Next of Kin

  Margaret nodded slowly. She had spent the best part of the previous hour trying to find the right words to use at this moment. It was bad enough breaking the news to someone that a loved one had passed away, trying to phrase it so slowly and peacefully that by the time the unhappy truth was revealed the listener might feel that it was a peaceful end. But a situation like this, a murder … there was no good way to phrase it. There were no suitable words at all. The best thing was to stay quiet and let her piece it together for herself.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ asked Stella after a moment, her face a blank.

  Margaret nodded again. ‘I’m so sorry, Stella,’ she said. ‘There was a phone call. While you were out. The police. It’s terrible news.’

  Stella looked away and seemed to be struggling with her breath for a moment. As a child she had had a tendency towards asthma but it was an affliction she had grown out of; Margaret hadn’t heard her breathing like this since she was very young, and worried for her.

  ‘Try to stay calm, Stella,’ she said, rubbing her back. ‘Breathe slowly.’

  Stella’s body seemed to crumble where she sat and she buried her face in her hands. ‘But how?’ she asked finally, trembling, holding back the tears for now. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘They’re not sure yet,’ said Margaret. ‘They weren’t able to tell me very much. I’m afraid you’re going to have to be very strong when I tell you.’

  Stella looked across again; in her mind she knew she could not afford to fall apart until she had heard all the details. Then and only then could she face her loss. ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid…’ began Margaret, at a loss as to how to explain such a terrible thing. ‘I have to tell you that he was murdered,’ she said.

  ‘Murdered?’ asked Stella, gasping, feeling her stomach turn in revulsion. ‘How? Why? Who did it?’

  ‘They’re very unclear about things right now. It’s a bit of a mystery. We’ll probably have to go to London to find out more. They were able to contact Owen, thankfully, and—’

  ‘What?’ asked Stella, who had turned away from Margaret as she faced the full horror of what she was saying. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘The police,’ explained Margaret. ‘They contacted Owen and he identified the body and—’

  ‘He…?’ Stella stared at her, her mind swimming, as if the whole thing was an enormous puzzle that she couldn’t understand. ‘Owen identified…?’ She stopped and considered it. ‘It’s not Owen then who—’

  ‘Apparently Raymond came around to visit Owen,’ continued Margaret. ‘But he wasn’t in. He’d gone out for the evening with some friends and a colleague of his from the gallery was staying overnight in his flat. The fellow was drunk, it seems, and Raymond showed up and—’

  ‘Raymond,’ said Stella with a sigh, closing her eyes and keeping them sealed for the best part of a minute as she tried to shift her emotions from where they had been a moment before to where they had to rest now. ‘Raymond’s dead,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Stella,’ said Margaret.

  The story had come together in the days in between. Owen Montignac had hired a young man named Gareth Bentley to work with him in the gallery. He’d been doing a good job so they went out one evening for dinner and, according to Montignac, Gareth got so inebriated and so quickly that he gave him the keys to his flat on Bedford Place and sent him there in a taxicab to sleep it off. In the meantime Montignac met up with some other friends and was in their company for the entire rest of the night, leaving their home at eight o’clock the following morning and heading straight for the gallery, which he opened up and where he stayed until the police called on him later in the day.

  Montignac went with them to examine the body and identified it as Raymond Davis, a young horticulturalist engaged to marry his cousin. He must have come around to see Montignac in the night, the police deduced, and when the drunken Bentley found him there a fight ensued, leading to the vicious death. Bentley, of course, was claiming his innocence but also maintaining that he could remember nothing of the night before due to the amount of alcohol he had taken. In the circumstances it wasn’t a very satisfying alibi, particularly since not only did it not seem to be an accident, but the fellow’s brains had been smashed in by a candlestick in a particularly brutal way.

  Stella had taken to her bed then but, Margaret noted, she had cried very little. Instead a great sadness seemed to descend on her and she just lay there. She had managed to keep herself composed during the funeral but had come straight back to Leyville afterwards, not even attending the wake, a formality which she said she hated.

