Fete Fatale

by Robert Barnard

  ‘What time would this be?’

  ‘Oh—ah—perhaps three, or a quarter past. Twenty past, even.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, feeling very much on top of things. Aggression was paying off. Elspeth Mipchin’s hands were shaking still, I wasn’t quite sure whether from guilt, or from a fear of Mary Morse. Either way, she was making no attempt to dispute my upper hand. I actually took from my handbag a little notebook and began to write things down.

  ‘Right. Twelve hatpins accounted for—six in your possession, six in Mary Morse’s. You’ll have them still, I suppose? I think, you know, I’ll have a look at them before I go. Now, since we have you equipped with a potential murder weapon, perhaps you’ll tell me where you were, what you were doing, at the time when my husband was killed.’

  ‘George—you shouldn’t let her—’

  ‘Really, Mrs Kitterege, this is a little—’

  ‘If you prefer to talk to the Superintendent . . . ’ I said, making as if to go. This had an instant effect.

  ‘Here!’ said Elspeth Mipchin. ‘We were here, weren’t we, George?’

  ‘That’s right. Home from the fête. Er . . . what time precisely was it your poor husband . . . ’

  Again I had a disconcerting sense of amused eyes, coming at me from somewhere.

  ‘Let’s say between about a quarter to four and four.’

  ‘We were having tea,’ said Elspeth Mipchin flatly.

  ‘Oh no, dear. We must be precise about this. Not on Saturday. Usually we would be having tea at that time. But we had lunched at The Green Knight—a very good cold meat and salad lunch they do there, and very cheap, or my good lady wouldn’t normally like going to a public house. So since it was a day out, in a manner of speaking, we indulged ourselves a little. So when we got back from the fête, you remember, Elspeth, we said we’d just have a cup of tea and a scone at five o’clock.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I asked. There was an air of doom and retribution in the air, but Elspeth Mipchin could do nothing until I had gone. She nodded.

  ‘So what did you both do?’

  ‘Elspeth went upstairs to lie down on the bed. The day, you know, had been tiring and very hot, and she had to go back later for the clearing up. And I—wickedly, because as Elspeth says we do not usually approve of watching The Box in the daytime—I turned on the Second Test on the television. Such wonderfully entertaining players, the West Indians. A joy to watch.’

  ‘So that in fact,’ I said, ‘you were not together—’

  ‘Not together,’ confirmed George Mipchin happily.

  ‘In different parts of the house?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘And it would have been perfectly possible for one of you—?’

  ‘One or other of us.’

  ‘—to slip out and . . . get himself or herself along to Castle Walk.’

  ‘Quite possible,’ agreed George Mipchin. ‘It’s only a couple of minutes or so away.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I enjoyed that tea very much indeed.’

  CHAPTER 11

  THYRZA AT THE VICARAGE

  The vicarage that Walter and Thyrza Primp had moved into when they first arrived in Hexton to preach the gospel of middle-class morality was a large, be-creepered Victorian residence, suitable for a large family and a retinue of servants. It had long since been abandoned by the Church of England on the grounds that it was impossible to heat and hardly worth renovating. It was now owned by a writer—a man who constructed bestselling blockbusters with titles like Corporation, Oil Rig and Palace. He was occasionally to be seen with a pint of beer in The Green Knight, and he wrote letters to The Times over the address The Old Vicarage, which gave them double the chance of being published. He was currently rumoured to be engaged on a thousand-page epic called Town Hall, about steamy sex and corruption in British local government. We bought his books out of a sort of local patriotism, but he wasn’t particularly Hexton.

  Walter and Thyrza Primp, meanwhile, had removed themselves to the new vicarage which the Church had built for them (out of the rents derived from their brothel properties, the nastier minds in the town alleged). The new vicarage was a three-bedroomed affair, built in the local stone, but in a style best described as anonymous. ‘It just suits us,’ Walter Primp told everyone. And if Thyrza Primp regretted their two-peas-in-a-pod grandeur in the old vicarage, she had by then gained an unassailable position in the town, and her natural parsimony reconciled her to her reduced state. It was this vicarage, which over the years she had contrived to make as cluttered and claustrophobic as the old, that she was now leaving, to make way for Father Battersby.

