Fete Fatale

by Robert Barnard

  ‘What could arouse anyone to such an impulse against Marcus? The least impulsive of men himself . . . ?’

  ‘Something he said, in a quarrel . . . ’

  ‘Marcus hardly ever quarrelled in his life. He had used up a ten-year ration of harsh words in the weeks before you arrived. On the other hand a feeling, welling up, of humiliation and failure . . . after your reception at the fête . . . ’

  ‘You’ve made up your mind that that was the motive, haven’t you?’

  Again, he was obviously trying to stop me committing myself to one notion.

  ‘I think it must have something to do with it. Of course, I realize you won’t like members of your flock being suspected.’

  ‘Come, come. I know as well as any that Christians can commit murder. Quite apart from anything else, I’ve been a jail chaplain. I’m only trying to tell you that you shouldn’t settle on a motive, commit yourself to it, too early. I’m sure the police haven’t.’

  ‘Where were you,’ I asked, out of the blue, for why, after all, should anyone suspect Father Battersby, ‘when Marcus was killed?’

  Father Battersby said cautiously: ‘I’m not sure that I know exactly when Marcus was killed.’

  ‘Let’s say he left the meadows around half past three, or five or ten minutes after that. That would give us some time between a quarter to four and four o’clock for his arrival at that point on Castle Walk.’

  Father Battersby sat, his chin in his cupped hand, his robe spread out around him, like a ballerina in mourning.

  ‘From the point of view of an alibi, it’s the later the better for me. I saw the Blatchleys going across the meadows on their way home, and I joined them. When we got home it was ten past four, because we commented that it had been a long day. So I was probably with them from about five to four. But before that—well, I suppose I was around and about, as I had been all day.’

  ‘Enjoying your triumph,’ I said, and it was not difficult for him to catch the note of bitterness in my voice.

  ‘Truly I didn’t regard it in that light. Nor, I may say, did Marcus.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I never did live up to Marcus’s standards, and even after his death I can’t. But it’s worth remembering that it’s not how you two regarded it that’s important. As far as other people were concerned, you had had—how shall I put it?—an exceptionally successful day. I gather Marcus said something of the sort to Mary Morse, on his way out from the fête.’

  ‘Really?’ His eyebrows went up.

  ‘In some tactful and generalized form. Tell me, is it your impression that Mary Morse was still at the fête when you left? I ask because you were one who had a great number of opportunities of observing her.’

  ‘She did rather put herself in my way . . . My impression is that none of those encounters occurred later than, say, three or three-fifteen. But that’s an impression only. Similarly, my predecessor’s lady wife—who, by the way, is departing rather earlier than planned—wasn’t greatly in evidence in the later part of the afternoon.’

  ‘And why,’ I asked sharply, ‘is Thyrza Primp departing early for the gaieties of Harrogate?’

  ‘I should have thought that there was one obvious explanation. You may not have heard, but she and Mary Morse were alone on their—’ he smiled deprecatingly—‘God bus yesterday. It can hardly have been a happy experience for her.’

  ‘That’s one explanation. I can think of others. I shall have to pay my call on her as soon as possible.’

  At this point, though Father Battersby was talking, was most probably giving me words of advice or remonstration, my attention was drawn back to Castle Walk. The breeze that had fluttered the hem of his soutane when we started the conversation had risen to a real wind by now, and real winds make themselves felt on Castle Walk. Coming round the bend, from the point where Marcus had been killed (how people managed casually to pass by there, it seemed!) and heading towards town, was Mrs Mipchin. The wind drove her drab linen dress to cling immodestly around her legs and thighs, and tore at the scarf around her neck, and the pale grey felt hat on her head. As I watched, it nearly took the hat away, and Mrs Mipchin clutched at it, then drew from it a pin, and held both hat and pin in the safety of her hands.

  ‘So, I repeat: take care,’ Father Battersby concluded. ‘Avoid making assumptions, don’t act on them if you do.’

  I looked around, but already he was striding away towards the gateway, over the trim lawns, his soutane billowing and giving him the air of a restless but purposive blackbird, flapping his way from crust to crust. I felt towards him warmly, yet he made me uneasy.

