The Body in Belair Park

by Alice Castle

  She hadn’t quite got round to her book outline, but she wasn’t going to reproach herself, for once. She’d made good progress. Tomorrow she’d be able to get straight down to it.

  For some reason, this sparked a little twinge of doubt. She’d been prevaricating for so long on the whole issue that she wasn’t even sure she could remember what to jot down. But she shushed the voice of doubt. She’d leave Wyatt kicking his elegant high red heels – as depicted in the astonishing full-length portrait that looked down on them from the wall of the magnificent assembly hall – for yet another day. There was stuff to get on with now.

  She picked up Ben, or rather, lurked outside the gates and almost caught up with him as he pottered home with Charlie and a couple of others – the same boys he’d been with earlier. When they got to the crossing near the chemist, she strode forward and tapped her son on the shoulder. He spun round, then saw Colin, and introduced him to everyone while she stood around feeling ridiculously like a gooseberry.

  The boys all stooped to pet Colin, who obliged them with plenty of tail wags and a goodly portion of drool. Beth, tiring of her role as Colin’s silent walker, reminded Ben they had to go and visit his granny in the hospital. With hastily concealed reluctance, he said goodbye to his friends, and they picked up the little green Fiat and sped off. Or tried to; it was, of course, bumper to bumper through the Village at this time of day.

  It wasn’t until they’d edged down East Dulwich Grove and passed the Goose Green roundabout, where more kids probably went to the Charter and so didn’t require intensive ferrying from one congested street to the next, that the traffic eased up. Beth tried a bright bit of chatter to while away the journey.

  ‘How was school?’ she tried.

  ‘Good,’ came the response, with the decided downward inflection that told her there’d be no more to the sentence, and that any other conversational gambits would meet an equally high brick wall. Nevertheless, she ploughed on.

  ‘How’s Billy MacKenzie doing? Is he in your class?’

  Ben looked at her. They were at a red light, so she gave him a quick smiley glance, hoping to appear as innocent as the enquiry. Ben’s face, by contrast, was as carefully shuttered as Katie’s new holiday home in off-season.

  ‘Why do you want to know? Is this about what happened?’

  Instantly, Beth was agog. She just about managed to stop herself from saying, ‘No, what happened?’ in a high-pitched squeak. She paused a beat, then said, ‘Might be.’ Two could play at monosyllables.

  ‘Because it wasn’t a major thing. Stuff like that goes on all the time. No biggie.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Beth with a reassuring smile, as she pushed the car into gear and drove off. Damn. She wasn’t going to get anywhere by asking more questions. So how on earth was she going to find out what was going on? And what was this non-biggie, exactly? Her mind boggled quietly. She’d have to ask Katie; maybe she was a more efficient interrogator. The thought was a little depressing. How had things come to this, so rapidly?

  Surely it wasn’t more than a few months ago that Ben would come to her, unbidden, with all his problems, with all the little events from the playground, and would enjoy telling her about them. But maybe she was deluding herself. There were always filters between parent and child, there had to be. But now these filters seemed to be as big and as wide as the car. Well, her Fiat was titchy. Maybe the car next to them, which was, inevitably, a Volvo SUV. She sighed.

  ‘Ok?’ asked Ben.

  Beth smiled, her shoulders sagging with relief. His little question was exactly the reassurance she’d needed that he was still her sweet boy, however grown up he was suddenly getting.

  ‘Just thinking about Granny,’ she lied. Well, it wasn’t entirely a fib. She’d been worrying, off and on, about her mother all day. Particularly about why Wendy hadn’t quite made it out of the hospital yet. She suspected that Wendy was clinging onto that bed for dear life, but it was always possible that she was taking longer to get over the whole, deeply unpleasant, incident than Beth had imagined. She sighed again. Terrible daughter, terrible mother.

  At least she was doing ok with Colin. He was safely in the back of the car, having another little snooze. He wouldn’t love staying in the car park at the hospital, but they couldn’t spend too long with Wendy, even if they’d wanted to. Ben would have homework. Probably. Though no doubt he’d rather die than tell her about it.

  As it turned out, Ben was happy enough to settle down in the corner with his books once they were in Wendy’s room, and once he’d hugged her and seen for himself that she was pretty much fine. Getting his homework out meant that he was behind a useful screen of paper and could safely avoid much family interaction.

  Honestly, where does this male desire to escape come from? wondered Beth. She twitchily tried to look at her watch while Wendy told her, for the umpteenth time, how she’d been on the verge of being discharged when her temperature had suddenly shot up and they’d insisted she stay in for a while longer. Beth peered at her mother through half-closed lids, wondering if Wendy was capable of doing that old trick of warming up the thermometer on a handy hot drink, then realised to her chagrin that these days the nurses probably had fancy digital devices that they waved over the patients’ foreheads or popped into their ears. Wendy must genuinely have had a turn. But she really seemed fine now.

  ‘Well, since you’re in for a bit, I wondered if you could help me on some background. I was hearing about the allotments…’

  ‘Oh, you know I’m not interested in gardening,’ said Wendy, lying back against her pillows like an eighteenth-century heroine about to expire.

  Beth did indeed know it, as Wendy had passed on her lack of skill and general apathy to her daughter and she was very much afraid that Ben had inherited it, too. The whole lot of them seemed destined to have horrible scrubby gardens, which was a terrible shame when you saw what could be done, even with a small plot. Most of Dulwich was a treasure trove of delightful shrubs and fragrant blossoms. Apart from the bits inhabited by Haldanes. Beth did love listening to Gardener’s Question Time but had no idea how to put anything she heard into practice. She’d once been amused to hear that the climbing rose named Eleanor Roosevelt had been described as “good in a bed, but better up against a wall”, and had made the mistake of relaying this to Harry. She smiled reminiscently.

  Her brother Josh was rubbish on the gardening front, too – not that he was in the country long enough to acquire a spade these days, let alone deploy it. Beth wasn’t even sure if he had a flat with any outside space. He’d always kept a pied à terre in the area, but these days didn’t have time to dip even a toe into it.

  ‘What about your next-door neighbours, though?’

  ‘Mrs Pink? I think she’s ill, you know, women’s problems,’ said Wendy in a stage whisper. ‘Shame, as she used to be lovely about taking in parcels. Her late husband was in insurance. Told me that your father had made wonderful arrangements,’ said Wendy smugly.

  Beth thought with irritation that they all knew that much. Not for the first time, she wished her dad had lasted long enough to encourage her own poor James to sign up for some policy or other. Then things would have been very different.

  ‘Should you be discussing financial things like that with people?’ she asked. ‘But isn’t the lady on the other side a gardener?’

  ‘Mrs Hills? Well, I suppose she’s keen,’ sniffed Wendy unenthusiastically.

  ‘Come on, Mum, she’s got a waterfall in her back garden. And doesn’t she have those fish?’

  ‘The carp,’ said Wendy darkly. ‘They give me the willies, those blighters.’

  ‘Why?’ Beth asked.

  ‘Ugh, they’re just so huge. And the way they glide about that tank of theirs. They’re like sharks. But quieter.’

  Beth didn’t point out that sharks were hardly known for the loudness of their banter. ‘At least they don’t bite.’

  ‘You think? Rather you than me, sticking a
finger in that pool,’ said Wendy with a theatrical shudder and her eyes shut tight.

  ‘Are they like piranhas, then? Cool,’ said Ben from his corner.

  Beth looked over sharply. You never knew, these days, when he’d tune into a conversation. It was quite disconcerting.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past them, let’s say,’ smiled Wendy.

  Despite herself, Beth was pleased to see grandmother and grandson enjoying a little moment of accord, even if it was totally wrong-headed. Carp surely just ate fish food. But maybe lots of it.

  ‘How’s the homework?’ she couldn’t stop herself from saying, and instantly Ben was back behind his wall of books and folders.

  ‘Yeah, good.’

  Good. That was all he said these days. It wasn’t good at all, she thought crossly.

  ‘How about if I give you some money for a snack, bag of crisps or something? You must be getting peckish?’ she said to Ben, while eyeing Wendy. Her mother still had her eyes closed and Beth was keen to ask her a few more questions before they had to leave.

  ‘Nah. I’m good,’ said Ben, behind his Latin textbook.

