Текст книги "An Expert in Murder"

Автор книги: Nicola Upson

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A tall, gauntly handsome young man appeared at the bedroom door, rubbing his eyes and running his fingers through thinning fair hair. ‘Who was that on the telephone?’ he asked, and the soft, Irish inflection made the question seem more casual than it really was. ‘Let me guess: there’s a problem with a play and only you can sort it out. Am I right or am I right?’

Without much hope of success, Terry attempted to defuse another fruitless round of bickering before it started. ‘It was only Rafe Swinburne adding one more demand to the list for this afternoon. If Aubrey’s not in the right mood, we’ll all find ourselves carrying spears in Morecambe before the month’s out.’ It was a feeble effort at lightness, he knew, and the only response it brought was a wearily raised eyebrow.

‘Would that be such a bad thing? At least you might come home occasionally.’

‘Don’t be so fucking sanctimonious – it doesn’t suit you,’ said Terry, his frustration quickly getting the better of him. ‘I’m not sleeping with him, if that’s what this is about, so you can stop worrying.’

‘You really don’t understand, do you? If it were about sex I’d almost be relieved, but it’s more than that. I might stand a chance 61

against another man, but I can’t take on the whole of the West End. You’re obsessed.’

‘You used to say that was sexy.’

‘That was before I lived with you. Then you had to make an effort to see me; now I’m just an inconvenient interruption to the working day. The actors, the writers, the boy that sweeps the stage

– they always come first, whether you want to sleep with them or not. How do you think that makes me feel?’

There was no answer to that. Acting was his life, his work and his play and, if he were honest, his only love; without it, he cared about nothing. Aware of the sadness his silence was causing but too selfishly honest to lie, Terry walked past his lover to dress for the theatre.

By the time Lewis Fleming arrived, the nursing home was almost always in darkness. He walked quietly down sour-smelling corridors which opened onto uniform rooms, nodding to nurses who tip-toed across polished floors and conscious of sleepless eyes watching him pass, glad of any focus to distract them from the darkness and loneliness to which evening abandoned them. For the ill and the desperate – and this plain red-brick building on Gray’s Inn Road was the last haven of hope for both – night was the hardest time and sleep the most elusive companion, so he went to cushion her from that hell, sitting wide awake by her bed and letting her sleep safely in the knowledge that, for a few hours at least, she was not alone. Resting on the stark white sheets, her hand felt cool in his.

Surrounded by the murmurs and the restlessness which reached him through paper-thin walls, Fleming had plenty of time to worry about what would happen if he could not manage to support his wife through her illness. Acting was a precarious way to make a living; he had been lucky to land a part in a play which had run for over a year, but it was coming to an end now and his future was uncertain. As the clock across the road struck the hour and then the half, he felt as though his life were passing twice as slowly as everybody else’s, while hers threatened to be over so soon. Pain 62

had begun to leave lines around her eyes that even sleep could not entirely smooth away, but she still looked young compared to the home’s other inhabitants, who had at least reached the vulnerable middle-age on which this unforgiving disease fed. Her face still held its beauty and its strength, and the blankets did much to belie the wasting of her body but, as he looked at her arms which were the colour of unbleached wax and tellingly thin, he was overwhelmed by the bitter sense of injustice that had been with him since the day the cancer was diagnosed. He remembered the mixture of courage and terror with which she had told him the news, and the stubborn disbelief with which he had received it. Could that really have been only three months ago?

At the first grey streak of dawn, when the rooms began to stir into life, he would kiss her gently awake as she had made him promise to do and slip away from her bed, past the seared faces and broken lives and down the steps into the street. A twenty-minute walk took him home, where he would fall exhausted into their bed and sleep until early afternoon; by three o’clock, he was back for the more conventional visiting period, and took his place among the ranks of husbands and wives armed with flowers, practised cheerfulness and carefully rehearsed homecoming plans, and with a resolve which crumpled the moment the visitor was out of reach of the searching eyes in the bed. On matinee days, he was spared this collective ritual and dared not go home, either, for fear that he would sleep through the afternoon and on into the night. He knew that his exhaustion was affecting his performance – Aubrey had already made that clear – but he had told no one of his situation, terrified that his livelihood would be taken away from him, and with it that thin sliver of hope that he could get them through this, that money could buy time, perhaps even a cure. The doctors had said it was not out of the question: that small chance and his wife’s constant faith in him were the only things that kept him on his feet.

