Barry Maitland: Dark Mirror

There were tears in his eyes now, and the three other people in the room, despite their long experience of such situations, drew back a little in embarrassment.

‘When she hid her Cornell paper from me, and I began to suspect the way in which it was intended to undermine me, I felt bitterly betrayed. Her disloyalty was like a knife in my heart. But I never, for one moment, thought of hurting her. That is obscene.’

Silence filled the room, then Brock said mildly, ‘Where were you on the afternoon and evening of Wednesday the eleventh of this month, Dr da Silva?’

‘What?’

‘A week ago, between the hours of three and eight. Please think carefully before you answer.’

Da Silva frowned, then reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a small diary. ‘Umm… lunch with Dr Ringland, a two o’clock lecture, then…’ He looked up. ‘I believe I went up to the British Library.’

‘What was the lecture?’

‘Victorian literature.’

‘To?’

‘Third-year arts students mainly. Why?’

‘Tina Flowers was in that class, wasn’t she?’

‘Um… it’s possible, I suppose.’

‘And then she went to the British Library, where, shortly after four o’clock, she requested two books. Do you know what they were?’

‘How could I?’

‘Because the following morning you returned to the library as soon as it opened, and requested those same two books, books so obscure that almost nobody else has ever requested them.’

‘Um… I believe I do remember. Marion had told me about them.’

Brock shook his head impatiently. ‘You followed Tina after the lecture up to the British Library, and watched her order the two books, one of which was the source of Marion’s revelations in her Cornell paper. You had been unable to find that book because it was stored in one of the special collections, the papers of the Havelock family, a name slightly different from the one you’d been searching for-Haverlock.

Da Silva sat rigid in his chair.

‘Where is that book now, Dr da Silva? You collected it the following day, but never returned it. Where is it?’

He said nothing, jaw locked.

‘Did you hide it somewhere in the library?’ Kathy pressed.

For a moment it seemed he would keep silent, but then he gave a kind of shudder and whispered, ‘She just read and read and read, completely engrossed, but she seemed to make no notes, nor photocopies, before the library was closing and she had to hand it back. So the next morning I was there before her and took out the book. It was a scurrilous store of gossip, that’s all; a travesty, full of innuendo and rumour. Marion should never have considered it seriously. It was unconscionable that it should cause so much distress. I knew exactly what Rossetti would want me to do with the damn thing, and I did it.’

‘You did what?’ Kathy asked softly.

‘I destroyed it,’ he said defiantly. ‘I tore it into shreds and flushed it down the loo. There, I destroyed a library book. You can arrest me for that.’

‘But Tina had read it,’ Brock said, ‘just as Marion had before her, so you had to destroy her, too, didn’t you?’

•

Guiltily, Kathy now also felt like a disloyal daughter. Brock was energised by the arrest, firing instructions to the team-her team-to fill the gaps in their case against da Silva. She worked with him, of course, following up his ideas, adding her own, yet all the time she held back a little, feeling they’d got something wrong. It worried her that he hadn’t been immersed in the case as she had been, but was that just pique at having him take over now? But if there was some flaw, it was up to her, who should have developed a deeper understanding of the dynamics, to put her finger on it.

She puzzled over this later that night, when she finally got home and sat on her sofa with a burger on her lap, staring up at her wall. The diagram, she had to admit, looked pretty convincing with da Silva in the centre, the perfect counterpart to Marion’s pattern on the left with Rossetti in that central place, ringed by his women, and Kathy could almost sense that Marion would have approved. So what was wrong?

She went to bed without an answer, overtired and uneasy. She soon fell into a deep sleep, only to wake again after a couple of hours. Her brain immediately began whirring with images of imagined scenes-Marion collapsing in the library, Pip in the pub with Rafferty and Crouch, Ogilvie tumbling down the library stairs, Douglas Warrender meeting Marion in Bastia, then returning across flower-covered hills to suffer a pool-side barbecue with his family and friends…

No, that was wrong. She opened her eyes in the pitch-dark room, remembering Warrender’s remark in St James’s Park: We were a perfect couple, making friends with other holidaying couples at the local restaurants, entertaining neighbours around the pool…

A perfect couple, not a perfect family. Was Emily with them? Kathy realised they’d never checked.

And suddenly it came to her that what had been wrong from the start was the way in which Marion and Tina had died. It was entirely plausible that da Silva, or Douglas Warrender, or even Keith Rafferty, might have desperately wanted Marion dead. But how would they do it? A hit and run, perhaps. An attack in a dark street. A strangling in a car, the body dumped. Something desperate, brutal and anonymous. But not arsenic poisoning.

The way Marion died had felt… what? Bizarre, certainly. Eccentric? That wasn’t quite it. Rather elaborate and clever, with its references to her studies. Too much so. Like a student prank. It reminded Kathy of those student pranks at school on April Fools’ Day, the bucket of water balanced over the door, the boot polish on the door handle, the collapsing chair. Elaborately staged, spectacular in their effects and at their best-or worst-cruelly matched to their intended victim.

She simply couldn’t imagine any of those men doing it that way. The diagram on her wall was all wrong, she realised. She had been so influenced by Marion’s, with its brooding male at the centre. Perhaps it wasn’t like that at all.

A final image came into Kathy’s mind, of Emily sitting sobbing on the leather sofa, as pale and racked as the two victims, whose symptoms she almost seemed to mimic. Da Silva wasn’t the only one who’d been at the British Library when Tina died. Emily had been there too. thirty

S uzanne also spent a disturbed night. Angela’s story about Dougie had unsettled her more than she’d been prepared to admit to herself. He had been her first great love, a dazzling figure against whose memory later boys had been measured and invariably found wanting. Even much later, when she matured and married, the summer in Notting Hill remained a lost Eden in her mind, to be nurtured and occasionally savoured in secret. Angela’s story had thrown all that into a new, grotesque perspective, and one that, if it were remotely true, resonated horribly with the case David was working on. She shuddered to think of the ramifications if she told him; but suppose Angela, who obviously hadn’t heard of the connection between Marion Summers and the Warrenders, did eventually pick it up, and decide to tell her story to the police? Where would Suzanne be then? One way or another, she didn’t see how she could keep it to herself without some kind of reassurance that the story was nonsense. She couldn’t approach Dougie, that was unthinkable, but in the end she decided that there was perhaps just one person who might put her mind to rest. And so, that Wednesday evening while Brock and Kathy were charging Tony da Silva with Marion’s murder, Suzanne had phoned the house in Notting Hill and asked to speak to Lady Joan Warrender.

Joan remembered her straight away. She was polite, but naturally puzzled at being approached like this, especially after Sophie had told them all about how angry she’d got with DCI Brock.