Late of This Parish

by Marjorie Eccles

  Eventually Quentin said, ‘This is why you were here, of course. You wish to know the circumstances of his leaving here.’

  ‘Whatever you can tell us, sir.’

  ‘I can give you the facts, but about Illingworth himself I knew comparatively little. Few people did, I imagine. But very well, I’ll do what I can.’ He stood up and walked to the empty fireplace, sat down on the club fender and clasped his hands round his knee, an elderly, sharp-witted little gnome gazing at them through this thick spectacles. ‘He never entered into the swim of things here, you know. Not unremarkable in itself – we have our share of individualists, not to say eccentrics, here. He was married, but his wife didn’t mix with the other faculty wives, either.’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘May I speak plainly, without prejudice?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘Then I will say that I am sorry to hear that Illingworth has married again. In my view, he should never have married in the first place. There are men, and I include myself among them, who do better for various reasons to remain single.’ A dry, objective assessment from a man who, Mayo suspected, had never been stirred by passions. ‘In Illingworth’s case ... well, for one thing, he was consumed by his work. Not that I am in any way against total dedication, quite the reverse, but simply of the opinion that it cannot combine with family life – unless the wife is singularly self-sufficient in one way or another – which Sarah Illingworth plainly was not. She struck me, the few times I met her, as beautiful but not in the least clever. Self-absorbed to a degree. As a consequence, she was unhappy with the other dons’ wives, many of whom are academics themselves or have satisfying and demanding careers. There were all sorts of rumours. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was highly promiscuous, and had a drink problem, too. I was not in the least surprised to hear that they had divorced, especially after what happened to the boy.’

  ‘They had children?’

  ‘One son. He should have been sent away to school. There at least he might have found some sort of stable background, some code of ethics, the right sort of companionship, standards to live up to. As it was, he was sent to the local comprehensive, which might have been all very well if Illingworth hadn’t been too absorbed in his work and his problem with his wife to suspect what was happening to the boy, and the mother too selfish to care how he passed his time or what company he kept as long as he kept himself out of her way. I dare say Illingworth did his best in difficult circumstances but it was the usual story. The boy was fourteen when he died.’

  An exuberant yellow rose had climbed the wall outside and thrust its head through the open lattice; suddenly the room was filled with its exquisite fragrance.

  ‘Drugs?’ Mayo asked.

  ‘What else?’ There was no doubt about Quentin’s compassion. His gnomish face looked inexpressibly saddened. ‘It’s not always easy to tell until it’s too late.’

  ‘No. Though there was a good deal of talk within the college – there is never any shortage of people ready to apportion blame, and it was clear that what had happened had done his prospects no good at all. A man’s private life is not his own if he chooses to set his sights on academic advancement. Eventually he left.’

  But he had left quietly. Nothing had been forced upon him, no scandal had followed him to his next appointment at Uplands House. Quentin managed to convey, without actually saying so, that scandal within the hallowed precincts of Cambridge would have been as damaging to the college as to Illingworth, and that having to bury himself in an obscure place like Wyvering was punishment enough.

  ‘Presumably Mr Willard knew of all this?’

  ‘Not from me, certainly, though Illingworth’s name was mentioned on Friday and I was not aware that Willard would have liked to discuss the circumstances of his relinquishing his Fellowship here. However, in the course of my life, I’ve learned that nothing is so easy to damage as a man’s reputation. His career had had one irremediable setback and I saw no reason to add to that. I have only spoken now because I see where your questions are leading.’

  ‘Perhaps you don’t know that Illingworth is being considered for the position of Headmaster? Do you believe if his background was known, it would prevent his appointment?’

  ‘That’s a question I prefer not to answer. You must draw your own conclusions.’ Quentin suddenly became the vague, mild-mannered academic again. ‘Dear me, is that the time? I’m very much afraid ...’

  Mayo stood up, sliding his notebook into his inside pocket.

  ‘When is the funeral? Friday? I have written to Miss Willard but I shall not be attending,’ said the Professor.

  ‘I’m leaving tomorrow for a short lecture tour of the United States. I was in fact just packing when you arrived,’ he added, waving his hands in a helpless gesture as though hopeful of the scattered belongings picking themselves up and putting themselves into suitcases.