On Thursdays and Saturdays, he crawled gratefully into an eating-house near the theatre, using its smoky fug to shake off the scent of flowers and drugs and pity that hung perpetually around him. He drank endless mugs of strong, hot coffee in the 63

hope that it would see him through two performances on stage and a third at his wife’s bedside, but ate little, conscious that every penny had to be saved. Today, as usual, the room was full of people for whom every shilling counted, but a woman at the next table stood out from the crowd, not least because she looked as tired and as worried as he felt. She was familiar to him from the theatre, and he had noticed her in particular because she reminded him of his wife. She looked up as the waitress removed an empty cup from her table and glanced in his direction, offering a half-smile of recognition. Embarrassed at having been caught watching her so intently, he returned the greeting in kind and quickly finished his coffee.

It was still raining when he left the eating-house to make his way to the theatre. During the lunch-time period on a Saturday, the area between Charing Cross and St Martin’s Lane was invariably full of itinerant young actors heading towards performances in which they enjoyed varying degrees of success, and he nodded to a few of the usual faces as he passed. Then, across the street, he saw Terry emerge from the saddlery shop which occupied the same building as his flat and walk quickly off in the direction of the New. A few seconds later another man, whom Lewis recognised as the actor’s latest lover, followed in his footsteps, catching him easily with just a few long strides. He grabbed Terry by the arm and the two seemed to argue for a minute before, in a display of affection which was foolhardy in such a public place, the taller man grabbed a flower from a stall and thrust it melodramatically towards Terry, who could not help but laugh. The tension between them fell away instantly, and Terry continued his journey alone, the flower now adorning his buttonhole.

Fleming felt a sudden stab of anger that God should allow these people to parade their filthy, fickle love in the street while seeming to punish him and his wife for their devotion. If he were to lose the only woman he had ever spoken to of love, the only woman he had taken to his bed, he knew he could never replace her with another.

In that instant, he felt vindicated for the decision he had taken during one of those long nocturnal vigils, a decision which went 64

entirely against his character – or at least what his character had once been. Cancer had a habit of eroding morally as well as physically, and everything he loved was under threat. He should not be ashamed of his actions. After all, what had he left to lose?

The dressing room smelt of scent and an electric fire. Outside, a steady stream of traffic passed along the corridor and, whenever the door opened, Lydia could hear the muffled tramp of scene shifters up above and catch a faint whiff of size from the paint dock. Apart from a small chintz sofa, its extent carefully chosen to limit the number of admirers who could be comfortably accommodated at any one sitting, the room contained very little unnecessary furniture but, after fourteen months of occupation, it felt as much like home as her rented lodgings down the road. However perfectly she rehearsed the lines about professional challenges and resisting complacency, no actress was immune to the advantages of a long run: praise and financial security were its obvious accessories, but just as valuable was the sense of belonging. In becoming someone else for more than six weeks at a time, she had discovered that she was also better at being herself.

The layers of familiarity had built up gradually during the many hours spent at the New, manifesting themselves in hundreds of letters and personal items which formed a living scrapbook of the present moment, a flamboyant index of everything that was most precious in her life. One wall was now completely covered in press cuttings, in pages from Theatre World’s photographic celebration of the play and in the hundreds of reviews which had offered virtually every positive adjective in the book to her performance. Along another, a rail held the three attractive costumes and numerous accessories which transformed her simply and elegantly into Richard II’s consort: the gold dress with peaspod collar and garland of lilies – so strange and exotic when she had first put them on, even to an actress used to playing historical roles – now felt as natural a part of her wardrobe as anything she could find in Kensington.

