The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (17 page)

There was a family that answered the description they had sent in a village called Donclody. The father, now dead, had been a violent man, both outside and inside his family circle, not otherwise criminal but brutal and stupid. The eldest boy, Patrick, was a tearaway with minor convictions, but nothing was known against the second son, Declan, or against anyone else in the immediate family.
The message helpfully added the name and telephone number of the Donclody parish priest. Charlie wondered cynically if they were in the habit of unloading awkward jobs on to the nearest available priest, in this case Father Baillie.

He sounded an elderly, compassionate man when they got him on the line after early morning Mass.

“The O'Hearns? Oh, yes, Patrick is the eldest, then Declan, and Mary is the third. Mrs. O'Hearn's done a fine job, on the whole, and against the odds, from all I hear. . . . No, I've only been here two years. . . . Well, I wouldn't want to be speaking ill of the dead, but the father by all accounts was a bit of a drunken brute, God rest his soul.”

Mike Oddie began to explain the situation, but was soon interrupted.

“Not Declan! You're not saying Declan has been murdered. Oh, but it'll break the poor mother's heart! I tell you, you couldn't have wished to find a nicer boy. And he had a brain too, a good, sharp brain, but with it all he was as willing and helpful as you could find in a year of looking. Oh, dear, oh, dear.”

“We've no certain identification as yet,” admitted Oddie. “We're hoping the mother might come over—”

“Oh, dear, is that necessary? The poor woman will be suffering so sorely at the loss.”

“We do find it is helpful to the survivors, as well as to us,” said Oddie. It was special pleading but it struck home.

“I can see that,” admitted Father Baillie. “Sometimes they have fantasies that it was never him at all, I suppose. You want me to talk to poor Eileen, don't you?”

“We'd be very grateful. And if you could persuade her to come over as soon as possible.”

“That might be difficult. I'm guessing that Rathdrum is as far as she's been in her life. And she'll certainly never have flown or been on water.”

“Persuade her, please. It's not only identification we need, but background too. Things such as, is there anything that we need to look into over there or can we concentrate on the young lad's life since he came to this area?”

“I can see that. I promise I'll do my best. If she wants me to I'll take her to the airport myself and do all that's necessary. Is it Manchester she should fly to?”

“Manchester or Leeds/Bradford. If you'll just phone and let us know we'll pick her up ourselves.”

Meanwhile there were things to be done, with most of the acolytes at Ashworth remaining to be interviewed, and the people at the farmhouse still largely unpressured about their story. But before they could get going Mike Oddie was handed a note about a phone message that had come in before they clocked in for the morning. News traveled fast in any small community, and in Haworth it traveled with the speed of light. Everyone by now knew that Ashworth was in the frame for a murder investigation. The message was from a Haworth garage, one situated in the bottom part of the town, not far from the railway station. It said that on Monday morning the Ashworth car had been in the garage's tiny forecourt when the proprietor arrived to open up. There was a phone call from Stephen Mates at Ashworth around 8:15, saying it had broken down the night before, and would they put it
in going order again. They were not the Byatts' regular garage, if indeed they had one.

“What say we split up?” Oddie said. “I'll look in on the garage, see if there's anything else they can tell us about the car—for instance, the interior, though it's not something garages especially notice. You go on to Ashworth, and I'll follow when I'm through in Haworth. Just keep it informal and delicately probing for the moment, at least until we have a positive identification. Who do you fancy taking first?”

“I'd like a word with Mrs. Max. She's the only outsider in the place, and she may, with luck, have an outsider's skepticism, unless loyalty gets in the way.”

“Who should I take, if I've time to do one on my own?”

“Try Arnold Mellors, in the cottage built on to the farmhouse,” said Charlie, after thought. “Then we'll take the others together—Ivor Aston and his sister, and Jenny Birdsell and her daughter.”

“Meaning you fancy those four?”

“As suspects? Well, especially the Aston pair. But I'm really thinking they may be more open with information, especially if we play one off against the other. It may need the pair of us to get the best out of them.”

