The Killing of Olga Klimt (16 page)

‘Have you any idea why Joan should have wanted to come here?’ Antonia asked.

‘No. No idea at all.’

‘Perhaps she wanted to kill me?’ Olga suggested. ‘When we were at the Albert Hall, she said she would kill me, didn’t she, Charlie?’

‘She did, yes, but that was some time ago. I can’t believe she still wanted to do it. I’d have thought it highly unlikely.’ Charlie stroked Olga’s hair.

‘Some girls don’t forget such things,’ Olga pointed out.

‘You said the front door was open and the key was in the lock,’ Payne said. ‘You mean on the outside?’

‘Yes. I took it out.’ Charlie nodded. ‘Oh my God, my fingerprints are everywhere now, aren’t they? All round the place!’

‘I am afraid so. You will have some explaining to do when the police come.’ Payne glanced at his watch. ‘But don’t worry. We’ll all have some explaining to do. My fingerprints are also all round the place, so are my wife’s. So it seems Joan was killed as she was letting herself into the house,’ Payne stroked his chin with his forefinger. ‘Now then, how did Joan get hold of the key?’

‘She might have stolen it from old Collingwood. She used to be his secretary,’ Charlie explained. ‘This used to be his property. I am sure he still has a couple of front-door keys. The locks haven’t been changed since his time.’

Payne turned to Olga. ‘If my calculations are correct, you arrived at the clinic only moments after Charlie left?’

Olga agreed that she must have done. The nurses had told her that Charlie had suddenly left, they had no idea where he’d gone. ‘They were very worried. They were wondering what to do. They asked me to sit and wait. They thought that
if I stayed there, Charlie would come back. They thought Charlie was looking for me. They made me a cup of tea. Then I phoned Charlie.’

‘Thank God you did!’

‘Charlie was so happy! Oh he was so happy! He couldn’t believe it was me at first! He said he was here, at Philomel Cottage. He told me to come.’ Olga’s smile faded. ‘The body was in the hall – it was horrible – the blood! There was blood on the floor. She had been stabbed in the back. There was blood on her coat. It was horrible.’

‘No knife?’

‘No knife. The nursery nut must have taken it with her,’ Charlie said. ‘She must have got rid of it by now. Dropped it in the river or into the Serpentine or something.’

Olga said, ‘Charlie wanted to hide the body. I told him it was stupid. How do you hide a dead body?’

‘How indeed. It would have been an incredibly daft thing to do.’ Payne nodded. ‘You are absolutely right.’

‘He wanted to bury it in the back garden,’ Olga said.

‘I couldn’t think of anything else.’ Charlie looked sheepish.

‘The police would have been able to trace Joan’s movements to this place soon enough,’ Payne said. ‘Her disappearance would have been noticed – by tomorrow lunchtime at the latest. There are CCTV cameras everywhere. What does she do? I mean, did – did she have a job?’

‘She used to be old Collingwood’s secretary, as I said.’ Charlie frowned. ‘Then she went to work for some Tory MP, I think. No idea which one. If she ever told me, I’ve forgotten.’

‘Where did she live?’

‘She shared a flat with two other girls. In Kensington or was it in Chelsea? She doesn’t get on with her father. Didn’t. Her mother is in a hospice in Wiltshire. She’s terminally ill. Cancer, I think. It’s all terribly sad, I see that now.’ Charlie bowed his head.

‘D’you have any idea why she dyed her hair blond?’ Antonia asked suddenly.

Charlie blinked. ‘No. No idea at all. The last time I saw her, her hair was brown. Joan’s hair was light brown. That was her natural colour.’

‘She didn’t do it in the hope of making herself look like Olga? With the intention of winning you back?’ Major Payne suggested. ‘Girls do odd things in the name of love.’

Charlie frowned. ‘That would never have worked … I thought she had got over me … I keep telling you … Actually, I heard she’s started seeing someone else … Came as a relief … ’

‘It’s horrible – we are sitting and talking about her while she is lying in the cupboard, dead!’ Olga cried.

‘Well, it’s time we called the police.’ Payne produced his mobile phone.

‘No, wait.’ Olga rose abruptly. She went up to where Antonia sat and took her hands. ‘It will be all right, won’t it? I am very frightened. The police won’t think it was me that killed Joan, will they? I mean they may think I have a reason to want her dead – because of Charlie? They won’t think she came here to see me and that we quarrelled and then I got angry and stabbed her, will they?’

