‘I’ll write the death certificate.’
Isaac phoned Caroline Dickson to tell her; she was relieved.
Outside the mansion, decaying after such a long time of neglect, the two officers stood to one side of where Molly Dempster had found Gilbert lying on the ground. The area was still marked off, but the grass had since grown.
‘It could still be Ralph, even though he was with the Spanish police,’ Isaac said.
‘He could have arranged someone else. Not Caxton and O’Grady, bulls in a china shop, those two.’
Chapter 30
Jill Dundas made contingency plans. There had just been too much interest in Gilbert’s death, too much sentimentalising about Michael’s death, too much morbid interest in Dorothy. Her father had been a brilliant man, a man to be revered, but he was not mentioned, while a drug addict and a skeleton were given preference.
The popular press continued to write on the subject. Michael’s death, and the subsequent arrest of a known agitator for involuntary manslaughter, raised speculation in the scurrilous newspapers and on social media about the possibility of demonic practices in the case of Dorothy, the sacrificial death of Gilbert, the just reward from God for Michael’s death.
Jill knew that none of it was true, but it was not possible to give a truthful account of all that had transpired. Gilbert had indeed been senile but showing moments of lucidity. His business mind had remained detached from his social behaviour: the death of his wife Dorothy unhinging him for many years. It was only her father who had been able to get near to the man, and he had known, he must have, of the horror that was on the second floor of the mansion. But not once did her father reveal what had been committed, not until the last few months when she came to know that her father’s time was up, the doctor picking up an ongoing degradation in his health, a fluctuation in his heart.
‘Jill, you must know the truth,’ he had said. It was late at night, and he had been sitting in his favourite chair, a glass of port in his hand. As she sat there, he recounted the saga of Gilbert Lawrence, Dorothy’s death, the irrational and unsound mind of his friend as if he was having a brainstorm, the pressure too much for the most lucid of men. It had been her father’s decision to ensure Gilbert Lawrence’s legacy. It had required the signature of the great man, gladly given as he suffered, unsure whether he was alive or dead. After that, her father had told her, Gilbert vacillated between sanity and utter madness, not willing to leave the prison he had created. The trips to the off-licence, even though they had commenced years previously, were the man’s attempts to reconnect.
Her father had convinced her that it was better to let sleeping dogs lie, and not to resurrect the past, to never let on what had happened in that house to that man, that woman. Dorothy had been an ill woman for a long time, her father said. A woman who had hurled herself off the top step of the staircase, dying at the bottom, not from a broken neck, but from despair complicated by grief over her son, anger with her daughter for marrying Desmond and moving away, from internal bleeding.
‘Don’t you understand,’ Leonard said that night to Jill, ‘Gilbert blamed them all. Dorothy for dying, Ralph for what he had become, Caroline for upsetting her mother. It was only me that he would see, not Molly. She raised other emotions in him, not that I always understood why, but he cared for her. He never mentioned an affair, but…’
And now Jill knew about Ralph, and Molly being his mother. Legally it did not impact on Gilbert’s last will and testament, although it may give her leverage, a means to delay what would become certain in time: that Gilbert had been mad, but he was becoming saner, and even at his advanced age he had decided to ease out of seclusion and to take control of his empire, to make his peace with his family.
***
The man didn’t phone often, but Frost knew he was worth the monthly retainer that he paid, a package left under a bench at the entrance to Greenwich Observatory on the first Thursday of every month at eight thirty-three in the evening, the man arriving at the spot two minutes later. The news was disturbing. Caxton and O’Grady were liable to be picked up at any time. Frost trusted Caxton, not so much O’Grady. The evidence was flimsy, and the police technique would be to arrest the men, pressure them heavily and hope that one would crack. He knew one of them would; he could not take a chance.
Frost knew that it was all due to Ralph Lawrence, a malignant sore of no worth. Lawrence had brought the police to his doorstep, and they were putting two and two together, coming up with three, but soon it would be four. And then it would be him at the police station, the connections made with Lawrence, with Belgium. A private man, Frost knew that if he wanted to stay where he was, free and not in prison, he would need to break the links joining him to the crimes that had been committed.
Inside his penthouse, he summoned one of his men. ‘How do you like fishing?’ he said.
‘We go