It was the first time Charlie had driven down the rutted track to Ashworth. Even driving slowly and carefully it made for a bone-shaking trip. As he opened the gate, drove through it, then closed it again, Charlie wondered about the Byatts' car. Presumably it was in the stables, just visible at the end of the field; presumably it would be by now as clean as a whistle—though with modern techniques that could well be more apparent than real, and Forensics might well come up with one of their infinitesimal
traces. Anyway, the time to bring Forensics in was when the body had been identified.

He left the car just inside the gate, parked over a ditch. He got out and looked around him. Which cottage would be Mrs. Max's? He guessed that most of Ranulph Byatt's disciples had a little bit of money behind them when they moved here, but that Mrs. Max would have had none. He chose the smallest of the cottages, one that was really a sort of end bit to Colonel Chesney's, and he struck lucky.

“Oh, are you back?” she said, bluntly but not unfriendly, as she opened the door. “I was just on my way up to the house.”

“Can it wait a bit, say, half an hour?”

“I suppose so.”

“Who is it, Mum?” came a man's shout from the back of the tiny cottage.

“Just the police.”

A young man came forward and appeared at the door. He was slight but wiry, and had a pinched but intelligent-looking face. He put his arm around his mother's shoulders, and Charlie felt that this was a pair he could do business with.

“Can I come in?”

“Of course. Where's your manners, Mum? We want to give you all the help we can.”

But Mrs. Max had not stood aside.

“I'm not going to be disloyal, Joe.”

“You don't have to be, Mum. But I don't owe anybody here any loyalty.”

“They gave us a home,” said Mrs. Max, finally moving her homely shape aside and letting Charlie into a minute sitting room, furnished with pieces too big for it—pieces
that had probably come from her former, marital home. Charlie threaded his way between them and sat down in a fat armchair. He found that he had to tuck in his legs if he were not to make foot contact with the mother and son on the sofa opposite him. Charlie had already decided that the boy was likely to be his best or possibly his only source of unbiased information, and he turned to him first.

“Right. Now, you are—”

“Joe. Joe Paisley.”

“Ah.” He turned back to the mother. “So you are really Mrs. Paisley?”

“Jeanette Paisley, by rights. My husband was one of two brothers well known in the Haworth area—mostly for the wrong reasons, I'm sorry to say. They called us, their wives, Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Max, and it's stuck.”

“I see. And you came here when?”

“Oh, when Joe was a little lad. Nineteen eighty-two, it was, when the Byatts moved here from Stamford.”

“I take it they needed domestic help, and you needed somewhere to live?”

“Pretty much, though I had family in Haworth, and they
wanted
domestic help rather than needed it, to my mind, with two women in the house. Melanie was perfectly able-bodied at the time, and Ranulph's arthritis was in the very early stages. Martha could cope perfectly well if she got herself organized. But it suited me to get a bit away from the Haworth and Stanbury gossip.”

“I see. . . . The night that Declan O'Hearn took off, last Friday night, you didn't hear anything, weren't wakened by any activity?”

“I was not.”

“Nor maybe Saturday or Sunday night?”

“No, I always sleep through.”

“Nothing wakes Mum,” said her son. “I often had to wake her in the morning if they needed her earlier than usual at the farm. Now she has an alarm clock.”

“I see,” said Charlie, nodding. “And how did you hear about Declan's . . . moving on?”

“They just said, last Saturday morning, that he'd taken off during the night and left a note.”

“You didn't read the note?”

“No, I didn't.” She thought. “But I saw Melanie screw it up and throw it into the fire.”

“What she said was the note.”

She thought, then nodded.

“Well, yes. She said how disappointed she was in Declan.”

“As if Ashworth was some kind of worthy cause,” said her son, “like the Peace Corps or something, that young people ought to serve in for next to nothing.”

“Did they try that on with you?” asked Charlie, turning back to Joe, registering the strength of feeling in the voice.

