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Authors: Clare Curzon

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BOOK: Last to Leave
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Even while she allowed herself to appear won round she fumed against them inside. How crass to insult her further with promises of childish treats. The ultimate indignity had been to have all choice removed: to be put under and operated on like a sick cat at the vet's. And be turned out a common bottle blonde.
She shrugged at their plans, keeping up a barrier of sulkiness. That was all for tomorrow. Tonight there was to be sea bass and chargrilled peppers followed by a pineapple torta with toffee sauce. Then Scrabble or backgammon while Stefano sang, serenading them with his guitar.
Jess endured the pantomime stiff-faced, inside coldly vowing revenge. They mustn't guess her new appearance could be turned to advantage. And there was one added point in its favour: when eventually Kate got to see it, all the air would go out of her sails. Speechless, she might forget to ask the most embarrassing questions.
 
Seated at Eddie's bedside, Kate was startled as one of the nurses came in quietly behind her. ‘Tea, Mrs Dellar?'
She hadn't been dozing; simply trapped in mental miasma, and it was good to be rescued from it. She took the proffered cup with a weary smile and cradled it in her lap.
She sat well back, allowing the nurses freedom of access. Although Eddie remained totally immobile there was so much to be done for him: constant checking of heart and blood pressure; drips to be overseen and kept flowing, then replaced; urine bags emptied; notes to be made up for the surgeon's round.
Only the sighing
clunk
of the ventilator assured her that he was, at least mechanically, functioning. She fixed her eyes again on his still face, the dark sweep of eyelashes lying along his unlined cheek. The five o'clock shadow that proclaimed him a mature man seemed a mockery.
This was a distorted replay of how she'd watched over him soon after his birth, Eddie the later twin to be born.
Jess, ever impetuous, had thrust herself into the world, lustily crying. Eddie had taken his time, lying awkwardly. There had been anxiety that with delay his breathing would be affected. Yet he had made it to the outside.
For several weeks he'd seemed frailer, slower, with a more tenuous hold on life than his more robust sister. Even when Kate had both babies home he was the one she most often stole in at night to check on.
But with the years all that had changed. He'd gathered strength, put on weight, grown into a sturdy, thoughtful little boy. At puberty he'd shot up, overtaken his sister in height, proved himself in athletics as well as with academic work. A sensible, sensitive, kindly personality, well able to take care of himself.
And now, suddenly, it had gone full circle, so that he was helpless again, and she must watch, powerless to do anything for him. Her hurt was overwhelming, physical.
She believed that for two days she had been his only visitor. Surely there was someone else who could take a turn sitting here, talking, in the hope that a familiar voice could reach through to his unconscious mind and stimulate it into action. She wondered if perhaps it worked away inside despite his outer stillness. What kind of dreams would he be having? There was no way to read that from his passive face.
She would give anything to have Jess here alongside, chattering and teasing in the way that never failed to get him going. Others would be useless at that.
Last evening she had sat alone in her cottage and watched dusk soften the outlines of her garden until all colour was sucked away and only the white lilac remained dimly visible, floating on the dark. It had seemed like life draining away. When she spoke by phone with Night Sister she'd learnt Eddie's condition was still unchanged. But
stable
. That new word had brought a small measure of comfort.
Later the young woman detective had called in with the wonderful news about Jess. That the charred body was someone else.
Or it had seemed wonderful until she realized it was still a violent death. Some unknown mother had lost a child in her place. It seemed shameful to feel such enormous relief.
And still nobody knew where Jess had gone off to without leaving word. It was appallingly rude, especially to Claudia and Carlton. If they hadn't had their minds full of their own losses they might have been more censorious. Undoubtedly, now that she'd phoned them about the body in the burnt-out house, they would be attributing Jess's omission to bad upbringing.
More black points against me, Kate thought wearily. I can't do anything right for them. Some people have to cope with a dysfunctional family. The Dellars are something else: individually
hyper
-functional, with each of them going all out to do his or her own thing, and the devil take any other consideration.
She ran through the events since Friday afternoon. With Dr Marion Paige she had felt some empathy because she too was an outsider: not a Dellar. But then, none of the family could be totally Dellar. At least half of their genes were from elsewhere, from people like Matthew's dead wife Joanna or herself; from dear Michael's mother too. She'd brought a new strain into the family, diluted the Dellar self-sufficiency. It was she who accounted for Michael having been so different, lovable and loving; appreciating a world of people outside himself.