  When I called there, the next morning, I was not banking on a particularly cheery reception. Thyrza Primp, in fact, had never been notably hospitable, even during Walter’s ministry: however lavish the spread provided—and it never was, particularly—she seemed to watch each item as it disappeared, as if she were operating some private system of rationing. In the event, however, my reception was even chillier than I had expected.

  It began, of course, with Patch. I had left Jasper at home, foreseeing problems, but nevertheless Patch started away like a coloratura machine-gun the moment I put my finger on the bell. Patch had been brought up to repel vagrants and others who might call at the vicarage expecting charity, so he was only doing his duty, but he did it with rather too much of a will. Of course, a vet’s wife must expect some of the odium to rub off on her where animals are concerned. As the barks soared into the stratosphere I was conscious of curtains being inched aside, and knew that when the door opened I would not present myself as any surprise.

  In the event, the door merely inched open. Two black, piggy little eyes gleamed out from the murk inside. Patch threw himself at the crack, still doing his own particular version of the Mad Scene. The eyes inside glared, malicious and unyielding. The doormat on the step said ‘Welcome’.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Kitterege?’

  ‘I’ve come to say goodbye, Thyrza,’ I said, as if this were any old social call. ‘I heard that you were leaving earlier than we all expected.’

  ‘That’s right,’ came from the gloom, but no further social gesture was made.

  ‘If you would just let Patch out—he knows me quite well, you know—it would be easier to talk.’

  ‘Talk?’ The implication was that there was nothing she would like less, but she opened it just a fraction, and Patch bowled out. He sniffed at my ankles, then rushed off to have a really good sniffle round the garden.

  ‘I know you’re busy—’ I began.

  ‘Very. Very busy. The removalists are coming to crate me up this afternoon.’

  Images of cranes swinging Thyrza Primp, all crated up, into a container bound for Harrogate swam irresistibly into my mind. But I had to admit that I could hardly have called at a worse time. On the other hand, there was really no alternative, granted her advanced departure date.

  ‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘if I might ask for just five minutes of your time—’

  The door was allowed to swing open a little further, but only to allow Thyrza Primp to place her square, aggressive little body plum in the opening. She was clad in a brown, crackly dress, and she looked like a paratrooper trained to repel all comers.

  ‘No. I have no hesitation in saying NO. Sympathy in bereavement is one thing. I’ve always had that, I hope. And it’s something I’ve needed myself very recently.’ (I thought of mild little Walter Primp, whom a mild little heart attack had carried off to a mild little heaven, where I imagined him reading the Daily Telegraph and hoping that his relict was not to make the same journey in the too near future.) ‘But I’ve no sympathy with sheer wrongheadedness. From all I’ve heard, you’ve gone clean out of your mind.’

  ‘Perhaps I have,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the idea that my husband was murdered.’

  ‘Yes, well, as I say, you have my sympathy. Though I may say that this is the first time that’s happened to one of Walter’s parishioners.’

  �
��I’m also suffering from the delusion that I might help find out who killed him.’

  ‘There you are, you see! That’s what I heard. What nonsense! What dangerous nonsense! And I hear you also have got hold of the idea that it has to be one of us?’

  ‘Yes. That is precisely what I do think. And please don’t serve me up the soldiers again. The soldiers are a dead duck.’

  ‘Then no doubt it was some unemployed vagrant.’

  ‘Ah—the classical passing tramp. Really, I wonder how anyone ever dares pass a tramp. Well, you cling to that idea, Mrs Primp, and I’ll cling to mine. What I’d like to ask—’

  ‘No. Quite emphatically no. I hear you quite terrorized Elspeth Mipchin. An extraordinary procedure. She was most weak-minded to let it happen, and what her husband was thinking about, to just sit there while it was going on, I cannot imagine. Well, I assure you I am not going to let it happen to me. The idea! I’ve never heard of anything so undignified in my life!’