Her dressing table was reserved for more intimate things: pictures of her father at the height of his musical career before it was 65

ruined by illness and depression; long and loving letters from her mother, with whom she corresponded weekly; and a rare photograph of Marta, taken on a bracing Sunday walk through Regent’s Park not long after they had met. Her normally camera-shy lover looked out from the picture through tears of laughter, much to the astonishment of a young man who stood in the background of the photograph, watching as Marta tried and failed not to be amused by the misfortunes of an elderly couple who had taken boldly to the boating lake. She smiled now at the blurred image, remembering how she, too, had been laughing too helplessly to hold the camera steady.

Idly, Lydia removed another chocolate from the box of Prestat which Marta – along with some innuendo about taking sweets from the lap of the Queen – had playfully arranged under the skirts of the lifelike souvenir doll that stood at the back of the dressing table. It was odd, she thought, that the only thing in the room which did not now carry a comfortable sense of the familiar was the face looking back at her from the mirror. She had not yet grown accustomed to the subtle lines of age that were beginning their inevitable dance around her eyes and mouth, nor to the implications that they carried for her career. At forty-three, as Bernard Aubrey had made abundantly clear to her less than a fortnight ago, she was fast approaching the age dreaded by all actresses, those difficult mid-life years which were played out to the tune of too old for Ophelia, too young for Gertrude. She had been lucky with Anne, and was fortunate to have persuaded Josephine to immortalise for her the tiresome, glamorous Queen of Scots but, after that, she was well aware that there could be some lean years ahead, that the cushion of Aubrey’s approval might not always rest with her.

Lost in her thoughts, Lydia did not notice that the dressing-room door had opened until she caught sight of Marta’s reflection in the glass. Such visits were rare, as Marta preferred to keep out of a theatre circle which she regarded as Lydia’s world, and the actress smiled with pleasure, her fears instantly forgotten. ‘How long have you been there?’ she asked.

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‘Long enough to know you’ve got chocolate on your lips,’ said Marta, laughing as she bent down to kiss the back of Lydia’s neck where it had been authentically shaved to accommodate Anne’s elaborate headwear.

‘I don’t mind if you don’t.’ Lydia turned round in the chair and took Marta’s face in her hands, tasting the coffee on her mouth as she drew her into a long, intense kiss. ‘Do you feel any better?’

‘I think I’ve drunk enough coffee to kill or cure the headache once and for all, but this place is hardly likely to lift a girl’s spirits.

That Lewis chap was in the Corner House looking as miserable as sin, John Terry’s upstairs at the stage door shouting at someone, and that young boy who does all the work while your Chekhovian stage manager scribbles away at her next masterpiece nearly jumped out of his skin when I said hello to him. I can see why I don’t venture down here very often.’

‘Don’t take it personally. Hedley’s in terrible trouble with Bernard over something; he’s been summoned to his office after the matinee for a dressing down. And Lewis has been miserable for weeks now. Rumour has it that his wife’s left him and Johnny says he’s hit the bottle, but he and Lewis have always hated each other so that might just be the bitch in him talking. Who was Johnny shouting at, anyway?’

‘I don’t know – he was on the telephone. Just one of the many unfortunates who are less godlike than him, I suppose. But I didn’t come here to talk about them,’ Marta said, dropping her sarcasm and sliding her hand inside Lydia’s silk robe. ‘How quickly can you get from here to the stage these days?’

Suddenly the door was thrown open and Ronnie appeared, staggering under the weight of an extraordinary horned head-dress.

‘Oh we areinterrupting something, I hope,’ she said wickedly.

‘We’ve come to let out your seams, although a little more exercise before each show might save us the trouble.’ The twinkle in her eye brought a deep flush to Marta’s face and a pink tinge to Lydia’s, and elicited a long-suffering smile of apology from Lettice, who followed closely on her heels. ‘Where would you like us to start?’

*

67

Normally, Hedley White would have been looking forward to his night off but, as he placed the furniture for the opening scene and moved to the side of the stage to run through the list of properties for each successive change, his mind was otherwise occupied. He knew he had behaved frightfully, and cursed himself again for such a rash act of stupidity, one that no amount of wishing or hoping could undo. The deed was done; Aubrey knew about it; and later he would face the consequences when he was called to the producer’s office.

