Текст книги "An Expert in Murder"

Автор книги: Nicola Upson

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

‘Children wander, Mother. They’re curious.’ Vintner pushed 254

Josephine over to the divan and made her sit down next to Marta, while he took his place on the piano stool opposite them both. He rested the gun on his knee, and Josephine watched his fingers moving lightly over the trigger as he talked. ‘I wonder if you remember my fifth birthday as clearly as I do? You gave me a kaleidoscope, and it was so beautiful I couldn’t tear myself away from it. It was hot, and we had all the windows open in the house.

You’d left me playing in my room and gone out to the garden for a while, and then suddenly I heard a man’s voice and you were laughing. I thought it was Father, come home for my birthday, and I ran down to show him my present. I couldn’t see you at first, but then I noticed the summer-house door was open. It was always your favourite place, remember? You went there to write and I was never allowed to go in, but I thought you wouldn’t mind on my birthday and I knew you’d want me to come and see Father.

Except it wasn’t Father, was it? He was still choking on dirt in the trenches while you made other arrangements. One present for me and another for yourself, except your birthday came more than once a year. I remember standing outside the summer house, looking in at the window through all those fucking flowers you’d planted, and I was so frightened. That man had you pressed up against the desk and at first I thought he was hurting you, but then you cried out and I knew, even then, that it wasn’t a cry of pain.

So I ran away. Neither of you saw me, of course – you were too engrossed in each other. I went back upstairs and smashed that kaleidoscope so hard against the floor that it broke. You found me crying not long after, and you thought it was because I’d broken my present, so you put your arms around me – still smelling of him – and promised to get me a new one. You did, as well, I’ll give you that, but of course you could never replace the thing that I really lost that day. I thought I was the most important thing in the world to you, and suddenly I realised I wasn’t. After that, I noticed how many times you brushed me aside, how often you pretended to listen to what I was saying when you were really thinking about something else. And how often you went to the summer house, of course.’

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‘I’m so sorry, Rafe, but you don’t understand what it was like for me.’

‘Oh, I understand all right. Father sat me down and explained it to me. When he finally came back on leave, he wanted to know why I was so upset and I told him what I’d seen. I thought if he got rid of the other man you’d spend time with me, just like you used to. He didn’t say anything at first, and then he made me repeat it to him, over and over again, every detail, asking about things I didn’t understand. But he did nothing about it – not straight away, anyway. Eventually, he explained that he’d had to send you away and I thought that was my fault. I suppose, in a way, it was. After you’d gone, he’d sit in that summer house and brood for hours on end. It was your special place.’ He seemed to make a conscious effort to drag himself back into the present, away from his memories. ‘Still, I don’t think you’d like it as much these days. The décor leaves a lot to be desired since Father blew his brains out there.’

Josephine knew her presence had been all but forgotten in the recriminations between mother and son. She looked at Marta, and was surprised to see that she seemed to be growing calmer as the exchange went on. Now, she leaned forward and put her hand on Vintner’s shoulder. ‘I wanted to take you with me more than anything in the world, but your father put me away and made sure I couldn’t see you,’ she said. ‘You’ll never know how it destroyed me to lose you, and I swear I’ll make it up to you, but we need to stop this now. There’s been enough violence.’

Vintner shook her off. ‘You could never make it up to me. We could spend every day together for the rest of our lives and it wouldn’t make up for those years of not having you. There was a time when I longed for you to reach out and touch me, but not any more.’ He met her eyes, his own filled with hatred. ‘As it happens, though, I have kept my promise to you. I’ve managed to trace your daughter. In fact, I’ve known who she is for some time. I was with her just the other day.’

Josephine would have given anything not to have noticed the small flicker of hope that passed across Marta’s face before she 256

walked into the trap her son had set for her. ‘Why didn’t you say?

Where?’

‘She was on a train,’ Vintner said and sat back, waiting for the horrific truth to sink in.

Marta had gone a shade of white which Josephine had always believed to exist only for the dead. Her own sense of grievance had, she realised, all but disappeared in the face of this torture: whatever Marta had done, she did not deserve to be played with like this. Josephine reached out and took her hand. She was convinced the two of them were going to die very shortly anyway, so what danger was there in a little compassion? ‘The girl who died on the train was called Elspeth Simmons,’ she said and then, when Marta showed no sign of recognition, ‘She was your daughter.