  ‘Dignity is not something I’m thinking about much at the moment. But if you prefer to speak to the Superintendent . . . ’

  ‘Ha! Yes, I heard you were trying that one. Yes, I would prefer to talk to the Superintendent. I am not unaccustomed to dealing with the police. I had many occasions to do so during my late husband’s ministry here.’ (That was certainly true. Mrs Primp was anathema at the police station, due to her determination to view sin as synonymous with crime. Unwary vagrants, too, who called at the vicarage hoping for a hand-out were often disconcerted to find themselves up on a charge.) ‘So don’t try to terrify me with threats of the law!’

  ‘Good. Well, I’ve no doubt he will want to talk to you. He was very interested this morning when I suggested that one of your hatpins might have been the murder weapon. A hatpin would correspond exactly to the nature of the injuries as set out in the autopsy, or so he said.’

  ‘I should have thought that Mrs Culpepper was quite as likely a source of hatpins as myself, given her trade. But what if one of mine were used? They were not mine any more. I had handed them over—a charitable gesture, as I thought at the time, though precious few are the thanks I’ve received for it. I should have thought the police would be less interested in who had owned them in the past than in who had charge of them at the time of the murder. I should have thought, in fact, that the hatpins led them straight back not to me, but to you, Mrs Kitterege.’

  She was clearly about to shut the door, having achieved this palpable hit, and I hurriedly said:

  ‘Why are you leaving early, Mrs Primp?’

  ‘Because the removalists changed the date they would collect my things. I have no more to say, so—’

  ‘Do you ever feel sorry, Thyrza?’ I asked, genuinely curious. ‘Do you ever feel a twinge of conscience at the trouble you caused Marcus in the last weeks of his life? Do you regret all the silly rows and bitterness you stirred up in Hexton?’

  As her face began to disappear in the gloom, something approaching a Cheshire Cat smile came over her face.

  ‘I most certainly do not. If your husband had done his duty as a churchwarden, then none of this would have occurred. His trouble was lack of backbone. And that’s the trouble with most of the people in this town. There’s no one willing to stand up for what’s right. That’s all I’ve done. I’ve stood up for what’s right.’ I stood there silent, wondering what concluding cliché she would dish up. In the event, she favoured me with two ripe ones. ‘My conscience is clear. I’ve nothing to reproach myself with.’

  Patch, sensing the finality in her voice, did a racing-car swerve in through the front door, which was then shut, decisively, almost triumphantly, with that snapping ‘Primp!’ sound that I associated with Thyrza. I made my way down the front path, past the stocks and the hydrangeas, and out into the street.

  The new vicarage had been built in a respectable but little-frequented corner of the town—quiet, unvisited by tourists. But houses it has—middle-class, net-curtained houses, and it was no doubt for this reason that, though there was no one else in the street, Timothy and Fiona, turning a corner, were already putting on a full performance even before they saw me: hands clasped winsomely behind their backs, long, lingering, doe-eyed looks into each other’s eyes, giggling whispered confidences into each other’s ears. I walked slowly towards them, anxious to witness the full range of their repertoire. I remembered that man in the P. G. Wodehouse story who keeps going up to people and whispering ‘I know your secret.’ I think I was miffed by my abject failure with Thyrza—anyway, something impelled me to try a variation on that idea. As I approached them, and as they apparently tore themselves from their absorbed and fascinated contemplation of each other to favour me with a double smile of unbearable innocence and sweetness, and before Timothy could address me with some words of sympathy which I’m sure he had been thinking up since he spotted me coming, I said:

  ‘You really don’t have to put on that performance just for my benefit, you know. I know all about you, you see.’

  As I passed by, the smiles were still there, but they were like the smiles fixed on unfortunate faces by ill-starred operations in the early days of plastic surgery.

  CHAPTER 12

  SECRETS

  It is, presumably, satisfying for the huntsman when a shot in the dark is rewarded by a yelp of pain. I certainly was inclined to preen myself when my shot in the dark resulted, just before lunch-time, in a phone call from Fiona Weston.

