Fete Fatale (11 page)

‘I'll ask Colonel Weston. And did you leave your stall again before—before you went out and saw your husband's body?'

‘No. I've thought it over. Mr Horsforth never came back to relieve me after my lunch-break.'

I felt like adding, ‘So if you want to pin the murder of Marcus on me, you'll have to fix it much earlier than you thought.' I suppressed it, because I'd had one unwise outburst already; but the tired eyes were on me, and I suppose he recognized that we were both thinking along the same lines. I said:

‘When do you think it happened?'

‘We don't know. We are obviously going to have to do a lot of interviewing, testing of people's memories, because of course the medics won't be able to pinpoint it at all exactly. The trouble is, at a fête, people don't keep looking at their watches the whole time.'

‘I did,' I said. ‘But I suppose you don't if you're just attending and enjoying yourself. But what makes you say that you think the . . . the crucial time was later?'

The eyes sharpened as they looked at me.

‘We've made no absolute decision about the likely time of death, you understand.' (Meaning, don't think you're off the hook, my girl.) ‘And we haven't even begun to interview people systematically. But we have had one sighting of your husband volunteered, and that was quite a bit later than your lunch-break.'

‘How much later?'

‘Shortly after half past three. The witness says she saw your
husband leaving the meadows, heading in the direction of the town square—presumably on his way home.'

‘She?' I inquired.

‘Yes.' He consulted his notes. ‘A Miss Mary Morse.' A quick glance at Inspector Parkin showed that he'd been informed that Mary was one of the town busybodies.

‘And did Miss Mary Morse claim to have exchanged words with my husband?' I asked, unable to keep a barbed quality out of my voice. The Superintendent flicked back through his notebook.

‘She claims that he said: “It's gone very well so far, hasn't it?” And that she replied: “Very well indeed.” '

I reflected. Robbed of the undertow and the tones of voice, the conversation sounded innocuous. No wonder Mary reported it. But I couldn't rid myself of the idea that there must have been more to Mary's burst of public spirit than met the eye.

‘At what time did Miss Morse come to you and volunteer this information?' I asked.

‘At about nine-thirty last night.'

‘Ah,' I said. ‘And what
else
did she volunteer?'

Superintendent Coulton looked at me, quite sharply.

‘Why do you think she volunteered anything else?'

‘Because I snapped her head off on the phone shortly after nine. If she came along to you about nine-thirty, it will have been to get some sort of revenge, though I'm sure she told herself she was only doing her civic duty. Treat what she said with caution.'

‘I treat all the information I get with caution,' said Superintendent Coulton, and though he was looking at me meaningfully as he said it, I thought it was probably true, and felt the better for it. Hexton was not easily going to put it over on him. He leaned back in his chair. ‘Mrs Kitterege, were you happily married?'

He was telling me, quite informally, of the tendency of Mary Morse's other ‘information'. My blood boiled, but I tried to answer as simply and directly as possible.

‘Yes, we were. Very happily married. We loved each other very much.'

‘Tell me what sort of a man your husband was.'

Well, you know how I saw Marcus. I talked about him for some time, telling the Superintendent the sort of things I would probably never have said about Marcus to his face. In the sharpness of
my sense of loss, I probably enthused about him, and perhaps this was unwise, perhaps almost suspicious. The Superintendent's eyes were hooded; the Inspector stopped taking notes (the character of the deceased was not ‘fact', perhaps). After a few minutes I ground to a halt, and had to suppress a sob. The Superintendent repeated:

‘And you were perfectly happily married?'

‘Yes, I've said so.'

‘You did not, either of you, go in for . . . extra-marital adventures?'

‘We did not,' I said. ‘Whatever Mary Morse may have said.'

‘I would ask some such question to any wife whose husband had been murdered,' said Coulton.

‘That must make you very popular with the recently bereaved. In this case, I suppose that Mary's little chat has ensured that you come here with your mind already made up,' I said, unable to suppress the bitterness I felt. ‘Has the good Miss Morse also kindly supplied you with a name to pin these extra-marital activities on to?'

