The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (26 page)

“In what way? Who was?”

“Ranulph and Melanie. In Ranulph's bedroom.”

“Anybody else?”

“No.”

“And no body?”

“No. All that came out of the blue.”

“How did they break it to you?”

“Oh, indirectly. There was something they wanted me
to do. I might find it shocking. But there'd been an accident. Nobody would understand.”

Charlie's eyebrows shot up.

“Not a very original story. How did you react?”

“I thought if they wanted me to do something nasty, perhaps illegal, they were going to pay for it.” He looked at Charlie. “I didn't know what it was then!”

His tone was anguished. He was trying to convey that he did have a conscience, hidden somewhere. Perhaps it was true.

“When did they tell you it was a body?”

“As . . . negotiations went on. Eventually, if we were going to agree on a price, I had to know what it was. I was appalled.”

“Why did you agree?”

He looked down like a guilty dog.

“Melanie appealed to me. Said Granddad's life couldn't end like that, shut up in jail. . . . All right, I admit it: I suppose I thought if that was what they wanted me to do, I could screw a lot of money out of them.”

“Did they tell you what happened?”

“No! I didn't want to know. Was it very nasty?”

“You don't want to know. Keep it like that. Where was the body, then?”

“It was already in the boot of the car. I didn't see it till the car broke down in Haworth.”

“Really? So someone had taken it to the stable, then. They must have been waiting to put it in when you got home.”

“Someone must have. Melanie just said, ‘You'll find it in the boot.' They had Mother's keys, of course.”

“This was when you agreed on a price?”

“All fees paid, and five thousand pounds down.” He said
it almost with self-loathing. Perhaps he was redeemable. Charlie was lost in thought.

“So someone killed him, then humped him down to the paddock, then into the car. Who could manage that?”

“A lot of people. He wasn't a big chap. Wiry, thin, quite short.”

“I suppose you speak with experience.”

Stephen shuddered.

“It was horrible beyond belief. The car broke down on the straight between Bridge House and Haworth station. I got it into the little station forecourt and sat there, out of my mind with worry what to do. I'd been aiming to drive over to Bingley Moor and dump him there—as far away from Stanbury as I thought the car would go.”

“You say ‘him.' Did you know who it was?”

“Somehow I did. I suppose it was the buildup, all the niceness to him. ‘Come into my parlor'—that sort of feeling. But they'd not said and I'd not asked. Anyway, there I was, stuck in Haworth. I got out of the car and started looking around. I knew the area well, but having a body to dispose of gives any place a whole new perspective. There are steps up to the car park from almost opposite the station. I got to the top and was just wondering whether this was a good place to leave him when the lights went off in the Tandoori and two of the waiters came out. They went toward a car together and they were talking in English. One asked the other whether he'd got to a garage yet, and the other said, ‘No, I don't know whether it's worthwhile. I think it's a write-off.' They drove off, and that left one old car in the car park. I went over and checked and the lock on the boot was broken. It seemed as good a place as any.”

“It was, in a way: it wasn't discovered for days.”

“I thought it might stay there till it began stinking. I went back to my car and waited till the traffic had dwindled to virtually nothing. Then I opened the boot and got the body out. . . . I don't want to talk about that. I tried not to look. Anyway, I got it up the steps and into the boot, then I banged the lid down and ran. I thought it would draw attention to the car, and us, if I left it in the forecourt, so I managed to turn it round and push it with the driver's door open back along the straight to the garage.”

“You did well, in the circumstances. It was the circumstances that you did badly in.”

“I know.”

“Then you walked home, I suppose. What sort of reception did you get?”

“The house was in darkness. But as I walked along the landing Melanie's door opened—gave me a hell of a fright, though I should have expected it. She just asked me if I'd got rid of the body, and I said yes and went on to my room. It was the truth too!” he added, as if what he was being accused of was untruthfulness.

“And the next day you left for here.”

“Can you imagine how much I wanted to get away? If the car hadn't been fixed I would have walked. I had a bit of money myself, and I got out of Melanie any cash there was in the house, with the promise that the balance would be sent by check when I had opened a bank account here. Melanie has always handled the household's money, at any rate since Granddad became so feeble. Then I got the hell out of there. For some reason I didn't want to face Mother.”

“Why not?”

His brow furrowed.

“I don't know. I had some feeling that she's always been somehow out of it, kept apart from all that, whatever it was. Innocent, if you like. And I didn't want to see her, knowing what I knew . . . having done what I had done. God, what a mess I've made of my life. What's going to happen to me?”

“I don't know,” said Charlie, with a real sense of pity. “You've helped yourself a lot, telling me all this without too much pressure and before Forensics comes up with physical evidence. But you're going to need all the brownie points you can muster with the college authorities, I would guess.”

“God, yes. Is it worth it? I came here to get away from Ashworth and my life there, and all I get is the same kind of loneliness.”

Charlie felt very old, giving him advice.

“You'll make friends. But do you want the sort of friends who'll make up to you for all the wrong reasons? Because you're a famous painter's grandson? Because you're involved in a notorious murder case in which you got rid of the body? Any sort of fast or snob set here is not likely to welcome you on any other grounds, are they? Think about it. Wouldn't you be better off getting your head down, getting into your reading and finding your friends among people who need to do the same?”

Stephen brooded. “Maybe. . . . Yes, I suppose that's true. I'll never find anybody who's cocked things up in quite the monumental way I've done.”

“I don't know. Don't wallow in self-accusations. If you cocked things up you had a lot of help doing it. You might ask yourself what kind of people would ask a young man,
just setting out in the world, to get rid of the body of a murder victim.”

Stephen nodded.

“The sort of people who provided the body in the first place, I suppose.”

Charlie stood up.

