weekend off after all.’
‘Oh.’ She gave a pained smile. ‘I was supposed to be going to Prague, but with all that was going on, I cancelled.’
‘Of course you must go. Especially after last night. Best thing.’
‘What’s happening to Rafferty and Crouch?’
‘CPS won’t touch it. The charges have been dropped.’
They were silent for a moment, then Brock said, ‘Prague in the spring… I’m told it’s looking good these days. I’m jealous.’ He smiled at her, a twinkle in his eye.
‘With Nicole Palmer, in Criminal Records.’
‘Hm.’ He turned back to the pinboard, the little smile still on his face.
•
Twenty minutes later Kathy saw Alex Nicholson step out of a cab at the front gate. She opened the door and went to meet her.
Alex shook her hand and looked up at the building. ‘This is cute. A gingerbread house. Just the sort of place you’d expect a fan of William Morris to live in. I’m envious. Pricey neighbourhood.’
Kathy had worked with Alex on several cases, and had found her rather intimidating at first. Slight in build, with a mop of black hair and unconventional, though stylish, taste in clothes, she exuded self-confidence. Some of the others in the team thought that Brock indulged her, but Kathy had to admit that she’d been pretty accurate in the past.
Kathy led Alex through the house, letting her take her time in each room, and filling her in on what they knew. They finished in the study, where they sat with Brock at Marion’s work table.
‘This house…’ Alex shook her head, looking around. ‘What do we know about it?’
‘Nothing yet. She moved in about three months ago. Forensics think she lived here alone.’
‘Maybe two people shared it before, and she just inherited it like this?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Because otherwise… well, you pointed it out yourself, Kathy-the front rooms and the back, so different.’ She shrugged and opened a notebook and began jotting. ‘I’m doing a study of poisoners. They have a whole set of profiles to themselves, different from all the rest. This is my first arsenic suicide, in fact my first arsenic poisoner, so I’m really interested. You thought it was murder at first, yes?’
‘Yes. It’s taken us three days to find where she lived. She’d kept it pretty much secret.’
‘So did she intend for you to think she was murdered? But then, why leave that stuff in the kitchen where it would eventually be found? Why not clear it away and leave the mystery open? Did she then want you to have to search for the truth? Make a public spectacle of her death? I mean, if she wanted to take poison, why not just do it quietly at home? Why choose St James’s Square of all places?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then there’s the poison. My God, arsenic! Horrible stuff, a painful, lingering death. You mentioned she was interested in it?’
‘Maybe obsessed by it,’ Kathy said. ‘Her PhD supervisor told me she was making it the focus of her interpretation of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, against his advice. And she had been talking recently to a colleague of his in the science faculty about its basic chemistry.’
‘Her period, the nineteenth century, was the heyday of the arsenic poisoners, wasn’t it? She would have identified, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Something like that. But there’s another possibility. Dr Ringland, the scientist she spoke to, said she was like other arts students-not very good with formulae and numbers. I’m wondering if she was experimenting on herself, trying to experience the symptoms at first hand, without actually wanting to kill herself. But maybe she got the dose wrong.’
‘Mixed up her micrograms and her milligrams, you mean?’ Alex nodded. ‘Possible. Not so interesting, but possible.’
‘If she was experimenting on herself, this may not have been the first time,’ Brock said. ‘Sundeep might be able to find signs of that in her body.’
Alex was staring at the pinboard on the wall. ‘This is interesting. Have you had it photographed?’
‘Yes, the SOCO photographer did that.’
‘You see the symmetry. The man in the middle, Rossetti, has a woman on each side of him. Do we know who they are?’
‘His wife Lizzie Siddal on the left in the pose of Ophelia, and his mistress Jane Morris on the right. Yes, I noticed that.’
Alex nodded. ‘The victim wife and the mistress. Plain Jane and Naughty Nancy? Is that what you were thinking?’
‘What are you getting at, Alex?’ Brock said.
‘Suicide usually happens after a period of intense internal debate, a struggle between opposing instincts. I’m just wondering if this might be a case of Plain Jane being murdered by Naughty Nancy, or the other way around.’
‘Come off it,’ Brock protested. ‘That’s psychology babble.’
Alex gave him a tolerant smile. ‘It’s not impossible. Did you notice that Jane’s bedroom door has a lock on it, on the inside, whereas the other doesn’t? Almost as if Jane were afraid of Nancy, and wanted to keep her out. Marion may have been suffering from DID, dissociative identity disorder, what we used to call multiple personality disorder.’
‘Isn’t that a form of schizophrenia?’ Kathy asked.
‘No, that’s a brain disorder, quite different. DID isn’t brought on by substance abuse, either. It’s still a controversial diagnosis, but I have encountered several very dramatic examples that convinced me, where two or more quite distinct personalities coexisted within the one individual, taking turns to control their behaviour. There have also been cases of what you might call mutual self-harm-one personality trying to hurt another. I don’t recall a case of resulting suicide, but I can look into it. There’s generally accompanying memory loss, dissociative amnesia. Has anyone mentioned instances of Marion blanking out, losing time?’
Kathy shook her head. ‘She does seem to have been very secretive though, hiding all sorts of things from people who were supposed to be close to her.’
‘It’s possible that was a defence mechanism, if she recognised that inexplicable things were happening in her life.’
Alex pointed at the photograph of a third face on the board, a young Victorian woman directly over Rossetti’s image. She stared straight at the camera, her face framed by thick dark hair finished in a braid across the crown of her head. There was no name.
‘She looks determined, doesn’t she?’ Alex said. ‘And familiar. Know who she is?’
Kathy shook her head.
Brock’s phone trilled in his pocket. He spoke into it briefly, checked his watch, then rang off. ‘I’m going to have to get back. Stay as long as you like, Alex. I thought you might find this one intriguing. Perhaps you have got something with your Jane and Nancy theory. Maybe she hated herself for what she’d had to become in order to survive. We might get you to write something for our report to the coroner.’
Alex said she’d get a lift back with him to the West End. As they made to leave she said, ‘If I had more time, I’d love to deconstruct that pinboard and try to work out exactly how she related her own life to it.’
‘Couldn’t it just be her work for her PhD?’ Kathy said, thinking that this was all getting rather fanciful.
‘That too. But you’re free to pick your own PhD subject, aren’t you? Your choice reflects your own preoccupations. You’re exploring yourself as well as your topic, and it can become pretty obsessive. Believe me, I know. Just make sure you’ve got it all recorded, Kathy. Did her computer not tell you anything?’
‘It seems she used the machines in her department. We’re in the process of accessing her email account.’
‘What, there wasn’t a computer of her own here, or at the library where she collapsed?’
‘No.’
‘What about disks, memory sticks?’
‘We haven’t found anything.’