Yours and Arthur’s.’

As she uttered the words, she saw shock transform itself into the adamant disbelief which so often delayed the onset of grief. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Marta said, shaking her off. ‘You just want to hurt me for what I tried to do to you. That couldn’t possibly be true.’

‘I’m afraid it is, Mother,’ Vintner said, and there was a hardness in his voice which signalled to Josephine that his deadly game was reaching its conclusion. ‘You see, what I haven’t told you is that Father gave me a few instructions before he died. You don’t think that pathetic note he left on his desk was his final word, do you?

That was just something to be read out at the inquest for Tey’s benefit.’ He glanced at her for a second and then turned back to his mother. ‘No – Elliott Vintner was capable of something far more creative than that. The very last thing he wrote was actually a letter to me. I’ve got it here, in fact.’ He rested the pistol on the piano and took a sheet of paper – worn and dirty from repeated handling

– out of the pocket of his corduroy trousers. Josephine recognised the scrawl of dark red ink from correspondence she had had by the same hand. ‘Shall I share it with you?’ He did not wait for an answer but unfolded the paper and started to read. ‘To become an expert in murder cannot be so difficult,’ he began, then paused and looked again at Josephine. ‘You’ll recognise that bit, of course, but guess what? It’s actually true.’

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He continued and Josephine knew that she was watching a performance, as carefully rehearsed as anything he had ever spoken on stage. She listened while the letter was read out, and Rafe Vintner’s voice was replaced in her head by his father’s, that low, confident drawl which had tried and failed to destroy her in court. These words, however, were far deadlier; the argument, more emotionally charged: ‘“We have always been close, Rafe, bound not just by our love for each other but by your mother’s betrayal of us both. If that love means anything to you, you can keep it alive, even after I’m gone, but only if all traces of that betrayal are destroyed. I can tell you howto do that, but you must search within your heart to decide if I’m asking too much. If the answer to that is yes, then forgive me for asking and go on with your life as best you can; if, however, the answer is no, if you share any of the pain and resentment that has led me to ask such a thing of my son, then this is what you must do to protect my name and to lighten the burden which you will carry alone after I’m gone.”’ Rafe Vintner’s voice was filled with emotion as he read on, outlining instructions from a dead man which had sealed the fates of Elspeth Simmons and Bernard Aubrey, and now seemed certain to do the same for Marta and for her. Josephine only had to look at Marta to know that Elliott Vintner’s final wish – that she should be made to suffer beyond all measure before she died – was a fait accompli: she could see that Aubrey’s relationship to Arthur had been as much a revelation to Marta as the identity of the girl on the train, and the combination would surely destroy her. ‘That’s the gist of it, anyway.’

Vintner folded the letter carefully and put it back in his pocket before picking up the gun again. ‘I won’t bore you with the practical details at the end except to say that they were very thorough.’

There was silence in the room and Josephine wondered if his arrogance was such that he expected applause. When Marta eventually spoke, her voice was barely audible but surprisingly steady.

‘So it wasn’t a mistake at all. When we met at the theatre afterwards, you already knew exactly what you’d done.’ It was a statement, not a question, but her son was eager to explain further.

‘Oh yes. I had no intention whatsoever of killing Tey – not then, 258

at least. I was going to pretendI’d misunderstood your description of her, but then you told me to go for the woman in the hat – so it ended up being your mistake. Never in my wildest dreams could I have hoped for that. It’s the ultimate irony, don’t you think? You instructed me to kill your own daughter. How Father would have laughed,’ he said, turning to Josephine, ‘to paraphrase your splendidplay.’

‘And then you tricked me into agreeing to kill Aubrey by making me panic,’ Marta continued, ‘knowing all along that, if I did, I’d be killing the last link with Arthur.’

‘Yes. Neat isn’t it? Two down, one to go.’

Josephine knew it was only a matter of time before Vintner carried out his father’s instructions to the letter and added her to the tally as a bonus. Playing for time, and understanding that he was the type to enjoy talking about his cruelty, she said, ‘How could you have known that Elspeth was going to be on that train? Or anywhere near me? We met by chance.’

