Fete Fatale

by Robert Barnard

  This time, I noticed, my sharpness won a sympathetic grin from Inspector Parkin. Presumably he too had suffered.

  ‘You don’t like these women?’ asked Superintendent Coulton, in one of those statements of the obvious that I suppose policemen are forced to go in for.

  ‘I . . . don’t . . . like . . . them . . . at . . . all,’ I said, spacing it out venomously to make clear my sincerity.

  ‘I see. I must say I still find it an area of controversy that I can’t quite understand.’

  ‘Read a few minor mid-Victorian novels and you’d understand it better. Hexton is a very mid-Victorian community, heavily diluted. And you have to remember that most of the people here are bored—sometimes out of their minds.’

  ‘And as far as you are concerned, it is this business of the new vicar that’s at the bottom of your husband’s murder?’

  I thought for a bit.

  ‘Yes . . . Perhaps in some indirect way that we haven’t yet understood. It all seems so trivial, but it has aroused very high feelings. And truly—you don’t have to take my word for it, ask anyone—Marcus was such a peaceable, loving man, there just isn’t any other reason I can think of. The trouble is that Colonel Weston, the senior churchwarden, is rather a lethargic person, though well-meaning enough, so when all the fuss blew up, it was Marcus, inevitably, who found himself in the firing line.’

  I stopped, appalled.

  ‘I haven’t asked you how he was killed. Was he shot?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t.’ He looked at me closely. ‘I notice you assume he wasn’t simply drowned.’

  ‘How could anyone drown Marcus?’ I asked impatiently. ‘He was very strong. It would take ages, and great strength and expertise, to hold him under. It just couldn’t have happened in Hexton on fête day. There would be bound to be people come along.’

  ‘He could have been stunned and thrown in,’ Inspector Parkin pointed out.

  ‘Yes . . . Funny, I never thought of that . . . But I suppose that’s because I thought of him as on his way home—walking busily along. Not standing by the river dreamily, asking to be hit from behind . . . But that wasn’t how he was killed, was it?’

  ‘No. He was dead when he went into the water. How long there was between his death and his being thrown in we don’t yet have enough information to judge. The medics will pronounce on that eventually, I suppose, but I’m not expecting that they’ll come up with anything very useful. There are some odd things about the body—dirt on the flesh and on the clothes that the river hadn’t quite washed away, and some bruises—which we’re going to have to account for. He could have fallen—’

  ‘From Castle Walk!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Why do you mention that?’

  ‘It’s the obvious place, isn’t it? It towers over the meadows and the river. I never could work out why Marcus would be going home along the river. It’s a very long way round, and he hadn’t got much time for his cup of tea and his pipe. Castle Walk is longer than through the town square, but not by much, and it’s a path he was very fond of. And of course it would be much cooler on a hot day.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Coulton. ‘That would explain it.’

  ‘And—’ I hesitated, because this would be painful. Marcus had liked pain no more than most. ‘How did he actually die?’

  ‘He was stabbed to the heart with something very thin and sharp. It would certainly have been a very quick death. The blow was either a very lucky one, or a very knowledgeable one.’

  ‘The weapon,’ I said, forcing myself to keep my tone absolutely clinical, ‘was withdrawn from the body?’

  ‘Yes. We have little or no idea what it could have been. The very finest of stilettos—but even that would seem to be too crude. Anyone around here with connections with Italy or Spain? Seen anything like that in anybody’s home—perhaps a war souvenir?’

  I thought. One didn’t like to think of the interiors of most of the houses in Hexton, but in the course of my getting together stuff for my stall I had recently seen the inside of a great number.

  ‘People’s houses here are full of such incredible bric-à-brac,’ I said. ‘Naturally I relied on that when I was collecting for the junk stall, though in fact I found they very seldom wanted to get rid of it, and resented it being described as bric-à-brac, let alone as junk. Thyrza Primp, to take an extreme case, was convinced that all the rubbish she loaded off on to me was stuff that anyone would find either useful or decorative, though I knew people wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole . . . Italy . . . I know Colonel Weston was at Monte Cassino, and fought his way up to Venice. But I’ve never seen anything like a stiletto in his house. He’s more a gun man—slaughtering wild life, and that sort of thing. The Culpeppers had a holiday in Amalfi a few years ago, but it doesn’t sound as if your average tourist souvenir is the sort of thing you’re looking for . . . Mary Morse and her mother made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land years ago. They felt the dirt was sanctified by the associations. They came back with all manner of hideous souvenirs, but I don’t think Israel is famous for its delicate weapons, is it? . . . I really can’t think . . . But you said that a stiletto—’

  I was interrupted by the telephone.