But hadn't Carlton's and Matthew's mother been an outsider too? Maybe some of what disturbs me about the others was down to her, Kate thought; that first wife of Grandfather Frederick. We don't know enough about the past, about those who were dead before we lived. That is one way in which I really believe in ghosts – the inescapable genes that they leave to haunt us.
And then
Claudia
: also an outsider. How had it come
about that she was the most Dellar of all? – almost setting the pattern: the poison in the pool. (Kate didn't know where those words came from. They sounded like a poetic quote.)
It was hard to think of Claudia as ever not having been a Dellar. She was so much the prototype. She considered no one's feelings when she spoke or acted; took no prisoners. Kate could not believe she loved her elderly husband. She was simply the dragon guarding his gate. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship, like rocks and barnacles, but Kate wasn't sure who was which.
Carlton lived isolated in his imaginings, surviving physically under her shadow. For Claudia, Carlton was her
raison d'être,
providing material security and nourishment. Little wonder then that when, amazingly, this disparate couple had produced a child she should turn out so strangely detached as Miranda.
Back to Marion Paige, no longer the new enigma. Kate believed they'd much in common. Both watched people, observed things about them, saw their strengths and weaknesses. But overnight her feelings about the woman had shifted. The difference between us, Kate realized, is that I try not to work on what I see. Particularly I've tried with my children. Marion, she was sure, picked up on others' foibles and made use of them. Her compulsion was to manipulate.
Which made her wonder quite why Marion intended to marry Robert, whom she obviously found transparent. The look she'd given him across the garden hadn't actually been doting. With new, sharper insight Kate knew then: in secret Marion despised him. Her expression at that moment had been one of slightly disguised contempt. And Robert – once-bitten in marriage, surely twice a harder nut to crack – was nevertheless in thrall to Marion, who would twist him to fit her requirements.
Kate shuddered. Oh God, she thought wretchedly; must I dislike them all? What's wrong with me? Perhaps, just
now, I'm paranoid. Put it down to shock. Otherwise why should I feel revulsion for the one person who'd at first appeared to be kind?
Is there no one I like?
Old Carlton: yes, she was quite fond of him, but warily. He could diminish one too easily. The more so if you let drop the protection of banter. Appearing so mild, so woolly-minded, he was the keenest of the lot; the most capable of withering the spirit with a word. She knew her own attitude was one of subservience: the underdog, nervously self-protective.
And Matthew was a sadist despite his courtly veneer: the legal raptor. Madeleine had little time for anything but horses. Her husband and his son Jake didn't really count.
What other Dellars were there? Only Miranda, the panicky hermit crab, poor girl.
On Tuesday morning Miranda Dellar was following her mother downstairs with a suitcase in one hand and the tartan rug over the other arm. She counted the eighteen steps to this lower flight, then twenty-seven repetitions of the fleur-de-lys pattern on the bottom line of the wallpaper as far as the hotel's outer door.
There had been five hundred and eighty-two square tiles in her bathroom upstairs. She felt safer if she knew.
Her lips moved as she passed over the flagstones out to the cab. Claudia was standing beside it and gave her a hard stare. Miranda closed her mouth tightly, and accidentally her eyes, so that she blundered into the open door of the waiting taxi. Her mother's breath escaped in a controlled
whoosh.
Miranda let the cabbie take the case from her hand and tried to step in, clumsily entangled with the rug. It was snatched from her. She took the seat in the far corner of the rear. The car had eight panes of glass for its windows, including the windscreen. There had been ten clouds in the sky when she woke up this morning. Now there were thirty-three smaller ones. That was good. She didn't know why, but it made her feel better. Clouds you could have a game with, because they were always changing. Too many other things stayed, fearfully, the same.
Not Jessica, though. Like the sky, every time she saw her cousin, Jessica was different. She came and went, like a wild dog that had never had a lead on. The policeman with the puppet face had asked last night when she'd last seen Jessica, and she'd said Friday, downstairs after dinner, just like everyone else. She'd remembered, because then Jessica had been going out to the terrace wearing a necklace with fifteen shiny green stones hung from a fine gold chain.
Something she hadn't mentioned was seeing the white
oblong of the letter being drawn from under Jess's door much later. That was because she hadn't seen the hand that took it in, though she had seen Flo, who worked in the kitchen, when she came back to deliver the letter. The policeman hadn't asked about her.
Miranda had been sitting on a library windowsill, (forty-eight small panes in a six by eight arrangement over its two sashes), and wondering at all the empty spaces on the shelves. Only one hundred and twenty-two books left. She wondered what had happened to the rest.
