Late of This Parish

by Marjorie Eccles

  As one of the unmarried masters, Illingworth lived in the school building, in a set of rooms housed in the upper storey of one of the towers whose entrance, Mayo and Kite discovered when they arrived at the school, was obscured by a network of tubular steel scaffolding, with ladders resting on platforms set at intervals to the height of the roof.

  ‘What’s all this, then?’ Kite asked a workman who was perched on a pile of planks, reading his newspaper and drinking tea out of a pint pot.

  ‘Roof repairs, mate. Damage from the gales last winter,’ the man informed them, laying down his paper. ‘Blew the capping from one of the unused chimneys and broke near a hundred tiles, didn’t it? Be a long job, this. Weeks, maybe,’ he added with satisfaction, digging into his pocket and lighting up a cigarette of the more pungent variety. ‘Brought this joker down with it besides.’ He indicated an enormous stone finial, its point broken off, which lay against a pile of scaffolding clamps on the ground. Knobbly with what had once been sharply-carved acanthus leaves, it looked now, smoothed by the weathering of time and impaled on its steel support, uncannily like some grisly severed head mysteriously resurrected and transported from the medieval gate of the Tower of London. ‘Need more than an aspirin if that trapped your toe, I can tell you.’

  ‘Must weigh half a hundredweight,’ Mayo speculated.

  ‘And the rest.’ A small shower of grit descended from above. ‘I should use the main entrance if I was you while we’re messing about here.’

  They were directed in through the front door, past the vast, mullioned-windowed room which was now the library, and up on to the main landing, from which led a short flight of steps with a door bearing Illingworth’s name at the top.

  Mayo had decided to interview him in his rooms, mainly because he wanted to see him alone. He wasn’t, therefore, at nine o’clock on Monday morning, best pleased to find Laura Willard already installed on the sofa when he and Kite entered. He suspected Illingworth had arranged this purposely and was of a mind to ask him to accompany him somewhere else while he was questioned, until it occurred to him he might be able to use Laura’s presence to turn the situation to his own advantage.

  The main door had opened straight into a large, comfortable sitting-room, with a glimpse through an open door of a bedroom beyond. They were typical bachelor’s quarters, not particularly tidy, with books stacked wherever happened to be convenient, and a large oak desk in front of the window, covered with piles of exercise books and what looked like exam papers. But Mayo thought he detected the hand of Gina Holden rather than Illingworth himself in the furnishings – the chintz-covered chairs, walls colour-washed in palest green, two fringed oriental-type rugs lying on a gleaming expanse of wood flooring, a small television set. However, a couple of flower vases on the stone window-sills stood empty, and one cool modern seascape and a framed photograph of Laura Willard on the oak mantelpiece were the only concessions to ornamentation.

  Laura in person was a different creature from when he’d last seen her. Then she’d been nervy and tense, but gone now was the feverish urge to talk, the inclination to tears. The inquest, after which the coroner would release the body and the funeral could take place, and which Mayo would also be attending, was scheduled for that afternoon. She was apparently already dressed for it. Black wasn’t her colour; it robbed her skin tones of the warmth they needed, but it undoubtedly gave her an elegance she had previously lacked, emphasized by the way she was wearing her hair today, richly coiled into a knot at the back of her head instead of tumbling down to her shoulders. She sat with her hands folded calmly on her lap, listening quietly as Illingworth was asked whether he’d like to reconsider the statement he had made regarding his movements on Saturday.

  Illingworth was as truculent as ever. ‘I see no reason to change anything I said,’ he answered shortly, looking taller and thinner and not so much like a heron as some scrawny cormorant this morning, his black gown hunched on his shoulders, the sleeves hanging like folded wings, hands deep in pockets, head thrust downwards ready to swoop on his prey. And not disposed to be any more amenable when he was informed of the checks made at the Thornaby Conference Centre and that no one there actually remembered speaking to him until nine o’clock that evening. His answer to that was a sharp reply to the effect that it was hardly surprising no one should remember, since he hadn’t actually spoken to anyone until after dinner.

  ‘You were there all day and spoke to nobody,’ Mayo repeated flatly.