  ‘Then we’d better leave you to it, sir. Thank you for your help.’

  ‘Sarah,’ said Kile as soon as they were out of the college. ‘Did you hear that? Illingworth’s wife was called Sarah.’

  ‘Pronounced with the aitch, though.’

  ‘He’s old-fashioned, he’d have pronounced it Sarah whichever way it was spelt.’

  ‘Even if she herself pronounced it the other way? All right, granted, I think he probably would. And that means Willard knew about her, and probably about the boy as well. Which might easily have stymied Illingworth’s chances if Willard was prepared to use it against him.’

  ‘Well, you’d think twice about appointing a man like that, wouldn’t you?’ Kite said. ‘A man who can’t keep his own son out of trouble isn’t going to be the best bet for looking after other folks’, is he?’

  ‘Maybe he would be, just because of that. Maybe better, having learned the hard way. But what a price to pay! Poor devil,’ Mayo said, surprised to find himself in sympathy with Illingworth, ‘with a wife like that, he had problems.’

  WDC Jenny Platt was on her way out of the station and did a double take when she saw Mayo and Kite approaching the door from the car park. ‘Too late, too late!’ she muttered. ‘And nearly made it this time.’

  ‘Hi, Jenny,’ Kite said. ‘Managed to get over to the hospital and see Mrs Crawshaw, did you?’

  Jenny swore, not very politely, to herself. She was already late for her date with a self-aware Scotsman called Duncan who wasn't the sort to wait around for police women who put their jobs before an evening out with him. ‘Yes, Sarge. I’ve left a report on your desk, sir,’ she said to Mayo who had just followed Kite in.

  ‘Maybe you’d better come upstairs then till I’ve read it.’

  ‘I’ve typed it out, sir.’

  ‘All the same.’

  Jenny rolled her eyes at the desk sergeant and followed in their wake.

  ‘Sit down, Jenny,’ Mayo said when they got upstairs, and quickly scanned her report, while Jenny hoped there were fewer spelling mistakes than last time. Mayo reckoned he couldn’t abide spelling mistakes, so there was competition in the department to spot his own errors – which had been known to happen.

  ‘How was the old lady?’ Kite asked, as Mayo read.

  Jenny smiled. ‘Feeling much better and bad-tempered with it. She’s only in for observation and they’ve put her in the geriatric ward, which she doesn’t like, being only seventy-three. But she’s bright enough. She remembered what she overheard quite clearly.’

  ‘She seems to think it was a quarrel,’ Mayo remarked, throwing her report down on the desk and sitting back.

  ‘She’s certain it was, sir. She’d gone upstairs to have a bit of a lie-down because she was just beginning to feel poorly. She had the window open and the voices came up from Willard’s garden – his and another man’s. She couldn’t recognize that one, couldn’t make out what they were quarrelling about, but she heard the name Sara mentioned.’ Jenny didn’t pronounce the name to rhyme with ‘fairer’.

  ‘And she’s sure of the time? Just after twelve?’ J
enny said certainly, Mrs Crawshaw had been absolutely sure. ‘All right then, Jenny, you can leave it with me. Thanks very much.’

  ‘Sir.’ Jenny slid out smartly, before anyone else could find her anything to do, though she’d long since given up hope of darling Duncan still being there.

  ‘Just after twelve?’ Mayo said, as the door closed behind her. ‘If she’s sure of that, Illingworth’s covered, for that time at least. He was in the register office getting married then.’

  The moment Mayo pushed open the door of his flat he knew Julie was home again by the delicious smell of cooking wafting towards him. From the kitchen a cheerful voice called, ‘I’m home, Dad!’ His heart plummeted.

  He was feeling more than a little frayed around the edges. He’d have liked a quiet evening, talking the case over with Alex perhaps, valuing her no-nonsense approach, her professional opinion. The next-best thing would have been a simple meal, a quiet drink, some music, tinkering with his clocks. The last thing he wanted was a re-hash of Julie’s problems. She threw down her wooden spoon as he came into the kitchen and met him with a great hug, and immediately in a rush of love he forgave her.

  ‘Gran thrown you out?’ he teased. ‘I thought you were going to stay with her for another two weeks.’