  ‘There we are,’ said Annie, serving up the breakfast on to a plate. ‘I put in a couple of extra eggs for her too. See if she can’t build her strength up. Wait there till I fetch the tea.’

  ‘Thank you, Annie,’ said Margaret standing up. ‘I think I’ll encourage her to get up after breakfast.’

  ‘Quite right too. All this lazing around is no good for anyone.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know,’ began Annie after a polite hesitation. ‘Whether Miss Stella will be staying full-time at Leyville from now on?’

  Margaret frowned. ‘I expect so,’ she said. ‘Why? Where else would she go?’

  ‘Well no, I didn’t mean that,’ said Annie. ‘Just with her not getting married after all. She’s not going to up sticks and head off to London to Mr Owen’s, is she?’

  ‘I think that’s the last place she’d want to be right now, don’t you? After everything that’s happened.’

  ‘I just need to know for my own situation,’ explained Annie. ‘If there’s not going to be the work—’

  ‘Oh please, Annie,’ said Margaret in frustration, reaching down for the tray as Annie placed the tea on it. ‘Can we not have this conversation just now? All I can think about is Stella for the moment, I can’t be expected to worry about everyone else’s rotas. You’ll get paid if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m worried about,’ said Annie angrily. ‘And there’s no need to be so rude.’

  ‘I wasn’t being rude,’ said Margaret in an exhausted tone. She sighed. ‘Look, if you’re really all that concerned I can have a word with Stella when the moment’s right and find out exactly what her plans are.’

  ‘If it wouldn’t be putting you to too much trouble,’ said Annie archly.

  ‘Fine then,’ she said, leaving the room. ‘I’ll speak to her about it as soon as possible.’

  She left with the tray and made for the staircase. The atmosphere was so gloomy that it threatened to overpower her but she understood only too well the worry that Annie was feeling. They had had so much death in this house, she considered, and even now, when there was the chance of a marriage and children, of a happy event, it had been stolen away. As she left, she clutched the tray so tightly in her hands that she could feel a painful sensation in her bones.

  3

  MONTIGNAC TOOK THE KEYS and wallet from his pockets and laid them in the tray, moved against the wall and stretched his arms out wide while the warder patted him down for any contraband materials that he might be smuggling in. Passing inspection, he followed the other visitors down the long, cold corridor and shivered slightly with the uncomfortable sensation that comes from being in a prison. Of all the places in the world where he would not have wanted to go by his own choice, this was at the top of the list.

  He glanced at the other visitors and couldn’t help but feel superior and out of place among them. They were, for the most part, a lower class of person, dressed in cheap clothes, the women with stringy hair, the men who hadn’t even bothered to shave or put on a tie; those who had looked like they wore the same suit every day of their lives, from morning till night. The corridor itself smelled of disinfectant and the stone floor, walls and ceilings could scarcely have made the place seem less welcoming.

  At the end of the corridor they turned left
and were escorted into a large room where small tables and plastic chairs stood at regular distances from each other and his fellow visitors started to scatter hesitantly in different directions as they spotted their loved ones. Montignac looked around the room slowly and finally found his prey sitting in a corner, at the most distant table, and walked towards him.

  ‘Hello, Gareth,’ he said, sitting down.

  ‘Owen,’ he replied, his voice betraying enormous amounts of relief. ‘I’m so grateful that you came. I didn’t know whether you would or not.’

  ‘Of course I would come if you wanted me to,’ he said with some concern. ‘How are you anyway?’ Gareth laughed and shrugged his shoulders as if to suggest that the answer was obvious. ‘I must admit I was surprised that you wanted to see me,’ continued Montignac after a moment. ‘But I was intrigued.’

