Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [15]
His moustache twitched again, probably in disapproval. Driscoll wasn’t against drinking as such, but he was against both beer and public houses. He was a port man himself and felt that ale played on a man’s emotion to the detriment of civilised behaviour.
A sudden thought struck me. ‘But if you want me to stay the night…’
‘That means your train leaves this afternoon,’ he finished. ‘We want this Seavers thing cleared up quickly. You’ve got nearly an hour until the train leaves, plenty of time to pack.’ He thrust a thin folder into my hand and strode back to his office.
Within five minutes I was in Great Scotland Yard hailing a cab. It took a good half-hour to reach my lodgings in Notting Hill, and the first thing I did when I entered my rooms was to check the tattered Bradshaw that usually propped up a short leg on the hatstand by the door. Driscoll had underestimated the time and I found that I still had an hour before the four o’clock train departed Paddington for Three Sisters. I allowed myself a cup of tea and threw a change of clothes and some other essentials into a bag. I let my landlady know that I would be away and set out on the short walk to the station.
It felt strange, beginning the familiar ritual of the journey knowing that it was business rather than pleasure that motivated me. I often visited my aunt on the spur of the moment. I found long ago that the strain of police work could be cleared by long walks in the countryside, and I used her house as a base. She and I were the only surviving members of our branch of the family. She had never married, and my parents had died some years before.
I arrived at Paddington with ten minutes to spare, settled into a comfortable compartment and finally began to read the file that had sent me on my way. In the main it detailed the case I had been involved in: the suicide of Gordon Seavers. Inspector Hetton was handling the case, but I had been roped in to go to Oxford when he was detained elsewhere. He had given me an informal briefing over a pie and a pint in a public house near Scotland Yard, but this was the first time I had actually seen the file. Hetton was a conscientious worker; the report was crammed full of detail and fact but contained precious little emotion.
Despite his academic record at Oxford, Gordon Seavers had, in the space of a few short years, gained a large measure of respectability. He was a member of several prominent government committees and was regularly quoted in the newspapers on matters of scientific import. As far as was known (and Hetton had talked to Seavers’s entire domestic staff, as well as a number of his colleagues) his life was lived respectably and openly. He was a man without secrets.
And there lay the rub. When he failed to respond to a call for breakfast one morning, his wife attempted to gain access to his study. The door was locked, and there was no response from within. A guest of Gordon Seavers – one John Hopkinson – had eventually broken the door down, fearing, quite sensibly, that Gordon Seavers had suffered some form of seizure or heart attack. In a sense, he had been correct. Gordon Seavers’s heart had indeed been attacked – by a letter opener. The door was locked, the windows were locked and his fingers were curled around the handle of the knife.
I looked up from the closely typed report and glanced out on to the snow-clad landscape flowing past the window. Already the flat farmlands of the Home Counties had been replaced by gently varying hills and hollows. The snow obscured the shades of the countryside, replacing them with a uniform white shadowed only by the low evening light. I remembered an artist’s sketch of Mary Seavers at the inquest from one of the dailies, her paper-white face thinned by misery and her eyes shadowed in anguish. She had no idea why her husband should kill himself, but she would blame herself for the rest of her life.
I turned back to the report. The crimson