Nor All Your Tears (29 page)

How Jean Abelson managed to persuade him to turn up was one of those questions that cannot be answered, at least not by me, but turn up he did. I met him outside the Clarkes' house in Kingswood Avenue; I was slightly late, which probably didn't improve his temper. He was restrained, I'll give him that, but restrained as in Big Boy and Little Boy were restrained until they had fallen to about nineteen hundred feet above ground level. ‘Why am I here, Doctor?' he asked at once. ‘Sergeant Abelson tells me you have something that may be relevant to the case; the normal practice would be to hand it in at the police station.'

‘I haven't done too badly in this case so far, have I? I mean, considering I'm a constant irritant.'

He looked from me to Jean Abelson sharply, his eyes narrowed to hostile slits; when he looked back at me, Jean's glance at me would have withered a witch. ‘I am a busy man, Doctor. What is it that you have that may be relevant?'

‘Can we go inside the house?'

We did as I wanted, Masson clearly doing so at great cost to his systolic blood pressure. The house was empty, of course; David was still in hospital, Joanne was in the care of the social services and Tricia was in the care of HMP. We sat in the back living room; it was as chintzy and over-ornate as I had suspected from my brief, blinkered look the day before; there were a pale brown shag-pile carpet, a three-piece suite of the most lurid red hue, a chandelier and a reproduction of the Green Lady; as my mother would have said, it was all very ‘red hat, no knickers'.

‘What is Tricia Clarke's story?'

Jean answered. ‘You were right. Joanna had a crush on Marlene Jeffries. That would have been OK, except that Miss Jeffries took advantage of her. It got more and more intense, possibly even physical; certainly when her father found out about it, he imagined the worse. According to Tricia Clarke, he was a violent and repressive man, especially so when it came to Joanna. She says that there is a history of violence in the family; that she has been attacked on many occasions, and the assault on David wasn't the first either. Clarke, it seems, was not able to control his temper. The thought that his daughter might have been seduced like that was too much. He lost control and battered her to death, as we know.'

‘And why then kill Yvette Mangon?'

‘He then learned from Joanna that there were letters she had sent to Miss Jeffries. They were fairly explicit and Mike Clarke realized that unless they were destroyed, they could potentially implicate him. He paid a visit to the house in the early morning, on his way back from work. We don't know the details, but Tricia Clarke says that he had become desperate to get hold of the letters, so we can surmise that he was probably pretty aggressive. We don't actually know if Yvette Mangon even knew about the relationship, let alone about any letters. We think, though, that her denials probably just inflamed Clarke even more; he lost his temper and . . . well, attacked her. It was a kitchen knife – we found it in the back garden.'

I asked, ‘Why the drawing compass in the eye?'

Masson spoke for the first time. ‘I would guess that after he'd lost it again and killed another teacher, he decided to try a bit of misdirection. He'd killed one teacher with the instruments of her profession, so to speak; he decided to leave a similar symbol after killing Miss Mangon.'

I nodded. It was plausible. ‘All of which brings us to Jeremy Gillman. Where does he come in to this?'

Jean continued. ‘According to his widow, Clarke didn't find the letters at Yvette Mangon's house, for which there was a good reason. She didn't have them; Gillman did.'

‘How did he get hold of them?'

‘We've yet to establish that precisely, although it would seem that Gillman and Mangon were fairly close. They'd been colleagues for years.'

‘And Gillman blackmailed him?' I guessed.

‘He sent Mike Clarke a note demanding a thousand pounds.'

‘Not a huge amount considering Clarke is on a printer's salary,' I pointed out.

Masson explained testily, ‘It was a first demand; one to test the water. The next one would have been ten times that, probably.'

‘Except that Clarke charged straight round there and drowned him.'

‘Yes.' Masson, I think, began to suspect that all was not as he had previously thought.

I said, ‘I wonder how he found out who the blackmailer was.'

Masson looked at his sergeant for a moment, then said, ‘We haven't found out as yet.'

‘Perhaps the note gave a clue,' I suggested.

It was Jean who said, ‘Not as far as we can see.'

‘You've got the note, then?'

