Fete Fatale

by Robert Barnard

  It was quite clear that she had only the vaguest idea who I was. Her card-index, consulted no doubt on the night before the fête, must have been put out of her mind immediately afterwards. If I had ever had any notion that there might be substance in Mary’s preposterous suggestion, then this would have dispelled it. If Lady Godetia had had anything going with Marcus, then she would have made sure she knew who Marcus’s wife was. Not that I had ever had the faintest twinge of doubt on that score. If Marcus had had, or was having, an affair—and maybe he had . . . maybe he was—then I paid him the compliment of absolute confidence that it would not have been with Lady Godetia.

  There seemed little point in sitting down with her now, but I did so, and got what pleasure I could from pricking a little pin into her social manner.

  ‘In point of fact I didn’t enjoy the fête all that much,’ I said.

  ‘Oh. That murder. No, most unfortunate, poor man . . . Oh! . . . Oh dear! Oh, darling—you’re not . . . Oh, but I didn’t imagine you could be out so soon . . . How can I apologize enough? Really, what must you think of my clumsiness?’

  Colour had come into her cheeks, already heated with her eating. She seemed almost genuinely upset, as very social people can be over a faux pas. I waved her back to her lunch as I ordered king prawns and a chow mein and a glass of wine from Mr Li. After a moment’s hesitation, and a desperate search for something to say to retrieve the situation, Lady Godetia bent down to gobble at a plate of pork and ginger, apparently intent on being gone as soon as possible.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, still pink with embarrassment as Li Chen departed with my order. ‘I didn’t, I really didn’t, mean to imply that the fête was a success as a whole. I really hadn’t forgotten your poor husband, and that dreadful scene—stamped on my memory, I do assure you. Because he really was a great favourite of mine, you know . . . It’s just that I thought you were one of the ordinary helpers, and I ought to say something . . . cheery.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said, extra cool as usual in the face of her mannered gush.

  ‘We cancelled my speech at the end, you know,’ Godetia said, as if that were the ultimate proof of their sincerity.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘You can probably make it next year.’

  Lady Godetia gave renewed signs of wanting very much to get away. Much more of me and she might even leave something uneaten.

  ‘You actually saw the body float by, did you?’ I said, rather as if I were a reporter questioning one of the knights or dames of Camelot about the end of the Lady of Shalott’s voyage.

  ‘Well, yes, actually. Everyone seemed to go out there, so I, eventually, followed. So appalling, and so strange. I dreamt about it that night.’

  ‘What had you been doing before that?’

  ‘What had I been doing? Do you know, the police came and asked me that. Why on earth are you interested in little me? I asked, but they said it was just routine. Well, I’d been talking to Mary Morse about library matters. We’re both on the committee: Mary because she’s keen on the decency line, as you know, and me because I find it gets me the new books quicker. Well, we were talking about that on and off throughout the day, whenever we met up. I had to go round and talk to people, you know . . . buy things, make the right gestures. So really I was talking to all and sundry, all the time, but when I was talking to who (or should that be whom?) I really can’t say. Now Mary left the tent—oh, about two-thirty or three, and after that I continued to go round . . . talked to Mrs Culpepper, I remember, and her insignificant little husband, who had the discarded toy stall—so unlike your husband, my dear.’

  ‘And had you talked to Marcus that day?’

  ‘Oh, but ye-es,’ she said, summoning Li Chen for her bill. ‘But much earlier. Before I went into the tent, when I was going around the games outside. Your Marcus was demonstrating his machine, and doing so well, and I said one of my silly little things—“You really should be going with the Olympic team”—something quite foolish like that. But your husband was a man. You’ve lost a treasure.’ She got up, and went pink again as she remembered her mistake. ‘I can’t say how sorry I am. That I didn’t remember who you were, I mean. So unfortunate. Say you’ve forgiven me. I shall dream about that tonight!’

  And Lady Godetia stuffed a ten-pound note into Mr Li’s hands and fled. It was clear that she was infinitely more upset by her social gaffe than by Marcus’s death.

