Death of a Gentle Lady - M. C. Beaton [58]
‘So what happens now?’
‘I think I’ll spend the next few days writing down everything I know. They might give me time off. I’m tempted to go down to London and talk to Kylie Gentle. I can’t ignore the fact that it must, somehow, have something to do with that family.’
Chapter Eleven
I think for my part that one half of
the nation is mad – and the other
half not very sound.
– Tobias Smollett
Hamish was granted leave. Daviot seemed relieved that he would be out of the way. Jimmy said that the van had been stolen from outside a croft near Grianach. He supplied Hamish with Kylie Gentle’s address in London but warned him that he was on his own. He would need to cover his own expenses.
Jimmy had a further bit of astonishing news. Blair was back on the job and sober. ‘He’s found God,’ said Jimmy. ‘He keeps a Bible on his desk and lectures us all on our sins. He was a nasty bully when he was drunk and now he’s even nastier. The man’s a right religious maniac.’
‘Won’t last long,’ said Hamish cynically. ‘One setback and he’ll be screaming that God doesn’t exist and straight down to the pub.’
Anxious not to leave his pets too long, Hamish drove to Inverness and took an early plane to London. Kylie and her husband lived in a flat in St George’s Mansions in Gloucester Road in Kensington.
He took the tube to the Gloucester Road tube station and walked along until he reached St George’s Mansions. He rang the bell marked GENTLE, hoping his journey wouldn’t turn out to be a waste of time with them gone on holiday somewhere. But Kylie herself answered on the intercom. When Hamish announced himself, there was a little gasp of surprise, and then he was buzzed in.
Kylie, looking like an elegant stick insect, stood in the doorway to greet him. ‘What’s happened now?’ she asked crossly. ‘The police have already been round asking if any of us have been near a place called Grianach. I told them we’d never even heard of it. Come in.’
Hamish, feeling uncomfortable in all the glory of his best suit, collar, and tie, followed her into a pleasant living room.
‘It’s got nothing to do with that,’ he said. ‘I can’t help feeling that something happened at your family reunion that maybe gave Irena the idea she could blackmail someone apart from Mark.’
‘Sit down,’ said Kylie. ‘Didn’t we go through that all before?’
‘I thought maybe you might have had time to think of something.’
Hamish studied her covertly. Could she be the murderer? Could she be trying to protect someone?
Her face was Botoxed into expressionlessness. She stared at him for a long moment. Then she said, ‘It was the usual business, my mother-in-law demanding we all run around her, hinting that if she did not have the correct amount of grovel, she’d leave her money elsewhere. Mark was oiling about. Then he suddenly got furious. He’d got the news that she planned to change her will. He was talking a lot to Irena. Then he suddenly seemed to get cheerful again. Oh, he made one odd comment. He said, “There’s a bastard in every family and a skeleton in every cupboard, isn’t there, Auntie?” Mrs Gentle went quite white with rage.’
‘I think I might pay a call on him,’ said Hamish. ‘Where is he?’
‘I’ll write it down for you. It’s a garage in Peckham.’
Hamish looked up the address in a battered old copy of the London A to Z he had brought with him. He found the nearest tube station on the map and set off.
It was a cold, dusty, windy day. London seemed much dirtier than he remembered.
When he found the garage, it was closed. He asked around and was told it had been closed for the last week. No one knew where the workers were.
He pulled out his phone and asked Kylie where Mark Gentle lived, hoping it would be somewhere nearby, but Kylie gave him an address in East India Docks.
It took him an hour and a half to get there. Mark’s flat was in the middle of what had been damned as Yuppie Town.