I saw what Mary had been trying to do: distract police attention from the major cause of strife in Hexton over the last few weeks—her own activities. On the other hand, I did wonder who Mary could have picked on for Marcus's covert love-life. It's not that there was any lack of attractive women in the country around Hexton, but in Hexton itself everyone for one reason or another had a faint air of unlikeliness about them. Mary must have had to think quickly to find anyone, and I wondered who on earth she had picked.

‘You really mustn't put my questions down to Miss Morse, and I assure you that my mind is not made up.' The Superintendent had a good line in patience, giving me the impression that he might be the father of a brood of rather tiresome children. ‘However, there has been one name mentioned. Tell me, how friendly was your husband with Lady Godetia Peabody?'

For the first time since Marcus's death I giggled, and the giggle swelled to a yelp of laughter. Mary really had been scraping the bottom of the barrel. When I recovered, I said:

‘You may think that I was in the dark over Marcus's sexual habits, and I'm sure a lot of wives are. But I assure you I do know something about his tastes. You'll be wasting your time if you start
investigating the possibility of an affair between Marcus and Lady Godetia.'

‘She was heard to say he was “madly attractive”.'

‘I'm sure she did. I can imagine Lady Godetia saying that about almost anyone: Denis Thatcher, Ronald Reagan—anyone a degree or two more attractive than Yassir Arafat. Whether anyone would ever be attracted to her is another matter.
Are
there men who are turned on by that Anna Neagle manner?'

I could see our local Inspector Parkin was shocked. Widows did not make jokes of that kind—or perhaps he considered Anna Neagle sacrosanct. He marked me down, if he had not done so long ago, as a sharp-tongued bitch. Well, I had no complaint about that.

‘We won't pursue that,' said Coulton, with a sigh.

‘I bet you
do.
But you'll be wasting your time. You know what Mary's trying to do, don't you?'

‘Well—' Superintendent Coulton threw a look at the Inspector.

‘She's using anything to hand—and clutching rather desperately, I may say—to divert attention from her own recent activities.'

‘Right. Then let's get on to them. Now first of all, tell me about your husband's position in the town.'

‘His position? Well, as you must know, he's a vet. Was a vet. He served on the town council for a bit—just a couple of years.'

‘Why not longer?'

‘He was sort of squeezed out. There wasn't any room for Independents any longer. Party politics took over, and they all started calling themselves Conservatives. That's what Marcus was, but he drew the line at calling himself one. So most of his community activity these last few years has been through the Church.'

‘Why the Church?'

‘Why not?' I asked defensively. After all, even I had to admit that there was nothing either perverse or absurd about being a Christian. ‘He's always been involved in the Church since he was a boy. He was one of the churchwardens at St Edward the Confessor's. Where, as I suspect you have already heard, there's been a lot of fur flying these last few months.'

‘Yes, I had heard. And as an outsider I find it rather difficult to understand. What was your husband's position in it all?'

‘His function was to smooth ruffled feathers. That was always
Marcus's function. He would go around trying to convince people that they were making a lot of fuss about nothing. They were, but mostly he didn't convince them.'

‘Among the ruffled feathers were Miss Mary Morse's?'

‘Pre-eminent among them were Mary's. With Thyrza Primp's a good second. Thyrza is moving away, otherwise she would have been more active. When he failed to soothe, Marcus had reluctantly to take a stand—just as a matter of common sense and good manners, and it was then that he couldn't avoid rousing people against him. The bone of contention was Father Battersby, who is apparently too High Church for Mary and her gang, and celibate to boot. For some reason Mary conceives a vicar's wife to be the pivot and mainstay of the parish, though God knows the precedent of Thyrza Primp might make most people hope for a few years' respite from vicars' wives.'

This time, I noticed, my sharpness won a sympathetic grin from Inspector Parkin. Presumably he too had suffered.

‘You don't like these women?' asked Superintendent Coulton, in one of those statements of the obvious that I suppose policemen are forced to go in for.

‘I . . . don't . . . like . . . them . . . at . . . all,' I said, spacing it out venomously to make clear my sincerity.