  As I watched her retreating back—and it was quite a back—a voice from the next table said:

  ‘We do seem to get encumbered with the dimmest of the upper crust in Hexton, don’t we?’

  I turned my head and saw that while we had been talking, Mr Horsforth had come and sat himself at the next table. Horsforth, I remembered, quite often lunched out—a perfectly sensible decision for a widower with no particular obligation to partake of the depleted and unsavoury school meals service currently provided by the County. He sat there, a glass of iced water in front of him, waiting for Li Chen to arrive with his food. On his face was that expression of fastidious superiority which was what I most disliked about him. Not that I had any inclination to fling myself to the defence of Lady Godetia.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I believe there are gentry who have brains larger than a pea, but she’s not among them.’

  ‘Her husband was the same,’ went on Mr Horsforth, with a sarcastic smile of reminiscence. ‘Thick as two planks. He was a constant embarrassment at speech days. Since the guest speaker invariably went on about what a hopeless dullard he was at school, it was very much de trop for the Chairman of Governors to prove the same with every word he uttered.’

  To give Mr Horsforth his due, he had never run the sort of school where it is implied that Michael Jackson is quite as commendable an object of interest as Beethoven, or that The Thorn Birds is the modern equivalent of Dickens. Still, at that point I was not inclined to give Mr Horsforth his due, or to let him off what I’d put the others through. If I was leaving Hexton anyway, I would not in the future be dependent on him for jobs.

  ‘And where,’ I asked, ‘were you on Saturday afternoon?’

  He looked at me, with a touch of granite in his eyes.

  ‘I’d heard that you’d been going round asking questions of that kind. It’s rather suspected you’re intent on discovering everyone’s little secrets into the bargain. I suppose it’s natural, though I’m not at all sure it’s wise. Or even helpful. Marcus, I should have thought, was not the sort who would go around uncovering the things people prefer to keep hidden.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ I said, ‘I should very much like to know what you were doing—let’s say between three-thirty and four on Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘Very much what I had been doing for the rest of the day, I suppose.’

  ‘That,’ I said, ‘was what I never found out.’

  Again that bleak look razed me.

  ‘I rather gather,’ he said, in a voice like the Isle of Arran on a wet November day, ‘that you expected me to spend more time on the knick-knacks stall than I actually did. I must confess I never realized that that was expected of me.’

  ‘You thought your duties were purely nominal? There to lend your name? Ah, well—these little misunderstandings will occur. But the question remains, since you were rarely on the stall, where were you?’

  He sighed.

  ‘It’s really too childish, Mrs Kitterege, if you imagine I have some little love-nest in the town, to which I repaired stealthily from time to time during the day. I don’t have some little liaison which I carry on after dark or at weekends. Headmasters really cannot do that kind of thing in their own back yards—even in these times. In fact, I wonder whether you realize what a headmaster’s job has become like, these last few years. We have a government that has no belief in education—State education, at any rate—and begrudges us every penny we spend on books and equipment. I have to beg for pencils, beg for stationery, ask parents to provide things that ten years ago they and we would have
taken it for granted the County would provide. And these are parents who are feeling the pinch financially themselves—frequently are actually unemployed.’

  ‘Granted,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen this myself at school.’

  ‘What that means is that headmasters have become compulsive beggars and button-holers: anyone with influence, anyone with anything to give, we have to be on to: Mrs X is on the County Education Committee; Mr Y is with ICI; Mrs Z is with the Social Services Department. All of them can be useful for some thing. That’s what my life is these days. A headmaster shouldn’t be a scholar, he should have a diploma in business management.’

  ‘I’ll buy that,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t care greatly whether you buy it or not,’ said Mr Hors-worth, who would clearly like to have lost his temper with me (he kept his temper on a very short fuse, as a matter of policy), but felt that it was hardly the time or the place. ‘It happens to be the truth.’

  ‘So what you were doing all day was—in essence—talking to people who mattered?’

