The Unquiet Dead (37 page)

Father Forrester continued: ‘It can be like a tiny leak. No one knows about the dripping pipe until the roof caves in.’

‘Father Eric, I’d like to ask you for another favour …’ She told him the address of the flat in the Lisson Grove Estate and outlined the task in hand.

‘What happened to this Romano fellow?’

Jessie looked around the room again. ‘His roof just caved in.’

‘He said he liked to think of his ex-wife in Spain, that she liked the food or something,’ said Burrows, reading back over his notebook. ‘We should get on to Interpol.’

‘I remember – the stuff about tomatoes, she liked tomatoes,’ said Jessie.

‘He grows them,’ said the young police officer. Everyone turned to look at him. ‘He showed them to me. He hands them out when he’s got a good crop.’

‘This is down on the allotment?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where you arrested him?’

‘That’s right. I’ve even helped him carry his stuff down there – what do you call it? He makes it himself to go on the garden …’

‘Compost?’ ventured Jessie.

‘Yeah, that’s it – compost.’

Jessie turned back to her officers, her fear reflected in their expressions.

‘He said she liked the feel of the sun on her bones,’ said Niaz. ‘Do you remember?’

‘What do you want me to do, boss?’ asked Burrows.

Jessie felt deeply disturbed by the inevitable conclusion they were all drawing to. ‘This is so sad,’ she said. She wanted the woman who had buried her son to be slicing vine tomatoes in the sunshine, sipping sherry and enjoying a little of life. But in her heart she knew that wasn’t the case.

‘Dig up his allotment. Start with the tomatoes.’

‘We’ll need a court order,’ said Burrows.

‘Then get one.’

Jessie felt heavy hearted as she walked up the stairs to her office. She had been right about Mr Romano all along, his grief had become his alibi, but that only depressed her more. Outside the canteen she toyed with the idea of eating, but found she had no stomach for it. A piece of well-thumbed newspaper fluttered as the canteen door swung closed on its hinge. The movement caught Jessie’s eye. She
walked towards the noticeboards. She expected an embarrassing ghost story. She found one, in full-colour copy. P.J. was photographed in the back of a stretch limo. He had a leggy blonde on either side. Models both, if the pose they struck for the intruding lens was anything to go by. P.J. had his hand up one of the girl’s skirts. They were girls, too. No more than eighteen. Jessie felt a lump in her throat and before she knew it, she’d ripped the page off the wall and thrown it in the bin. It missed. In her pocket she felt for the recently sealed envelope, the letter her brother had suggested she write, and scrunched it into a ball.

The next person to come out of the canteen was Mark. They looked at each other; he glanced at the clipping on the floor, then back at Jessie. He’d aged in a week. She wasn’t sure who looked worse. Slowly he bent down and picked up the offending article. He screwed it up and dropped it in the bin. Jessie was mute. As he walked past her, he squeezed her arm.

‘His loss,’ he said.

Jessie shook her head. ‘I don’t want your pity,’ she said quietly.

‘What do you want?’

‘Your support.’

Mark nodded once. ‘Ditto.’ He moved away.

‘I’m sorry about your –’ He held up his hand to silence her. She understood the gesture. It was too early for words of sympathy to cause anything other than more pain. Jessie bit down
on her lip as she watched his hunched shoulders walk away.

Outside her office was a young WPC whom Jessie liked.

‘I can’t –’ Jessie began, but the lump in her throat was making it difficult to talk.

‘There’s a woman in your office who needs to see you.’

Jessie shook her head. ‘I can’t –’

‘She says it’s very important. Her name is Clementine Colbert. She was the woman who –’

‘It’s okay,’ said Jessie, finding her voice. ‘I know who she is.’ She held up her hand. ‘Just give me a few minutes.’

The WPC retreated. ‘I’ll get you some tea.’

Tea, the panacea WPCs were taught to give to victims, thought Jessie. You didn’t need psychic powers to spot one. She leant back against the wall and summoned the strength to go on.