When Flo came indoors she'd silently followed her up the sixteen uncarpeted steps of the backstairs and watched as she pushed the paper under Jessica's door. Flo hadn't seen her standing back in the shadows. When Flo had gone she'd waited there five hundred and thirteen seconds until the note had been pulled fully in. But she hadn't seen Jessica do it. Then she'd felt tired and gone to bed.
Well, the questioning was past and over now, she consoled herself, as the taxi gathered speed over the short trip to the old house. (In passing she counted seventeen cows in Harper's field; then two police vans in their old driveway; a white plastic tent with five men in white overalls still examining the pit they'd dug where the kitchen used to be.)
She stepped down and waited while her mother paid off the cab. (Five pound coins and three fifty-pence pieces. No change.) It drove off, the suitcase and rug having been transferred into the ancient Daimler. Claudia backed it out of the stables. A white-overalled man came across to speak to her and didn't seem pleased at what she told him. Then, seated behind her parents, Miranda was in the soot-smudged Daimler on their way to Cooden Beach, Sussex. To the holiday bungalow, which Mother said was all the home they had now.
The Daimler had just left the M40 at the M25 junction when a patrol car came up behind, flashing its lights. ‘I was doing sixty-five in the centre lane,' Claudia dictated grimly
to Carlton as she pulled onto the hard shoulder. ‘I want you to stand witness to that.'
The police car pulled in ahead and a plain-clothes man got out, approaching with his warrant card extended. He wasn't one they'd met already. ‘DC Silver,' he introduced himself cheerfully. ‘I'm afraid you failed to inform my inspector that you were moving out of the Thames Valley area.'
‘I have just informed one of your men who was examining the old house,' Claudia said icily. ‘And obviously he has passed that fact on to you. Will you now kindly let us continue our journey.'
‘When you have satisfactorily answered a few more questions, madam. May I know the address you're making for?'
Claudia opened her mouth to put him in his place. ‘Oh, tell him and have done with it,' Carlton muttered, foreseeing complications.
Claudia frigidly dictated the address. ‘It is a holiday bungalow.'
‘And how long are you intending to stay there?'
‘Really, young man, I don't see that …'
‘Indefinitely, I imagine,' said Carlton. ‘We have nowhere else to go at present. Fortunately we left a few of our possessions there last autumn.'
‘Thank you, sir. In that case we shall be in touch with the Sussex police force, and if there are further questions we need to ask, you may expect a visit from them.'
‘Is that really necessary?'
‘This is a major crime, sir. An unidentified body was found in your house. We need to find out who else might have been present overnight, apart from your family as listed.'
‘How on earth would we know?' Claudia interrupted impatiently. ‘Obviously somebody broke in, a stranger, and set fire to the place.'
‘I understand you employed a catering firm that evening,
who left in their van at ten-fifteen. All are accounted for. Was there anyone else, a domestic help of any kind …?'
‘Florence from the village, she stayed on to clear up. I was paying her overtime. She came for her money at about ten to eleven.'
‘And left straight after?'
‘I assume so. She had her hat on and a bag with some leftover food.'
‘Right. I shall need her full name and address, madam.'
‘Florence Carden. She lives in one of the old almshouses down Church Lane. Either the third or fourth. That's all I can tell you.'
‘The third,' Miranda muttered.
DC Silver peered into the dim rear of the old car. ‘Ah, miss. Anything you can add?'
His face loomed palely through the glass like a white-bellied fish in an aquarium and startled her into speech.
‘She came back. Not right then. Much later, after midnight.'
Everyone was staring. She closed her eyes and waited for the fury to burst on her, but the detective got there first. ‘You saw her? Where did she go?'
‘She's imagining it,' Claudia rapped out. ‘She doesn't know what she's saying, constable.'
‘Where, Miranda?' Carlton quavered.
‘To the attics. She had a note for Jessica. She pushed it under her door.'
‘And then?' Silver pursued.
‘She went away. And I went to bed.'
Everyone relaxed a little. ‘That would account for the girl leaving,' Claudia said sharply. ‘An assignation with some lover, no doubt. And she hadn't the common courtesy to leave a note to explain she was going.'
‘How do you know she didn't?' Silver asked pertly, glad to put one over on the old trout. ‘In a blaze like that, what chance had a piece of paper?'
He'd have delayed them further if he could think what
else to fish for. As it was, he'd have a small tiddler to take back to the Salmon. But first he'd have a word with this Flo, who just might have observed something of interest about this stuck-up family. He hoped to find more commonsense in the kitchen department.