  I turned back to Castle Walk and Mrs Mipchin, making her way grimly towards town. Clutched in her right hand, mesmerizing me, was that long, steel hatpin—a pin much like those that I had sold in such numbers on the day of the fête.

  CHAPTER 10

  CHEZ MIPCHIN

  As Father Battersby disappeared through the gatehouse, I scrambled to my feet. Jasper barked his approbation, for the walk had not so far turned out at all as he had hoped. This earned us a frown from the bossy functionary as we hurried out into the wynds again. With a bit of luck Mrs Mipchin would be on her way home, and would pass by the cottages just below the castle. Jasper and I hurried ahead to meet her.

  Her expression, as she saw us tripping down the steps, stumbling in our eagerness, was rather along the lines of Macbeth when he sees there is no empty seat at the feast. I, and Jasper, seemed to embody all that she most feared to encounter. I was not foolish enough to put this down to feelings of guilt: what she feared, most probably, was a social contretemps, a situation which no rules of behaviour had taught her how to cope with. It was rather like the Queen waking up to find a wild-eyed Irishman in her bedroom, but, if report be true, handled with considerably less aplomb.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Kitt—Helen . . . This is surprising.’

  ‘Hardly,’ I said drily. ‘I imagine Hexton has been buzzing with my flouting of its rules and conventions over the past day or two. I’ve met with nothing but embarrassment and avoidance every time I’ve put my nose outside my door.’

  ‘I’ve always said,’ Elspeth Mipchin enunciated, with that infuriating Edinburgh primness, ‘that if we look behind what we call rules, we’ll see that there is usually sound sense about human nature at the bottom of them.’

  ‘Have you?’ I said, with flat scorn in my tones. She had that sort of thin, genteel voice that often reads the serials on Woman’s Hour. Her dreary complacency irritated me no end. ‘The trouble is that people differ.’

  ‘Ye-e-es,’ she agreed. (How much better, it was implied, if they had not been so wilful as to do so, if they had all modelled themselves on the impeccable Elspeth Mipchin.)

  ‘And I’ve already come to the conclusion that these rules are designed to spare people at large, not to help the bereaved.’ Mrs Mipchin was not so stupid that she did not register that I was including her in a collective charge of hypocrisy and selfishness. I pressed home the advantage by saying: ‘I was thinking of flouting the rules still more dramatically by asking you for a cup of tea.’

  ‘Oh yes—of course—naturally.’ Mrs Mipchin’s house was only two minutes away, while mine was on the outskirts, and it seemed to be impossible to refuse, if only on humanitarian grounds. I did not want to leave her with the impression, however, that in my enfeebled and widowed state I had been exhausted by the afternoon sun. I said:

  ‘I realize it should be you calling on me, but as you know I’m a perverse creature, and I don’t know how long I’m going to be in Hexton to receive calls.’

  Mrs Mipchin shot me a glance—composed of I know not what—as we walked through the narrow wynds.

  ‘You are thinking of leaving Hexton?’

  ‘As soon as I know who killed my husband,’ I said calmly.

  When we got to the Mipchins’ front door—they lived in one of the stone houses that opened directly on to the wynds—Elspeth Mipchin looked pointedly at Jasper. Then we made our
way without a word round to the back, and she waited while I tied him to the line post—neither asking nor suggesting that I do that, but taking it for granted that I knew that no dog was allowed to pollute the Mipchin interior with hairs, boisterousness or smell. Jasper spotted a King Charles bitch in the next garden, and seemed quite happy. Then Mrs Mipchin led me round again to the front door. To go in through the kitchen was unthinkable.

  As we came through the door I thought I heard the sound of a television being switched off. Mrs Mipchin’s ears also seemed to twitch suspiciously. She put her hat—the hatpin reinserted—into the hall cupboard and marched into the living-room.

  ‘Mrs Kitterege has called for tea,’ she announced, the ice of disapproval quite undisguised. The Mipchin residence was furnished with heavy and dark pieces of a kind that is rather unfairly called ‘traditional’. It all sat squarely on the floor and announced ‘I was not cheap.’ Mr Mipchin was sitting over a coffee-table on which was a half-finished jigsaw puzzle, apparently of a vast cornfield in Upper Silesia. It looked very difficult, which was just as well, because I suspected it was just a blind to cover telly-watching when his wife was out of the way.

