The Mistress of Alderley (12 page)

“I am, but I live with my parents.”

“Of course. Now
Blind Date
was a bit later than usual, and I finished my meal and switched it off before it ended. That would be around seven-thirty.”

“Good. And what did you do then?”

“I took my plate to the kitchen, put it under the tap, then poured myself another glass of wine, and went over to the window.”

She pointed to a wide window, with a view over to North Street. Rani had taken a peek while she was pouring him his coffee.

“Why did you go over to the window?”

“Why? Well, I often do. I'd switched on the television again because there was a concert on BBC2. You can't say I'm not catholic in my tastes, can you? Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. I wasn't interested in the first piece—the
Daphnis and Chloe Suite
—but I wanted to watch the next one, which was Beethoven's Seventh.”

“So you were at the window, watching what?”

“Not the stars, anyway! I like people. I watch them. In a way it's my job.
You
must understand, Constable. It's your job too, isn't it?”

“It certainly is,” said Rani, feeling that the false sincerity in his voice was almost as bad as the gush in hers. “Is this area good for people-watching?”

“Not really, no. Not as good as my last flat. It's
near
to places—lots of clubs, and the Grand Theatre, and of course the main shops—but it's not on the way to anywhere. Around here there's really nothing much, is there? So you see a few drunks, taking the air and not really sure where they are—but that's later on as a rule.”

“What about when you were watching: seven-thirty to eightish?”

“A bit betwixt and between. Earlier you'd see the shop people and the office people leaving work, some of the residents in these flats coming home. Those are regulars, and after a time you don't notice people you see regularly anymore. There'd have been a few of our residents coming back on Saturday, those in the retail trade probably, though we must have a few workaholics in all sorts of jobs, but mostly from restaurants, trips to London or Manchester, visits to elderly mums and dads. So those would be the sort I wouldn't particularly notice…. I do remember a courting couple, very sweet and swoony and old-fashioned they looked—”

“Young?”

“Oh yes. Late teens, I should think…. Then there was a roughly dressed young man—weather-beaten, in jeans, open-necked shirt, though there was a nip in the air, and a long coat. I thought he might be one of those that beg outside the theater…. Then there was—yes! this might be it, I think—there was an older man, who I noticed because he was wearing a very swish suit.”

“Yes, this could be it,” said Rani. “When?”

She thought.

“It was when the Ravel was ending and the Beethoven was about to start. Because I watched him: he was walking up North Street, and he seemed to be about to cross the road—towards where the Crescent Hotel is—come and see.” She drew him to the window. “There.”

“Right,” said Rani, looking toward the shabby establishment on the far side of the street below.

“And I thought: ‘He's not going to be staying in a dump like the Crescent,'” said Rhoda Moncrieff, “and he stepped back onto the pavement, probably because a car was coming, and at that point there was applause on the television, so I came away from the window for the introduction to the Beethoven, and I didn't see anything else.”

“Pity—but not your fault,” said Rani, not wanting to seem to criticize so obliging, and so potentially valuable, a witness. “So you stayed on this sofa for however long the Beethoven is, did you?”

“Yes—say between thirty and forty minutes.”

“And did you go back to the window after that?”

“Yes. Yes, I did. Say by then it was around half past eight.” She took up the
Radio Times
again. “Yes, the concert ended at eight twenty-five. By then the light was definitely poor. And I'm afraid I didn't see the smartly dressed man again though I stood here, watching and sipping, for some time.” She saw Rani's face, and fell over herself to make up for his disappointment. “But I did see something funny. This time it was a woman. Smartly dressed again—oh, definitely: long fur coat down to the calves—possibly not real fur these days, of course, even if she was really fashionable. Long dress underneath, I could just see that, and I think heavily made-up. There was an operatic first night at the Grand, so I thought she might have come out at interval time. And she really
did
go to the Crescent Hotel. Because I thought it must be going up in the world. Or getting a reputation for a certain sort of assignation.”

“Let's be quite clear about this,” said Rani. “You actually saw her go in?”

“Oh, definitely.”

“And she didn't come straight out, having found out she'd gone to the wrong place or something?”

“She didn't come out in the next twenty minutes.”

When Rani gave a detailed account of this interview next day to Charlie and Mike Oddie, he found receptive ears; they even made a tape of his account, to make sure that nothing was missed.

“What can a fashionably dressed lady do in a hotel that takes twenty-plus minutes?” asked Charlie cheekily.

“Borrow my copy of Alan Clark's diaries,” said Oddie.

In the car from Leeds to Marsham on Tuesday morning, with two uniformed constables, male and female, in the back, Oddie and Charlie talked of strategies for the coming interviews.

“You've seen more of Caroline Fawley than I have,” Oddie said. “What's your opinion?”