  ‘That wasn’t what I said.’ He wasn’t bothering to hide his impatience with what he evidently considered time-wasting preliminaries and thick policemen, and pounced in a pedantic and donnish fashion which Mayo found extremely irritating. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he decided Illingworth was probably the type who is his own worst enemy and likely had no idea of the impression he was making. All the same ...

  ‘What I actually said was, if you recall,’ he was continuing, ‘that I left Wyvering at about half past eight. Now look here, I can see you have to know the whereabouts of everybody concerned, but what the hell does it matter where I was and what time I got there? I was nowhere near Wyvering when Laura’s father was killed.’ He shot his cuff to look at his watch. ‘And if that’s all, I have my first lesson in ten minutes.’

  Maybe I should’ve been a teacher, Mayo thought sourly. Clocking on at half past nine and off at four.

  Kite had stopped writing and was waiting with interest to see what was going to happen. Hadn’t Illingworth realized he was on course for getting his ears chewed off? Better men than he had been taken apart for much less. Sergeants and DCs, even, never mind nerds like Illingworth. Kite had a poor opinion of the intelligentsia.

  But at that point Laura Willard intervened by speaking Illingworth’s name, though in a voice so low it was barely audible. He heard, all the same, and swung round to look at her. What passed between them was some communication between them alone but after a moment he shrugged and turned back to Mayo. ‘All right, all right, I didn’t actually arrive at Thornaby until five. I had a walk round the grounds to stretch my legs, then fell asleep on my bed and missed dinner. I woke and went into the bar at just before nine, which was when I saw Collins. Will that do?’

  ‘And where,’ Mayo asked austerely, ‘were you between eight-thirty a.m. and five p.m.?’

  ‘I don’t see that’s any business of yours.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t, but I’d like an answer, all the same. Where were you?’

  ‘I had another engagement.’

  ‘It must have been important for you to have missed out on the day’s proceedings, as well as the previous evening’s.’

  A long silence. Laura got up and opened the window behind her and stood apparently breathing in the scents of early summer. In front of her the scaffolding, the diagonal slash of the ladders across the windows, made a surrealist landscape of the view and after a moment she turned away and resumed her seat, watching Illingworth, her eyes wide and watchful, deeply brown.

  ‘If I tell you,’ Illingworth said at last, ‘I must ask you not to divulge it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, there’s no way I can agree to conditions.’

  Laura said into the silence that followed, ‘There’s no reason why he shouldn’t know, David.’

  ‘Except that Richard should be told, first.’

  ‘Another half-hour isn’t going to make any difference.’ Suddenly, Illingworth smiled. It was a smile of great charm, all the more surprising after his previous ill-temper, giving a whole new dimension to the dark planes of his face. For the first time Mayo saw what his attraction might be for Laura. He threw out his hands in a gesture of surrender and she said steadily, ‘David was with me in Lavenstock, Mr Mayo. We had an appointment at the register office and then we went on for a rather special lunch. He left me round about three o’clock.’

  Mayo sat back. He was too much in command of himself to show the surprise he felt but it took him a moment or two to digest it. She smiled very sli
ghtly and confirmed what he thought he’d heard. ‘We were married on Saturday, Mr Mayo.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘People do,’ said Illingworth.

  Through the open window a motor-mower could be heard in the distance. The rich, yeasty smell of newly-cut grass came into the room.

  ‘I think David’s told you how my father felt about our marriage. I did my best to talk him round but he couldn’t be moved – so we decided to marry regardless.’ Despite her newfound confidence Laura’s voice was not quite under control.

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ Illingworth said, ‘God knows, you’ve a right to a life of your own.’ There was a hard, gritty edge to his voice.

  ‘I’m not sorry! It just seems so – oh, I don’t know. But I couldn’t simply walk out and leave him, not in his state of health! So I looked round for a live-in housekeeper and finally found exactly the right person, someone I felt I could really trust and who I was sure wouldn’t let him browbeat her. For rather complicated personal reasons – her previous employers suddenly decided to go abroad – she needed to start immediately. That was all right, but if I hadn’t moved out when she moved in, there wouldn’t have been much point to the whole thing. So we just got married. It had to be a fait accompli, you see, before my father could raise objections.’