  Elspeth Mipchin announced: ‘I’ll get the tea.’

  That was a departure. George Mipchin was generally ordered to make the tea, while Elspeth saw to the dainties (who rated walnut sponge, and who could be fobbed off with lemon fingers being matters that demanded the nicest discrimination). Now she was undertaking both, no doubt intending to take her time, and leaving the hapless George to break the social ice. He did his duty well, if fussily, and ushered me into a chair by the empty grate.

  ‘So you’re getting about a bit again? Not shutting yourself away? That’s right . . . That’s good.’

  ‘I find it helps, seeing people,’ I said. ‘Besides, I don’t know how long I will be staying in Hexton, and I want to get things . . . sorted out.’

  ‘You’re thinking of leaving?’ He sounded genuinely concerned. ‘How sad. Where to?’

  I hadn’t really thought. Back to Mother? We would sit around the house both heartily wishing we were on our own. The whole thing was as yet more an idea than an intention, and the best thing about it was its usefulness as a catalyst.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t decided. It will depend a bit on how I stand financially. Not Harrogate, anyway.’

  George Mipchin shot me a sly smile. I added:

  ‘I think the main thing is to get away from the town that killed my husband.’

  I added that, I think, because Elspeth Mipchin was coming in with a tray of bone china, with a design of pink cornflowers on it. She looked aghast at my directness.

  ‘What an extraordinary thing to say. If it were not for your . . . circumstances, I would use a stronger word. Everyone knows that your poor husband was killed by one or other of those drunken soldiers. I’ve always said that one day—’

  ‘If everyone knows that,’ I interrupted, ‘they know a great deal more than Superintendent Coulton knows. I believe it’s true that he has handed one of the soldiers over to the Military Police, but there’s no question of a charge of murder.’

  ‘But why not? The man is clearly not doing his duty!’

  ‘The Superintendent rang me earlier today. Marcus was definitely stabbed on Castle Walk. Perhaps you saw the spot when you walked around it just now. It’s becoming quite a tourist attraction, isn’t it? This is quite certain, because his blood was found on grass and leaves on the slope. The soldiers were on the lower path by the weir—everyone is agreed on that. Unless they could be in two places at once, none of them could have murdered Marcus.’

  Elspeth Mipchin stood there motionless, her mouth pursed up into her near-habitual expression of distaste. Then she turned without a word and returned to the kitchen.

  ‘Ah!’ said George Mipchin. ‘Not the soldier lads, then. That’s a . . . pity.’ I had the odd notion that his eyes were looking at me mischievously from under his Crippen moustache. ‘I have the impression that people were rather clinging to that.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt they were,’ I said. ‘When did you hear about the soldiers?’

  ‘Someone—Mrs Culpepper would it be?—phoned Elspeth after church to say all those boys were at the police station. She said it had been much discussed after the service.’

  ‘I can imagine. And thanks given during it by those who knew, I suppose. You were not at the service?’

  ‘No . . . No . . . We discussed—Elspeth discussed—but in the end we didn’t . . . ’

  ‘But you were not on the God bus?’

  ‘No. No.’ A little snigger burrowed its way through the moustaches. ‘I believe the two good ladies who organized it were in fact alone on the bus. Again, we discussed whether we should go on it, as we had planned, but Elspeth decided—’

  ‘We decided,’ said Elspeth Mipchin, returning with a tray of eatables.

  ‘Quite, my dear. When I say that you decided I mean that we decided.’ He rolled an eye comically in my direction. ‘After thinking things over, we came to the conclusion that it would be wisest to stay away altogether.’

  ‘It was a real spiritual struggle,’ said Mrs Mipchin.

  ‘It must have been,’ I agreed. ‘And in the end you decided to do nothing.’

  ‘We watched the service on television,’ said Elspeth Mipchin defensively. ‘Little though I approve of having it on in the daytime. A very pleasant service it was too. I have to admit we felt happier committing ourselves neither way.’

  ‘And will you take your seat on Mary’s bus next Sunday?’

  Mrs Mipchin gave every sign of feeling boxed into a corner.

