“I fear not. My mother spends part of the summer there but mostly she lives in Monte Carlo. She was here, of course, for our wedding”-Zillah’s hand received a squeeze-“but she went back a month ago.”
The police officers looked rather puzzled by this unnecessary information, as well they might. “Mr. Melcombe-Smith, I’m not questioning what you say, but isn’t it rather odd for a young and active man like yourself, a very busy man and newly married, to pass what must have been about thirty hours indoors with nothing much to occupy him but the sort of speech he was well used to making? It was an exceptionally fine day and I believe the countryside around Fredington Crucis is beautiful, yet you didn’t even go out for a walk?”
“You certainly are questioning what I say. Of course I went for a walk.”
“Then perhaps someone saw you?”
“I am unlikely to know the answer to that.”
Later in the day Jims was walking across New Palace Yard toward the members’ entrance. He felt reasonably satisfied with what had happened and was sure he’d hear no more. After all, they couldn’t possibly suspect him of making away with Jeffrey Leach, not him. He had no motive, he hadn’t seen the man for at least three years. In the worst-case scenario, if they found out about his return to London-and they couldn’t-he’d brazen it out, say he’d forgotten. Or give story number four, the one he hadn’t thought of in the small hours, that he’d returned in the night after Zillah was asleep, slept in the spare room so as not to disturb her, and left before she was awake. That would cover everything.
When Michelle told her the murdered man in the cinema was Jeff, Fiona had suffered that momentary loss of consciousness once apparently common in women but now rare. She fainted. Michelle, who a few weeks ago couldn’t have got down to the floor, did so with ease, sat beside her stroking her forehead and whispering, “My dear, my poor dear.”
Fiona came to, said it wasn’t true, was it? It couldn’t be true. Jeff couldn’t be dead. She’d seen a paper which said it was someone called Jeffrey Leach. Michelle told her the police were coming. Would she feel able to see them? Fiona nodded. The shock had been so great, she couldn’t take much else in. Michelle got her onto the sofa, helped her put her feet up, and made milky coffee with plenty of sugar in it. A better remedy for shock than brandy, she said.
“Was he really called Leach?” Fiona asked after a moment or two.
“It seems so.”
“Why did he tell me he was called Leigh? Why did he give me a false name? He’d been living with me for six months.”
“I don’t know, darling. I wish I knew.”
At her interview with the police-the same woman who had taken Zillah to the mortuary and would speak to Jims the next morning-Fiona suffered the beginnings of disillusionment to add to the pain of her loss. That his name was truly Jeffrey John Leach was confirmed, that he was in touch with his former wife, and that he appeared to have had no employment for several years, not perhaps since his student days. The police asked her where she’d been on Friday afternoon and to that she gave very little thought. She could easily name half a dozen people who saw and spoke to her at her merchant bank between three and five. “I wouldn’t have harmed him,” she said, a tear running down her face. “I loved him.”
They examined Jeff’s clothes and what they called his “personal effects.” As a result of watching television programs, Fiona asked tentatively if she would be needed to identify Jeff. They said that wouldn’t be necessary, as Mr. Leach’s former wife had already done so. Fiona found this more upsetting than anything she’d so far heard and she began to sob. Through her tears she made it known that she’d like to see Jeff and they said that could be arranged.
When they’d gone she fell into Michelle’s arms. “There’s never been anyone I felt about the way I did about him. He was the man I’d been waiting for all my life. I can’t live without him.”
Most people would say eight months’ acquaintanceship wasn’t enough for life, and Fiona’s sorrow would pass, but Michelle had known Matthew for only two when she married him and what would she have felt if he’d died? “I know, darling, I know.”
Fiona thought how unkind she’d been to Jeff that evening in Rosmarino when she’d told him to save his silly stories for their baby, she was grown-up. She remembered how she’d reproved him for not being as nice as he might have been to Michelle. Oh, why hadn’t she loved him as he’d deserved?
Responsibility for the recycling and rubbish bins in the neighborhood of Ladbroke Grove station was not Westminster’s or Brent’s but that of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The men who came to empty them on Monday regarded anything in them worth having as their especial perks, and discarded goods were generally picked over with an eye to unconsidered trifles.
The green Marks and Spencer’s bag was still fairly near the top of one of the bins and the younger of the recycling men spotted inside it something wrapped in tissue. It looked as if whoever had used it as a waste receptacle-it was sure to be a she, he said scornfully to his mate-had forgotten she had left a newly bought item inside. And so it was. Investigation revealed a pale blue cashmere sweater, which would do admirably as a birthday present for the recycler’s girlfriend.
Something else was in the bag. They unwrapped it. By that time everyone in the country who read a newspaper or watched television knew the police were looking for the weapon used by the Cinema Slayer. This might well be it.
The cemetery desecration made an even better story than Natalie Reckman had expected. Witchcraft appeared to have been involved, and an interview with an English resident in Rome revealed the possibility of satanic rites carried out near the burial place of Shelley’s heart. Building a new theater was a project she thought she might work up into an article if she described what was happening on the Palatine Hill and recommended something similar for London as a sort of follow-up to millennium celebrations. It might be called the Millennium Theatre or even, thought Natalie, her imagination running away with her, the Natalie Reckman Theatre.
Before getting on the plane home on Monday morning, she bought an English newspaper. It was, of course, a paper from the day before, the Sunday Telegraph, and there she read that the dead man, victim of a murderer becoming known as the Cinema Slayer, was Jeffrey Leach.
Most people, however tough and however experienced, feel some pang, frisson, or tremor of nostalgia on learning of a former lover’s death. Natalie had never loved Jeff but she’d liked him, enjoyed his company, and admired his looks, even when quite aware he was using her. In the prime of life, he had met a horrible death at the hands of some madman. Poor old Jeff, she said to herself, what a thing to happen, poor old Jeff.
That horrible death must have taken place no more than an hour or so after his leaving her in Wellington Street. Sitting in the aircraft, that morning’s paper delivered to her and on her lap, Natalie remembered, as they left the restaurant, how Jeff had asked her to go to the cinema with him. If she’d gone, would things have been different? Maybe she’d have chosen a completely different cinema to go to. But another possibility was that she’d have been killed too.
The someone she’d told Jeff she was very happy with was at Heathrow to meet her. They had lunch together and Natalie told him all about it. A journalist himself, though of rather a different kind, he saw what she meant when she said there might be a story in it. “Poor Jeff looked a bit funny when I talked about this Zillah woman. Guilty, I felt. Well, maybe not so much guilty as having something to hide. There’s been something fishy going on. I’m wondering if they were never divorced at all. That would be just like Jeff.”