“Too contradictory and all-over-the-place to summarize easily,” said Charlie, keeping his eyes on the road, but trying to visualize her. “On the plus side: intelligent, perceptive, civilized. On the minus side: a dead loss where her own emotions are concerned. They paralyze her judgment. Presumably the two marriages are evidence of this. During all her talk about Marius I had this feeling of rose-colored spectacles: the wife being pregnant by an unknown boyfriend—couldn't be Marius because it had been a marriage in name only for years. Smell of stinking fish there.
And
in his supposed ownership of Alderley, as I found out from Sir John: he was renting it. This was a temporary affair for him, not a ‘till death do us part' one. So the intelligence, the human understanding, aren't operative in certain situations. Unless, of course, she's acting. I think she's doing that a lot. She emphasizes words as if she's in a play.”

“And the children?”

“Oh, that's even more difficult, because I didn't see enough of them to judge, and, of course, I've never met the eldest. Alexander and Stella are midteens, unformed—anything could happen to make them quite different people.”

“You don't believe the child is father to the man?”

Charlie thought.

“Sometimes, maybe. But often they change when they go out into the world—having independence, making their own decisions, makes them new people. Not surprising, is it? Dear old Wordsworth—yes, I
do
know who wrote that.”

“Of course you would. Married to an academic.”

“Ex-academic, aspirant novelist. Dear old Wordsworth may have felt the childhood him in the adult him, but other people look back on their early years and think: ‘Who the hell
was
that?'”

“Fair enough. What are these children like
now
?”

“The boy is quiet—far from the unbuttoned type. Computer geek. Likes secrets, I think. Whether he hugs them to himself or whether he can be persuaded to give them up through flattering his self-importance I suppose we'll find out. Also whether he's interested in
using
them. Stella is more outgoing, I think. Starting to be very interested in men, something of a tease, with a mind of her own. Close to her mother, but I would guess she understands the situation there.”

They were approaching Marsham, and Charlie concentrated on finding the right roads. From the back of the car the middle-aged PC, Stan Hargreaves, let out a
cri de coeur.

“I 'ope you're right that the child isn't father to the man—when it's a woman anyway. Because if my daughter as a woman is anything like my daughter as a child, she's goin' to make some poor man the stroppiest wife in 'istory!”

They split up when they got to Alderley, Mike Oddie interviewing Caroline in the big sitting room, with WPC Dutton at his side, and Charlie talking to the children individually in a small, underused study, with PC Hargreaves as his lieutenant. Stella went first, and marched in with no obvious shyness or fear of incriminating herself. Charlie introduced Hargreaves, but felt no further need to pander to her youth or make chat before the main business.

“Now, I want you to go over what you did on Saturday night as if you haven't talked to me about it at all. Talk to PC Hargreaves here if that will help: he hasn't heard it and hasn't been told it.”

Stella turned to the middle-aged PC with a dazzling smile, as if rehearsing for a career as a vamp. She's going to be a stunner, both policemen thought simultaneously.

“Right,” she said, ticking events off on her fingers. “Parents go off to Leeds around six, I think. Guy immediately suggests we take Mum's car and go off too. Seems like a good idea to us, so we go off to Leeds as well.”

“Why Leeds, when there was a danger you'd bump into your parents?” asked Hargreaves.

“Most of the other towns we could go to are a drag at weekends. Leeds is big enough for us to be able to keep away from the sort of place Marius might go to. He was the only one we had to watch for. Mum and Olivia—not that
she'd
care—would be busy in the theater.”

“And when you got there?” prompted Charlie.

“Right. We drove around, and finally found somewhere to park down near the law courts. Then we separated and went off to do our own things.”

“And what was your thing?”

A tiny shadow crossed her face and was gone.

“Well, farting around for the first hour or two. Just looking at places, seeing what was going on. You can't actually get into anything much if you're only fourteen.” She looked at them with a hint of provocativeness. “I can look a lot older if I try, but Ghastly Guy sprang it on us, this trip to Leeds, so I didn't have the time I needed. Anyway, I walked around, had a coffee and a bite to eat, caught my brother smoking up one of those ginnels—little passageways—off Briggate, had a horrible cheeseburger down near the station somewhere, then got rather fed up with the time I still had to waste. I made my way up to the Grand Theatre, though I'd intended to keep away from there. The interval was well over, so knowing Mum was in the stalls I slipped up to the dress circle and told the attendants there I was Olivia's sister. One of them said I had the look of my mother, and she let me slip in with her at the back of the circle and watch for a bit. Olivia wasn't on, but her Colm was, with a baritone. It really wasn't bad. I thought Colm was dishy when he came to Alderley, and he looked marvelous onstage. Olivia goes through them like paper handkerchiefs. I don't think she notices whether they're dishy or not. They're just notches on a stick for her.”

“How long were you there?”

“Oh, twenty minutes maybe. I think it was about quarter to ten when I went out again. I decided Leeds wasn't much fun for someone my age, so I just went to the Odeon and sat through a bit of a film till it was time to start back to the car. I didn't even see the end of the film—not that it mattered, because it was dead boring.” She perked up a fraction. “But I can tell you the plot, roughly, to prove I was there.”

“Do you read detective stories?” asked Charlie.

She drooped. “Yes. Is it that obvious?”

“Let's just say it wouldn't be much use you telling us the plot, since Mr. Fleetwood probably died in the early part of the evening, so far as the preliminary report would suggest.”

