The Mistress of Alderley (18 page)

An expression of injured innocence suffused Syd's face. It was well practiced, Charlie guessed.

“At the moment? I'm not doing anything for him at the moment.”

“Then why was he here?”

The man swallowed, and in his head he ran through a litany of the lies he used when the theater authorities decided his activities had overstepped the mark.

“He's in the area because his partner is acting in Bradford. He just called in to pay his respects.”

“Pull the other one. He thanked you, and said his visits to Leeds wouldn't be the same without you. Would it help to jog your memory if I mentioned the Crescent Hotel?”

His mouth dropped a fraction.

“How did you know about that?” Charlie stood quite still and waited. “I ain't done nothing wrong.” This was said aggressively. “The hotel just rang, said they'd got this very swish room, and it was available for hire.”

“Long or short lets?”

“Yes.”

“Redecorated to the specifications of Marius Fleetwood, lately deceased.”

“Well, he did mention that.”

“And you'd get your cut for bringing it to people's notice.”

“Nothing wrong with that, is there? Nothing wrong with any of it.”

“No, there's not,” said Charlie, drawing back a little from the confrontation. “An assignation for a quick one is not an offense anywhere except Kabul or Tehran—and maybe Boston. But just because there's something rather whiffy about all this, as I think you realize, perhaps you'd better tell me precisely what you're doing for Mr. Radshaw. Otherwise I might have to go a lot higher up to get the necessary muscle to pry it out of you.”

Syd looked sick.

“Well, you might say Mr. Radshaw is a bit of a connoisseur.”

“Oh yes? What is it? Delft china? Netsuke?”

“Don't come the smart arse with me!…Oh, sorry, Sergeant. No, it's what you might call physical things he's a connoisseur of.”

“I thought it might be.”

“And I sort of…suggest people who might provide something novel, tell him about new establishments that have sprung up since he was last in town. Or, as in this case, tell him about new locales, situations for seduction that he might find—you know—stimulating.”

“I know. So Mr. Radshaw, at your suggestion, has probably by now been along to arrange the hire of a room that his own daughter was to have been bedded in on Saturday by a man who was stabbed nearby by a person unknown. Seems Mr. Radshaw has a pretty strong stomach, doesn't it?”

“It sounds worse the way you put it.”

“Pardon my crudeness. And I presume the lady he is taking there is not his present partner.”

“That's his fucking business, isn't it.”

“Couldn't have put it better myself,” said Charlie, taking his leave.

Talking it over with Mike Oddie on Friday morning, Charlie conveyed his strong sense of the awfulness of the stagedoor keeper and his customer, but then said with a shrug, “Can't see that it's relevant.”

“Maybe not. But it's an interesting indication of character. And it's just possible it could be useful as a lever.”

“If he knows anything we would want to know. By the way, I have the impression from Caroline Fawley that his present partner is a pretty formidable character.”

“This case is littered with them,” said Oddie wearily. “Anyway, Radshaw is one of the unexplored possibilities—likewise his partner, though she was probably onstage at the time he was killed. There's one other aspect we haven't made a great deal of headway on.”

“Where did Fleetwood come from?”

“Right.”

“Family, parentage, education. What was he kicking
against
?”

“If he was. It tends to make a good story if someone who was a serial adulterer comes from a strict Methodist background. But it's just as likely that he would come from a background of similarly randy males. Randy females, come to that.”

“But the thing is that we don't know,” said Charlie. “I wonder if his wife knows. Sometimes wives and husbands are ignorant of the most basic things about each other.”

“Sheila Fleetwood is supposed to come in this morning. There's the hearing and the bail application for her son. Perhaps we could ask her. And we've had a call from a sister that I haven't had time to follow up. I don't get the idea that Fleetwood was worried by the fact of having a working-class background, do you?”

“No. But there may be something in that background he was keen to conceal.”

When Sheila Fleetwood came in at ten in the morning she had her daughter with her—a bright, lively fifteen-year-old with a sparkle in her eyes and an obvious kinship with her mother.

“Wigged school just for the day,” Sheila explained to Charlie. “Came up on the early train to give me moral support at the bail hearing.”

“Nice of her,” he said, giving her a smile. “I don't think there'll be any problems, though. There certainly will be conditions. Make sure he sticks to them, or he could be in deeper trouble. I don't get the impression of a very strong character, I'm afraid.”

“He's not. We'll do what we can, me and Helena.”

“Oddie and I were wondering if we could have a few words about your husband's background.”

Sheila looked uneasily at her daughter, who caught the glance.

“Oh Mum, for heaven's sake! I've known Dad has another little woman tucked away somewhere since I was seven, and I've known that he changed her regularly like a library book since I was eight. You can't tell the policemen anything worse than that.”