  ‘Let me finish the cooking and then we can talk. I rang to ask Alex to join us but she’s just come off duty and she’s whacked. That’s how I knew you were on the way, she said she’d spoken to you.’

  He thought this might be Alex being tactful. Julie, he imagined, knew by now how things stood between them, since she had stopped asking him why they didn’t get married. There was a strong bond between the two women, a deep, shared affection, Alex in fact having been Julie’s friend before his. Years before, his wife Lynne and Alex had been at school together, and Alex had helped Julie through the crisis of her mother’s death better than he’d been able to do.

  ‘Have I time for a quick shower?’ he asked.

  ‘Fifteen minutes?’

  ‘Less.’ On his way to the door, he stopped. ‘What was that noise?’

  ‘What noise? I didn’t hear anything,’ Julie said, bending over the cooker to taste her recipe.

  She was cooking halibut – au poivre. One of his favourite dishes, spicy with peppercorns, rich with brandy, port and a little cream. He was evidently being got round. But he was glad to see that her scruples against eating her fellow-creatures didn’t extend to fish. He listened. ‘There it is again, a sort of screech. I’d better see what it is,’ he said, thinking of Miss Vickers’s Moses and imagining dire possibilities.

  ‘No, I’ll go,’ Julie said hastily. ‘You go and shower.’

  She’s up to something, he thought, and stayed where he was, waiting. When she came back into the kitchen, she was almost obscured by a huge birdcage. In the cage was a parrot.

  ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘He’s called Bert, short for Flaubert ... Flaubert’s Parrot, association of ideas, get it? Oh well, never mind. Isn’t he beautiful?’ The bird was deep crimson with black markings on his wings, blue wing-tips and tail. Handsome, as parrots went, certainly. He had a fierce beak and a beady black eye that reminded Mayo of Macey. ‘He’s a parakeet, not a parrot, and he doesn’t take any looking after. He’s very good.’

  ‘But not quiet,’ Mayo said, when he could speak above Bert’s shrill cacophony.

  ‘That’s because he’s in strange surroundings. He’ll soon get used to them.’

  ‘Oh no he won’t,’ Mayo said. ‘Not these surroundings, anyway. What am I going to do with a flaming parrot?’

  ‘He’ll be company for you. Oh Dad, don’t be a spoilsport! John brought him for me –’ John, he thought; well, it was a reassuringly ordinary name – ‘and when we leave he’ll be homeless and won’t have anywhere to go.’ Her eyes were huge. She used to look like that when she was a kid, just before she cried. ‘Dad? Please?’

  A bloody parrot, he thought, as he shaved and showered. That’s all I need.

  Later, after they’d eaten, he learned why he’d been selected as the recipient of this great favour, though by then it came as no surprise. She had come home only long enough to pack a toothbrush. She was leaving before six the next morning, next stop Dijon, and promised to keep in regular contact. He wasn’t to be worried about her – Gran wasn’t, she thought it would give Julie a chance to get her act together. Had given the enterprise her blessing, especially after meeting John and his girlfriend.

  His girlfriend?

  ‘You weren’t listening when I told you, were you? She’s French, her name’s Marie-Solange, you can’t possibly have forgotten.’

  ‘Oh, that Marie-Solange,’ he said.

  No reason, really, why he should feel so much better. But he did, and said goodbye to her the next morning with a cheerful face and what he hoped was a good grace.

  While Mayo was digesting his dinner and a fait accompli he could do nothing about, and being given instructions on how to feed his new flatmate, Sebastian Oliver was walking quickly along the high path towards the castle ruins. His light, springy steps made no sound. He was wearing black trainers, his dark roll-neck sweater and navy-blue jeans, and he kept his hands shoved into the pockets. Only his face showed white and set where the light caught it.

  Reaching the castle ruins, he stood by the safety railings on the path, under the shade of the horse chestnut trees with their white candles gleaming in the darkness, facing the shadowed sweep of the valley. It was the dark of the moon and windy and the night was full of echoes; small things stirred in the grass-grown moat. He had never before felt the ruins to be sinister, but as he looked and saw them black against the dark sky, he felt a sense of the inimical, a tremble akin to that his Welsh ancestors must have felt in the minutes before the raids over the border to storm just such a fortress as this.

