‘Please.’
‘Here we are. No, nothing this year. His last loan was that new biography of Stanley Baldwin, last December.’
‘Thanks for your help.’
Kathy phoned the Warrenders’ house from the car. Emily was a little more settled, apparently, after a lie- down. They put her on.
‘Hi Emily,’ Kathy said. ‘Just a small thing. We’re tracing Tina’s movements before she died, as I told you, and I understand you both spent some time in the London Library last week, looking for a lost book. Do you remember that?’
‘Mm, yes, that’s right.’
‘Do you remember what it was?’
‘I think… some sort of memoir? I’m not sure. We never found it.’
‘Why was it important?’
There was a moment’s silence, then Emily replied, ‘Tina thought Marion had been looking at it. I think Tina thought there might have been something there about how Lizzie Siddal died. That’s what she was most interested in, some discovery of Marion’s that got her tutor really upset.’
‘She said that, did she?’
‘Yes, she did.’
Kathy phoned Brock, and told him what they had learned.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to interview Emily later to get that on record, but that’s good enough. Come on in and we’ll get to work.’
•
The room was drab and dispiriting, as if to tell those who were interviewed in it that anything they might come up with had certainly been heard between these grubby walls before.
‘Since we saw you last, Dr da Silva,’ Brock began, ‘we’ve had a chance to check some of the things you told us.’ He stopped and stared at the man across the table.
Da Silva tried to meet his eyes, but only succeeded in looking shifty. He was a changed man, Kathy thought, the arrogance gone along with the colour from his face. His clothes looked crumpled and soiled, as if he’d slept in them on someone’s sofa, and she wondered if his wife had thrown him out. He took a pair of glasses out of his pocket and put them on with an unsteady hand, as if for protection.
‘We’ve been trying to confirm your account of your movements on Tuesday the third of April, the day that Marion Summers was poisoned, but without success. None of your neighbours saw you that day, you made no calls through your house phone nor received any. There’s no evidence of you being at home that day at all.’
Da Silva’s solicitor began to object, but Brock simply nodded his head patiently and then went on, questioning the tutor again about the details of that day, what he’d had for lunch, what letters he might have written (none), and emails he might have sent from his home computer.
‘No, nothing like that. I told you, I was completely engrossed in the paper I was writing for a conference presentation that was overdue.’ His voice was different, like a nervous public speaker whose throat is stretched tight with tension.
They would require his computer, Brock said, and would carry out a search of his home, although from his tone he didn’t expect to find much. He moved on to the days following Marion’s death, and da Silva’s visit to her house.
‘I spoke to Keith Rafferty,’ Kathy said. ‘He denied that he’d supplied you with a key.’
Da Silva made a noise intended as a scoff but that came out as a choke. He took a sip from the plastic cup in front of him and said, ‘That’s no surprise.’
They turned to his relationship with Dr Ringland and access to his laboratory, laboriously working through every detail until eventually the solicitor said, ‘I think that’s really enough. As you can see, Dr da Silva is suffering greatly from the strain of these terrible events, of which he is entirely innocent. Unless you have something specific to ask him, I’m going to advise him to say no more.’
‘It’s true!’ da Silva blurted out, loud enough to make his solicitor glance at him in alarm. ‘You… you’re trying to make me out to be some kind of predator, preying on girls like Marion and Tina. But I’m innocent! I was proud of Marion, proud of her as a father might be proud of his daughter, proud of her development, of her intelligence and insight. Proud of her independence, too, of her refusal to accept my opinion on trust, difficult as that sometimes was.’
There were tears in his eyes now, and the three other people in the room, despite their long experience of such situations, drew back a little in embarrassment.
‘When she hid her Cornell paper from me, and I began to suspect the way in which it was intended to undermine me, I felt bitterly betrayed. Her disloyalty was like a knife in my heart. But I never, for one moment, thought of hurting her. That is obscene.’
Silence filled the room, then Brock said mildly, ‘Where were you on the afternoon and evening of Wednesday the eleventh of this month, Dr da Silva?’
‘What?’
‘A week ago, between the hours of three and eight. Please think carefully before you answer.’
Da Silva frowned, then reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a small diary. ‘Umm… lunch with Dr Ringland, a two o’clock lecture, then…’ He looked up. ‘I believe I went up to the British Library.’
‘What was the lecture?’
‘Victorian literature.’
‘To?’
‘Third-year arts students mainly. Why?’
‘Tina Flowers was in that class, wasn’t she?’
‘Um… it’s possible, I suppose.’
‘And then she went to the British Library, where, shortly after four o’clock, she requested two books. Do you know what they were?’
‘How could I?’
‘Because the following morning you returned to the library as soon as it opened, and requested those same two books, books so obscure that almost nobody else has ever requested them.’
‘Um… I believe I do remember. Marion had told me about them.’
Brock shook his head impatiently. ‘You followed Tina after the lecture up to the British Library, and watched her order the two books, one of which was the source of Marion’s revelations in her Cornell paper. You had been unable to find that book because it was stored in one of the special collections, the papers of the Havelock family, a name slightly different from the one you’d been searching for-Haverlock.
Da Silva sat rigid in his chair.
‘Where is that book now, Dr da Silva? You collected it the following day, but never returned it. Where is it?’
He said nothing, jaw locked.
‘Did you hide it somewhere in the library?’ Kathy pressed.
For a moment it seemed he would keep silent, but then he gave a kind of shudder and whispered, ‘She just read and read and read, completely engrossed, but she seemed to make no notes, nor photocopies, before the library was closing and she had to hand it back. So the next morning I was there before her and took out the book. It was a scurrilous store of gossip, that’s all; a travesty, full of innuendo and rumour. Marion should never have considered it seriously. It was unconscionable that it should cause so much distress. I knew exactly what Rossetti would want me to do with the damn thing, and I did it.’
‘You did what?’ Kathy asked softly.
‘I destroyed it,’ he said defiantly. ‘I tore it into shreds and flushed it down the loo. There, I destroyed a library book. You can arrest me for that.’
‘But Tina had read it,’ Brock said, ‘just as Marion had before her, so you had to destroy her, too, didn’t you?’
•
Guiltily, Kathy now also felt like a disloyal daughter. Brock was energised by the arrest, firing instructions to