‘I can’t say what the police will think, but you don’t stab people in the back when you are quarrelling with them. Don’t worry.’ Antonia tried to be reassuring. ‘We also seem to be forgetting that there is already someone who has confessed to the murder. Fenella Frayle did, didn’t she? All Charlie will have to do is tell his story. Wait a minute,’ she told Payne. ‘Don’t ring yet.’

‘Will they believe me though? That’s what worries me,’ Charlie said. ‘I mean, it will be my word against hers, won’t it? OK, there is the call she made to the clinic and they will probably be able to trace it to Miss Frayle’s mobile phone, if
she used her mobile phone, that is, though she may not have. In the end it will be only my word that she told me she had killed Olga. I don’t think they’ll believe me. The whole thing is too fantastic! Do you see? It’s too idiotic for words.’

‘I do see,’ Antonia said. ‘It
is
fantastic.’

‘All Miss Frayle will need to do is deny it. Somehow,’ Charlie went on gloomily, ‘I don’t see her admitting to the police she killed a perfect stranger to oblige me – do you? She is a highly respectable figure. She invites immediate trust. She doesn’t look like a nut at all. She sounds frightfully composed and rational. You wouldn’t say she looked like a nut, would you?’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ Antonia gave a little smile. ‘Though my grandson seemed to have some reservations about her. I wonder if that means he’ll grow up to be a fine judge of character.’

‘Unless they traced the knife to her in some way, there would be absolutely no proof that it was a case of mistaken identity, that she killed Joan thinking it was Olga!’

There was a pause. Antonia came to a decision. She slowly got to her feet. ‘I think we should go and see Miss Frayle, Hugh. She lives at a place called Jevanny Lodge. She lives above her school.’

‘She calls it her “snuggery”,’ Charlie said.

‘Actually it would be best if I went alone. You stay here and wait for the police.’

‘Are you sure?’ Payne asked.

‘Yes. I’ll go in the car, if you don’t mind. I think it would be better if I saw her before the police did. She knows me. It would be well, kinder. She’ll be more inclined to open the door to me at this time of night. I am after all little Eddy Rushton’s grandmother. Besides she’s read two of my novels.’

Charlie stared at her. ‘Good God. Do you write
detective
stories?’ Suddenly he grinned. ‘Well,
that
explains it!’

Payne cocked an eyebrow. ‘You think you have a chance of getting her to confess?’

‘I don’t know. I will try my best.’ Antonia shrugged. ‘Wait about ten minutes before you call the police, will you? I want to talk to her without being interrupted.’

‘Very well, my love. Do be careful,’ Payne said.

Antonia drove in the direction of the Sylvie & Bruno Nursery School as fast as she could. ‘Hell for leather,’ she murmured. (Did anyone ever use the expression nowadays?)

She found herself trying to imagine the experts in violent death arriving at Philomel Cottage. She hated police procedurals, so she was vague about it. There would be a team consisting of a detective inspector, a police sergeant, a police surgeon, a photographer or two, a print man, whom she envisaged as having small delicate hands, several plain-clothes men who would no doubt subject every room in the house to a methodical search. They would be carrying with them their peculiar paraphernalia and specific skills.

She could see them very clearly now, hard-faced, bleary-eyed men and, possibly, a woman or two, standing around, looking as though they would rather be somewhere else …

Antonia had forced herself to read a couple of police procedurals and found them tedious, but she understood they had a following. Well,
chacun à son goût
…

She imagined Hugh sitting patiently on the sofa, smoking his pipe, his legs crossed, giving every appearance of being unperturbed, waiting for his turn to be interviewed.

‘Major Payne? You say you have nothing to do with any of this? Then what the hell are you doing here?’

No, they wouldn’t say ‘hell’; they would be politer. But they wouldn’t allow Hugh to smoke his pipe inside the house, would they? They might even confiscate it if he refused to put it out! Poor Hugh. Would the inspector take Charlie’s story of the exchanged murders seriously? Actually she had no idea. Poor Charlie.