“So he was already lying there?…Poor old Marius. He was a bit of a bullshitter, but he didn't deserve that.”

“What was your opinion of Mr. Fleetwood?”

“Well, let's just say that if your colleague is talking to my mother, he should be taking several pinches of salt: knock off the halo she puts around his head, throw a few handfuls of mud at the pure whiteness of his robes, then the picture might be closer to the truth.”

“In what ways did he pull the wool over your mother's eyes, do you think?”

“She was just his bit on the side.” She made an attempt to look worldly wise, and came within an inch of succeeding. “He was accustomed to having one, and she was his latest. She wasn't the center of his life, and she'd have been dropped the moment he was tired of her. He set her up in this place because
he
liked a bit of luxury and elegance. He wouldn't have wanted to spend his weekends in an old semi—quite apart from the fact that Acton, where we used to live, would have been too close to home for him.”

“Have you any evidence of all this?”

“No. But would you care to bet on it?”

“No, I wouldn't. What about his son?”

“Ghastly Guy? He was back at the car when I went back to the law courts. I don't think he'd found the swinging Leeds scene as riveting as he'd hoped.”

“I meant what did you think of him?”

She paused before replying.

“You'd better ask Alexander about Guy. He knows a lot more.”

“But you must have an opinion.”

“I think he's a pathetic little twerp.”

 

“It was love at first sight,” said Caroline. “I know that sounds corny.
All
this is going to sound corny. That's how it was, though.”

“How did it happen?”

“I was eating in an Italian restaurant with a friend. Female. I'd just been in an awful comedy that flopped in the West End—taken off after only three weeks. The friend had to leave early to get to the theater—she was in a quite successful transfer from the National. I was on my own, just ordering coffee, when this man came over, said he was sorry about the play, that I deserved better, and could he order both of us a brandy and could he drink his with me.”

“And after that?”

She shrugged, and smiled tearfully.

“After that the next thing I knew was he was in bed with me, and I wished we never had to leave it.”

Oddie wondered how many women had similar stories about Marius Fleetwood.

“And then quite soon after that you were here at Alderley, and the arrangement was an established thing?”

“That's right. Within a month or two. That's nearly a year and a half ago. I still had some television work to do, but I could commute, and one of the things was
Heartbeat,
which is filmed here in Yorkshire, so it all worked out beautifully.”

“But now you've given up your career—I suppose that was your own decision?”

“Oh, very much so. I think Marius would have quite liked it if he was associated with someone who was on the television a lot of the time. But as soon as I saw this place, and got settled in, I thought, This is it. Being with the children all the time, there when they needed me. And having Marius come up every weekend. Those days were just—I can't explain—
wonderful
! The crowning point of my life. They made me feel that all those years as a moderately successful actress had been a waste of time.”

“And it didn't worry you that you were—to put it bluntly—a weekend mistress, and he also had a five-days-a-week wife?”

“No. It had become a marriage only in name: they lived entirely separate lives. But he never tried to run Sheila down, make her ridiculous in my eyes or tell nasty, demeaning stories about her. He was
tender
towards her, and concerned about how I should regard her, and I thought that was nice, chivalrous. It said a lot about how he regarded women, how he thought they should be treated.”

Oddie changed the subject.

“There hasn't been any problems with people in the village? I would guess there would have been plenty, twenty or thirty years ago.”

“Probably there would have been. I don't think the swinging sixties made much of an impact in places such as Marsham. But over the years, almost without people noticing it, things do change, and attitudes. I've been made
very
welcome, and the children too. My big friend in the village is Jack—Sir John Mortyn-Crosse, a
lovely
man. He tells me your sergeant has already talked to him. I hope he didn't regard him as some sort of rival for my affections, who stabbed Marius in the middle of a quarrel over me.”

“No, not at all.”

“Because we're just good friends. There's another whopping cliché for you. But we really
are.
”

“I gather from my sergeant that there had been some talk recently between you and Mr. Fleetwood as to whether things should go on quite as they have been doing.”

“You mean Sheila's pregnancy? I have to admit that that did come as a bolt from the blue. I mean, knowing how things were between them, and not knowing her age: I'd assumed she was about Marius's age, that is, probably beyond childbearing, and if not that, then too sensible, if you get my meaning. It's all a bit of a
mystery,
who the boyfriend is. But we decided—at least for the moment, but probably long term as well—to let things go on as before. The present setup…sorry, the setup as it was until Saturday, suited us, suited our lives and routines. So in the circumstances it didn't seem to us that something that we had nothing to do with needed to change it. The baby actually coming, and Marius not wanting to be its nominal father, might have made a difference, but somehow I don't think either of us thought that would happen, or if it did that it would alter things. We so wanted things to continue as they are…were. They were so
perfect.
”

Without the slightest sense of any snake in the Eden undergrowth, Oddie thought. And PC Dutton was barely able to keep the skepticism she felt from showing on her face.

 

Alexander came into the little study, rather nervous, rather uncertain, but also rather, under the surface, pleased with himself. He's got something for us, Charlie thought. Whether he's going to give it up easily, or only after I've played him for hours, is another matter.