“Well—”

“He's the Unknown Father. I want to know about him.”

“I suppose you're right.” So five minutes later, in Oddie's office, she turned to him and said, “You want to know about Marius's background. Really, I'm almost as much in the dark about it as you are. What in particular do you want to know?”

“Family background, for a start,” said Oddie.

Sheila marshaled her thoughts.

“Birthplace, Pontefract. Original name: Albert Winterbottom. I must say I'm very glad he changed it. He only told me when he had to produce his birth certificate for something or other. Father a train driver, mother a housewife, as they all were in those days. Marius got to grammar school, and went straight from there into retail trade.”

“Trainee at Morrison's,” put in Charlie.

“That's right. Stayed there for five years or more, learning the basics. He could have gone to university, but he always said he already knew at the time he left school that he wanted to go into retailing, so university would have been useless to him: ‘No point in farting around getting a degree,' as he usually put it.”

“And did you have much to do with his family?” asked Oddie.

“I had nothing to do with them.”

“I'm guessing that wasn't your own choice.”

“It wasn't.” Sheila paused and thought for a moment or two. “Quite early in the relationship, when he was getting to know my family, I brought it up. ‘You don't want to know about them,' he said. Of course I brought it up again when the wedding list was compiled, and later too, but Marius always brushed me aside. Eventually I stopped.”

“What was your own father?”

“Something in the City. That sounds almost as vague as Marius was about his, but that's because I was never interested enough to find out in detail. He was pretty high up in some insurance company—that's as much as I know to this day.”

“And you don't think it was snobbery, social shame, whatever you call it, that made him cut himself off from his background?” asked Charlie.

“No…. No, I don't….” Sheila thought again for awhile. “I
think,
knowing Marius, that he cut himself off from his family because they couldn't be of use to him any longer. He could be very ruthless, and he would be pleased rather than ashamed to hear me saying that.”

“Anything else you can tell us?”

“Mother dead…Oh, all this should be prefaced by ‘I think.' Marius was always ready with a lie if it suited him. So I think his mother was dead by the time we married. There is or was a sister.
I think
his dad is now in some kind of home.”

“I've got another granddad, then,” said Helena.

“Not one that's much use to you, I'm afraid. Marius did say not so long ago, ‘I don't think he knows what time of day it is, let alone what month or year.'”

“That would suggest some kind of occasional contact,” said Oddie.

“Yes, that's what I thought. Quite probably he was paying nursing home bills, perhaps through his sister. And really that's all I know—or all I think I may know.”

“Not much at all,” said Oddie to Charlie later, when Guy had been released on bail into his mother's care.

“Nothing much to go on from our point of view. Nothing in the way of motive for murder. Total neglect, apart from a financial contribution to square his conscience. A ‘couldn't care less' attitude, which had been going on for years.”

“Still, it's got to be followed up. Toss you for who does Radshaw and who does the Winterbottoms.”

They tossed, and Charlie got Rick Radshaw and Oddie the Winterbottoms.

The terminal state of decline of the English breakfast could be illustrated by the habits of the Mortyn-Crosses. The Dower House, where traditional habits and values were clung to as if they had the efficacy of prayer beads or jujus, indulged in the full caboodle on one day a week only, a Sunday. Otherwise the first down to the kitchen cut white and brown bread and made toast, and marmalade and jam was put on the dining room table. And that was it. Traditional breakfast dishes—the full fry-up, scrambled, poached, or boiled eggs, kippers or kedgeree—might be cooked at lunchtime, but breakfast was toast.

Mind you, Meta took a lot of it. And each piece called for a great deal of butter before it was topped with Frank Cooper's Oxford Marmalade. Jack had always regarded his sister's eating habits as being in the nature of a healthy appetite, a jolly girl's hunger. Recently, however, they had suddenly assumed the aspect of outright gluttony. That Friday morning he averted his eyes from the knife applying the butter as a spade does cement onto a wall, and from the spoon thrust into the marmalade pot as if it were diving into a bottomless lagoon. Really, he thought, Meta had never grown out of the nursery: greedy, petulant, childish. He suddenly thought she was a burden heavier than he could bear.

“I'll go down to old Pattel when I've finished breakfast,” Meta announced, “and pick up the
Telegraph.
”

“Why have we changed from the
Times
?” complained Jack.

“I've told you, the
Telegraph
is better for juicy court cases and murders,” Meta pronounced. “It's well known.”

Jack, who could subject statements like that to pedantic scrutiny when he was in the mood, today merely sighed.

“Is it the Fleetwood murder you're still interested in, or has another of our friends been killed?”

“Of course it's the Fleetwood one. It will be in the news for weeks yet, and then again at the trial, if they ever catch anyone. I don't pin much hope on your blackie pal, but the older one who's been on television may have a brain in his noodle. Though he did say yesterday that they hadn't ruled out the possibility of a mugger who took fright, or a shizo…schizo—you know.”

Jack sighed again. Meta must be the last person in Britain who found the word “schizophrenic” beyond her.

“You sound as if you'd feel cheated if it was a mugger or a schizophrenic,” he said.

“Not so interesting as if it's someone we know,” Meta said, munching. “Any of the children could have done it. Or one of Caroline's husbands or old boyfriends. Or one of those theater people, or someone from Marius's past. People are saying his past is littered with old girlfriends and look-alike children. They say there was one seen in the village not so long ago—a boy.”

Jack felt he had to protest.

“You're talking as if this was just any old murder case. But Marius was a friend.”

“He wasn't a friend of mine.”

“Well, I do have to admit that I had reservations about his intentions,” Jack weakly conceded.

Meta sniggered. “You're talking as if they were Victorian lovers.”

“But I looked on him as a rather scapegrace nephew whom I was always pleased to see.”

“It was
Caroline
you were always pleased to see, you oaf.”

“Of course it was. Caroline is a wonderful acquisition to the neighborhood—a delight to see and to talk to. I have the highest respect for Caroline.”

It was said emphatically, but Meta snorted.

“You're deceiving yourself. You're in love with her. Anyway, I think it's pretty funny to talk about having the highest respect for a kept woman. And the rector and his wife feel the same.”

Jack flinched, but kept his glance on her.

“The rector must take whatever line he feels right. Naturally he has to uphold the Church's beliefs. But I won't have Caroline called names in this house.”

Meta snorted again.

“Kept woman, floozy, piece on the side, tart.” She realized she had gone too far when Jack rose in anger, and she pushed back her chair and said, “Off to the village.”

Casting a regretful glance back at a half-finished piece of toast, she bounced out of the room and out of the Dower House, banging the front door behind her. Jack sat for a second or two in thought. Then he got up and went to a tall cupboard built into the hallway. From the top shelf he took down two old suitcases, dusty and falling apart from long disuse. He started up the stairs with them, then, as an afterthought, went and bolted the front door. Once on the landing he went into his sister's bedroom and threw the suitcases on the bed, sending up a cloud of dust. Then he opened the wardrobe and, higgledy-piggledy, put skirts, suits, and coats into one of the cases, stuffing them in and forcing it shut. Then he went to a chest of drawers, pulled out petticoats and knickers, stockings, bras, and nightdresses, and threw them into a case. He could hardly bear to look at them, though they were all familiar to him from the weekly wash. Then he fastened the clasp and took both cases downstairs. Having looked out the living-room window to see that his sister was not arriving back at the house, he unbolted the front door and put them outside. Then he got a piece of paper and wrote on it:

This he taped on the front door, then went inside, bolted it, and went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and wait.

It was ten minutes before he heard the inevitable Meta commotion. There was banging on the door, and then the constant ringing of the bell. It was a real brass bell, and Jack didn't see how he could disconnect it without ruining it, so he tied a wet tea towel around the clapper and this at least lessened the nuisance considerably. He knew that Meta would come round to the back eventually, so he moved, teacup in hand, into the hall, and just in time. Maddened by the silence the bell-ringing produced, Meta strode round, banged on the back door, then peered through and banged on the window. Jack was not tempted to peer back through the crack in the hall door. He knew that the unattractive sight of her pudgy, blotched face could produce in him a pity that might induce him to let his sister back into his life, where she had occupied a prime position for so long. No more. Never again. Those days were over. Pity should be expended with better discrimination.

Eventually—as he knew she must, because there was nothing else she could do—Meta went. He heard her stomping down the path, and, going to the living room window, he saw her plodding toward the village like an invading storm trooper. She was not carrying the two suitcases. That did not surprise Jack. Meta had never been one (in the long-ago days when they had the money to travel) to carry her own luggage. And she would not yet have given up. Where would she go to resume her campaign? There were not a great number of houses where she was still welcome, so Jack put his money on the rector.

The call from Mr. Watters came half an hour later. He said that he had Meta there, at the rectory, that she was very distressed, that he was sure their differences could be sorted out, family differences were so distressing, particularly in an
old
and
distinguished
family such as the Mortyn-Crosses, a family with such
deep
roots in the neighborhood, and if he could be of any use, could act as some kind of mediator in the sad little matter, he'd be glad—

“Best thing you could do,” barked Jack, “would be to collect her bags and put her on the train to Peterborough. Give her ten quid for the taxi fare to Aunt Sarah's, and I'll reimburse you when I know she's gone.”

There were mutterings of dissent from the other end.

“Your sister has talked about her aunt, but she says they hate each other.”