‘Not exactly. I gather from poor Hedley – he’s a friend of mine, you know – that Bernard Aubrey arranged the tickets as a treat for his soon-to-be-acknowledged great-niece. In fact, Hedley saved me a lot of trouble all round. I knew who Elspeth was and what she was interested in – Father could tell me that much because he’d made it his business to keep an eye on things after he’d given her away. I knew I could arrange to bump into her, either at the theatre or at that ridiculous shop, but I thought I was going to have to seduce her myself to get her where I wanted. As it happened, Hedley did my dirty work for me and there was no need to venture into those murky waters, so I suppose I have to own up to a bit of help there. I couldn’t believe my luck when Hedley came downstairs one night after the show and asked for an autograph for Elspeth Simmons. It only took a bit of gentle encouragement to get them together and, after that, I could always find out where she was. It was embarrassingly easy, really. He was so excited about her coming down this weekend that he never stopped talking about it and how thrilled she’d be that his precious Mr Aubrey had arranged for her to meet her favourite author. It was pathetic.’

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Now Marta spoke up. Unlike Josephine, however, she was not trying to distract Vintner but to understand him. ‘How could you have so much hate in you for someone you’ve never known?’ she asked. ‘She did nothing to you. She didn’t even know you existed, for God’s sake. That girl – your sister – was just as much a victim in all of this as you are. More so. And yet you took her life away just because your father told you to. What sort of puppet are you?’

‘She was my half-sister, actually. Get it right, Mother. I did have my doubts, I admit, but you soon dispelled those for me. If I was ever remotely tempted to ignore Father and just settle for having a mother again, you put me off that straight away. Do you know how desperate you sounded when I came to see you in that pathetic place and offered to reunite you with your daughter? I thought Father was wrong about what you’d agree to do, but you actually wanted her – your piece of the gardener – so badly that you were prepared to kill. There was a time when I wanted you to love me that much but you never did, so I thought I might as well cut my losses and go ahead with Father’s plan. He did love me, you see, so I thought I’d make one parent proud of me, at least.’

‘Oh, he’d certainly be proud. You’re in a class of your own.’

Marta’s defiance was surely a symptom of shock but it seemed to unsettle Vintner a little. Whatever reaction he had expected from her – horror, despair, grief – it had not been this and, for the first time, Josephine sensed that he had underestimated his mother. His response, though, was to continue to taunt her.

‘So what if I did do it because Father asked me to?’ he shouted.

‘I loved him, and that doesn’t make me a puppet. You destroyed him by what you did all those years ago, and what do you think my childhood was like after that? Believe me, I’m more than happy to do as he asked because his memory is worth protecting. What memories do I have of my mother to look back on? Oh yes, the one of you playing Lady Chatterley and fucking someone who wasn’t fit to lick his boots. So yes, I killed for him and yes, I enjoyed it. I found your apology for a daughter in that railway carriage and I stabbed her with Father’s bayonet. It’s a shame she didn’t know her own father, of course, but I left an iris with her in his memory – I 260

thought you’d appreciate that. Aubrey had one, too, except his was an original. Your gardener kept a flower head in his tobacco tin –

sent by you from our garden, presumably. Father found it on his body when he was dragged out of the dirt, and he kept it in case it came in useful.’

Marta was on her feet by now and Josephine recognised someone who had long ceased to care whether she lived or died.

Vintner took a couple of steps towards her, tightening his hold on the pistol. ‘And I did something in your honour, too, Mother. I shaved her head. That’s what they do in asylums, isn’t it? I would have made a better job of it but I was interrupted. Still, it’s the thought that counts, and it was the least I could do for you. You said you always wondered if she looked like you. Well, she didn’t really so I thought I’d make sure you had something in common.

I’d hate for her to have been a disappointment after all these years.’

‘For God’s sake, you don’t know anything about Elspeth – either of you.’ Josephine’s fear was quite forgotten in her indignation on Elspeth’s behalf. ‘You destroyed everything she had,’ she shouted.

‘Her childhood and her family, her sense of who she was and who she could be, and now even her life. Leave her some respect, at least.’

