‘No,’ Brock murmured. ‘Well, you couldn’t let that happen.’
‘What could I do? I tried appealing to Grace. I said that Marion’s research really wasn’t ready for public exposure, and it would be a kindness to her to make her wait. But Grace smelled a rat. She said that Wallcott at Princeton had heard something about Marion’s work from one of his colleagues who met her by chance in the university here, and Grace was afraid Princeton might publish her first if she cancelled. I was beside myself.’
‘So?’
‘Then I remembered that I’d met Marion’s mother. She turned up uninvited to a faculty tea party for students and their relatives, a year or more ago. Appalling woman. When she learned I was Marion’s supervisor she cornered me. I think she was half drunk, horribly flirtatious, and I had to listen to the story of her life before Marion realised what was happening and dragged her away. But I did remember her name, Sheena Rafferty, and the fact she lived in Ealing somewhere. She was in the phone book, and I went to see her. I assumed she’d know where Marion had moved to, only she didn’t. Her husband, Keith, was there, and when I left he came after me and said he might be able to find out where Marion lived, if I made it worth his while. He asked for fifty quid in advance. I suppose he was testing me, to see how badly I wanted to know. Maybe he sensed I was desperate. So I paid him and he said he’d get in touch.’
‘When was this?’
‘About a month ago, the middle of March.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. He didn’t get back to me. I was going to contact him, but then I heard the terrible news about Marion and did nothing until Inspector Kolla told me last Monday that Marion had been living in Hampstead. I tried to find the address from the phone book but couldn’t, so I phoned Sheena Rafferty again. She wasn’t in, but her husband was. I told him that Marion had some papers of mine that I wanted back, and asked if her mother had access to the house.’
‘Couldn’t you have asked us that?’ Brock objected.
Da Silva bit his lip. ‘I did ask DI Kolla, but she wasn’t cooperative, and she pretty much gave me the impression that I was under suspicion, so I didn’t press the point. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, you see, and wanted time to search.’
‘Go on.’
‘Rafferty said he probably could now find out where the house was, and also get me a key, if I was prepared to pay.’
‘How much?’
‘A thousand pounds.’
‘Really? And you agreed?’
‘I tried to haggle, but he wouldn’t have it. I think he believed there was something going on between Marion and me that I wanted to cover up, an affair or something. In the end I agreed, and within a couple of hours he came back to me. We met at a pub; I paid him the money and he gave me an address and a key. That evening I went to the house and removed the things you found in my office.’
‘Will Rafferty confirm this?’
Da Silva looked squeamish. ‘Unlikely, I should think.’
Brock sat back in his chair, linking his fingers over his chest, and turned to Kathy. ‘What do you make of that, DI Kolla?’
‘Bullshit, sir,’ Kathy replied evenly. She reached forward and took the book out of its plastic bag, opened it to the title page and read:
‘ He sees the beauty
Sun hath not looked upon,
And tastes the fountain
Unutterably deep…
‘That’s your handwritten dedication to her, isn’t it, Tony? You saw the beauty, did you? You tasted at the fountain, unutterably deep?’
He reddened. ‘It’s from one of Rossetti’s poems.’
‘Called “Dream-Love”, yes.’
‘It was one of her favourites,’ he blustered. ‘We’d discussed it in a tutorial some time ago. I was being… ironic.’
A muffled snort came from Brock.
‘Doesn’t sound like irony to me,’ Kathy went on remorselessly. ‘It sounds like a frank expression of love. You were lovers, weren’t you?’
He bowed his head. ‘No. There was a time when I felt we might have been. She seemed to encourage me, when she needed my support to get her scholarship. Then, when it was confirmed, she changed her tune. My dedication in her book was… unwise. I could see that it might be misinterpreted. That’s why I took it from her room, before anyone could draw the wrong conclusions.’
A frown crossed his face and he seemed to rouse himself, as if a bubble of his old self-esteem had risen to the surface. He looked Kathy in the eye and said, ‘Haven’t you ever fallen foolishly for the wrong person, Inspector?’
‘Yes,’ Kathy replied. ‘But I didn’t have to kill them.’
After they had gone, Brock said to Kathy, ‘You didn’t mention the stuff left in the kitchen.’
‘No, forensics removed it on the day we found her house. I hoped he might let that slip. Only the killer knows about that.’
‘But there is a problem, isn’t there? If he murdered Marion and planted that arsenic in her kitchen on the third of April, why did he wait until nearly a week later-after you’d told him that Marion lived at Rosslyn Court-to remove the things from her study?’
The same thing had been bothering Kathy. ‘It would all depend on the timing,’ she said. ‘It was like Alex said, he couldn’t stage the scene in the kitchen until he was sure that she had taken the poison and that it had worked. Then he couldn’t be sure how much time he would have. He had to move fast, setting up the evidence and leaving straight away. It was only later, when he realised that he was being treated as a potential suspect, that he decided to remove any embarrassing material he could find in her house.’
‘Hm.’ Brock scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘So we have a number of fixes on the murderer’s movements: he visited Rosslyn Court prior to the murder, maybe on the Monday, to lace Marion’s juice with arsenic; he was in St James’s Square at lunchtime on the Tuesday to witness her having her lunch and being taken away in an ambulance; and he was in Rosslyn Court again immediately afterwards to stage the scene in the kitchen. If da Silva’s your man, there must surely be a record of him and his little red sports car on a camera somewhere. Find that and we’re in business.’
But by the end of the day they had found nothing.
•
Another takeaway supper, another glass of wine, Kathy sitting brooding on her sofa, facing her own private murder wall. She was conscious of how different the two halves were. The left half, the photos of Marion’s pinboard, which initially had seemed rather chaotic and confusing, now appeared as a well-balanced composition, a tightly knit pattern built around the central figure of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, balanced on each side by the two women, Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris and brooded over by Madeleine Smith, while the other players in their drama orbited around. By contrast Kathy’s own diagram, on the right, seemed disorganised and unresolved, images floating around an empty centre, without clear connections. She had two victims, Marion and Tina, and she put her pasta aside and rearranged them on the wall so that, like Lizzie and Madeleine, they were balanced to left and right of the centre. But there was no centre. Instead she had three suspects, Keith Rafferty, Nigel Ogilvie and Tony da Silva, rotating around a void.
She returned to the sofa and ate some more, considering this. The three men were very different from one another, yet were tied together in various ways. They knew each other, and were connected by self-interest, circumstance and assault. Could they all have been involved in the murders of the two women? Or were they merely satellites of some other missing figure in the centre?
The photo of Marion’s white flowers was pinned over to one side, and Kathy recalled Pip’s comment about their meaning, I shall die tomorrow, and their name, Montpellier cistus, from the south of France. And maybe