 
The extended Regional Crimes team had taken over the canteen for the morning's briefing, sitting around on tables, chairs and service counter. DI Salmon planted himself opposite the mobile whiteboard which had been rolled in from the Incident Room. ‘Settle down,' he growled and the conversation died.
His grotesque grin panned the watching faces. ‘It's like Christmas,' he told them, ‘the way crimes are being crammed into our stocking. First, we have suspected arson and the insurance adjusters sniffing round for reasons not to pay up. Second, overnight we discover an extra person gained access to the property, either by stealth or invitation. And thirdly this unidentified person is found burnt to a crisp. Fourthly, a young woman guest, Jessica Dellar, has gone unaccountably missing from the house. Fifthly, it appears she was a bit of a water gypsy. Her narrowboat on the canal near Denham has been broken into in her absence. A neighbouring boat-dweller quotes this as happening during the evening of Friday when she was with the Dellar family at the house that was torched, and the neighbour had gone to see a film in Slough. He discovered the padlock broken and the boat's contents disturbed when he went the following morning to – as he claims – “water her plants”.
‘Sixth, the young woman's brother, having escaped the fire and at present in a coma at High Wycombe hospital, has injuries consistent with being viciously attacked. While still conscious but confused, he claimed he had damaged himself blundering through a wood.
‘The bruises have now had time to develop and some are quite specific. Photographs are available in the Incident
Room.' Salmon grinned fiendishly, his grating voice laying on the heavy sarcasm. ‘As we all know, trees don't wear boots, so it's clear he was well and truly done over. Among other recognizable marks, his ribs were kicked in. His coma arose from a blood clot on the brain.
‘Some of you've had time to familiarize yourselves with the family in question. And the
question
gets more complicated as time goes on. It appears that the elderly householder, Carlton Dellar, his wife and adult daughter have removed themselves outside our authority. All further questioning must be by arrangement with the Sussex force. In view of the arson, as yet unofficially confirmed by the Senior Fire Officer, I want every detail of these people's financial affairs sifted. DC James, take a uniform officer and see what bank details you can get locally. Two estate agents have given the opinion that the property was in very poor shape and worth less than the valuable ground it stood on. Total destruction while so many were present in the house could have been an attempt to blur the issue and spread the blame.
‘The family has dispersed. From today Sir Matthew Dellar can be contacted at his daughter's home in Ascot. In view of his legal background we are already checking on death threats made to him when he was a Prosecuting Counsel, and more recently a Queen's Bencher. His daughter, her husband and stepson also live at the same address. His son, a city journalist with the
Independent
has returned to London and will be in touch with us daily.
‘The unidentified body may, I'm told, still yield DNA, so let's hope for a match already on our books – er, computer. There's an assumption that the body is male and fell through to the cellar with the collapse of the kitchen floor. Damage to bones in the throat indicate that he was strangled, and confirm the case is one of murder.
‘Your incident room manager is Sergeant Harry Thomas. Let him have your individual reports within half an hour of return to base. You will continue in the teams already
drawn up, and tasking will be arranged by your team leader. The fingertip search of the grounds at Larchmoor Place will resume immediately after this briefing. A mobile canteen will be laid on at midday. Any absence requests will be dealt with by myself. So think twice before you bother me. Any questions?'
A hand went up from a rear table. ‘The missing girl. What were her relations with the others?'
Salmon scowled. ‘She was family. Carlton Dellar's niece.'
‘Yeah, but I mean could she have duffed up her brother and then run off? Family doesn't mean they all got on well together, and these two were twins. Maybe too close for comfort.'
Salmon grunted. ‘What's your name?'
‘Callow, sir. Community PC.'
Salmon ignored the titters. ‘Well, Callow, you can look into that yourself and give me the answer by four o'clock. Anyone else?'
No one ventured further, and the briefing broke up. From his seat in the rear, Superintendent Yeadings folded his notes, rose stiffly to his feet and nodded across the room to Z. She would find him in his office.
He had barely gone three steps when DC Silver burst in from outdoors, red-faced and out of breath. ‘Sir,' he said desperately, to cover both Yeadings and Salmon. ‘Sorry I'm late. I've been chasing something up.'
‘And?' Yeadings enquired. Salmon glowered.
‘Carlton Dellar's daughter Miranda saw a note delivered to Jessica Dellar's room late on Friday night. It was Florence Carden, the kitchen help, who brought it, so I went and questioned her at her home. A nice old girl about sixty, she said it was from a young man, her sweetheart, who was waiting in the garden to speak to her. That is …'
‘Jessica's sweetheart, not the kitchen help's,' Yeadings suggested helpfully.
BOOK: Last to Leave
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