  ‘Precisely. People who mattered to the school. People who could help preserve the threatened standards of the school . . . So if you are going around looking for secrets, you won’t find any in my activities on Saturday afternoon. Try some other tack.’

  He sat back, smiling complacently.

  ‘Like drink, perhaps?’ I hazarded.

  He practically threw himself out of his chair at me, his face purple with rage.

  ‘How the hell did you know about that?’ he hissed.

  That was an interesting question, really. It came to me pretty much the moment I said it, and I’m inclined to call it inspiration—that is, a sudden coming together of observations and scraps of information that hitherto had been scattered, pigeonholed in various corners of my mind. There was that sight of the glass of water on the table—nothing in itself, because a headmaster would be ill-advised to drink in the middle of the school day. There was the fact that Timothy, his son, was never on any account to be seen in a pub—not, at least, in the Hexton area. And there was the fact that once, long ago, when I first had a spell teaching in his school, one of the forms had had as a nickname for him ‘The Brandy Head’. Mostly he was called the inevitable things—Horsey, Sarky, Beaky, and suchlike—but this group had been studying for GCE The Power and the Glory, with its whisky priest, and they called him The Brandy Head because one of the boys claimed to have seen him at a distant rubbish tip, getting rid of a carton of brandy bottles.

  ‘I regard this as a serious matter,’ he went on, in an apoplectic whisper. ‘Who’s been talking? McPhail, I suppose. What was it? Some sort of professional confidence between him and Marcus?’

  ‘I assure you, doctors do not exchange professional confidences with vets. It’s quite possible Marcus might have mentioned any of Smokey’s problems to Dr McPhail, but quite impossible that McPhail should have revealed to Marcus anything of the problems of . . . your wife, I presume?’

  There was a pause while Horsforth was brought chicken and almonds and a plate of noodles. He settled into them moodily. I had finished my king prawns, and I demanded another glass of Li Chen’s wine-box Jugoslav Riesling.

  ‘It was a disease with her,’ he said at last, with an expression of dyspeptic taste on his face. ‘Something medical. Something she had inherited.’ (Anything, in fact, except a reaction to the sort of life she had, married to him.) ‘She was immensely cunning in getting hold of it. I used to wonder how she found the money to pay for it, from the housekeeping money I gave her. Later I discovered she’d had an inheritance from an uncle that she’d told me nothing about. It was just a few hundreds, but enough. Imagine concealing a legacy, intending to spend it on drink! By the end I had to supply her—the alternative was worse. You can imagine the problems that would have been caused if anyone had found out, but by then she wouldn’t have cared if the whole town knew, just so long as she got as much as she needed. I tried to persuade her to go away, to some clinic or cure, but she said what was the use? She’d just take up with it again as soon as she came home. And I knew she was right . . . You can imagine the sort of effect this had on our son, on Timothy.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I said carefully, ‘that it must have made him . . . secretive. Turned him inward, made him adept at hiding things.’

  He looked at me in astonishment.

  ‘Oh no. Not at all. You obviously don’t know Timothy at all. He’s a very open boy. We have a complete understanding. He has no secrets from me at all. No—I meant how strongly he took against drink, and all that . . . sordidness.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘In a way that’s one good thing that has come out of the whole dreadful business. He’s a terribly upright boy, Timothy, and I’ve never had reason to be other than proud of him. Not brilliant—I’d have liked an academic career for him, naturally, but still, he’s doing very well at the accountants’. He was glad when she died . . . We didn’t say so to each other, but we each knew the other was glad.’

  ‘You were spared possible embarrassment,’ I said.

  ‘We were spared watching that human degradation,’ he replied, once more sharp and self-confident. ‘If you’ve never seen anything like that, you’ve no cause to adopt that ironic tone. Now you know my little secret. Is it satisfying? Do you really imagine it can have anything to do with the death of Marcus? I tell you one thing: if I find that it’s got around town, I’ll make sure you never do a day’s teaching with any Education Authority within a hundred-mile radius of this town.’