  ‘That’s probably for me,’ said Superintendent Coulton.

  He strode over to the phone and said the number. Then he said ‘Coulton here,’ and stood there, listening for some minutes. I noticed an expression of satisfaction on his face. Then he snapped out ‘I’ll be right over,’ and banged down the phone.

  ‘Well, it looks as though we’re one step ahead,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a lead on how the body got into the water.’

  CHAPTER 8

  OUR GALLANT BOYS

  When the two policemen had gone, leaving me with no idea of what their new lead might be, I cleared away the coffee-cups, washed up the few odds and ends that were sitting around in the kitchen, and then went next door to fetch Jasper. He had been left there on the morning of the fête, and had been there, shamefully forgotten, ever since. His welcome to me was rapturous. Mrs Leadbury, who had been looking after him, was more awkward. She began: ‘Oh, Mrs Kitterege, I was so shocked—’ and then ‘You don’t have to take him, you know, I’d be only too happy—’ But then she subsided into silence. Death is a great nonplusser.

  I found that out again later. Jasper nosed his way about the house, and registered that Marcus was not home. But he was used to that, and in the end he settled down in one of ‘his’ corners of the house, fixing me with an expectant black eye. He thought it was his right to be taken for a walk.

  I thought so too, as a matter of fact. And as I said before, I had no notion of conforming to Hexton’s code of confinement for the recently widowed. Still, going out into the town—however much of a relief it would be to get it over—required some psychological preparation: it was a question of screwing one’s courage to the sticking place. And then there was the question of where to go. In the end I decided that the best place to go was the most outrageous: I decided to take Jasper to the spot where I believed Marcus to have been murdered. I could imagine the commentary that would be lavished on that act over the next few days in Hexton.

  The first thing I realized as I walked through town on the way to the castle was that Hexton’s etiquette for widows was for the benefit of Hexton at large, and not for the benefit of the widows. Never since the day the Marquess of Queensberry had branded Oscar Wilde a ‘somdomite’ can there have been a public progress attended by so many abrupt about-turns or precipitate dives into shops. The fact that it was Sunday rendered the latter manoeuvre particularly farcical and fruitless. Some people actually had to face me and greet me, their embarrassment patent and naked. At so hideous a spectacle as a widow walking her dog on the first morning of her widowhood, the burghers of Hexton suddenly seemed to see the advantages of the custom of Suttee.

  The people I encountered were mostly the godless of Hexton, for the churches were not yet out. Heaven knows what paroxysms of outrage I would have met with
if Mary, Thyrza and Co. had been on the streets. As it was, I gained the spot where the town gives way to the castle keep and Castle Walk itself without meeting any of those whom I particularly associated with the unhappiness and strife of Marcus’s last days.

  I stopped at that point, and gazed down into the valley and to the parish church of St Edward the Confessor. The cars parked around the church were surely more numerous than in the days when Walter Primp had preached of a safe, middle-of-the-road God, distinguishable from a dull, backbench Tory MP only by his omniscience? Yes, definitely there were more cars. I strained my eyes. That, surely, was the ancient Mercedes owned by Franchita and Howard Culpepper? As I watched, the clock in the town square struck twelve, and soon after people began to stream out. Yes—it had been a very large congregation indeed. Mary’s God bus must have been all but empty, setting the seal on her humiliation. An emotion oddly compounded of pleasure and bitterness flooded over me. How delighted Marcus would have been. But did he need to have died to bring it about?