The Scott-Somers’ nanny had aged well. Like most Parisian women, she was immaculately dressed, with shiny, neatly cropped hair, and a silk scarf peeking out between the stiff collars of her white shirt.

‘I am a lawyer now,’ she said. ‘International law. I only took the job with the Scott-Somers to perfect my English …’ Clementine Colbert paused. ‘I stayed too long.’

‘How long were you having an affair with Mr Scott-Somers?’ asked Jessie.

The Frenchwoman’s eyes rose to meet hers. ‘Who told you?’

‘No one.’

‘I loved him,’ she said in plain English. ‘I was not a silly little girl with a crush on her boss, it was not like that. There was a real connection.’

‘Isn’t there always?’ said Jessie, more angry than she had a right to be.

‘I did not come here to justify our relationship. I came here to help you find Nancy and to explain.’

‘Why did you run away?’

‘I was making a phone call to Nico—Mr Scott-Somers when Nancy was taken. It was completely my fault and I was so scared about that, I fled. When little Charlotte arrived home without us, she told the staff that I had lost her and a man who looked like a bear had taken Nancy. They didn’t believe her, of course. She was always running off; it was just her way of making people notice her. She was not as attractive as her sister, who always got much more attention. Mrs Scott-Somers was not a very maternal woman. Anyway, no one believed Charlotte; perhaps Mr Scott-Somers did little to change the view that she had run from me. Everyone thought I had gone away because I was scared of the family, you see, that way it took the attention off me.’

‘And in doing so put a hefty charge on some very small shoulders,’ said Jessie.

‘No one was thinking straight.’

‘Clearly.’

Once again Clementine raised her chin defiantly. ‘Your opinion of me matters very little. I simply want to do my duty.’

A little late, thought Jessie, but she didn’t say anything.

‘He told me I must not come back. He was angry, of course. With me, with himself. I thought when things had passed, when the man was in jail, eventually we could …’ Wishing for it hadn’t made it happen, she couldn’t change the past. ‘But, as you know, they found me, the prosecution. I was subpoenaed, I had to go even though I had promised I wouldn’t. I meant what I said to Nancy that day in court: I
was
sorry. I
would
have done anything to make it up
to her
. My English was good enough to know what I was saying – they twisted my words, I did not know about the law then. I do now. That case should never have been thrown out of court. I don’t know who that lawyer was, but he pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes that day.’

‘He was paid for by Mr Scott-Somers.’

Clementine Colbert looked genuinely surprised.

‘It took me a little while to figure out that he was trying to protect himself. Not his family. Certainly not Nancy. Expensive divorce, and all that,’ continued Jessie.

Mr Scott-Somers’ mistress was completely serene when she spoke again. ‘No, it was
me
he was trying to protect. You don’t have to believe me, but what we had was real. What could we do after that
terrible day in court? Nancy was ruined, she had terrible nightmares, wet her bed, became completely withdrawn, and poor little Charlotte was completely subsumed by it. All because we had been too timid to do anything about our relationship earlier. There is no right time for these things, is there?’

Jessie wasn’t feeling in a sympathetic mood.

‘I went home to Paris, I studied hard, I got a job, I worked at getting over him.’

‘Successfully?’

The woman opposite her did not respond, she glanced at her empty wedding finger, then looked Jessie firmly in the eye.

‘I came back for his funeral. I decided to stay on in London. It is easier to grieve alone. When I saw the news, I came here. I don’t care what they are saying, Nancy could not have killed anyone.’

‘How can you be so sure? You haven’t seen her since she was eleven.’

‘Nicholas and I promised never to see each again. And we fulfilled that promise, though now I cannot understand why. No one benefited from the punishment we imposed upon ourselves. If I could just go back to that one day …’ Again the futility of her words was not lost on Jessie. ‘We wrote when things got unbearable. A letter can breathe life into you, if you let it. This is why I know things about the family. I know that Nancy had suicidal tendencies. She wanted to kill herself, but she couldn’t. Like me, she believed, you see.
She believed in God – why wouldn’t she? She’d been told she was an angel enough times. So you see, she couldn’t kill anyone.’