  ‘Oh, I say, Mrs Kitterege, you did have us worried for a bit there, but after all, you’re not going to say anything to anyone, are you, I mean, parents or anyone, because after all it’s not relevant to anything. I mean, not to your husband’s death, I mean—gosh—how could it be? and we know you’re looking into it, and we think it’s jolly clever of you, and brave, but our little private goings-on have nothing to do with anything like that, and we do hope you’ll keep them under your hat, because—Gosh, here comes the Pops, I must fly, but you won’t, will you—?’

  Fiona, it seemed, had been caught by her charade in a ’twenties groove. What was rather annoying was that her call had given me no shred of a clue as to what I was supposed to know. Beyond the fact that at that age the secret was likely to revolve around sex, I had no inkling.

  I said as much to Franchita Culpepper when I called on her that same day for afternoon tea. She was the only one who attempted to say—sincerely, I felt sure—how sorry she was about Marcus, and how much the town was going to miss him. The effect of her words was rather blunted by Oscar, who jumped up at me, butted me with his head and his rump, and licked all available areas of bare skin to express his mountainous delight at my visit. It’s no joke being jumped up at by a nearly full-grown Rottweiler, but he nicely covered the embarrassment we all feel, in Hexton, at the expression of any sort of emotion.

  ‘Come to ask questions?’ roared Franchita, retreating into her more normal mode of conversation as we went into the sittingroom. It was a room I had always liked. The house had been owned for decades by an old lady who expected to die at any moment, but never did, and who consequently did as little as possible in the way of redecoration or renewal of furniture. Franchita, presumably with Howard’s help, had made it a little museum of Art Deco, with all sorts of knick-knacks and oddities of the period scattered around (some worth many times, now, what they had paid for them, though I should imagine that was usually true of anything Franchita bought). In this Coward-like setting Franchita, I suspect, saw herself as an Amanda, though in fact she was more like Madame Arcati.

  ‘To ask questions, yes,’ I said. ‘How things get around.’

  ‘Is there any small town where they don’t? Howard’s out, by the way.’

  I was glad. It seemed to give me a freer hand with Franchita. But I was so unused to his having any existence or activity separate from Franchita’s that there was probably surprise in my voice when I asked:

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Teaching Russian at the army camp.’

&
nbsp; ‘I didn’t know Howard knew Russian.’

  ‘Of course he does. That’s what he taught at Grimsby University, before they cut out Russian. Can you imagine a government being so stupid as to step up the Cold War and cut down on Russian teaching at the same time? That’s what this one did. I wouldn’t vote for the silly woman except that there is nobody else to vote for. Howard is Russian language—nouns and declensions and irregular verbs and all that. Doesn’t need any imagination, which is a damn good thing, because he hasn’t got any. Howard’s just what the army needs. I used to teach English once, but it was literature. Tea? Cake? I’ll see what’s in the tin.’

  While she was away foraging in the kitchen, I patted Oscar and tried to fit Howard Culpepper’s teaching of Russian into a pattern that could have led to the killing of Marcus. I failed dismally. I could imagine Franchita, in her youth, as a seductive and steely-willed spy, seducing secrets out of National Servicemen, but that didn’t seem to lead me any closer to Marcus’s death either.

  ‘Damned glad Howard’s got this job,’ said Franchita, coming back with trays. ‘Minding him all day becomes a bit of a chore after a time. He’s out there three afternoons a week, which gets him out of my hair, quite apart from bringing in a welcome little bit of money.’

  ‘I never thought of you as in need of money.’

  ‘We’re not. We’d just like more.’ She flashed her molars at me. ‘Howard was paid off handsomely, though that doesn’t remove the sting. I’ve got a little bit of my own. Still, hat shops don’t exactly bring in a fortune. I charge the earth—as you’ve no doubt noticed—and the new people always come and buy from me when they find out that hats are still de rigueur here. But they don’t buy new ones every season, as people once did, and the young ones buy their jokey hats at jumble sales. No—I’d have done better to have gone in for video games, or some such darned thing. Wouldn’t I have kept those little blighters in order!’