  A sharp bark from Jasper brought my attention back. We turned away from the town and continued along Castle Walk. At the town end of the Walk the wooded slope down to the meadows is a comparatively gentle one. As you continue up and around the castle walls the slope becomes precipitous, and less heavily wooded, until just above the weir it is the sort of sheer drop that vertigo sufferers have great difficulty getting past. It was here that I had in mind for Marcus’s fall, and as I rounded the bend that approached it, I realized that I was not alone in my idea. At that point along the walk a little knot of four or five policemen were collected.

  As they saw me approach, one of them stepped forward to turn me away, thinking I was one of the sensation-seekers they had probably already had their fill of. Another one, who knew me, put his hand on his arm and whispered in his ear. When I came nearer, this second one came up to me and said:

  ‘Are you sure you want to be here, Mrs Kitterege?’

  I nodded, and went ahead to the spot at which they were standing. It was difficult to know quite what made one so sure that this was the place where Marcus had gone down. Just a matter of a few broken stalks, a sparse, precarious bush that seemed to have been knocked sideways, grass flattened that had not yet righted itself; yet somehow these meagre indications added up to a trail, from the most precipitous section of Castle Walk, down to the path beside the weir.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think it must have been here.’

  The policemen didn’t know quite what to say. Most of them I knew, or had talked to, because Marcus’s work brought him quite often into contact with the police, due to strays, quarantine regulations, or cattle thefts. They were awkward with me, but used to me, and soon one of them, a sensible young man, began pointing out the indications, one after another, of Marcus’s path down, coolly, as if he were giving a demonstration at Police College. It was bracing, and well done, but I noticed he kept his hand on my arm the whole time, as we stood at the edge of that dizzying drop. Finally I thanked him, and continued my way round the castle.

  The path led me, eventually, back into town, and to a point not very far from the police station. Once again people—friends, even—made the most obvious manoeuvres to avoid coming face to face with me, but I ploughed grimly on: they were going to have to get used to it. I too, for that matter, was going to have to get used to it. On an impulse, not quite knowing what I was going to do when I got inside, I turned into the police station.

  There was a desk sergeant on duty, and some young men sitting around the walls. Somewhat abruptly, to cover my embarrassment, I said to the desk sergeant:

  ‘The Superintendent was called away during our talk. I wondered if he was free now.’

  ‘That’s right: it was me that called him. I’ll see if he can talk to you now. May I say how sorry I am, Mrs Kitterege? We thought the world of your husband in our family. He treated my little girl’s hamster last year, and he couldn’t have gone to more trouble if it’d been a prize racehorse.’

  My heart went out to the man. It was possible to do the right thing in a simple and graceful manner.

  ‘Thank you. That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me. Marcus never made any distinctions.’

  ‘I expect you can guess what the Super’s up to,’ whispered the sergeant as he left, jerking his head towards the young men lining the walls. I looked at them properly for the first time.

  They were, not to put too fine a point on it, an ill-favoured bunch. One was long and thin, his shanks so spindly and covered with such close-fitting jeans that one could imagine a tailor sewing them around matchsticks. Another was pudgy and blotchy, his arms and even his neck hideously and obscenely tattooed. All of them were sweaty and surly, and gave off a stale odour of hangovers and long-term personal neglect.

  Suddenly I realized who they must be: these were ‘our gallant boys’—ones from the lower end of the acceptability scale. They were also, I strongly suspected, the more unpleasant of the two drunken parties at the fête. My stomach gave a slight heave as I realized why they must be here.

  ‘The Superintendent suggests you go in,’ said the desk sergeant, coming back softly behind me. He led me through to a bare, draughty interviewing room, where Superintendent Coulton sat behind a desk, and where another version of the boys outside sat on an uncomfortable-looking wicker chair. He was well-built, but too fleshy to be impressive, and the tattoos on his arm and the four or five ripe boils on his face added to the feeling that he was pathetic rather than dangerous, however truculent his air.

  ‘This is Mrs Kitterege,’ said Coulton gloomily. ‘It was her husband you tipped into the river.’

  ‘I didn’t mean no harm,’ protested the boy, his voice having overtones of whine which robbed it of menace. He looked at the sneakers he wore, never at me. ‘It were just a bit o’ fun. I were that pissed.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to go over, for Mrs Kitterege’s benefit, exactly what happened,’ said Superintendent Coulton.