She admitted that they had.

I have now to confess that I like a dramatic effect, and on this occasion I felt I did pretty well. I reached into my pocket and brought out the pieces of paper I had found in Mike Clarke's hand. ‘Is it anything like these?' I asked.

Masson went through an astonishing range of facial coloration; everything from deep purple to the palest of rose whites, with a few hints of yellow in between. His vocalizations were no less varied – although without obvious sense being conveyed – as he looked at my exhibit for the prosecution. Eventually, he spluttered, ‘Where did you get these?'

I came clean and he was not impressed. ‘Why the bloody shining hell didn't you tell anyone?'

‘I tried,' I said. ‘Several times. No one was interested much.'

There was a long pause until he said in a very low voice, ‘That's no excuse.'

‘Nevertheless, it's true.'

‘As evidence, it's now completely useless.'

I thought about this. ‘Not entirely,' I decided

At which point I think, in terms of my previous image, Inspector Masson dropped below nineteen hundred feet. He went off, and he did so big time, in a blast of atomic strength. He ranted; he raved; he did a fair amount of profaning; and he threatened.

Only eventually did he subside.

It was Jean who calmed him down. She did so by asking a very pertinent question in one of the short pauses that he was forced to employ whilst breathing. ‘What do we make of these notes, sir?'

‘What does that mean?' he asked; my medical instincts suggested to me that he was becoming slightly hysterical. ‘It's two more blackmail demands.'

‘They're almost identical to the one we were given by Tricia Clarke,' she pointed out.

‘So?'

‘Where did Clarke get hold of them?'

Masson embraced the beauty of silence for the first time for about three minutes; it was a very good question. She pressed home her point. ‘I'd say that these look almost like practice attempts.'

I put in then, ‘I think they are.'

I took them upstairs to David's bedroom.

It was archetypal of a teenage boy's bedroom. On the walls were posters of Status Quo, Led Zeppelin and a young lady in soft light who played tennis in a distinctly free and easy style. There was a pile of
Melody Maker
papers in the corner; I didn't check, but I would have laid a fair sum of money down that somewhere in the vicinity was a copy or two of
Mayfair
or
Knave
. The walls were covered in woodchip paper that was emulsioned a repulsively deep shade of orange; there was a black coverlet pulled up over the bed, although the bedclothes beneath were patently still rucked up. In front of the window was a desk on which were piles of textbooks, exercise books, pens, paper and an electronic calculator.

‘What are we doing in here?' growled Masson.

I went over to the desk and started searching through the items thereon. It wasn't long before I found what I was looking for – David's biology exercise book. It was A4 in size and the cover was deep pink. David was not a tidy worker; many of his diagrams of stamens and carpels (I hurried past those of the sexual organs of a mammalian intimate nature) were, I am afraid to say, shoddy; clearly Jeremy Gillman had thought so too, for he had written a far from few acerbic comments on them; these, together with his commentary on the persistently poor test scores, provided a good sample of his handwriting.

I showed Masson. ‘So?' he demanded.

It was Jean who answered, although she did so in a questioning, wondering manner. ‘You're saying that David wrote the notes?'

I nodded. ‘I think David stage-managed everything. Every single murder.'

FORTY-THREE

‘
T
his is a deeply dysfunctional family. Both parents had been married before, and none too happily. Both of them brought a child from those marriages. Mike Clarke was a man of violent tendencies with little ability to control them; Tricia was equally combative, especially when it came to her son, David. Mike's relationship to his mother, Ada, and to his daughter, Joanna, verged on the paranoid. Clearly there was – or at least had been – some sort of bond of affection between Tricia and Mike, but between David and his stepfather there was very rapidly marked antipathy. At best, Mike ignored him; at worst, he looked for every opportunity to make him suffer. Often, I think, physically. Not surprisingly, it was the source of a lot of resentment between Tricia and Mike.'

‘How the hell do you know all this?'

Jean suggested, ‘Your father?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘And I saw them in action, too.' Both of which were the truth, just not all of it.

Masson grunted. ‘Sounds like another fairy story, Doctor.'