  He looked across the table and tried not to give away the fact that his appearance was harrowing. Although he had hardly been overweight before, he had lost a good ten pounds since being incarcerated and his skin was a pale, waxy colour. His hair had been cut quite short and he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days; the stubble was irregular, thick around the chin but straggly and inconsistent about the cheeks and throat. The youthful good looks that he had sported were starting to fade at an incredible rate, the effect, Montignac believed, of an altogether too comfortable life having been suddenly destroyed. To his surprise, Gareth was smoking a cigarette, something he couldn’t remember him ever doing before.

  ‘This whole thing…’ began Gareth nervously, looking around to make sure that he wasn’t being overheard. ‘This whole thing is a tremendous mistake.’

  ‘Is it indeed?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ he said, faltering. ‘I don’t know how it happened. It … it must have been a terrible accident.’

  Montignac sighed and sat back in his chair. He noticed that there was the faintest hint of trembling in Gareth’s fingers as he put the cigarette between his lips and drew on it inexpertly, like a schoolboy having his first drag. He sucked in the nicotine too deeply and held it in his mouth too long but somehow managed to control his coughing.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what you remember?’ asked Montignac. ‘From the beginning.’

  ‘Well that’s just it,’ said Gareth. ‘I don’t remember anything much from that night so I don’t know what to say. Everyone keeps asking me but what can I tell them? I remember going to the Threadbare to meet you, and I remember you suggesting that we go and have some dinner and we went to the pub at the end of the road—’

  ‘You drank an awful lot there, Gareth,’ he said, interrupting him. ‘I couldn’t get you to stop. I’ve never seen someone get through so much alcohol in so short a time.’

  ‘I’ve done that before,’ said Gareth sadly. ‘I should have learned my lesson. Alcohol and me … well we don’t mix. I black out, I get violent—’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘But I’ve never done anything like this before. Nothing even approaching this. You have to believe me, Owen.’

  ‘I tried to stop you,’ protested Montignac. ‘I said you should either slow down or stick to water but you got quite aggressive then.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he replied apologetically. ‘You said you weren’t a child, you told me that I wasn’t your father and if you couldn’t celebrate earning a thousand pounds, well what was the fun of life anyway?’

  Gareth shook his head and then placed it in his hands, bereft now. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have listened to you. But once I start, it seems that there’s no stopping me.’

  Montignac sighed and looked around. He noticed the way that all the guards who were either standing by the walls or parading between the tables looked directly ahead of themselves all the time, as if they didn’t want anyone to think that they were eavesdropping on conversations, but something about the way they held themselves implied to him that they could hear every word that was being said and were ready to interject if any trouble broke out.

  ‘You have to understand,’ said Montignac, leaning forwards a little and lowering his voice. ‘This is very difficult for me. Being here, I mean. After all, Raymond … well he was engaged to my cousin. And Stella’s like a sister to me.’

  ‘I know that, Owen, and I’m so sorry. Did you know him well?’

  ‘I knew him a little. He was a sterling chap.’

  Gareth bowed his head, biting his lip in regret. ‘I don’t even remember him coming round. For that matter I don’t even remember arriving at your flat.’

  ‘I gave the taxi driver my address,’ said Montignac. ‘He’s since spoken to the police to confirm that,’ he added quickly.

  ‘But why didn’t you come with me? Why did you leave me on my own?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, man, it was barely half past nine and you were on another planet of drunkenness. I hadn’t been drinking very much at all and I wanted to celebrate too. That was the plan, for both of us. I didn’t want to call it a night yet. I never suspected that … well, anything like this might happen. Do you think I’d have left you alone if I had? In fact I was trying to do you a favour. I knew that if you went home to Tavistock Square in that condition, there’d be hell to pay. I figured I’d never see you again, that you’d be locked up in your father’s chambers until your retirement party forty years from now. So I sent you off to Bedford Place and met up with some friends myself. I was with them all night. In fact it got so late that I stayed with one of them and then went straight from there into work the next morning. It was only that afternoon that the police came to see me.’