  The boy grimaced. ‘I’ve bin through it.’

  ‘Again.’

  The boy sighed, exaggeratedly. The world was being hard on him—for no reason, no reason at all.

  ‘Well, there was this bloke—big bloke in a green jacket—’e coom down to us by t’river, an’ ’e told us to stop spoiling other people’s fun, that’s ’ow ’e put it. ’E ’ad no call to say that. We weren’t doin’ nowt.’

  ‘That was about a quarter to three,’ supplied Coulton under his breath. ‘I think that’s why your husband wasn’t at the games when you went back to the tent.’

  ‘So we didn’t want no trouble, an’ it weren’t much fun at the bleedin’ fête, so we just took up us bags—we ’ad a few more cans in them—and went away. We sat us down by t’river for a while, and had us each a can, an’ larked about a bit. Just fun. You’ve got to let off steam once in a while. Then another lot of army lads coom up from t’fête. We shouted at ’em a bit—a slangin’ match, like—and we went on up t’road along by t’river and up to t’weir. That was when we saw it, like.’

  ‘The body?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Where was it exactly?’

  ‘Nearly at t’weir, but on t’other side of t’path, face down. An’ I said: “Here, that’s that stupid prick that bawled us out.” An’ someone said: “ ‘E’s dead drunk.” ’Cos we was dead pissed, like, an’ we didn’t think. An’ I said: “Chook ’im into t’river to sober ’im up.” I didn’t mean no ‘arm. I meant to go in after an’ get ’im out, honest I did, once ’e’d ’ad a soakin’.’ He looked up momentarily, saw that he was not being believed, and looked down to his jogging shoes again. ‘So we got ’old of ’im, two on us, an’ dragged ’im across the path, an’ chucked ’im in. Then, as us watches ’im, I looks down an’ sees there’s blood on me ’ands, an’ I knew it weren’t mine. I said: “He were dead!” an’ we all scarpered . . . It were awful . . . Like we’d done it, some’ow.’

  He went silent for a minute, and it
was obvious that this was a moment of horror that had actually got through his thick skull.

  ‘One of t’other lot—the lads as was be’ind us—tried to wade in an’ get ’im out, but t’current were too strong. ‘E’d got caught up in a bloody great branch. But they told on us when we got back to barracks . . . Stupid gits . . . We’ll get even wi’ ‘em.’

  ‘I don’t think you will, you know,’ said Coulton. ‘Well, Mrs Kitterege, I’m afraid that’s the story of how your husband came to be in the river.’

  I sat down for a moment on another little hard chair. It was stupid to be sentimental about what happened to a body, but these thick-headed, brutal louts seemed to add one further outrage to the monstrous outrage that had already been inflicted on it. Momentarily I felt sick, but I swallowed and was all right.

  ‘Yes,’ I said at last. ‘Thank you for letting me hear his story. Now all we have to find out is how it came to be there by the weir.’

  • • •

  When I left the Superintendent he was deciding what to do with these unprepossessing specimens of the soldiery. I said I thought they might be left to the military authorities. They were marginal—‘nasty but marginal,’ I said—and the Superintendent seemed to agree.

  I had intended to go straight home, and Jasper, in spite of his irritation at the interruptions to his walk, seemed willing. But as I walked, grim-faced and not encouraging converse (even had anyone been willing to offer it), a whole host of things were buzzing around in the back of my mind, yet refusing to form themselves into any recognizable shape or pattern that could enable me to say that I had come some steps further. It was mainly the desire to talk things over with a sympathetic soul that determined me, when I passed her house, to call on Mrs Nielson. She lived, as we did, somewhat on the outskirts of Hexton. The prized houses in the town are the old stone ones, built directly on to the wynds. They are quaint but poky, and not all of them even have a back garden. They would never have done for a vet’s surgery, and so we have a largeish, late-Victorian house ten minutes from the centre, with Simon Fox, Marcus’s partner, living three doors down. Mrs Nielson had a much smaller house, between us and town, but she had ample garden both back and front, which was already showing vigorous signs of her activity during this her first spring in the house. As I went up the front drive I heard her through the open front door talking to Gustave: