practically a friend of the family.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Rafe Vintner,’ he said. ‘I believe you knew my father.’ He noticed the flower she was holding and turned back to Marta. ‘I left that at stage door for you. I’m quite hurt that you should have given it away already.’
‘You left it? Why?’ Marta looked astonished, and Josephine could see very clearly who was in control of the alliance – whatever the alliance was. She remembered what Archie had said about Vintner’s son, and realised the danger she had put herself in. How could she have been so stupid?
‘I don’t know why I left it, really,’ Vintner was saying. ‘Let’s call it filial affection, shall we?’
‘Rafe, don’t – not in front of . . .’ but Marta was interrupted before she could finish.
‘Oh, the game’s up, Mother,’ Vintner said. ‘It’s a shame, I agree –
my career was going rather well and I really did want that part in
know that a little bird’s just flown down from Berwick-upon-Tweed to spoil the fun we’ve been having. In fact, she’s probably doing it as we speak. That’s why I’m here now – to tie up a few loose ends.’
Marta looked at her son as though he had gone completely insane, but Josephine was piecing together the most terrible of pictures. When she had considered a connection between Marta and Elliott Vintner, the stumbling block had been Marta’s lack of grief for Elspeth; could the explanation for that really be that she was somehow implicated in her murder? Like most people, Josephine was reluctant to believe that a mother was capable of harming her child, and she stared at the woman she thought she had been getting to know in utter disbelief. What sort of monster would con-spire with one of her children to destroy the other? Marta looked back in desperation, as if pleading with Josephine not to judge her, but suddenly her expression changed to one of pure fear. Turning round, Josephine saw that Rafe Vintner had placed himself in between her and the door. He had removed a scarf from a battered leather holdall and was now carefully unrolling it. Inside was a gun.
‘Don’t Rafe, please!’ Marta cried, but Vintner was already moving back towards Josephine. Before she had a chance to register what was happening, he had grabbed her arm and turned her roughly round and she felt his breath on the back of her neck. The barrel of the gun was pressed hard into the small of her back and, in that moment, she understood what it meant to know true fear.
She had written about it many times and, in the past, had been afraid for others – for Jack, of course, and for her mother as she lay dying – but this blind terror was something altogether different. It was a selfish, humiliating emotion, stronger than anything she had ever known.
‘Don’t you think it’s a little late for such a sudden change of heart,
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Vintner laughed quietly. ‘So this is the great but elusive Josephine Tey,’ he said. ‘You know, Mother, she’s not at all like the woman you described to me at the railway station when you were trying to tell me who to kill. How could you have got it so wrong? Still, there’s always a second chance.’ He turned back to Marta. ‘You believe in second chances, don’t you Mother? That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Being a family again after all these years. So don’t go soft on me now – we started this together and we haven’t finished yet.’
This time, the shock served to strengthen Josephine’s resolve rather than destroy it. ‘You told him to kill me?’ she asked, looking incredulously at Marta. ‘Why the hell would you want to do that?’
Marta stayed silent. ‘Perhaps I was being a little disingenuous there,’ Vintner said. ‘It was my idea. After what you did to my father, you surely can’t wonder why
Mother just offered to help me out. We’ve been estranged for a while, you see, and she was so pleased to see me that I think she’d have agreed to anything.’ Marta opened her mouth to speak but he interrupted her. ‘There’s no need for secrecy now, not with our little friend here,’ he said, gesturing with the gun. ‘And I’m sure Josephine would like to know that you weren’t exactly opposed to the idea of bumping her off.’ He put his mouth closer to Josephine’s ear. ‘In fact, it was her idea to do it in a crowd – she thought it would be a nice tribute to your little crime novel. And she had her own reasons for wanting you dead. It’s a shame you don’t have time to talk to her about them.’
‘But you killed . . .’ Josephine began, but Vintner put his hand quickly over her mouth. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘I see you’re a few steps ahead of us, but all in good time. It’s a shame to rush a good story – you should know that.’ He paused. ‘Where was I? Ah yes –
your murder. You see, Mother was supposed to point you out to me and make herself scarce. The thing is, she was a little bit hasty in getting out of the way. She didn’t wait to meet you properly and confused you with someone else, so she gave me the wrong information. Before you got here just now, she was even blaming Lydia 253
for saying something about a hat.’ He shrugged his shoulders and added sarcastically, ‘A tragedy.’
With a mixture of horror, incredulity and pity, Josephine realised that Marta had no idea who her son had killed at King’s Cross. As if to prove her right, Marta spoke again.
‘You’re frightening me, Rafe. This is not what the plan was.
We’re no nearer to finding your sister now than we were when I agreed to help you, and you promised we’d be a family again. I thought you wanted that as much as I do.’
‘Aren’t I enough for you then?’ Vintner spat the words out, and the bitterness in his voice was almost as palpable to Josephine as the gun which rested in her back. She could not see his face, but she could tell from the growing fear in Marta’s that the agreement which she had believed to exist between them was gradually being exposed as a lie. ‘Do you have to have your bastard daughter to play happy families?’ he continued, and Marta flinched as if the blow had been a physical one. ‘Anyway, if you want to talk about promises, what about your promises to me? Like the one you made to add a little something to Bernard Aubrey’s whisky. Thank God I didn’t trust you to carry that off.’
‘I couldn’t do it – we’d already made one mistake.’ Marta was crying again now. ‘And he didn’t need to die.’
‘Oh he did, you know. He was far too close to the truth about everything, so it’s just as well I made sure, isn’t it? That’s one broken promise. Then there are the promises you made to your husband, of course. You didn’t keep those for very long, did you?’
‘We’ve been through this time and time again. Your father was an evil man.’
‘How the hell would you know? You turned your back on him after five minutes of marriage. He went off to fight