  ‘The whole thing has been an absolute nightmare,’ said Gareth. ‘I woke up … I didn’t know where I was…’

  ‘Well it’s not exactly been a barrel of laughs for me either,’ hissed Montignac, looking around to check the position of the guards. ‘For pity’s sake, Gareth, how could you just throw your life away like that? You know people are saying you’re going to swing for this?’

  Gareth let out a low groan, a sound of such pain and agony that it might have come from an animal that needed to be put down.

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t know Raymond Davis?’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Gareth. ‘How could I have known him? I’m not a horticulturalist and that’s what he was, right? I’ve never even been to the RHS or Kew Gardens or any of those places. They don’t interest me. And why would I want to kill him anyway? I have no motive.’

  ‘Well I don’t know, but that’s what the police are trying to find out. And the newspapers.’

  ‘The newspapers are on to the story?’ he asked, looking up with tears in his eyes; he had had no access to the papers in jail, despite the fact that he asked for them on a daily basis.

  ‘Of course they are,’ said Montignac with a gentle laugh, as if the whole thing was entirely obvious. ‘Remember who your father is, after all. Remember how he sentenced that fellow to die earlier in the year when everyone said that his connections would get him off, but your father said no, the law’s the law. Well that’s coming back to haunt him now. Now they’re all using his words and throwing them right back in his face. They’re saying that just because it’ll be his son in the dock he can’t turn around and say—’

  ‘But I didn’t do it!’ protested Gareth.

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake. You were found alone with Raymond’s dead body, covered in his blood, alone in the flat, and your fingerprints were all over the candlestick. The evidence is damning.’

  ‘Well if I did do it,’ said Gareth, looking lost and shaking his head from side to side even as he verbally accepted the possibility of guilt. ‘Then I certainly didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Well that’s not much use to Raymond Davis,’ said Montignac. ‘Now is it?’

  ‘No, of course not, but—’

  ‘Nor is it of any comfort to my cousin, who’s been devastated by this. You know she lost her father earlier in the year?’
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  Gareth looked around in despair and as he did so, he caught the eye of one of his fellow inmates who gave him a salacious, gap-toothed grin.

  ‘I hope she knows how sorry I am.’

  ‘I very much doubt that she cares.’

  ‘Owen, you’ve got to help me,’ he said, leaning forwards and trying to grab the other man’s hand. Montignac recoiled instantly. He could see the filthy nails and wondered when he’d last dared to wash. The last thing he wanted was to be touched by him; he began to wonder why he’d even come here but then remembered. It was to find out exactly how little Gareth remembered from the night of Raymond Davis’s death and the interview had proved a very satisfactory one so far. ‘You’ve got to help get me out of here,’ he repeated quickly.

  ‘Me?’ asked Montignac. ‘What on earth can I do? Stage some sort of prison break? Smuggle a file inside a cake?’

  ‘Well you can tell them what you know,’ he said. ‘That I’m … that I’m a good person. That I would never—’

  ‘Gareth, listen to me,’ said Montignac, adopting a more sympathetic voice now; it was clear that the younger man was in absolute torture and it gave him no pleasure to witness this. ‘I can see that you’re in pain here and I have no doubt that you’re filled with remorse. But let’s be honest; I don’t really know you.’

  ‘But we’re friends, aren’t we?’

  ‘I…’ Montignac looked away in despair; he could feel Gareth’s eyes burning into him, could sense his longing to believe that theirs was a friendship that superseded all other loyalties or responsibilities. ‘We haven’t known each other very long,’ he said finally, regretting having come here at all now. ‘Even if I did have any influence, which I don’t, how on earth could I possibly be a character witness for you when—’

  ‘But we worked so well together. All that business with the Cézanne paintings,’ he added, lowering his voice at the risk of being overheard. ‘I was loyal to you during that, wasn’t I? I did a good job?’