“They were working round to that,” he replied with relish. “Making remarks like ‘A strong lad like you will always be useful at Ashworth,' or ‘Ranulph's always happiest with someone he knows.' Work at Ashworth? I should 'eck as like!”

“Don't believe everything Joe says about the people at the farm,” said his mother, her lips tightened. “He's got his own views. They never jelled, like.”

“Wouldn't want to jell wi' people like that,” said her son. “And it's not just them.”

“You mean,” probed Charlie, “that you don't jell with the people in the cottages either?”

“Gives me the creeps,” said Joe, with a touch of youthful self-righteousness. “The whole setup does. All this worship of Ranulph bloody Byatt. You can admire somebody's painting wi'out giving up your whole life to him.”

“And you think that's what they've done?”

“I'm bloody sure it is. Body, soul—”

“Conscience?”

Joe blinked at him.

“Well, yes. I wouldn't have put it like that, but, yes, they have.”

Charlie decided to show his hand a little.

“I mention that because I believe O'Hearn was heard to say that there were ‘things he wouldn't do.'”

“Good for him.” Joe thought for a moment. “Not that it did the poor bugger any good.”

“Maybe the reverse. Maybe it was the reason he was killed.”

“You mean they put something to him, and it was so horrible or maybe so criminal that when he refused to do it they had to kill him?”

“It's a possibility.”

Joe Paisley pondered for a second or two.

“I've wanted Mum to get away from here for ages.”

“Don't be silly, Joe,” his mother said forcefully. “What the policeman was just saying was nothing but speculation.”

“That may be, but his thoughts are going the same way as my thoughts always have. Get shot of them, Mum.” He turned to Charlie. “I've got a flat in Bolton. There's room for both of us.”

“Get away with you!” said Mrs. Max vehemently. “No
young man wants his mother permanently encamped with him! And what happens when you get a girlfriend?
She's
going to be delighted to have me there the whole time, isn't she?”

“Let's get this clear,” said Charlie, breaking in. “Why did you want your mother to get away from Ashworth?”

“Isn't it obvious?”

“Well, if you ignore what's happened in the last week, no, it's not. I've met Colonel Chesney, and he seems perfectly normal, and he describes Arnold Mellors as if he's, if anything, terribly dull. The women at the house, on the surface, seem pleasant enough. The old lady, Melanie, isn't what I'm used to, but she was friendly and helpful in her rather regal way. I just wonder why you've been trying to get your mother to leave ‘for ages.'”

“Silly fancies, that's all it was,” said Mrs. Max. Her son sat there thinking. He was one of those people who don't speak till they have their thoughts in order.

“First of all, we were always going to be outsiders here. Most of the people in the cottages are not
artistic
people, to my way of thinking: they're arty-farty people. But either way round, we were never going to be in with a crowd like that. Now she's on her own here, Mum's very isolated. She doesn't realize it, but she is. She needs to be in a place where she has her friends, things to go to, that kind of thing.”

His mother was scornful.

“People to gossip with, you mean. That's all you think women are good for when they get older. I've been talked about too much to want to do it to other people.”

Her son ignored her.

“Then there's the sort of people he gathers around him. They don't just admire him: they're devoted to him, they're his creatures. They're emotional bloody cripples, if you ask me. You may say they sound dull and ordinary, but he fills their lives, gives them a reason for existing. You can't say that's healthy and normal.”

“Agreed, if it's true. But your mum has escaped the influence.”

“She has. And Stephen and Mary Ann, you could say, though Stephen is
obsessed
with his grandfather, even if he isn't a member of the fan club.”

“I'm not getting an altogether pleasant picture of Stephen,” said Charlie. Joe's mouth curled.

“Stephen Mates is a prat. He's really quite ordinary, but he has to feel superior to people, and the only way he can do that is by setting himself up as the young master, the heir to the estate. Estate! What crap!”

“His grandfather said he behaved like a boor to Declan O'Hearn.”