Although he had only worked for him for six months, Hedley already looked up to Aubrey as the father he had never known, respecting him as someone who, through sheer hard work, had made a practical success of a profession which liked to make itself as esoteric as possible. Hedley was well aware that working-class boys like himself did not naturally enter the theatre but, in offering him a job as an assistant stage manager, Aubrey had dispelled all notions of Masonic exclusion by showing him that there was an alternative to universities and drama schools and being born into the right family, an alternative which made use of his talents and gave him the experience he craved. Working at both Wyndham’s and the New, he spent his days making tea, painting flats, sweep-ing the stage and walking around sets while electricians focused lamps. It was hard work, physically, which suited his strength and energy, and extra responsibilities built his confidence faster than he would have believed possible. If anybody had told him this time last year that he would be taking walk-on parts in front of hundreds of people and enjoying it, he would have laughed in their face.

Like all outsiders who are suddenly welcomed into a club to which they doubt their right to belong, Hedley was well versed in the peculiar language of theatre and revered its traditions and rituals. Each night, he took great pleasure in carefully preparing the ground for the Ricardians, an exclusive group, established in the early days of the production, whose membership was restricted to the three actors left on stage towards the end of Richard of Bordeaux. The rules of the club were strictly observed after all 68

shows except matinees, and it was Hedley’s job – or McCracken’s in his absence – to place a small table and three chairs in the wings during the final act. Lewis Fleming, as Bolingbroke, was the first of the group to make his final exit, and would open a waiting bottle of claret, the quality of which had improved dramatically as the play’s success grew; the actor who played the King’s loyal servant was next off and would dutifully pour the wine into the waiting glasses while John Terry paused on stage to make the most of the bitterness and regret contained in Richard’s closing lines. As the play finished, Terry joined the other two for a toast to the next performance and, after the cast took its many curtain-calls, all three Ricardians returned to savour the rest of the bottle.

Tonight, when Aubrey took to the stage for his customary cameo appearance as the guard – a role that Hedley often played himself – the club’s membership would be extended to four and, as the producer drank nothing but Scotch, it was the junior stage hand’s task to ensure that a single malt was added to the inventory before he went off duty after the matinee. The sense of having thrown away his place in this little world haunted Hedley even more than the prospect of being handed over to the police, and he was entirely at Aubrey’s mercy. He would kill for a second chance, he thought, as he placed the decanter on the shelf next to the claret, ready for the evening performance.

69

Five

Penrose sat at his desk on the third floor of New Scotland Yard and stared at the collection of bleak photographs laid out in front of him. Fallowfield must have conveyed his instructions to the letter, because the photographer had been relentless in his thoroughness: in stark black and white, the camera’s handiwork offered death from every angle, challenging him to erase the question marks which were all over that small railway carriage, and preserving the scene for those who might need to comment later on whatever answers he came up with. As detailed as the pictures were, his own memory really needed no material reminders of what he was dealing with: it would be a long time before a far more intense image of this particular death was erased from his memory. In his head, he heard his superior’s familiar words of warning: ‘You only see what you look for, and you only look for what is already in your mind.’ The trouble was, his mind was a blank. Rarely had he been so without inspiration in a new case, lacking any instinct other than a sense that things would get worse before they got better.

He turned now to the carefully labelled personal effects which, if he only knew how to read them, told the story of the last few hours in Elspeth Simmons’s life. Taken out of context and placed in uniform evidence bags, her things conveyed little of the warmth and animation which, according to Josephine, had characterised the girl in life. There was a handkerchief, a powder compact and comb, a packet of Symington’s Jelly Crystals and another of Mackintosh Toffees, a purse and a small pile of loose change, made up of two half-crowns, two sixpences, a shilling, four pen-71

nies and a halfpenny, and the magazine that had linked Elspeth to Josephine on the day she died – all the paraphernalia of a young woman on the move and, with hindsight, touching in its normality. What he found more interesting, though, were the note and the flower which hinted at a promise of affection, even love. He looked at the iris, with its striking triad of dark purple petals, and wondered what it had meant to her or to the person who sent it.