  Mayo thought she might really be saying, before she lost her nerve. Or that Illingworth had given her an ultimatum.

  ‘It was obvious we couldn’t have the sort of wedding I’d always wanted, in church with all our friends and relatives to wish us well. My father would have refused to attend, never mind officiate, and I couldn’t have gone through with it in those circumstances. Which meant the register office.’

  OK. These were Laura’s reasons. But Illingworth’s? Mayo wondered briefly if congratulations were in order, but decided against it as being inappropriate in the circumstances. He thought a glass or two of celebratory champagne at lunch might well have had something to do with Laura’s accident.

  ‘So you say now you left around three, Mr Illingworth, and reached Thornaby at five.’

  ‘Not only say I got there at five, I did!’

  ‘It would be better if there was somebody else who could say so as well.’

  Illingworth shoved his hands in his pockets impatiently. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that I married Laura, then went straight back and killed her father? That’s obscene!’

  Mayo suddenly lost patience with him. ‘Since you’ve mentioned it, sir, don’t let’s lose sight of the fact that it’s quite possible, obscene or not. You left Miss Willard at three. Her father wasn’t killed until six-fifteen. Plenty of time for you to get over to Wyvering and then drive down to Brighton before nine.’

  ‘And how do you suggest I did all this without being seen?’

  ‘That I don’t know at the moment. But if you did, I shall find out.’

  He noticed the fine film of sweat on Illingworth’s forehead and thought: Good, let him sweat. It’ll do him no harm. He didn’t like the man, much less his attitudes and had been inclined to feel sorry for Laura, thinking her gullible and easily manipulated until he saw how Illingworth appeared to take notice of her. He still felt sorry for her, but there was no accounting for how women felt.

  He became aware that she was speaking again, rapidly, as though she wanted to get over what she had to say quickly. ‘There’s something else that perhaps you ought to know, Chief Inspector.’

  She took a deep breath and Mayo thought: Here it is. When anyone said this to him, addressing him as Chief Inspector, it was usually worth listening to carefully.

  ‘It’s about Danny Lampeter.’ Her colour was suddenly high and the explanation came out in a rush. ‘Yesterday morning I went to look for a brooch to wear on my suit. It was a Victorian one in the shape of a lovers’ knot, gold. I don’t care for Victorian jewellery on the whole and I hardly ever wore it but it had belonged to my mother and I wanted to wear it for my wedding. I couldn’t find it. I feel almost certain Danny Lampeter took it. There were one or two more bits and pieces gone, too, some jet and a cameo brooch.’

  Well, well. ‘Presumably you had reasons for believing he’d taken them?’

  It all came out then, about her father’s suspicion that Lampeter had for some time been pilfering things from the house, and how she’d managed to stop Willard from accusing him before because there’d been no proof. ‘It was never anything much,’ she said, ‘a bottle of whisky, some money left out for the window-cleaners, that sort of thing. But when I told my father about the brooch, he said that was it, Danny would have to go. As I was coming home on Saturday, I passed him on his motorbike going very fast down the hill – but then the Rector came and told me about Father and – well, I forgot all about Danny. It wasn’t until later that I began to wonder if...’

  He helped out her embarrassment. ‘To wonder if your father had confronted him with the thefts and Danny had lost his temper?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened,’ she said unhappily, ‘Danny’s pretty handy with his fists.’

  Had she forgotten that hadn’t been the way of it at all? That her father’s life had been snuffed out in a very different way? He wondered, watching her, how much else she’d ‘forgotten’. She hadn’t deemed it necessary to tell him about Danny until she thought suspicion might be falling on Illingworth, whereupon Danny Lampeter, the village scapegoat, had conveniently emerged and she had found it her duty to tell what she knew about him.

  Duty. A word that kept cropping up. Mayo tried to picture the diary page where Willard had written the quotation. ‘The principle of doing one’s duty, whatever that may be.’ Yes, that was it. And into his mind also came the name written above it, Professor Quentin, a man who had seen Willard the day before his death – a professor at Cambridge, what was more, where David Illingworth had been a research fellow. Had it been the same college? Mayo decided then and there to check, and if so that a trip to that venerable city was indicated. He was suddenly, perhaps irrationally, but never mind that, convinced that the key to Illingworth’s actions lay there.

  As for Danny Lampeter ... The story Laura Willard had told provided a likely explanation for Danny’s disappearance. Hearing of the old man’s murder and knowing what he’d done, escape would have been the first thing he would think of. In any case, Ruth Lampeter had lied. If Danny had left before 6.0, as she swore he had, he couldn’t have passed Laura Willard coming up the hill in the taxi at 6.20. Mayo decided to leave that bit of business with Kite, knowing he’d ferret it out, if only for his own satisfaction.

  CHAPTER 15

  After the drive across the flat, empty fenlands, parking convenient to the college in Cambridge presented difficulties. Hampered by incessant traffic, tourists on foot, undergraduates on cycles and the usual fiendish one-way system, Kite eventually settled for a space in a multi-storey car park above a new shopping centre. From this they walked straight into a maze of narrow busy streets, where shops and markets rubbed shoulders with churches and college buildings of grey stone and ancient brick. Glimpses of quadrangles with creeper-hung walls and of quiet college gardens were vouchsafed through open gates, and the traffic noise receded as they made their way through the Backs towards Quentin’s college. A young man and two girls in a punt were tailed by a pair of floating swans ...

  ‘Got it made, haven’t they?’ Kite asked, casting his eyes up. ‘I’d been on the beat three or four years by the time I was their age.’

  ‘Good luck to ’em.’

  ‘Chance is a fine thing. I don’t know that many from Lavenstock Grammar ever made it,’ Kite answered belligerently, looking prepared to argue about privileged beginnings and head starts.

  ‘Must admit it’s a bit rarefied for me, too,’ Mayo answered, more pacific than truthful, but Kite was mollified and said no more, while Mayo thought of the city’s sense of timelessness and the beauty of its lucid architecture and didn’t see how anyone could fail to feel a sense of uplift.

>   Professor Quentin met them at the porter’s lodge and welcomed them with formal courtesy, offering them tea and scones when they had negotiated the narrow stone staircase to his rooms. He was very short and bald, a man in his fifties, of kindly if contradictory appearance, suggesting a certain impatience with sartorial details. He was wearing a conventionally tailored suit, pristine white shirt and blue-spotted bow tie, and with it a Fair Isle pullover which had all too obviously not well survived its too-vigorous washings. Walking before them up the stairs with small, precise steps, he revealed beneath his neatly-pressed navy-blue trousers, thick, gaudily patterned socks and a pair of scruffy, down-at-heel brown shoes in want of a lick of polish.

  He had been saddened to hear of the death of his old friend, he said, unspeakably shocked at the manner of it. Over tea, he described his visit to Castle Wyvering the previous Friday and what he and Willard had talked about at some length, inclined to reminisce about their friendship and the correspondence they had conducted for many years. No mention of Illingworth and eventually it was Mayo who had to broach the subject. A shade of reserve crossed the other man’s face as soon as his name was mentioned. ‘Yes, I remember him. Always spoken of as a man to be watched. I mean, of course, in the academic sense.’

  ‘Did you know he was teaching at Uplands House School in Castle Wyvering?’

  ‘I was aware of it, yes.’

  ‘And that he was engaged to Mr Willard’s daughter? Is in fact married to her now?’

  The thin Spode cup stayed half way to their host’s lips, then he drank and put the cup down precisely on the saucer. ‘No,’ he said carefully, ‘that I did not know.’

  Seconds passed while the Professor absorbed the implications of this news. Mayo drank his tea and waited. The dark old room was used to silent thought. It reflected the same unself-conscious contradictions of its owner’s person: a lovely rosewood table gleamed under the open window, choice watercolours in gold frames hung against the dark panelling, yet the chairs, though exceedingly comfortable, were disreputable and the frayed rugs apt to trip the unwary. A gas fire, simulating coal, stood incongruously in the sixteenth-century fireplace. Apart from that, the room was in a considerable state of confusion, with articles of clothing and piles of papers strewn all over the place.