  He was keyed-up, aware that his life had reached some kind of crisis. If things went the way he intended tonight, he would cut out, make a clean break with the past, perhaps never come to Wyvering again. What was it about the place that induced this uneasiness with himself, the feeling that there was something lacking in his successful lifestyle? Perhaps old Willers had been right and pursuit of the purely materialistic was not and never could be enough. Thinking of the old man, however, remembering him as he’d last seen him, was hardly to be borne.

  Since Willard’s death Sebastian’s conscience, never before a thing to trouble him much, wouldn’t now leave him alone. The chance for revenge – a chance he’d waited for – had come, his quick mind had put two and two together and he had seen the advantage for himself and had acted without stopping to think it through. Too late, he deeply regretted it. Revenge was sweet, but remorse was bitter medicine that he was afraid he might be swallowing for the rest of his life.

  He heard a footfall and as he turned towards it a figure materialized out of the darkness, approaching him. ‘You took your time,’ he said as he stepped out of the shadows.

  CHAPTER 16

  Having despatched Kite to see what he could make of Danny’s girlfriend Tracey, Mayo went along first thing the next morning to see the man handling the bomb case at the Fricker Institute, Detective Chief Inspector Uttley, who worked from Hurstfield.

  Hurstfield’s police station was a replica of the Divisional Headquarters at Lavenstock, standard county constabulary architecture, a collection of concrete and brick units constructed on the Lego principle, but not half as cheerful, especially on a depressing wet morning. Rain was slashing down as he parked his car and ran, head ducked against the wind, for the station entrance.

  ‘What have you got for us, Gil?’ Uttley was ready for him, a large placid-looking man with a big hard stomach tightly straining against his trousers. ‘Have some tea, help yourself to sugar. Don’t take it? Wish I didn’t.’ He drank his own tea from a pint pot with ‘Grandad’ written on it above a picture of a benevolent old codger in a rocking-chair with a pipe. He had a proven reputation for being sharp, shrewd a
nd ruthless.

  ‘I was thinking it might be the other way round,’ Mayo said, ‘but help might be mutual. I’ve an idea your bomb at the Fricker Institute and this death at Castle Wyvering just may be connected.’

  Uttley’s little blue eyes flickered but otherwise he showed no surprise. ‘I suppose you know that’s where the director of the Fricker lives?’

  ‘The fact that Thorne lives there may simply be a coincidence. I don’t know yet. I’m still feeling my way.’

  ‘Hm.’ Uttley clasped his hands across the mound of his stomach, his chins settling one on the other. ‘You’d better tell me your side of it first – then I can tell you what I’ve got that may be relevant.’

  He listened without comment to the facts of the Wyvering murder, staring into space. The silence continued when Mayo had finished what he had to say. Then Uttley blinked, refilled his visitor’s teacup and focused his attention again. ‘Remember that theft from the furriers in Hurstfield a couple of months ago?’

  Mayo cast his mind about, remembering it without being able to recall specific details.

  ‘All right, no reason why you should, I suppose. Not on your patch, and it wasn’t a big job. But you might remember the nicked furs being subsequently set fire to on the lawn in front of the golf club when there was a dinner-dance being held there.’

  Mayo did remember that.

  ‘It was a big do,’ Uttley went on, ‘car park full of Jags and BMWs, a Merc or two and the odd Roller, and I suppose it was predictable a lot of the women present would own furs and be wearing ’em. At any rate, that seems to have been the supposition. We’d no leads on who the fire raisers were – scarpered before the fire was discovered. They’d made their protest and it got them a paragraph in the local rag, which was presumably what they wanted, though at that point no special group claimed responsibility. But then we got lucky and had a tip-off and subsequently we’ve been keeping an eye on two women here in Hurstfield: Sylvia Patman and Theresa Quinn. Patman used to work at the Fricker Institute as a typist until about a year ago and Quinn has two brothers in the IRA. There’s reason to believe both women are heavily involved in an animal liberation group which may have been at the bottom of the fur job – and which, incidentally, has now got itself a name. Calls itself the Sorority Against Research on Animals, if you please.’