How did she feel when she received it? And how would she have felt if it was her lover’s face she had looked into as the life drained out of her? He hoped to put a name to that face when he questioned Frank Simmons and his wife in a couple of hours’ time.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about the bag itself, except that the contents scarcely seemed to justify its outlandish size. Perhaps the dolls were the answer. It certainly made more sense for them to have been hers rather than carried by a killer for whom speed and invisibility were of the essence; the fingerprint report would at least tell him whether or not she had handled them. He looked at the miniature king and queen, less lifelike now in their forensic wrapping, and gave an involuntary shudder. There was something unnerving about the violence with which the female doll’s hand had been broken off and discarded, but perhaps the gesture was nothing more than spite towards the victim, a scorning of Elspeth’s love for the artificial passions of the stage rather than a sinister strike against Josephine herself. As much as he felt for the dead girl, a lovers’ quarrel in which the dolls simply represented a mockery of her relationship would be a welcome explanation for her murder.

A brusque knock at the door interrupted his thoughts and, without waiting for a response, Sir Bernard Spilsbury came into the room. Others might have been surprised to see the celebrated Home Office Pathologist at the Yard on a Saturday but, to all intents and purposes, he was also a member of CID and behaved like any other hard-working member of the team. At fifty-seven, he often spoke of retirement but was actually busier than ever, driven hard by the police at his own insistence. In all the years Penrose had worked alongside Spilsbury, he had never known him 72

to refuse a call. His reports were not quite as prompt as they used to be, and age had made him a little excessive in his thoroughness, but Penrose was always prepared to wait a little longer to hear opinions from a man for whom he held tremendous respect.

Although by no means infallible, Spilsbury had proved to him on countless occasions that medicine had its value even in the face of death, that it was a path to truth even when life had been outwit-ted by evil – and that justice could prevail if someone paved the way for it with diligence and care.

‘Sorry I’m late, Archie, but the traffic down Gower Street was diabolical. Of course, if the Metropolitan Police thought it worthwhile to catch up with the rest of the civilised world and build a laboratory of its own, then you’d have had your report by now and you might even be halfway to getting another killer off the streets. But who am I to criticise?’

Penrose smiled at the rebuke, which was invariably the first thing Spilsbury uttered when he arrived at Scotland Yard. The pathologist’s opinion that Britain lagged behind other countries when it came to a commitment to forensic evidence was well known and, Penrose believed, fully justified. Among many of his colleagues there was still a prejudice against importing too much science into an investigation even though most were coming to rely on such developments as a matter of course; the analysis of dust in a suspect’s pockets or mud on his boots was all very well, they would say if asked, but there was still a preference for direct rather than scientific methods of proving guilt and, even if the force as a whole could be persuaded that forensics were an aid to rather than replacement for observation and patience, the argument that English judges and juries were inclined to be dis-trustful of laboratory evidence had yet to be overcome. If anybody could change that, though, Spilsbury could; no name was more closely associated with violent or mysterious death. He had a quiet authority and a core of steel, yet it would have been hard to imagine a more affable and sympathetic character.

Penrose had never known anyone get the better of him in cross-examination, although privately he wondered whether the 73

unquestioned influence that Spilsbury’s opinion carried always contributed to justice.

The charm and the steel were both evident today as he sat down and took his report out of the vast bag which he took everywhere.

‘It’s a nasty one, this,’ he said, without wasting any more time on social niceties and, as he always did, affording Penrose the respect of a fellow medic. ‘The cause of death is fairly straightforward –

internal haemorrhage as a result of sharp trauma to the heart from a penetrating injury originating just below the breast bone. From the angle of the wound, I’d say that she was standing up when the weapon entered her body and that the injury was made with an upward stab – you don’t often see that – by someone a few inches taller and right-handed.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘Could be either, I’m afraid. The victim was only a couple of inches over five feet, so the height issue doesn’t help us. If she’d been wearing something a little more robust, I’d have said quite confidently that the assailant was a man, but her coat was undone and a sharp point would have gone through that dress very easily.

The tissues are quite soft, you know, and a reasonably fit woman, particularly an angry one, could have done it without a problem as long as the weapon was keen enough – which it most certainly was.’