She had spoken without considering the impact of her words, but they served both to distract Vintner and to break Marta’s self-control. Vintner only turned to Josephine for a matter of seconds, but it was long enough for his mother to hurl herself at him in fury with no thought for the danger she was in. It occurred to Josephine that Marta may have wanted him to fire and put her out of her misery but, if that was indeed the case, she was unlucky. The gun went off as she knocked him off balance but the only casualty was a small alabaster idol, given to Lydia as a present and kept on the mantelpiece. Vintner fell to the floor, dragging Marta down with him, and Josephine scoured the room frantically for something she could use as a weapon, but there was no need; as he went down, Vintner’s head smashed into the corner of the piano stool and he lay still on the carpet, the gun a few inches from his hand.

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Marta did not move immediately and Josephine began to wonder if she, too, was hurt, but eventually she raised herself onto her knees and looked at her son, then put her hand to his neck. ‘He’s still alive,’ she said, and Josephine stepped across to pick up the pistol, but she was too slow. Marta got there first, and Josephine felt a resurgence of her earlier fear; no matter how much sympathy she had for Marta’s grief, the woman had tried to kill her and here she was with a far more straightforward opportunity. But that was not what Marta had in mind. She stood staring down at her son, the gun levelled at his chest, and Josephine could not even begin to imagine the emotions that ran through her head as she held the life of her child in the balance. For a second or two, she thought Marta was actually going to pull the trigger but, in the end, the battle in her heart came out on the side of mercy. Instead, she held the gun out to Josephine.

‘Here, take this,’ she said wearily. ‘I hope you won’t need it, but just in case. Will you get him some help?’

Josephine took the weapon from her. It was the first time in her life that she had held something whose only purpose was to kill, and she was disconcerted by how natural it seemed, by how comfortably the weight of the gun rested in her hand. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked, although she thought she already knew the answer.

‘To finish what he started. Or perhaps I should say to finish what Istarted all those years ago. I know I’m not in a position to ask for anything from you, but I’d like to end it in my own way.

No one could punish me more than I can punish myself.’

‘Marta, please, you don’t have to do that,’ Josephine said, and tentatively raised the gun.

‘That would be such an easy way out for me, but not for you,’

Marta said, gently lowering Josephine’s hand. ‘It’s impossible to live with someone’s blood on your hands – I should know – so I wouldn’t want you to do it even if you were capable.’ She knelt beside her son and lightly ran her fingers over his cheek. ‘He’s so like his father, you know. I don’t know why I couldn’t see it.’

Quickly she stood up to leave the room but turned back as she got 262

to the door. ‘You can’t possibly justify to someone why you tried to take their life, but I am sorry, Josephine. I really am.’

Then she was gone, and Josephine waited for the front door to close. Keeping her eyes on Elliott Vintner’s son, she moved over to the telephone to call Archie.

As it happened, Scotland Yard arrived rather sooner than Josephine expected in the shape of a bewildered young constable who seemed more frightened of Rafe Vintner than she was; God help them if Vintner had been conscious, she thought. Minutes later, Archie’s car screeched to a halt outside, flanked by an ambu-lance and a marked police vehicle.

‘It really is the Flying Squad, isn’t it?’ she said when he appeared at the door, but Penrose was in no mood to joke.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing coming here alone?’ he yelled at her. ‘Do you realise what could have happened to you?’

‘I’ve spent the last hour trapped in a room by a madman with a gun, so I think I’ve got a fair idea,’ she said sharply, then softened when she saw the panic in his eyes. ‘But nothing did happen to me, Archie. I’m all right – honestly.’

As Vintner was lifted onto a stretcher and taken from the room, Josephine explained exactly what had happened. ‘God, it’s like something out of a Greek tragedy,’ Penrose said when she had finished, and looked at Fallowfield, who was packing away the gun ready to remove it from the scene. ‘We need to circulate Marta Fox’s description immediately. If she leaves London we might never find her.’

Josephine signalled to Fallowfield to wait a moment. ‘Will she hang for what she’s done?’ she asked.

Penrose considered. ‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t actually killed anyone and, from what you tell me, a good barrister could argue that she wasn’t of sound mind when she agreed to help Vintner. She’s been through so much and, ironically, the fact that she’s been committed to an asylum will work in her favour in court.’

‘Then I think I can tell you where she’ll be, Archie. There’s only 263

one place she’d want to go now. But you have to let me speak to her.’

‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘Never in a million years would I let you go near that woman after what’s happened. She wants you dead, and she nearly got her wish.’

‘If she still wanted to kill me, she could have done it easily just now,’ Josephine argued. ‘She gave me the gun, Archie – there’s no danger for me any more. But there is for her. She’s determined to die, you know, but I might be able to change her mind. Are you really going to stop me trying?’

Penrose hesitated, but Fallowfield backed her up. ‘If anyone can get her to give herself up, Sir, Miss Tey can. And we can stay close by to make sure nothing happens to her.’

‘All right,’ Penrose said, making his mind up. ‘But I’m not going to let you out of my sight this time.’

King’s Cross was not as crowded as it had been when Josephine was last there, but the station still had an air of efficient busyness about it. The stable-yard clock over the entrance chimed six o’clock as she passed underneath it, and she walked quickly over to the huge boards that indicated arrivals and departures. As agreed, she left Penrose and Fallowfield to wait there and turned purposefully towards the trains.

Marta was standing a little way down the platform, between two trains preparing to depart and just yards from where the daughter she never knew had died. Josephine walked towards her, and sat down on a nearby bench. Certain her approach had been noted, she waited for Marta to speak.

‘You were absolutely right, Josephine,’ she said, turning round at last. ‘I didn’t know anything about my daughter, not even her name. What was she like?’

‘She was a joy,’ Josephine said simply. ‘The sort of girl who could lighten your heart without ever realising she’d done it. There was nothing self-conscious about her, you see. She was warm and honest, and she didn’t try to be anything she wasn’t – and that’s so rare. She had an innocence about her – and I do mean innocence 264

rather than naivety. Life had been difficult for her at times; she found not knowing where she’d come from hard to accept, and there were problems in her adoptive family, but a lot of love, too, and she seemed blessed with a talent for happiness. Very few of us can claim that.’ Sadly, she remembered Elspeth’s sudden shyness about her new romance. ‘She was at a crossroads in her life, as well; she’d just found love with Hedley and that seemed to have given her a new confidence, a real excitement about the future.

You would have been pleased, I think, and so would she.’

Marta joined her on the bench. ‘One of the things I loved about Arthur was that he could always find something to be fascinated by. He was so very special, you know. Whenever I was with him, all I knew was joy – and after being married to Elliott, you can imagine what a surprise that was. That talent for happiness you mentioned – that was so much a part of him. I’m glad it lived on through his daughter, if only briefly.’

‘There are a few people in life you feel privileged to have known,’ Josephine said, thinking about Jack. ‘Elspeth was one of them, although she would have laughed at the idea. I’d have loved the chance to get to know her better.’ She looked at Marta.

‘I’d like the chance to get to know her mother better. I can’t be sure, but I suspect Rafe was wrong when he said she wasn’t like you. Before all this happened, I imagine you were rather different.’

Marta nodded. ‘So much so that it feels like another life. I don’t recognise myself any more. The woman Arthur loved hated violence and revenge and mistrust – all those things that men go to war for. She would have found murder abhorrent.’

‘And craved peace and beauty? She sounds very much like the Anne of Bohemia that Vintner wrote about.’ Marta’s sharp glance was not lost on Josephine. ‘You don’t have to explain why you wanted to kill me, Marta,’ she said. ‘You hated me for the same reasons that Elliott Vintner did. But he didn’t write The White Heart, did he? You did. It was your work I was supposed to have stolen, not his.’

‘I shouldn’t have given another writer the new book if I wanted to keep that a secret, should I? Yes, I wrote the novel that made 265

Elliott Vintner’s name. I sent the manuscript to Arthur in one of the consignments that went out from May Gaskell’s war library.

Elliott must have either intercepted it or found it in Arthur’s things after he died. The next time I came across it was in the hospital that my husband sent me to. There it was on somebody’s bed, a published book with Elliott Vintner’s name plastered all over the cover. All that fuss he made and everything he put you through, and it was never his to lay claim to, never his privilege to feel wronged.’

‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘I had no proof. The manuscript was long gone and anyway, I had no fight left in me. I was so afraid of him, Josephine. I never wanted to marry him, but outwardly he was the perfect match –

wealthy, a little older than me, an academic – and my parents took it for granted that I’d accept him. I was too young and too naive to argue. He turned out to be very different behind closed doors, of course.’

‘Did he hurt you?’ Josephine asked.

Marta gave a bitter laugh. ‘Oh yes, but not by doing anything as straightforward as hitting me. No, he was far too clever to do anything that I could talk about without being ashamed. He was hateful in bed – truly hateful. He used to pride himself on thinking up new and inventive ways to humiliate me. One day, he found a stash of short stories I’d written, and he was so scornful about his little writer wife. After that, whenever he’d finished with me in bed

– and he was insatiable in his cruelty – he’d make me write about what we’d done and read it out to him. I had to relive the shame of it over and over again. It was his bid for immortality, I think, and he knew it kept him in my head when he couldn’t be inside my body. He used to give me marks out of ten for the prose.’

Josephine was shocked. ‘No wonder you turned to Arthur,’ she said. ‘It’s a miracle you could be with anyone after that.’

‘Yes, but Elliott knew exactly how to destroy me for what I’d done, and the world made it easy for him. Women like me – pregnant with a child that wasn’t my husband’s – were outcasts, fallen and in need of salvation. What’s terrible is that you start to believe 266

it yourself when you’ve been in there for a while, and the people who ran that place went to great lengths to keep you ignorant of the fact that things might be changing a little for the better in the world outside. The worst thing was the way that they stamped on any solidarity between the women; it would have been bearable if we could have helped each other through it, but we were constantly separated and played off against one another, and God help you if you got into what they so charmingly called a “particular friendship”.’ She took a cigarette out of the case in her bag.

Josephine lit it for her and waited as she used the distraction to rein in her emotions. ‘I was lucky, I suppose,’ she continued at last.

‘Some people spent decades there, detained for life. You could always tell which ones they were because they were obsessed with sin and religion; it didn’t matter if they were prostitutes, victims of incest or rape, or just feeble-minded – they’d all been taught to despise themselves.’

‘And you were there until Rafe came to find you? You must have been desperate to get out for years.’

‘Yes and no. Arthur had died and both my children had been taken away from me, so there didn’t seem much to get out for.

Depression is the cruellest of things, you know. It deadens everything – there’s no pleasure left in life, no colour or sensual enjoyment. Just an absence. I don’t think I’d have felt any different if I’d been in a place I loved, seeing things that used to bring me joy every day. In fact, that probably would have been worse, so I welcomed being somewhere that turned me into no one.’ The cigarette had been smoked quickly, and she threw the end down onto the track. ‘Elliott took everything from me – my children, my book, my creativity in every sense of the word.’

‘And your talent for happiness.’

Marta nodded. ‘Exactly. It’s hard to put into words how that felt. I remember being with Arthur in Cambridge just after Elliott had gone to war. He took me to a museum, just along the road from where he worked at the Botanic Gardens, because it had a collection of paintings that he loved. There was a whole wall of Impressionists and we stood for ages looking at an extraordinary 267

Renoir landscape – it was so sensual that I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Next to it were two smaller paintings of women, one dancing and one playing a guitar. I was surprised at how awful they were by comparison – you could hardly believe they were by the same artist – but Arthur said that, if anything, he liked them better because they’d been painted late in Renoir’s life when his hands were crippled with arthritis, and he thought there was something very noble about someone being so determined to create beauty in spite of the pain. I’ve never forgotten that, and I suppose it’s how I felt, emotionally. I knew there was still so much that was beautiful in the world and I wanted so badly to write about it but, after Arthur died and I lost everything, I just couldn’t. Books and art –

they should all have a beauty about them, even if they begin with a scream, but it was as though someone had put a pen in my hand and frozen it. Does that make sense?’

‘Yes, it does,’ Josephine said. ‘More than you could know.’

Marta looked questioningly at her but there was no time to go into her own darkness as well as Marta’s; even from this distance, she imagined she could feel Archie’s growing impatience.

‘Then Rafe turned up and suddenly there was a glimmer of hope,’ Marta continued. ‘How does that speech of Lydia’s go in your play? “When joy is killed it dies forever, but happiness one can grow again.” I always loved that line because it’s exactly how I felt.