A Fall from Grace (18 page)

Felicity had come in with the coffee, and started to hand it round. Richard Norton waited till everyone had a cup, then took up his story.

“Well, it was about five days after I spoke to you on the telephone. There was a ring on the doorbell about four o'clock in the afternoon. It wasn't yet dark, but it was getting that way, so I opened the door a bit cautiously. And there was this girl—young woman, it almost seemed—standing there bold as brass.”

“You recognized her?”

“Not to say recognized. You see, they'd always come at night, and I'd only seen them by peering through our bedroom window. Sometimes a streetlight caught one of their faces, but not often. But I thought it was one of the two elder girls—I think her name is Anne Michaels.”

“And we weren't in doubt for long,” put in his wife.

“No, we weren't. Because she simply said, without so much as a hello or telling me her name: ‘Can I come in? I've got a proposition to make to you.' ”

Charlie's eyebrows hit the roof.

“I wasn't expecting that.”

The couple nodded.

“Nor were we, I can tell you,” said Richard Norton. “Anyway, I wasn't happy about her coming into the house, and I hesitated, but she just pushed past me and marched into the lounge. I protested, but . . . well, I've never been a very forceful chap, and she took no notice.”

“I was already in the lounge,” said Carol Norton, “listening. She came straight in, didn't even nod to me, and sat down in one of our easy chairs. And when Richard got back into the room she looked at him and said, ‘I suppose you'd like an end to these visits from the children, wouldn't you?' And before Richard could reply I said, ‘We would.' I didn't want any macho stuff from him, posturing-like, because the truth was I wanted to do anything she asked us to do, just to get rid of them.”

“As if I could manage a macho posture if I tried!”
protested Richard. “Anyway, she grinned an evil grin—such a shame, because she is naturally such a lovely looking girl—and said, ‘It can't be nice having a pack of kids shouting and singing at you. I expect you've always liked children, haven't you?' And I said, ‘I used to.' She liked that, and grinned still more.”

“I'm still puzzled,” said Felicity. “I still don't have any idea of what she was after.”

“Oh, it didn't take long for that to come out,” said Carol. “She took up Richard's last remark straight away—she seems to be a very quick-witted girl. She said, ‘You could start liking them again, I should think, if you got rid of us.' ”

“I said maybe,” said Richard. “Because at that moment it seemed like she'd changed my view of children for life.”

“She took that up too, didn't she, Richard? She said, ‘We're not the usual run of snotty-nosed kids, you know. We're out of the ordinary.' And Richard said, ‘You're certainly that.' I sat there hoping that was the last of his smart-aleck remarks, because I was afraid she would take offense and leave.”

“Well, she didn't,” said Richard. “She'd come with a purpose, that was obvious, and she was determined to get it before she left. I said, ‘What will it take for you to leave us alone?' And she said, ‘What will it
cost
is really the question.' I thought, I can't believe this is just a common-or-garden piece of blackmail. But that's what it was.”

“It would be interesting to know if you're the first to be stung like that,” said Charlie thoughtfully. “Has she
had a whole line of victims? Sorry—go on.”

“Well, she was sitting there, smiling like a Cheshire tiger, and I just said, ‘How much?' And she paused, licked her tongue around her lips and said, ‘Twenty pounds.' You could have knocked me down with a feather. I was expecting five times as much.”

“I said, ‘Done!' ” said Carol. “I got up, went to Richard's wallet, got out a note and handed it to her.”

“Did she look disappointed?” asked Charlie. “As if she wished she'd asked for more?”

“No,” said Richard. “If she was, she didn't let it show. She gave a little smile of satisfaction, put it in the pocket of her school blazer and got up. ‘Nice to have done business with you,' she said, and as she went through the door, ‘We won't be back.' ”

“Well,” said Charlie, stretching back in his chair and taking a deep breath, “I'm as flabbergasted as you are. As a policeman I can't approve of giving way to blackmail. Still, I'd have to admit that you got off lightly. It seems so out of character. Do we put it down to a child's ignorance of money—twenty pounds seeming an awful lot to her?”