‘What about Mr Scott-Somers? After all, Malcolm Hoare ruined his life, your life, his daughters’ lives …’

‘No, Detective Inspector, we did that.’

Jessie escorted the missing piece of the puzzle to the exit. ‘What was so important, Madame Colbert, that you had to ring Mr Scott-Somers that day?’

Jessie watched the shudder pass through the woman’s petite frame and immediately regretted asking.

‘I was pregnant,’ she said, nodding, as if she still could not believe it. ‘I miscarried in the seventh month. They told me they found nothing wrong with our son.’ She gave Jessie a challenging look. ‘The wrath of God, you think?’ Jessie said nothing. ‘I miss them both,’ said the Frenchwoman. ‘All the time.’

The press were camped behind temporary barriers outside the Scott-Somers’ house. The family – what was left of it – were holed up inside their gilded cage. Amanda Hornby had opened the floodgates, the protective fence was down and Mr Scott-Somers wasn’t alive any more to exert his personal kind of pressure. Those in power might be loyal to their benefactors, but this was a question of
murder. Every aspect of the Scott-Somers’ life, from disgruntled ex-employees to tailors to the bevy of ex-husbands that Charlotte had accrued and discarded, were speculating, cogitating and agitating. As Niaz and Jessie approached, the swarm of leather jackets and long lenses turned their way and the battering of questions started.

‘Who killed Malcolm Hoare?’ ‘Is he haunting Marshall Street Baths?’ ‘Where’s Nancy?’ ‘Is she haunting Marshall Street Baths?’ ‘Where’s the exorcist?’ ‘Did they get him bumped off?’ ‘What about the explosion?’

Jessie turned away and ran up the steps. The door opened.

‘Hey, Jess, did you and P.J. have a lover’s tiff?’

The door closed.

They stood in the cool marble vestibule and for the briefest of moments Jessie felt the reassuring warmth of Niaz’s hand on her back. Strength, thought Jessie, comes from the least likely of places. Terence Vane showed her into a plant-infested ‘breakfast’ room. It had a glass ceiling that was wound open by a long metal rod. Coffee was being served. The women drank it strong and black. Mrs Scott-Somers half-turned towards Jessie and spoke over her shoulder.

‘See you’ve met our friendly press corps?’ she said, a strange smirk in her voice. BBC News 24 was playing on a television mounted on the wall. Jessie’s own photograph was floating ominously over the
muted newsreader’s lapel. Next came a picture of P. J. Dean and his murdered wife Verity Shore. She knew the shot; it was from
Hello
! Yet another of those ‘confirmation of our love’ pieces. Jessie didn’t need to hear the voice-over, she knew well enough what was being said. It would be the Ritz photograph next; followed, no doubt, by P.J. in the limo. The story was on a loop, but she was not enjoying the ride. She turned to face Mrs Scott-Somers.

‘We have traced the money,’ she said.

Nancy’s mother stiffened. Her sister appeared to stop breathing.

‘She gives every penny to charity,’ Jessie announced.

‘What?’ Mrs Scott-Somers was completely thrown.

‘Quarter of a million pounds a year!’ said Charlotte incredulously.

‘It is donated to a number of charities which vary in profile and size.’

‘What does she live on?’ asked Mrs Scott-Somers.

‘Perhaps she has a job and lives off the earnings, though I should add she isn’t a registered tax payer.’

‘She’s dead,’ said Charlotte.

‘No, she isn’t dead.’

‘She must be. Nancy isn’t capable of getting a job.’

Jessie thought she detected a note of envy in Charlotte’s voice. Was the idea of a small, unencumbered, independent life the one jewel that the heiress could not afford?

‘The list of recipients changed quite recently, and only Nancy could instruct those changes.’

Charlotte was shaking her head. ‘I dreamt about it, Detective. She was alone, in the dark, surrounded by dead cats.’

‘That was your sister’s childhood nightmare. Not yours,’ said Mrs Scott-Somers impatiently.

Jessie watched Charlotte pick up the phone. ‘Terence, Bloody Mary please.’