“I think that about sums it up. If you're in trouble, they're in much more. Come on: let's go back to your lodgings and pack. I'm afraid you're going to have to come back to Yorkshire.”

“Did you believe him?” asked Oddie the next day as they sat in Oddie's office in Leeds Police HQ with Stephen Mates in custody in one of the cells.

“Yes, by and large, I did,” said Charlie, who had thought over the interview a lot the night before. “Of course, there may have been a degree of slanting—letting himself off the hook, exaggerating his own horror and reluctance. Wouldn't you, in the circumstances? But on the facts, and the sequence of events, I believed him. And
what he said is borne out by Mary Ann Birdsell's memories, hazy though they may be.”

“Not to mention her mother's even hazier ones. Though we may ignore those, in my view.”

“Absolutely. We treat with skepticism everything said by any of the Ashworth disciples.”

“Because on any assessment,” said Oddie somberly, remembering his talk with the medical experts, “garroting a victim would need the sort of strength in the hands neither Byatt nor his wife remotely has at this stage of their lives.”

Charlie nodded.

“And according to Stephen Mates's story, someone took the body down to the stable area, then put the body in the boot, while Melanie and Byatt himself negotiated terms for its disposal.”

“It might be worth investigating which of the Ashworth disciples has a driving license.”

“But it was Stephen who drove the body and dumped it,” protested Charlie.

“Precisely. Why didn't the person who had done the murder also drive the car and dump the body?”

“Right. I should have thought of that. . . . You know, if it hadn't been Stephen, they would have tried to persuade one of the other drivers there to do it, and probably succeeded.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I see all of the Ashworth mob as in it, in some way. Not directly, not participating or watching, but
knowing
. Realizing that Ranulph is an artist turned on by violence, by cruelty, and knowing that things have
occurred in the past that stimulated his creative urges to heights he couldn't otherwise have reached. And they all keep quiet about it, probably don't even discuss it among themselves, because they're not close to each other. But each one
knows
, is aware, or at the very least suspects.”

“I wonder if you're right,” said Oddie reflectively. “You know them better than I do. If you are, it will be the devil's own job to prove—and another one to frame any charge based on it.”

“Probably out of the question. I wonder if Declan O'Hearn suspected the same thing, and that helped him to his decision to get the hell out of there.”

“I
wish
he'd been picked up,” said Oddie. “Until we find him, there's always the nagging doubt in the back of our minds as to whether he's alive or not.”

“I think he is. We have enough bodies. What we need now is a lot more facts.”

“Here's one,” said Oddie. “Stephen Mates was treated for asthma and related illnesses at the Royal Salford Hospital in late September 1984. They specialize in diseases of the lungs.”

“And while the boy and his mother were away, the father disappeared,” mused Charlie. “And in the succeeding months there was a second sharp upsurge in creativity on the part of Ranulph Byatt. By the way—this is a very long shot—what sort of detail is there on the motorway accident that killed Catriona Byatt and her husband?”

“A fair bit. It was a very nasty accident. I've got a computer printout somewhere here.” Oddie rummaged in the mass of paper that regularly blotted out the plasticized wood of his desk when he was on a difficult case. “Here.”

Charlie took it and read.

“Hmmm. A fast car overtook them and cut in, causing them to brake sharply and be hit from behind by an old Land Rover, the driver of which was severely injured. . . . Interesting. I must get something checked.”

“Before you go,” yelled Oddie to his departing back, “what about that other ‘period' in Byatt's painting?”

“Ah, yes,” said Charlie, turning back, “I read up about that last night when I got home. Not as interesting as the earlier ones—not to art critics, I mean. No predominant color this time: some critics call it his ‘black' or ‘gray' period, but apparently that's stretching a point. Briscott quotes one or two critics from influential newspapers and periodicals. One mentions feet, shoed feet, looking as if they were suspended just an inch or two over a floor.”

“But the pictures are not admired?”

“I didn't say that, but not so admired as the earlier ones. Apparently most of them are very abstract, at a time when abstraction is rather going out of fashion.”

“I see. And when were these painted?”

“More slowly, not so much in a burst of energy as both of the earlier ‘period' paintings were. The arthritis taking hold, presumably. But most of them came in the years ninety and ninety-one.”

“We don't, to put it bluntly, have anyone who disappeared around 1990, do we?”

“Not that I've heard of.”

“We could ask the Keighley Police.”

“Sure. Except that the Keighley Police would never have heard of Patrick O'Hearn, or Declan either, and they don't seem to have been informed of the disappearance of Morgan Mates either.” Charlie paused. “There was one thing I wondered . . .”

“Spit it out.”

“Most of these people seem to have done up their cottages from a semiderelict condition. But Arnold Mellors talked about his cottage becoming vacant. That's rather different, isn't it?”

“It is. It's a long shot, but a possibility. What do you think our best move would be, psychologically?”

Charlie meditated for a moment or two.

“Take Melanie Byatt in for questioning. Remove her from their midst. We've ample evidence against her for the disposal of the body. Taking Byatt himself might be an extreme step, what with his fame and his state of health. But we can insulate him. Then all the disciples are on their own.”

“I was thinking along those lines.” Oddie paused. “I'm far from feeling tenderly disposed toward Byatt, and I wouldn't think twice before taking him in, but maybe you're right. Go off and do your checking, and then we'll bring in the matriarch. I'll ring Keighley, see if they have a suitable cell. You can take her there to cool her heels, and then come back to Ashworth and we can do some questioning and thinking.”

When, a little over an hour later, they drove once again down the rutted track to Ashworth, a few questions had been answered in their minds, but many more remained unclear. This, Charlie felt sure, would turn out to be the crunch day. They left their car ostentatiously outside the farmhouse and rang on the doorbell. It was Martha Mates who opened it. Her face showed the frankest of apprehensions.