  It was a terrible shame to interrupt him while he was actually getting down to some work, but it had to be done. ‘Chocolate bar?’

  ‘’S’ok.’

  ‘Can of Coke?’ asked Beth in a shrill voice.

  ‘All right, all right, Mum. You must be desperate to get rid of me. I’ll get you a tea as well, shall I? It must be ten minutes since you had one,’ said Ben, uncurling himself from the chair.

  She realised with a shock that he was now almost the same height as her, and not only that but had a much clearer grasp of what was going on than she had hoped. She was going to have to seriously up her game if she wanted to carry on outwitting him. She pressed a ten-pound note into his hand and smiled up into those eyes, so like James’s. ‘Get a tea for Granny as well, could you? Three sugars.’

  Wendy, from the bed, protested for a moment. She always liked to pretend she only took one sugar, but inevitably succumbed to the third. She seemed too tired to insist on the charade today. ‘Thank you, darling boy,’ she said.

  The door closed behind him and Beth got down to it. ‘Listen, Mum. I’m trying to find out who else might have had a motive to bump off poor old Alfie and try to poison you as well. There’s the bridge lot, sure, but Janice at the school was saying the gardens people are even worse. Your neighbour, Mrs Hills, opens her garden up in the summer, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Mm, yes. She’s part of the Open House mafia,’ Wendy agreed.

  ‘There must be a reason why people call them a mafia,’ said Beth. ‘How well do you know her? What about the rest of them? What are they like? And is there a big crossover with the bridge lot?’

  ‘That’s a lot of questions,’ said Wendy weakly.

  ‘While I’m at it, there are a few people who were dummy at the same time as Alfie that day. They’d have the best chance of killing him. I need to go through them with you.’

  Wendy shuddered, and Beth wished for a moment that she’d been a bit more euphemistic. After all, this group of people had all been dummy again yesterday, and therefore had probably tried to kill Wendy, too.

  ‘It’s urgent, Mum. Let’s just rattle through the list and you can tell me what you think,’ Beth said more gently. ‘So, how about Dr John Kendall?’

  ‘Johnny? Are you mad? He was our doctor for years; your father played golf with him.’

  Beth thought darkly that he couldn’t have been that brilliant a medical man if he hadn’t noticed her father was about to make a sudden one-way trip to the great clubhouse in the sky, but she moved on. ‘Christina Smith?’

  ‘Ha! She couldn’t kill anyone to save her life,’ said Wendy. ‘She’s got a bad leg. Did something to her knee ages ago. I think she fell, or did too much of something. Anyway, she won’t have got up from the table the whole time, mark my words.’

  ‘Rosemarie Hadley?’

  ‘No, she was sitting down all the time Alfie was out. I saw the back of her head, you know, that hairdo. It’s unmistakable. I don’t know about the attempt on me, of course.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure I saw her,’ said Beth, squinting to remember. That blonde coronet… she’d seen the light glinting off it… hadn’t she? Beth mentally crossed her off too. ‘R. Joyce?’

  ‘Well, you’d know her better than me. Isn’t Regina Joyce a teacher at Wyatt’s? Part time, I suppose, or she wouldn’t be able to come to bridge. But she’s very scatty, I doubt if she could finish anyone off even if she started.’

  Beth put her head on one side. She remembered the beleaguered-looking former English head. It was true, she was always dropping things. Did being a klutz rule you out as a killer, though?

  ‘How about Peter Tilling?’

  Now Wendy laughed aloud. ‘His arm is in a sling, didn’t you see? He broke it on his allotment.’

  That reminded Beth about gardening. ‘Alfie had an allotment, too, but paid other people to keep it up for him. Do you think it’s something to do with that?’

  ‘I told you, I have nothing to do with that whole gardening set,’ said Wendy faintly. ‘Frankly, as soon as they start talking about pruning their petunias, I tune out. I know there was a bit of a hoo-ha over something last year, though. Alfie mentioned it to me, but he would always start chatting when we had a difficult hand. I often had to shush him, you know.’

  Beth bit her lip. Her mother wasn’t a multi-tasker at the best of times. And the more she found out about Wendy’s bridge playing, the more she suspected her mother hung on to her status as a good player by dint of sheer bloody-mindedness.

