The Main chance

40

`Lavinia! What are you doing?'

Paula's voice was full of shock and disbelief. She stared at the hard chin, the white face, the shotgun held so steady in her strong hands. `Having already murdered Bella, Mrs Carlyle and Leo,' Tweed said in the calm voice he always used in a crisis, 'she now proposes to murder both of us. How, Lavinia, if I may ask, how do you propose to get rid of our bodies?' `Good question, Mr Tweed. Dump you aboard the deck behind me. Then send the ship out across the bay into the Atlantic. OK with you?' she asked with a sneering smile.

Paula was appalled by the sheer callousness of Lavinia's reply. Her brain was spinning with shock. Lavinia's next words didn't help. `You've lost count, Mr Tweed. Look at the far side of the deck. Recognize the corpse curled against the hull?' `Marshal,' he replied promptly. 'With a necklace which has ripped out his throat. Patricide, the murder of one's father, is regarded as the most contemptible of all crimes.'

' My father?' Lavinia's voice was venomous. 'I hated him, my pseudo-father. I was conceived when he played with Mrs Mandy Carlyle, the tramp who charged so much a night. She was my pseudo-mother. May she rot in hell. My own mother couldn't have a child, desperately wanted one. Marshal had the idea when Mandy Carlyle became pregnant by him to admit what had happened to my real mother. She agreed to go with the Carlyle bag to a dubious expensive nursing home well away from Hengistbury. My real mother had pretended to be pregnant. When I was born my real mother took me back to Hengistbury as her own child. The clinic where it happened faked papers to cover up the impersonation.' Her voice became grimmer. 'Can you visualize how I came to hate my pseudo-father?' `Yes, I can,' Tweed said quietly. 'How did you find out?' `You know that.'

Keep her talking, he said to himself. He had seen the safety catch on the shotgun was released. Lavinia had only to press the trigger and both of them would be dead. `I'd like you to tell me, please.' `I found Marshal's secret chequebook. Large sums paid out to the Carlyle bitch. Blackmail. I guessed why.' `Why did you murder Bella?' `Obvious. She stood in my way for my ultimate succession as the bank's owner.' Lavinia's lip curled in the same sneering smile. 'She was eighty-four. She'd had her time.'

Paula was again appalled at the same sheer callousness. `Logical,' Tweed agreed, his face devoid of expression. 'So why murder Mrs Carlyle?' `Obvious again. I loathed the woman. And she could become dangerous, resuming the blackmailing of Marshal.' `What happened when you arrived at Dodd's End?' `I told her who I was. She sneered, said it was pleasant to meet her only daughter. She was drunk, and hardly got out of her chair.' `So what happened next?' `Her remark incensed me. I had a collar inside a carrier. I said I needed a drink, went behind her towards the drinks cupboard. It was so easy. I slid the collar down over her filthy head.' She grinned. 'I've never used more strength than when I tightened the collar. I nearly took her head off her shoulders.' `Understandable,' said Tweed, forcing himself to play up to her. 'But how did you know her address?' `Marshal, the idiot, had scribbled it down at the end of one of the secret cheque-books' `Why had Leo to be removed?' `Oh, Leo.' She grinned, a sadistic grin. 'He overheard a call I made to Calouste warning him you'd all left the manor. I knew he'd gabble so he had to go.' `Again logical,' Tweed agreed in the same quiet voice. 'And now Marshal?' `Again obvious. He inherited the bank. He was standing in the way of my taking it over. Bella has left a final will naming me as owner if Marshal and Warner are no longer alive.' `You know that because you took the will Bella handed to you, sealed when I first visited her.' `Really?' She tossed her head. 'Solicitors are not allowed to reveal such documents. So how do you know that?' she asked, her curiosity aroused. `You pretended to have a long lunch at the Pike's Peak Hotel in Gladworth. Actually, you were busy seducing the solicitor so he'd show you the will and then put it in a legal envelope and re-seal it. How do I know that? I took the trouble to phone the hotel proprietor and ask him if you had lunch there that day. He told me no one had had lunch there that day. I began to. wonder what you had been up to. `Clever Mr Tweed.' `And Calouste Doubenkian is dead. Drowned when his chateau was flooded.' `Really?' She raised her eyebrows. "Then I can sell to the Sultan. They crave gold in the Far East.' `Gold?' He gazed into the deep-blue pools of her eyes. He could read her now. A hint of pure evil in the blank eyes. `You'd have made a very first-rate detective, Mr Tweed,' she observed as she levelled the shotgun.

There was a loud explosion which echoed in the brief silence.