Despite this less than glowing review of my performance up to that point, I continued. ‘And then Joanna developed a schoolgirl crush on Marlene Jeffries; one which, moreover, was reciprocated. There was no way that it wasn't going to become the subject for a lot of rumours around the school, which meant that David got to hear about it; he in turn used it as a way of getting at both his stepsister and stepfather. I wonder if he found some letters that Marlene Jeffries had written to Joanna. He knew that Mike Clarke would find the concept of his daughter being involved in a lesbian relationship beyond his ability to bear so, of course, he at once told him. It was as cruel as killing a kitten, but it was done in a deliciously subtle way. He waited until they had returned home from the parents' evening at the school to show him the letters that Marlene Jeffries had written to his daughter. They had met Miss Jeffries just a couple of hours before, and she had appeared to be nothing more than a caring teacher; this deception only magnified exponentially the effect. Mike Clarke was primed and ready to kill.'

‘How did he know she'd still be at the school?' Masson sounded churlish, like a man who felt cuckolded.

I shrugged. ‘I don't suppose he planned ahead. From my experience of Mike Clarke, he didn't think more than ten minutes into the future. He went to the school first and that was where he found her. She was alone in the gym and he let rip.'

‘This is all speculation.'

‘Some of it,' I admitted, but I wasn't about to feel cowed. ‘Can you prove it's wrong?'

Which he couldn't.

Jean suggested gently, ‘Why did he kill Yvette Mangon?'

‘Because David Clarke pointed out that not only were there letters from Marlene Jeffries to Joanna, there were also possibly letters going in the opposite direction. He left his stepfather to ponder the potential consequences. He manipulated him into a state of paranoia about them.'

‘And he just went around there and killed her for them?'

‘I don't know, but I should think he went around there in a state of extreme fear that Yvette Mangon had some evidence that could give him a motive for a vicious murder. I imagine that he lost his temper once again.'

Masson looked less than impressed. ‘Have you got anything to substantiate any of this?'

Jean was a little more accepting. ‘Do you know if he found the letters?' she asked.

‘I haven't the foggiest,' I replied cheerfully because, as far as I was concerned, it didn't matter. Apparently it did to the good Inspector, for he made the kind of sound that people make when they have something stuck to the roof of their mouth. I continued, ‘I would suspect that he didn't, because I can testify he was a bit jumpy about that time.' The bruise on my jaw line had faded, but there was still an ache in the mandible beneath.

Jean said thoughtfully, ‘So, you think that David then forged a blackmail note from Jeremy Gillman so that his stepfather would seek him out and kill him?'

‘David's always had problems at school. If you ask his teachers, he's been something of a trial for a lot of them, but especially for Yvette Mangon and Jeremy Gillman. Those two he had real run-ins with. Those two hated him and he hated them, and he had found the perfect weapon with which to get his revenge. His stepfather was none too bright, and easy to manipulate; David knew exactly which levers to pull, and he pulled them.'

She asked, ‘Where does Arthur Silsby fit into all this?'

‘Nowhere. He's just punishing himself because he had been told what was going on between one of his pupils and a member of the teaching staff, and he didn't want to know; he allowed himself to be fobbed with Miss Jeffries' convincing denials. He feels worthless and ashamed; he believes he has betrayed a sacred trust.'

Jean's face was closed down, a frown twisting it, although not in an unattractive way. Masson had his eyes closed and when it came, his sigh could have inflated a bouncy castle but he said nothing. Both Jean and I were left waiting for his next withering comment or sarcastic question.

Neither of which came through.

In the end, he enquired of no one in particular, ‘These notes –' he indicated the ones I had produced for his delectation – ‘these are practice notes, right?'

‘I think so. I think that David Clarke can be extremely conscientious when he wants to be.'

Suddenly it was Jean's turn to be the epitome of doubt. ‘Are you really expecting us to accept this story without a single shred of physical evidence? There is no forensic evidence connecting Mike Clarke to the deaths, let alone providing some basis for the idea that he was in turn manipulated by his stepson.' What could I say? She was right. ‘And how did Mike Clarke find out who had sent the note, and where he lived?'