The Mistress of Alderley (21 page)

“Jack, thank you so much for having come,” she said, drawing him into the kitchen. “You've been wonderful to me, and I'm so grateful. Tea or coffee? And what would you like with it? I've got chocolate cake, or some little biscuits I made for Marius last weekend which are still nice and crisp.”

“Oh, tea. And the biscuits, if the memory is not too painful.”

“Not painful at all.”

“I usually avoid coming up at weekends,” said Jack, “but now—”

“
Now
you're doing me a service. Taking my mind off things. And by
things
I mean anger rather than grief.”

She was aware, as she fetched the tin of biscuits and brewed the tea, of a suppressed excitement in Jack. She tried to dampen it down when they went into the sitting room and waited for the tea to brew.

“I've just been talking to the chairman of the Little Theatre in Doncaster,” she said. “There's a chance of a job there, as big panjandrum—a sort of actor-manager.”

“Oh Caroline, I
am
pleased! You know I always—”

“Yes, Jack, I know—
now.
And now I know why. You were trying to warn me about Marius, not trying to preserve my dramatic gifts for the English stage.”

“Both, my dear—both.”

“At least you didn't know about him and Olivia. I suppose you've heard by now?”

“Rumors, my dear. Mrs. Naylor's son is very in with Opera North.”

“People love that kind of thing. It makes me feel dirty. It's a terrible thing when your own daughter
disgusts
you. I never want to see Olivia again.”

“Don't say that. Some day she may have need of you.”

“I certainly hope she does!” said Caroline grimly.

“Anyway,” said Jack, trying to turn the conversation, “it will be wonderful to see you onstage.”

“Oh, I'll only do old-woman parts, and there aren't enough of those to go round.”

“If you only give yourself old-woman parts I shall write letters of protest to the
Doncaster Evening News.
”

“You're so sweet, Jack. I'm afraid I shall have to move to a smaller house, and one closer to Doncaster. I'm really sorry about playing host to the fete, but it looks as though you and Meta will have to shoulder it again.”

Jack bounced up and down in his chair and sprayed biscuit crumbs all over his ancient suit.

“You haven't heard, then?”

“
Heard,
Jack?”

“It's all round the village, but probably no one has told you because you're more or less in mourning.”

“Mrs. Hogbin is the only one who brings me village gossip, and her day is Tuesday. Tell me, Jack: I'm on tenterhooks.”

“I've turned Meta out of the house!”

Caroline's jaw fell open.

“Jack! You haven't!…What do you mean, ‘turned out.'?”

“I mean I packed her bags, put them outside the front door, and locked her out.”

“But why? You've lived together so long—all your lives, in fact. What had she done?”

Jack looked down and became cagey.

“Oh, it had been building up for a long time.”

She'd been sounding off about me, thought Caroline.

“But where will she go? She's got no money, or so she always says.”

“She's gone to Aunt Sarah in Northampton. I had a bitter phone call of complaint from Auntie yesterday evening. But she's eighty-seven, and needs someone there. They'll shake down.”

“But what if she's turned out again?”

“She can't be. Sarah hasn't got the strength.”

An awful conviction came over Caroline: Meta had been turned out to make room in the Dower House for herself and the children. She'd realized he was besotted, but she shuddered at such cruel consequences of something that was an illusion, a chimera, something that absolutely never could be. It had to be nipped in the bud.

“Jack, I can see how excited and pleased you are about this—”

“I am!” he said, his mouth stretched in a broad, triumphant grin. “It's like a liberation, Caroline. I haven't been so excited since VE Day!”

Caroline's face assumed an expression of warm but sad sympathy.

“But you do realize, don't you, that though I'm
enormously
fond of you as a friend, it never can be more than that. It's nothing personal. It's just that Marius was
absolutely
the last man in my life, and—”

“Caroline!” He almost shouted. She raised her head and looked at him, and saw that his face was red with a sort of horror. “You misunderstand. I've never for a moment imagined—I've worshiped you, but absolutely not in that way. I wouldn't have dared! And you know, since Lydia died, and the little baby, there's never been any question, not the slightest in the world, of—”

Caroline had to dash in to retrieve the situation.

“Oh Jack—I am
so
sorry. You must think me an awful fool.
Please
put it down to all the traumas and horrors of the last few days. I just thought your turning out Meta, after all these years, and your always having been so good and considerate to me—”

“Enough said! Dear Caroline, enough said! I turned out Meta because I've been wanting to for years without really realizing it, and I finally plucked up courage to do it. Already I feel as if my life has been transformed. I can spend my last years alone and in peace. You can't think how happy that makes me.”

Probably Aunt Sarah would have liked to do the same, Caroline thought. Then she felt she was being mean.

Rather sooner than he might otherwise have done, Jack decided that he had better be off. Ushering him through the hall and out into the September sunshine, Caroline was conscious of the eyes of Alex and Stella on them from the stairs. She suddenly had a thought that almost made her laugh: Jack had gone through the whole visit without farts or tummy rumbles. His distaste for his awful sister must have been the thing that upset his stomach, and he had effected his own cure for it. How odd! To cover her amusement she said, “Jack, I do hope you can forget my stupid,
stupid
mistake, and we can go back to being as we were.”