‘I see. I must say I still find it an area of controversy that I can't quite understand.'

‘Read a few minor mid-Victorian novels and you'd understand it better. Hexton is a very mid-Victorian community, heavily diluted. And you have to remember that most of the people here are bored—sometimes out of their minds.'

‘And as far as you are concerned, it is this business of the new vicar that's at the bottom of your husband's murder?'

I thought for a bit.

‘Yes . . . Perhaps in some indirect way that we haven't yet understood. It all seems so trivial, but it has aroused very high feelings. And truly—you don't have to take my word for it, ask anyone—Marcus was such a peaceable, loving man, there just isn't any other reason I can think of. The trouble is that Colonel Weston, the senior churchwarden, is rather a lethargic person, though well-meaning enough, so when all the fuss blew up, it was Marcus, inevitably, who found himself in the firing line.'

I stopped, appalled.

‘I haven't asked you how he was killed.
Was
he shot?'

‘No, he wasn't.' He looked at me closely. ‘I notice you assume he wasn't simply drowned.'

‘How could anyone drown Marcus?' I asked impatiently. ‘He was very strong. It would take ages, and great strength and expertise, to hold him under. It just couldn't have happened in Hexton on fête day. There would be bound to be people come along.'

‘He could have been stunned and thrown in,' Inspector Parkin pointed out.

‘Yes . . . Funny, I never thought of that . . . But I suppose that's because I thought of him as on his way home—walking busily along. Not standing by the river dreamily, asking to be hit from behind . . . But that wasn't how he was killed, was it?'

‘No. He was dead when he went into the water. How long there was between his death and his being thrown in we don't yet have enough information to judge. The medics will pronounce on that eventually, I suppose, but I'm not expecting that they'll come up with anything very useful. There are some odd things about the body—dirt on the flesh and on the clothes that the river hadn't quite washed away, and some bruises—which we're going to have to account for. He could have fallen—'

‘From Castle Walk!' I exclaimed.

‘Why do you mention that?'

‘It's the obvious place, isn't it? It towers over the meadows and the river. I never could work out why Marcus would be going home along the river. It's a very long way round, and he hadn't got much time for his cup of tea and his pipe. Castle Walk is longer than through the town square, but not by much, and it's a path he was very fond of. And of course it would be much cooler on a hot day.'

‘Yes,' said Coulton. ‘That would explain it.'

‘And—' I hesitated, because this would be painful. Marcus had liked pain no more than most. ‘How did he actually die?'

‘He was stabbed to the heart with something very thin and sharp. It would certainly have been a very quick death. The blow was either a very lucky one, or a very knowledgeable one.'

‘The weapon,' I said, forcing myself to keep my tone absolutely clinical, ‘was withdrawn from the body?'

‘Yes. We have little or no idea what it could have been. The very finest of stilettos—but even that would seem to be too crude. Anyone around here with connections with Italy or Spain? Seen anything like that in anybody's home—perhaps a war souvenir?'

I thought. One didn't like to think of the interiors of most of the houses in Hexton, but in the course of my getting together stuff for my stall I had recently seen the inside of a great number.

‘People's houses here are full of such incredible bric-à-brac,' I said. ‘Naturally I relied on that when I was collecting for the junk stall, though in fact I found they very seldom wanted to get rid of it, and resented it being described as bric-à-brac, let alone as junk. Thyrza Primp, to take an extreme case, was convinced that all the rubbish she loaded off on to me was stuff that anyone would find either useful or decorative, though I knew people wouldn't touch it with a bargepole . . . Italy . . . I know Colonel Weston was at Monte Cassino, and fought his way up to Venice. But I've never seen anything like a stiletto in his house. He's more a gun man—slaughtering wild life, and that sort of thing. The Culpeppers had a holiday in Amalfi a few years ago, but it doesn't sound as if your average tourist souvenir is the sort of thing you're looking for . . . Mary Morse and her mother made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land years ago. They felt the dirt was sanctified by the associations. They came back with all manner of hideous souvenirs, but I don't think Israel is famous for its delicate weapons, is it? . . . I really can't think . . . But you said that a stiletto—'