  ‘Well, dear, we’ll have to see, won’t we? See how things go.’

  What precisely, I wondered, did she mean by that? Elspeth Mipchin was not by nature a fence-sitter. What was going to bring her down on one side or the other? Did she mean that if, by next Sunday, Mary Morse or Thyrza Primp had not been arrested for murder, and what is more, if somebody had been, and for a motive that had nothing to do with all the ecclesiastical shenanigans, then Mrs Mipchin would consider putting her faith on the line and getting on the God bus, since it would have been disinfected of any questionable associations? I rather felt she did mean something like that. Such an interpretation did have the true, Victorian, Podsnappian ring to it.

  Elspeth Mipchin had by now sat down, and was dispensing tea. The eatables, I noted, were a plate of Marie biscuits and another of quite unpleasant-looking sponge-fingers. Elspeth was trying to tell me something, I felt. I took one, and munched into it with a slightly exaggerated pantomime of enjoyment. I was tempted to say brightly, ‘Did you enjoy the fête?’ but that seemed unduly reminiscent of the mythical question supposed to have been put to Mrs Lincoln, so I merely said:

  ‘Did you buy much at the fête?’

  Mrs Mipchin shot me a suspicious glance. My words earlier had alerted her to my intention of finding out who had killed Marcus, but she could think of no valid reason for refusing to answer.

  ‘Oh—some embroidered doylies . . . and some chutney . . . some rather good early strawberries . . . And George bought something from your stall.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said. ‘A doll in Welsh national costume, wasn’t it? And did you buy anything from my stall?’ I added, turning to Elspeth Mipchin.

  ‘Nothing to speak of. Since George had bought something to remember poor dear Thyrza by . . . ’

  ‘Nothing to speak of. But suppose we do speak of it. Perhaps I could make a guess. You must have bought something while I wasn’t there. Mr Horsforth was on duty so seldom that it was quite remarkable that you should have found him there at all. Now what, I wonder, was it that you bought?’

  ‘I don’t understand, my dear, this inquisitorial tone.’

  ‘A hatpin!’ I said. ‘Maybe two? Half a dozen?’

  ‘I don’t think that, merely because one buys one of the cheaper articles on the stall—’

  ‘Oh, I assure you that it isn�
�t the price of the hatpins that I’m interested in,’ I said. ‘By no means. What concerns me is their strength. And their sharpness.’

  Mrs Mipchin’s mouth suddenly gaped most ungenteelly open.

  ‘Why—?’

  ‘Because it’s my belief that one of Thyrza Primp’s hatpins was used to stab Marcus.’

  Elspeth Mipchin’s teaspoon clattered on to her saucer with a sound that, in the silence, appeared deafening. She said in tones of great horror:

  ‘Thyrza Primp’s hatpins!’

  And I said, rather in the manner of Banquo:

  ‘Horrible, whoever’s hatpin it was. But my mind keeps turning back to Thyrza Primp’s, because they were strong, and old-fashioned, and available—and because it seems somehow appropriate. You do understand what I mean, don’t you? When precisely did you buy yours?’

  The strength seemed to have gone out of Elspeth Mipchin. I think that normally she would have refused to answer, for she had the self-confidence of her own righteousness. But I had so disorientated her that her hand shook as she gave her tea an unnecessary stir, and she replied almost meekly:

  ‘I don’t know what time it was, but quite late. You had gone for lunch—I know, because Mr Horsforth was complaining about being left on his own.’

  ‘What a hide,’ I said calmly. ‘So it must have been after two, then. You went up to the stall, and you bought—how many pins?’

  ‘I bought half a dozen.’ She rushed on: ‘I bought six for Mary too.’

  ‘Ah! Six for Mary Morse!’

  ‘That’s right. She had said earlier how useful they would be, but—’

  ‘But she didn’t want to come up and buy them while I was on the stall. Don’t be embarrassed. I quite understand. So you got her some at the same time as you got your own. And when did you hand over your purchase to her?’

  ‘Ah—er—not long afterwards. Mary was around in the tent—no, just outside. Mary had been listening to the choir . . . such a pretty performance!—and I handed them to her then and she gave me the 50p.’