“Of course, Caroline, my dear.” He paused, then looked at her with a twinkling eye. “And, you know, thinking it over, it's really rather flattering. In fact, truth to tell, I'm chuffed to bits that you could even think of it!”

And, looking at him, Caroline could believe it.

She waved him good-bye, and went back into the house, which suddenly seemed overlarge, undistinguished in its architecture and furnishings, and even slightly ridiculous as a home for herself and two children. The two children were still standing on the stairs, looking at her in that adolescent weighing-up, judgmental way.

“You don't have to worry,” she called up. “I haven't made a fool of myself.”

But that, she thought, was exactly what she had done.

 

“So what say we go on to opportunity?” asked Oddie. “Can we rule out his two current women on those grounds alone?”

“I'd have thought we had to rule out Caroline Fawley, at least as doing it herself,” said Charlie. “There's no doubt she remained in the theater when he slipped out, no doubt she was around throughout the interval, and was in the theater for the second half. Rani and the other uniformed people have checked that very thoroughly, and it's dent-proof. Aside from hiring a knife-man—and a gunman would be much more likely and efficient—she's in the clear.”

“But not the wife,” said Rani. “Meeting ends at Stevenage at five o'clock. M1 then A1—you could do it easily by seven forty-five.”

“I've been in a car with you, Rani,” said Mike Oddie. “You're a maniac.”

“I'm a fast, safe driver,” protested Rani.

“In the passenger seat it felt maniacal. I'd put Sheila Fleetwood down as a careful, efficient driver. We'll class her as possible but unlikely.”

“All three children have to be classed as possible and not at all unlikely, as far as opportunity is concerned,” said Charlie.

“I agree. I can't see Guy as having the guts, and the other two are awfully young to murder a capable, well-setup man who's also a sort of father figure to them. But we're not into character—a quagmire area anyway. We're into opportunity. And you're forgetting, Charlie, that there are four children.”

“Four children. I stand corrected. Or rather five. Miss Helena has kept herself pretty much in the background of the picture so far as our investigations are concerned. Or should we say six, remembering Olivia? Still a child, with its typical want, want, want. But back to the real, actual child: the one who, so far as we know, has never seen his father. I don't fancy Pete Bagshaw's alibi at all. At home watching television with his mother. Backed up in a too-pat way by his mother. He could have been anywhere.”

“Not quite,” said Oddie. “If he was with a lot of other people—fellow students, say—he would have told us. But he could have come into Leeds. He could, if he has a car or the use of one, have gone to Alderley to snatch a look at his dad, or to do something more drastic. There again he could have heard that the star of Opera North's new production was Olivia Fawley, and that she was the actress Caroline Fawley's daughter, and concluded that his father was likely to be at the first night.”

“But not that he was likely to leave after half an hour and go to a crap hotel like the Crescent,” said Rani.

“Unlikely, I admit. But there is one possibility.”

“What's that?”

“That Pete Bagshaw lied—if he did—because his mother was not home that night. He lied to give her an alibi, not vice versa.”

They pondered this for some time.

“Right,” said Charlie. “Anybody else?”

“The sister,” said Mike. “We really can rule out the father I'm sure, but not the sister. She fits into the pattern of the women in Fleetwood's life—a strong, independent personality. I have only her word for it that the contact between ‘their Bert' and the Winterbottoms was practically nonexistent. It could have been much more frequent, and it could have left wounds.”

“There's the same difficulty as with Pete Bagshaw and his mother,” said Rani. “How could she guess his movements?”

“Yes, there is. Less so perhaps with another group—Olivia's lovers at the theater. They would have had ways of finding out—in fact, I wouldn't put it past that awful piece of self-obsession herself to tell them about the assignation, boast about it, taunt them with it.”

“A nearly limitless pool of suspects opens up,” sighed Charlie. “And there's a related one as well.”

“Related?”

“Someone who may have been enraged by the Fleetwood-Olivia affair—if he knew about it—out of sheer chivalry.”

“Jack Mortyn-Crosse?”

“Yes. He has this enormous protectiveness towards Caroline. I would have said he was the gentlest, most ineffectual of men, but then we're not into the quagmire of character, and any or all of us could be wrong about people we don't know beyond an interview or two.”

“And he has a sister, doesn't he?”

“Yes. A nasty woman—a racist, probably a classist as well: she could well have thought of Marius as a common little tyke. Could have thought of Caroline as an actress in the old-fashioned sense of the word, tantamount to a prostitute. But those are not motives for murder. And I have to say she seems to me to be comic-nasty rather than dangerous-nasty.”

“Character again,” said Oddie. “The awful fact is, almost all these people could have had the opportunity, and unless we make a breakthrough over the weekend we'll have to get down to breaking alibis and charting opportunities.”

“I still think,” said Rani, “of those three kids wandering around Leeds at just the right time. What was the estimated time of death?”

“The doc says any time between around half past seven and nine o'clock. With his betting being on the earlier part of the time span.”

“There you are, then: just when they were all three wandering around, not very sure what they were going to do with their freedom in the big city.”

“But it's a part of Leeds nobody goes to,” objected Charlie.

“The less you know of a city, the more likely you are to land up in dead ends and back alleyways,” said Rani.

They thought about that.

“Guy,” said Oddie. “A first-time visitor. But I don't fancy him.”

“They could have landed up in that area by following someone,” said Charlie. “Most obviously they could have followed Marius.”