“Mr. Peace, we have grandchildren,” said Carol Norton. “These days kids have a very good idea of what money is worth and what it will buy. And I'm sure this particular young woman has a much better idea than most.”

“Come along, Carol, it's getting late,” said her husband, standing up. “We've done what we came to do. I just hope it's useful, if there is a connection between the children and your dad's death, Mrs. Peace.”

“I do think there's a connection,” said Felicity.

“I wish there was a way we could say thank you,” said Mrs. Norton. “It was so good to have someone who was on our side.”

“Aren't you a baker?” Charlie said to Mr. Norton. He nodded. “It would be good to have a nice loaf of bread, baked by someone who really knows what he's doing. We've tried more than once, but the results are always dismal.”

“Even when Charlie is kneading,” said Felicity, “and bashes the living daylights out of the dough.”

“Oh, you have to do it with love,” said Mr. Norton. “Aggression is no good with bread. You'll have one of my best farmhouses, and a brown one too, and it'll be our pleasure.”

When they had gone Charlie and Felicity chewed over the cud provided by the Nortons.

“I'm sure Norton is right about Anne Michaels. She is the sort of young lady who is bound to be on the ball where money is concerned. So why did she call off the persecution and settle for so little?”

“You'd been to school and read the riot act,” said Felicity. “She could have seen her glittering career stymied from the start by a police investigation.”

“I wish I'd been so effective,” said Charlie. “I didn't get that impression at the time. There is a rather mundane explanation that occurs to me. I guess that the drama pupils are a lot busier than most of the children at Westowram High: rehearsals and special classes after school, in addition to all the usual schoolwork and homework. Time to—let's say amuse themselves—
must be limited. Maybe they wanted to be off with those not particularly interesting (to them) people as quickly as they could because they'd got a more interesting and potentially profitable victim in view.”

“My dad?”

“Yes. This was probably about the time they targeted him and I heard them singing when I came home from work.”

Felicity thought.

“Or a slightly different interpretation,” she said. “They'd already been there by the time Anne called on the Nortons. Anne had been invited in, and had had the idea for a new sort of blackmail, something much more subtle, which didn't involve a posse of young children.”

“Rather demeaning in the long term for a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old, you think, to run around with a children's gang, even if she was the leader?”

“Exactly. She gets a sum she can share among her little army, tells them she's too busy with
The Tempest
to do anything for a bit and then embarks on establishing a relationship with Dad. After a time she starts making the connection with him a bit more public.”

“At the carol service, for example.”

“At the carol service. Where, alas, she was helped by me. Not to mention that poor old dad fell for it like a sucker.”

“I never thought of your dad as a sucker. More of a predator.”

“Yes, with Mum he was, capitalizing on her devotion. And anyone else who enjoyed being a doormat.
But he never knew how the mass of ordinary people thought or reacted. That made him very vulnerable.”

“What you're saying is that Anne intended to capitalize one way or another on the suspicion and shock ordinary people would feel at a close relationship between an elderly novelist and a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl.”

“I can't think of a better motive for her getting involved with him. She was aiming to create the sort of shock that swept through Coombe Barton. Anne's parents hadn't felt it by the time that Dad died, but their slowness could have been prodded by Anne herself, with well-calculated ‘revelations.' ”

They left it there. Charlie found it hard to envisage Rupert Coggenhoe as a victim, but it did seem plausible that Anne Michaels should have intended making him one.

* * *

The next morning, before he went to work, he had a phone call from Ben Costello. It was not very satisfactory.

“Inspector Peace? I'm ringing about the autopsy on your father-in-law.”

Charlie made no comment on the “Inspector Peace,” but instead kept his cool, conspicuously.

“Do you want to speak to Felicity?”

“No, I think it will be better to talk to you first. As far as the initial findings are concerned, they're inconclusive. As I think we said was likely to be the case, there were so many injuries to the body as it fell from the upper path to the bottom of the quarry that distinguishing
any particular blow by a human hand was extremely difficult. But of course, work is continuing on that.”

“I see. Rather as I expected.”

“As I did too. Now my boss, Superintendent Trench, is keen to get possible DNA material from the clothing and send it for analysis. Mr. Coggenhoe was wearing an old sports jacket that would respond. But I must say I don't see the point of all that if we have no suspicion of foul play.”

“What exactly do you mean?”

“Well, say we get material that connects this Anne Michaels to him, or for that matter connects your wife to him; would it tell us anything we don't already know? They were both close to him, and could well have handled his clothing. But I'm not the one in charge. All I'm doing is telling you a possible step that we may take in the future. And as you know it could involve a long wait.”

“Don't I know it,” said Charlie feelingly.

“You might like to make your feelings known to Superintendent Trench, who's in charge of the case.”

“No, I wouldn't. My motto in such cases is to tread softly. It's his business entirely, so far as I'm concerned. I'll get Felicity. This is her loss and her problem, so her views are the ones you want.”

“Oh—before you get her, I believe you've been talking to the Vickerys—Dwayne and his mother.”

“I was just going to tell you that,” lied Charlie. “I know the boy from the visit I made to the drama class at
the high school here. You must have heard the rumor that's going around the village: that my father-in-law's death is connected—I suppose you could almost say inspired—by the death of one of the characters in a play put on by the drama stream.”

“I had heard,” said Costello, with contempt in his voice. “I think more than enough has been said about those kids. As I probably made clear when we talked.”

Charlie's face was impassive, and he continued regardless. “I was alerted to the possibility of gossip by an odd visit I had from Harvey Buckworth, who is one of the stream's teachers. I managed to get out of Dwayne what was worrying Buckworth, which he never came clean about himself. I told Mrs. Vickery it all seemed very far-fetched, and she really shouldn't be keeping her son off school as a result of loose talk such as this.”

“I'm not worried about her bloody son. All this talk will do is send people off on the wrong track. By now ninety percent of the village will be convinced it was a murder, whereas accident or suicide are much more likely explanations.”

“I'd agree with you about accident—heart attack, leading to a fall. No indication of that, though, in the postmortem?”

“None so far.”

“But I can't agree about suicide. No one who knew my father-in-law will believe he could consider robbing the world of his incomparable gifts by taking his own life.”

“Maybe. You could be a bit biased, don't you think? There
could be reasons we know nothing about. Anyway, I'm relying on you keeping out of this, like we said. It's probably not a case in any sensational sense of the word, but the last thing we need is Leeds sticking its nose into our business. Now, can I talk to your wife?”

Charlie put down the phone without saying another word, and called Felicity. He listened in to her end of the conversation, and his wife reacted exactly as he had done. He hoped that Ben Costello was more tactful and less aggressive in his part of the dialogue than he had been with him.

While they were still talking he went out and got into his car. On an impulse he drove toward Leeds by way of the road where Chris Carlson had set up his campaign headquarters. The office had had a coat of paint around the windows and on the shop board above the windows and doors. So far it was blank, but in the window there was a smart homemade poster simply shouting
CARLSON FOR MAYOR
. As he drove past he saw the boy whom Chris had called Peter wielding an enthusiastic paintbrush inside the shop. He stopped his car and went back. The door was open and he stood a moment looking.

“Hi, Peter. You having fun?”

The boy turned round and grinned.

“Yeah. I really like painting. I'm thinking of doing it for a living.”

Chris solving people's life problems for them again!

“Is Chris around?”

“Not now. He will be. He's gone to Radio Bradford
to tell them about the mayor thing.”

“The mayor thing?”

“Like how it ought to be elected, how it hasn't yet been tried properly and how the other system just produces party hacks.”