  ‘It certainly won’t get around via me,’ I said, signalling to Li Chen that I wanted to pay. ‘I intend to leave this place and its secrets. My only interest is in finding out who killed Marcus and why. Remember Marcus, Mr Horsforth? Remember that he was once a human being, before he became a murder case?’

  He suddenly looked embarrassed.

  ‘Yes. Of course, I should have said something. That silly woman put it out of my head. I was very sad about it—very sad indeed. He was a good influence in the town, none better. I’m afraid the murder, and all the uncertainty, put it out of my mind.’

  ‘That’s what’s happened with most people,’ I said sadly. ‘They’ve forgotten Marcus, because he was murdered.’

  CHAPTER 15

  THE WESTONS

  I was not altogether sure that it was worthwhile going to see Colonel and Mrs Weston. Marcus had always got on well with the Colonel, though he sometimes found him infuriatingly slow and non-committal (Marcus, be it said, being far from fast or committal himself). The Colonel had been right behind Marcus in his fight for charity and sanity in the parish of St Edward the Confessor, and Mrs Weston had not joined forces to any noticeable extent with the harpies of Hexton. The police, surely, would have got out of the Westons all there was to be got?

  On the other hand, they were the parents of Fiona, whose doings still intrigued me (on a personal, gossipy, level, rather than as anything that might be of relevance). And they were among the last, presumably, to have seen Marcus alive, and simply on those grounds it seemed foolish to neglect them. I rang up Nancy Weston and (in effect) invited myself round for four-fifteen the next day. She promised me muffins if it was cool, which was a good start.

  It was cool—one of the few cool days that summer—when I made my way down St Joseph’s Wynd, in the direction of their house. I hoped the muffins would be good. Through a gap in the street, over the wall of a little garden path, I could see their house. I paused in my progress as I saw the front door open, and I watched as Timothy and Fiona came out. What was this? The young ones making their escape because they knew an oldie was coming to tea? Or was it something very different—were they coming to meet me, to waylay me before I could get there? Yes—they were turning in the direction they knew I would arrive from.

  I paused a little longer, and as soon as they began along the road I knew there was something odd about them. They had changed their performance. This new act was called Temporary Interruption
to Love’s Young Dream. Or perhaps, if they had been painted by a nineteenth-century painter, The Falling-Out. Hands were not held, and they mooched along at least a foot apart, discontent written all over the set of their faces, tension written on the set of their shoulders. Timothy kicked a soft-drink can left in the gutter; Fiona gazed at the gables of houses and pouted. Doubtless already they had been observed from behind the curtains of front rooms; perhaps already telephone lines were singing as the Hexton information service (‘You know I’m not one to gossip, but do you know what I’ve just seen?’) spread the news through the town and the surrounding farms and cottages.

  ‘Well,’ I said, as we met at the corner, just as they had intended we should. ‘This makes a change.’

  Heads kept shaded from observers, they smiled, nervously and conspiratorially.

  ‘It’s a new stage in the affair,’ said Fiona.

  ‘I think you’re very wise. What you had was a Second Couple routine. It would never have sustained a whole play.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Timothy, ‘we’re keeping our options open, but we’re thinking of making this The Beginning of the End.’

  ‘Really? I should have thought with Rows and Reconciliations this was a show that could have run and run.’

  ‘Well, it’s got to end some time, hasn’t it? And if we break up, I can borrow Dad’s car and go off on long, moody drives at weekends. And Fiona can go and stay with friends, or say that’s what she’s doing, to take her mind off things. We can spin it out for a bit, and it might prove even better than what we’ve got going now. We wouldn’t need to see each other so much, for example.’

  ‘What we came along for,’ said Fiona, ‘was to make sure you were not thinking of telling. That way we know all our options are open.’

  ‘No, I certainly wasn’t thinking of telling,’ I said. ‘Anyone who fights the Hexton code has my general sympathy. On the other hand, I would rather like to know what I’m not telling. What precisely, I mean, has all this been a cover for?’