corroborates his story.'

'Ah yes, the girl. Naomi's daughter.'

'Cassie wasn't involved in the actual murder. The whole thing was, to begin with, a sort of
folie à deux,
and it's very possible she was the moving spirit. She's capable of it – but in the end, Joss went too far, even for her. Her relationship with her mother, not to say her brother, was complex. Naomi genuinely didn't care what her children did, Cassie desperately tried to make her care. She went out of her way to be outrageous, pretended that her mother meant nothing to her, but when it came to it, and she saw Joss stab Naomi, it was too much.'

Cassie – proud, fierce Cassie – in deep shock after what had happened, had initially been put into a hospital bed and heavily sedated, afterwards turning her face away and refusing to speak, except to ask how Joss was.

'Still in intensive care,' Abigail had told her. 'Early days yet, but they believe there's at least a chance he'll pull through.'

'My mother won't.'

'I'm sorry.' And Abigail had found that one small part of her was. There'd been something about Naomi, a free spirit who'd lived by her own principles, such as they were. She'd been a disaster as a mother, yet Cassie at least had loved her, certainly more than she'd known, and nothing Naomi had done could have justified her terrible end.

During the days that followed, one police officer or another had been constantly at Joss's side. There were times when he talked feverishly, times when he fell silent, times when he was forbidden by the doctors to speak at all. Then, after a while, Cassie consented to unburden herself, at first to nobody except Lindsay, although she made no objections about the WPC with a tape machine who sat to one side.

'What a bloody shambles,' Mayo had said, receiving these reports from Abigail.

'Yes, sir,' she'd answered stiffly.

He gave her a sharp glance. 'No blame attached to anyone. We couldn't have foreseen and avoided what happened.'

But she knew that she'd seen the weapon which had killed Naomi, days before Joss had killed his mother. 'It was the same weapon he used to kill Fontenoy. I knew it as soon as I saw it in her chest. It was what she called a burin – an engraving tool – which I'd seen the first time I visited her. I should've known then that it was the same weapon that had killed Fontenoy, it exactly fitted the description of the profile Timpson-Ludgate gave. I ought to have realized.'

'Well, you didn't. And we can all be wise after the event,'

Mayo said astringently, with scant sympathy. Sympathy was not what was needed here. The investigation which ended clean and sanitized and all wrapped up, where you didn't blame yourself for something or other, had yet to happen.

'Well,' George said with a sigh, 'I suppose you're wanting to see the Fabergé piece.'

They were indeed. When the flower hadn't turned up in a search of the house, when it had been clear that it, and the letter, had been the source of the row between Joss and his mother, it had been on the cards they'd been returned to George Fontenoy, even before he rang to say that he had them and wanted to offer some explanation.

'She brought them herself, you know ... Naomi, that is, someone I'd never expected to see again, I must confess. The last time I'd seen her she'd been Jake's wife, Matthew's mother, before she went off like a gipsy with some Greek waiter, leaving Jake and little Matthew behind without a thought, poor little devil.' He stopped, embarrassed. 'I'm sorry, she's dead now. That was unpardonable.'

'She brought you the flower, and the letter?' Abigail prompted.

'They were hers, they both belonged to her by rights, you know.' He stood up now and, crossing the room to a wall safe hidden behind a picture, brought back a box of creamy white wood with tiny gilt hinges and clasps, which he deposited on a low table before the fire.

The honeysuckle spray which Alec Macaudle had so lyrically and accurately described lay on black velvet. George lifted it carefully and set it on the table. It was smaller than Abigail had imagined, not more than six or seven inches high, a lovely, gleaming thing of enamelled gold and precious stones. She began to understand the appeal of its restrained elegance and beauty. She wanted to touch, to examine the intricate detail, marvel at the exquisite workmanship.

Mayo thought, Christ, six figures?

'She brought the letter, too.' From inside the lid of the box, which it just fitted, George lifted and carefully unfolded a piece of yellowed paper, brittle on the creases, crossed with faded Cyrillic script. 'Afraid I can't decipher it for you, it's in

Russian, which Tsar Nicholas and his children always used between themselves. Natural enough. I'd have thought, seeing it was their native language, but apparently anyone who was anybody at the court spoke French. I've been told, and there's no reason to think otherwise, that it's a birthday message to the Grand Duchess Tatiana, from her father.'

George passed a large manila envelope to Mayo. Think you'd better read this, too, it'll tell you more than I can. She had it all written out before she came, so there can be no more misunderstandings in future. May I make you some tea while you read it?'

Remembering the last occasion they'd drunk George's tea, and knowing Mayo's detestation of anything other than strong Indian, Abigail thought it might be kinder to everyone to decline but, feeling George was probably anxious to occupy himself while they read through the thick sheaf of lined foolscap Mayo was now drawing from the envelope, she said, 'Thank you, that would be kind.'