‘Have you ever come across a hatpin used as a murder weapon before?’

‘No, Archie, and I still haven’t; that’s where it gets interesting.

The weapon you found in her body wasn’t the one that killed her

– that much I can be sure of.’

Even with all the possibilities Penrose had been considering, that one had not occurred to him. One of the few things he believed he could take for granted was suddenly removed and he felt the foundations of the case shift again beneath his feet. A feeble ‘How do you know?’ was the best he could come up with.

‘Because of the blood. No hatpin would have caused such massive internal blood loss. It wasn’t obvious immediately because there was virtually no bruising to the puncture point and no obvi-74

ous external haemorrhage, but inside it’s a different story. There was a huge amount of blood in the pleural cavity and in the area around the heart, and some had passed into the abdominal cavity along the line of penetration. Yes, it’s conceivable that a hatpin could cause enough damage to be fatal, but it would be a much slower death than was the case here and you certainly couldn’t rely on it. Once you know you’re looking at two different entries, you can see that the hatpin has taken a slightly different route from the initial thrust with the blade, but it’s only marginal and the swapping of one for the other had very little effect on the external wound itself.’

‘So what sort of weapon are we looking for?’

‘Something narrow – like I said, very little blood found its way out from the entry point – and fairly long; it would need to be at least six inches to reach the heart through the liver and diaphragm.

A nice paper knife would work, for example, if it were sharp enough – and that’s the key: there’s no drag on the tissues at the edges of the wound, so it went in and came out cleanly.’

‘How much did she suffer?’ Penrose asked, conscious that he was soon to see Elspeth’s family.

‘It would have been very quick and it’s doubtful that she knew much about it. From the damage to the wall of the heart, I’d say the assailant moved the knife around in the body once the initial wound was made, and that will have speeded up the process even more. The blood in the pericardium will have prevented the heart from pumping effectively and her blood pressure will have dropped almost instantly, before the impact of a hard and fast stab really registered. It’s likely that the shock of what had happened, together with the rapid loss of blood pressure, would override any behavioural pain response in the victim and I should think she was unconscious within a minute, perhaps less. So, depending on your point of view, this particular weapon did a lovely job. It always amazes me that more of our villains don’t favour the knife, you know. It’s a much better bet than a poker or a piece of lead piping, and so much more imaginative. And that’s something there’s no shortage of here – imagination.’

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Penrose agreed. Flicking through the post-mortem report, he found the section that dealt with the shaving of the girl’s neck, a seemingly purposeless act of defilement which, bizarrely, he found more disturbing than the fatal injury. For once, Spilsbury’s conclu-sions told him little; the tiny amount of blood indicated that the cut had been made very shortly after death had occurred, but he had already suspected that. It was pointless to ask the pathologist to speculate on its meaning, so he turned his attentions back to more material evidence. ‘Can you tell me anything else about the killer? A name would be nice, but I’ll settle for hair or clothes.’

Spilsbury smiled. ‘Well, he – let’s say he for convenience’s sake –

certainly wasn’t covered in his victim’s blood when he left the train, so you can rule out that appeal to the public. There may have been a little on his hand but not enough to make him stand out from the crowd, and there was no blood or skin under the girl’s fingernails to indicate any injuries that might arouse suspicion. The shock would have stopped her putting up much of a fight, even if he’d given her the chance to struggle. And there were no prints on the hatpin other than hers. On a more positive note,’

he continued as Penrose looked increasingly despondent, ‘there were some fibres under her nails and more in her mouth which don’t appear to match anything she was wearing so, when we’ve done more tests, I might be able to tell you what his coat or jumper was made of. My guess is that the killer pulled her towards him with his left hand – there’s a mark on the back of her neck to support that – and muffled any noises she might have made by holding her face against his chest as the knife went in. There was a lot of dust on the skirt of her dress but that’s consistent with what was on the floor of the carriage, so it tells us very little except that it’s certainly not the cleaning you pay for in first class. She must have fallen forward onto her knees when she lost consciousness, and then been lifted onto the seat where she was found: easier for a man to do that, of course, but again not impossible for a woman.