The scene of the crime would be taped off. Every scrap of paper, threads of fabric, shreds of wood, pieces of plastic, hairs from the kitten, bits from Olga’s make-up, the detritus of everyday living would be rescued and examined to see whether it could add to the picture of how Joan Selwyn had died and at whose hands …

In her detective novels Antonia (writing as ‘Antonia Darcy’) never attempted to mystify her readers with the mechanical, the technical, the ballistic, nor, for that matter, with the forensic. Some thought it a weakness, but Antonia didn’t care. She hated doing research – she feared she wouldn’t get it right because she found the process so boring. Procedural verisimilitude simply had no place in her kind of plot.

Antonia was famous – some said notorious – for allotting the police only a tangential part in her novels. Actually, in one or two of her books the police did not appear at all. The investigation was invariably conducted by a pair of gifted amateurs. Gifted amateurs might be an anachronism, but hers were carefully camouflaged by mobile phones, references to Google, Twitter and Facebook and lashings of self-deprecating wit. (Were Charlie and Olga on Facebook? They were the right age for it.)

Antonia pulled her thoughts back to the murder at Philomel Cottage. There were some questions that needed to be answered. Who was the person that had phoned Olga and told
her to go to Doctor Bishop’s clinic? Why had that phone call been made in the first place?

Joan Selwyn must have arrived at Philomel Cottage soon after Olga left. What had Joan Selwyn been hoping to achieve? She had had a front-door key in her pocket and she seemed to have been stabbed in the back as she was about to enter the house. Miss Frayle must have followed her … Well, yes … Miss Frayle was the killer … Miss Frayle had believed Joan to be Olga, so she killed her …

Antonia wondered whether they were not dealing with two murderers, both intent on the same target. How did that work out? Enter First Murderer, former girlfriend Joan Selwyn. Joan had only pretended to be over Charlie whereas in point of fact she was still hankering after him. The fact that she had dyed her hair blonde could be interpreted as pointing in that direction. Unrequited passion, as Hugh had put it once, was the devil.

Antonia tried to envisage the scene. Joan has acquired a key and she is in the process of unlocking the front door with it, her intention being to hide somewhere inside the house and wait for Olga. But just then the Second Murderer arrives. Fenella Frayle is carrying a knife in her pocket. It’s getting dark and she sees a blonde girl standing in the doorway with her back to her. She is convinced that it is Olga and she goes up to her and stabs her in the back – which introduces the joint elements of dark irony and poetic justice into the proceedings.

But Joan had no weapon of any kind on her. They had checked her pockets. No gun, no knife, no blunt instrument. Could she have intended to strangle Olga? Or had she hoped to use something from inside the house? The poker? There had been no gloves on her hands or in her pockets either. Had she planned to do it with her bare hands then? It was possible, people did do illogical things, especially if they were in the grip of a powerful emotion, but Antonia was not convinced …

There it was. Jevanny Lodge. The Sylvie & Bruno Nursery School. That was where it had all started. There were enough street lights, so the place did not look as sinister as it might have done. Only one window on the first floor was lit. Miss Frayle’s snuggery? So she was in.

Antonia pushed open the little gate and walked up to the front door. Suddenly she shivered, though the evening was not particularly cold. Someone walking on my grave, Antonia thought. She remembered Hugh had urged her to be careful …

She rang the front-door bell.

As there was no answer, she rang the bell again. She stood and waited. Nothing. She glanced up at the lit window. No shadowy silhouettes. No movement. The curtains were drawn across the window.

Antonia reached out for the knocker. She heard the ‘bang-bang-bang' reverberate inside the house. Then she did it again. Someone was passing in the street and, with the corner of her eye, she saw them pause. Possessed by a spirit of recklessness, Antonia drew back a little, away from the door, and called out, ‘Miss Frayle? Miss Frayle? Are you there? Are you all right?'

Miss Frayle wouldn't want a rumpus, Antonia reflected. Not at a moment like this.

‘Miss Frayle! Will you open up, please?' Antonia called out in a louder voice. She then picked up a pebble and threw it at the window. She heard a tinkling sound as it hit the pane.

Nothing. A thought crossed her mind.
Fenella Frayle might have killed herself
. Some murderers committed suicide. Fenella Frayle was not a hardened criminal; rather she was someone who had had a moment of madness …

‘Miss Frayle?' Antonia shouted again. ‘I am going to call an ambulance!'

She felt extremely self-conscious since she hated raising her voice, but she realised she was doing this for her own personal safety as well. Fenella Frayle was less likely to attempt killing her if there had been a rumpus outside her front door. Passers-by might remember the woman bawling outside the Sylvie & Bruno Nursery School shortly after ten in the evening …