“All the better. It'll give them both plenty of privacy. Sarah's eighty-seven and in need of care. Meta is in need of a roof over her head. It's the perfect solution. So make it clear she's
never
going to come back here.”

He put the phone down on some well-intentioned squawks. Then, exceptionally for him, he went and poured himself a whiskey—a triple by pub measures—and diluted it as he liked it, with ice and tap water (Jack was traditional, but not a slave to tradition). Then he sat down, not doing anything, but just thinking—basking, if the truth be known, in what he had just done, and in his new solitude. Another half hour later he heard the rector's car, unmistakably wheezy, and heard the luggage being loaded into the boot. He sat on while Meta stomped up to the front door, opened the letter box, and screamed through it, “Jack, you're a cruel bastard, and you'll pay for this.” He felt happiness well up inside him as he heard the rector's car drive off for Doncaster station and the train to Peterborough.

In fact, he had never felt so happy since his last day at public school.

 

Charlie found the village of Abbotsdale without too much difficulty. He arrived there on Friday at lunchtime, after the talk with Sheila. It was five miles from Knaresborough, and the softer end of what the tourist traffickers called the Yorkshire Experience. Gently rolling fields surrounded the village, edging toward the determined flatness of the Vale of York. The village itself consisted of about twenty-five houses and cottages, all probably centrally heated, and all competing in their minds if not in actuality for the title of Best-Kept Cottage Garden. The natives were fairly friendly, however. He had got Rick Radshaw's address from the woman at Opera North who had invited him to the first-night party, and when he had rung three times at the doorbell a neighbor poked her head out of her door and said with grim humor: “Try the pub.”

At least there still was a pub. Many of the villages close to Bradford—more convenient for Lauren Spender's acting engagement, but less well-heeled than this one—had lost their last pub, and determined drinkers were condemned (if they took notice of drink-and-drive laws) to a long trudge to the nearest village that still retained that last bastion of British civilization.

He heard a voice as soon as he opened the door of the Spotted Cow and felt the warmth of its simulated gas open fire in his face.

“What always strikes me, coming north,” the voice said, just a touch too loud, and with the suspicion of a drawl, “is how short everyone is. I mean, down south I'm a fair height, but up north I'm a
giant
because everyone's so short. And round here they're positively
dwarfish
!”

How to win friends and influence people, thought Charlie. His eye picked out the tallest man in the groups around the bar and went over to him.

“Mr. Radshaw? I'm Detective Sergeant Peace.” And he flashed his ID.

“So?” said the next-great-soprano's father.

He was half standing, half sitting on a barstool, and his arm had gone around the shoulders of his partner, a hard-faced, overcosmeticized woman of about forty. Radshaw was wearing jeans, and was still lean enough to do so without exciting ridicule, but his long, thin face was greedy rather than just hungry, and his eyes told of endless morning and evening drinking sessions.

The people who had been around the pair when Charlie came in had spirited themselves away to other parts of the public bar, probably not so much from tact or nervousness as seizing an opportunity.

“So I'd like a talk with you both.”

“Why don't we grab a table, then?”

“I need more privacy than that. Couldn't we go back to your cottage and talk?”

“Go back to the cottage? But I'm still on my second drink.” One look from Charlie made him crumble around the edges. “Oh, very well…. Fred, another double scotch please…. I'll just have this, and then we'll get back.”

“Bacardi and Coke, Fred,” said the fragrant Lauren.

“Look, there's not much point in talking to Lauren,” said Rick. “She was onstage all evening in
Loot,
in Bradford.”

“Onstage all evening doesn't always mean what it seems to,” said Charlie. “Still, I did flick through a copy in Waterstone's before I set out. Fay does seem to be on most of the time. If the lady wants to she can stay here, and we can talk alone.”

He was fixed by hard, violet eyes.

“No, I think I'll come. It could be quite interesting.”

Rick Radshaw too, now that he'd got used to the idea, seemed to quite fancy being interviewed. He had almost certainly entertained the idea that he might be, because he hadn't asked in connection with what Charlie wanted to question him. He downed in his second gulp his third double whiskey, then pulled himself off the stool and up to his full height (about five foot ten, Charlie estimated).

“Come on. I'm ready for the rack and the thumbscrews.”

“You've done
Yeomen
once too often,” said Lauren dismissively.

Charlie had the impression as they all three did the two minutes' walk back to the cottage that the eyes of Abbotsdale were on them from behind closed windows. Clearly, if so, there must be something about him that marked him off as “copper.” What a humiliating thing to realize about himself! Rick and Lauren seemed impervious to the attention, either because they didn't notice it, or because they accepted it as their due, they being Thespians. Rick threw open the cottage door, and they were greeted by an agreeable centrally heated fug. Rick went straight to the drinks cabinet, took out an opened bottle of red wine, and sloshed two glasses full.