Murder, Mystery, and Magic. John Burke
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you’d ring for a taxi for me, then. Don’t want him to wake up and start another battle over his precious phone.”
“I’ll drive you back.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I think it’s a very sensible idea.” She had been so silent, and now was so decisive. “Come on, David, I do know what I’m doing.”
She closed the front door very quietly, walked briskly but soundlessly down the short path to the gate, and then even more briskly along the pavement to the corner of the street. I had to hurry to catch up with her, “Don’t you keep your car in the garage?”
“There was somebody blocking the way when I got home today. Had to park it round the corner.”
When we were in her Mégane I said: “You were talking about when you got home—home from where?”
“Shopping, of course. I do have to do some real shopping sometimes, you know. Not just as a cover-up.”
She pretended to concentrate on the road, although there was little traffic and it was no more than a ten-minute drive to the block where I lived. We stopped a hundred yards from the entrance. That was unremarkable: we had always been careful to cover our tracks. Maybe we wouldn’t need to from now on.
I said: “Are you planning to leave Crispin?”
“We’ll talk about that some other time.”
I put my hand on her arm. It tensed; and then she made too obvious an effort to relax. “Are you coming in?” I asked. “We can talk about things then. About everything.”
“The state he’s in, I’d better get back.”
“The state he’s in,” I said, “you don’t know what he’ll do.”
“Oh, I think I know him well enough. Leave it to me, David.”
She kissed me quickly and meaninglessly.
“Tomorrow?” I said. “I can take the afternoon off. Sort things out,”
“Tomorrow,” she said, “maybe things will sort themselves out.” And as I got out of the car, she said with unexpected intensity: “Thanks, David. Thanks so much for everything.”
* * * *
So here I am in a police cell, refused bail. My solicitor has just left, and obviously doesn’t believe a word I’ve told him, any more than the police do.
Their first assault had left me winded, incredulous. I didn’t feel that I could really be in my own office, on an ordinary day, listening to something far more crazy than anything some of my clients offered as storylines.
“But hold on a minute,” I was protesting. “She was there with us last evening. Having a drink. The three of us.” And when that stony face yielded no response, I demanded: “Look, how did Crispin die? Fall over blind drunk, or something? Alcoholic poisoning?”
“Not alcoholic,” said the inspector. He cleared his throat and said very formally: “Do you think we might come and have a look round your flat, Mr. Milburn? In your presence, naturally.”
“What on earth for?” I groped through memories of so many detective stories for the right procedure. “Anyway, have you got a warrant?”
“If we have to get one, we shall get one. In the meantime, have you any reason to be worried about what we might find?”
I had no reason at all to be worried; but that didn’t stop me being worried. There was something very threatening in the atmosphere.
And they soon gave me reason to worry. Once they had driven me home the two of them prowled from room to room with a hideous determination to find something where there could not possibly be anything to find.
“Look after things yourself, Mr. Milburn?” asked Emerson.
“I have a cleaner in twice a week.”
“Yes. All very tidy Systematic. Do your own cooking?”
“When I’m not taking clients or publishers out,” I said as loftily as possible, “or being taken out.”
“A very agreeable arrangement, sir.”
They peered about in the kitchenette, sifting my spice pots and condiments and jars of this, that and the other to and fro. It took a further fifteen minutes of trawling before the detective constable called from the bathroom to show the little phial tucked under the ball-cock of the lavatory system.
“Not alcoholic,” the inspector said again. “A different kind of poison. Far quicker.”
It was grotesque. “D’you seriously think I’d be clumsy enough to hide something, whatever it is, in such an obvious place? If I’d had anything to hide, that is.”
“In a hurry, last night? Going to tidy up when you’d got your breath back?”
“Last night.” I drew a deep breath and tried to keep my voice steady. “If you ask Mrs. Brooke about last night, she’s got to admit she was muddled. The shock of it, all right. Must have thrown her. She’s simply got to confirm that we were there together, and she drove me home, and—”
“No, Mr. Milburn. Mrs. Brooke was away. She had gone to stay with a publishing friend. She was apparently scared of the hostility between her husband and yourself, and when she heard you were coming round she didn’t want to be there.”
“A publishing friend?”
“A Miss Nina Whiteley. She went there for protection.”
A terrible, incredible suspicion was dawning. I thought of Gemma paying her usual quick visit to the bathroom that last time she was here. Thought of her strange silences and that recent conspiratorial expression of hers.
“Look,” I said. “Exactly how did Crispin die?”
“Cyanide poisoning. And you wouldn’t know that, Mr. Milburn? Even though there were only two glasses in the room, one of them with traces of cyanide. And both with fingerprints on which may just possibly turn out to be yours, Mr. Milburn.”
“And once we’ve had the stuff in this bottle analysed….” His constable let the words hang in the air.
“I think we’ll continue this down at the station,” said his inspector. And he began to recite the rigmarole I already knew off by heart, thanks to those client authors who went boringly through it every few chapters: ‘“but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court….”
In the interview room my solicitor sat stony-faced beside me. For all the moral or legal support he gave, he might as well have been sitting alongside the policemen on the other side.
The accusation was that I had been pestering Mrs. Brooke, and on one occasion had raped her when she was visiting me to discuss her husband’s work. She had made no complaint at the time because negotiations with her husband’s publisher had been at a tricky stage and she did not dare to antagonise me. But then Crispin Brooke began to suspect, and had called me round that evening for a showdown.
“And you lost your temper, and there was a fight.”
“A fight? Me and Crispin? He was ex-SAS, you know. I wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
“Neighbours confirm there was a shouting match. It could be heard halfway down the street.”
Of course. Gemma opening the window and then not saying another word that might give away her presence.
“As you say, Mr. Milburn, picking a direct fight with a highly trained soldier with the deceased’s courageous record was risky. So in the end it had to be something subtler. If you can call cyanide subtle.”
“Cyanide’s agonizing.” I knew that much, again,