  ‘So Alfie really was into gardening?’

  ‘Oh yes, darling. Have you not seen his place? It’ll go to that daughter of his now, I suppose, though she never did a thing for him. Honestly, I did more to look after him than she ever did.’

  And that was really saying something, Beth thought, given that Wendy had just more or less admitted she had a habit of shutting the poor man up every time he opened his mouth. Beth hoped Wendy wasn’t expecting to be remembered in Alfie’s will. It was potentially a fertile source of motives that she needed to investigate, though, she thought with a gleam of hope. Maybe they were getting somewhere at last?

  ‘Did he have a lot to leave, then, would you say?’

  Wendy opened her eyes at last, pursed her lips and considered. ‘Well, not much,’ she said at length. ‘Just the house in Dulwich, I suppose.’

  Beth nearly tutted in exasperation. She wasn’t sure if Wendy was being faux-naïve or not. A house in Dulwich rarely went for under a million pounds, and they often changed hands for far more. ‘Where did he live again?’

  ‘Oh, you know, Pond Cottages, over that way. His was the house with the enormous hollyhocks outside.’

  Immediately, Beth knew just the place her mother meant. It was a charming, not to say absurdly idyllic, little house, not dissimilar to the one that Katie had just spent a fortune on in Cornwall, except that you didn’t need to drive for six hours to get to Alfie’s place. Other than at school pick-up time, of course.

  On a private road still owned by Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Estate, nestling close to the wide-open spaces of his Endowment Schools’ emerald green playing fields, and opposite Dulwich’s original mill pond, it was as close as you could get to rural living without leaving London. Although the little row of Grade Two listed gems was called Pond Cottages, and the houses did look tiny from the outside, they were Tardis-like – deceptively spacious and mostly with at least three-bedrooms. Many had had garden rooms, studios, and summer houses tacked on at the back to extend their footprints over the years, in times when Southwark Council and the Wyatt’s Estate had been less picky about architectural integrity. In fact, most of the houses would be quite familiar to anyone who’d caught even a glimpse of a costume drama on TV or at the cinema, as they were frequently hired out to film companies for location shoots.

  So, that was a cast-iron motiv
e right there. Alfie Pole’s gorgeous central London ‘cottage’ was no doubt worth a very fair sum, and probably had its own lucrative career as a backdrop to everything from Great Expectations to Vanity Fair. His sitting room alone, which was bound to come complete with attractive original Georgian panelling, mantlepiece, and shutters, no doubt earned more in a day than Beth did in a term at Wyatt’s.

  ‘Oh, does he hire it to film companies, then?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Wendy, in scandalised tones. Her voice was still quiet, but she was vehement as she explained. ‘No, Alfie had quite a thing about all that. He was always complaining about the way the neighbours rented out their places. “Prostituting their homes,” he called it. Said he’d never, ever do it himself. He loved the peace and quiet of his little place. And to be fair, when they make a film round there, it does fill the whole row up with vans and people and stuff.’

  Beth immediately wondered. Alfie had been sitting on a little goldmine but refusing to dig. Was that reason enough, she wondered, for his neglectful daughter to want to bump him off? Stranger things had happened. Beth put the woman straight at the top of her list of suspects. Next should come anyone who intersected between the bridge and gardening worlds, as Alfie would have had the opportunity to annoy them in either, or perhaps even both, spheres.

  ‘I don’t suppose Alfie ever told you he’d fallen out with someone, did he?’ Beth hazarded, without much hope of a useful response.

  ‘Well, only that thing that he kept harping on about… what was it? So hard to concentrate when one’s working on a complicated bid. And Alfie would keep introducing new conventions, you know.’

  ‘Conventions?’ Beth knew she’d probably regret asking, but she couldn’t let it go.

  ‘Yes, you know, when you bid two diamonds after one no trump but that actually means hearts… come on, darling. I’ve told you all about this time and again,’ said Wendy in tones of quiet exasperation.

  ‘Yes, but fifteen, no, probably twenty years ago… and I wasn’t listening then,’ said Beth mulishly. She was conscious that time was ticking away, and Ben would be back any minute with his haul of junk food and tea. She definitely couldn’t afford to get side-tracked into a discussion of weird bridge stuff now.