Good to meet you. Laurence Waverley. I brought Miss Maciver, both Misses Maciver, here.”
“Did you? Then you’ll know that this is a crime scene, Mr Waverley. Would you care to tell me what you are doing here without authority?”
The change of tone was partly a matter of personal style but also down to the fact that, upright and face on, authority wasn’t something you could accuse Mr Waverley of not having.
“Reluctant though I am to shelter behind encroaching age, I have to admit to a slight prostate problem. I came upstairs in search of a loo. Idle curiosity, I fear, made me open the study door. Idle but not altogether morbid. I recall the sorrow occasioned by Mr Maciver Senior’s death, and I am distressed that my dear friend, Miss Lavinia, is having to go through this dreadful experience yet again.”
“You knew the father then?”
Waverley’s gaze went to the portrait on the wall.
“Only in a professional sense. We were not friends. Few people make friends of a VAT investigator.”
“Ah,” said Pascoe, ushering him through the door on to the landing. “You’re a VAT-man.”
“Was. Safely retired. Please accept my apologies for trespassing in this way, Chief Inspector. I should have realized the study would be treated as a crime scene until the authorities have established beyond all doubt it was suicide. That process, I presume, is not yet complete?”
“Why do you say that?”
“A DCI on site? My slight experience of the police suggests that CID likes to wash its hands of suicides as quickly as possible and get on with the investigation of real crime.”
“Just routine, Mr Waverley. Let’s join the others.”
They went down the stairs. Jennison’s form was still visible through the front door. Waverley must have entered in the few moments when the constable had been in the kitchen.
Novello looked at the newcomer curiously, then raised an enquiring eyebrow at Pascoe.
“Mr Laurence Waverley,” he said. “In search of a loo.”
Cressida, who was sitting at the table looking pale and angry, didn’t even glance up. Lavinia, standing at the window which gave a view of the extensive and heavily wooded rear garden, turned and smiled.
“There you are, Mr W,” she said. “Would you believe it, the green peckers are still here. Do you recall the first time we met? We heard one hammering away and I was able to take you right to its nest? I wonder if they’re still using that old beech. Of course it may have blown down by now. It was quite rotten ten years ago. Shall we go out and look?”
Waverley glanced at Pascoe, smiled wryly as if to say, We each deal with death in our own way, and said, “Of course, my dear.”
He tried the back door. It was locked. He turned to the glass-fronted key cupboard on the wall under the electricity supply box, but before he could touch it, Pascoe said, “I wonder, would you mind going out of the front door?”
Once let them start opening other entrances to the house, it would become a public thoroughfare. He glanced at Novello. This was a good chance for her to have a chat with Lavinia out of Cressida’s presence.
She gave a little nod as if he’d spoken the instruction out loud and set off after them. He returned his attention to the key cupboard. On its top there was a scatter of fine debris, plaster, mortar, the kind of stuff you’d expect to accrue in an old neglected house, but thicker here than on any other surface. By contrast the tiled floor beneath looked like it had been well brushed.
Behind him there was a sound midway between a sigh and a groan from Cressida. He turned, anticipating a renewed verbal assault now they were alone, but instead found her slumped forward with her head in her hands. For a second he thought she was crying but when she raised her face to him, though pale and drawn, her cheeks were dry.
“Christ, Pete, I could do with a drink,” she said.
He noted that he’d ceased to be a rank and become a name. Fair enough. She was Ellie’s friend, and if there were anything to be got out of her, he guessed it was more likely to be offered to Pete than to Chief Inspector.
She rose suddenly and started pulling open cupboard doors. Lots of crockery, but the nearest thing to booze was a row of crystal tumblers. She seemed to lose interest and flopped back down again. Pascoe stared at the tumblers. Glasses left unused for any length of time soon lose their fresh-washed shine and eventually they start collecting dust. These looked like they hadn’t been touched for weeks. Or months. Maybe years. Except for two.
Carefully he picked one of them up. It left a damp circle on the shelf as if it had been recently washed and put back not quite dry.
Last night, thought Pascoe. Probably last night someone in the maternity party had wanted a glass of water. Then washed the glass-two glasses-and put them neatly back in place? Not likely, not with them all running around, in Dalziel’s elegant phrase, like blue-arsed fleas.
“Pete,” said Cressida helplessly, “is there something wrong here or am I just being a pain in the arse for nothing?”
He replaced the glass and closed the cupboard, taking his time. Resisting the urge to get irritable because grief had provoked someone into being a pain in the arse was easy. Resisting the equally dangerous urge to be open in response to a simple emotional appeal was much more difficult.
He sat down opposite her and said, “I honestly don’t know, Cress. All I know is that it’s my job to look for something wrong so I can be absolutely sure that nothing is. When I’m sure of that, my job’s done, but it still leaves you with a brother who was depressed enough to take his own life, and you didn’t see it coming. But it’s no use blaming yourself. Not seeing something coming doesn’t make it your fault.”
“Well, that’s a real comfort,” she said with a flash of her previous aggression. “Whoops. Sorry. There I go again. No, the real trouble is, being a Maciver’s like eating out with a bunch of people so drunk no one can remember what they had so in the end it’s easiest just to divide the bill so you all pay the same. In other words, we’re such a fucked-up family, collective guilt is the order of the day. Not that that stops us pointing the finger at each other, of course.”
She broke off and fixed him with her huge, almost violet eyes.
He said, “Anything you can say that might help us understand Pal could be very useful.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for instance, this mimicking of your father’s mode of death. What do you imagine that was all about?”
She looked doubtful for a moment then shrugged.
“Why not?” she said. “Sitting here in the house I was born in, the house where my mother died and my father and brother topped themselves, maybe I can raise a few ghosts if I tell it like it was.”
I don’t recollect having an unhappy childhood so I suppose I must have had a happy one.
What I am sure of is I was happy when I was around Pal and not so happy when Pal wasn’t there.
The thing was Pal and I were really close, a unit, almost twin-like, I’d say, though there were three years between us. There was nothing sexual in it, let me get that out of the way in case you’re getting horny thinking this is building up to some big incestuous passion scene. OK, we used each other like biological diagrams when we were trying to get to grips with all the where-do-babies-come-from stuff, but when we moved from theory to practice, we both looked elsewhere. Easy in Pal’s case. He was always drop-dead gorgeous. I reckon at least half of my friends wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t been his sister.
My mother. I was eleven when she died. Periods just started, teens ahead, the age when a girl starts needing her mother most though she imagines she needs her least. Mum was one of those quiet little women you don’t notice is there until she isn’t. Then you start thinking of all the things you could have done or said to let her know you loved her. That’s after you’ve stopped blaming her for dying, of course.
She’d not been well since she’d had Helen three years earlier. I know girls are expected to go all gooey and maternal when they get a little sister, but maybe there was too big a gap between us. Or maybe it was because Mum had such a bad time, ill through much of the pregnancy and a long hard labour. She was never the same
