Fete Fatale

by Robert Barnard

Priest

  This provoked less thought, and I just added ‘check’ beside it, before writing:

  Hexton

  After a time I wrote ‘check too’ by this word, and wrote a last entry that I thought rather interesting:

  Nonsense language?

  It was not, I had to conclude, much. It was certainly not, in police language, a ‘case’. Nevertheless, I was sure that it was in some sense the answer. I went into the kitchen to peel some potatoes, and to heat up the frozen ‘For One’ dish. It turned out to be a peculiarly nasty braised something-or-other that I had made long ago, before I knew better than to try out The Times’s cookery correspondent’s recipes. It didn’t matter. After the first mouthful I didn’t really notice what I was eating. I was too preoccupied with thinking the thing through, with filling in the areas around the few clues and indications I had gathered together in my mind. When I had finished my meal, and washed out the taste with a glass of wine, I got on the phone to the Superintendent.

  The Superintendent, though I haven’t mentioned it, had been in constant touch with me over the case, ringing me once and sometimes twice a day. I haven’t mentioned it because he rarely told me anything of any great moment. I was, after all, a suspect, and would remain one until somebody was arrested. So I heard how many tourists the police had interviewed, how they were attempting to establish the precise doings and whereabouts of many people (including, no doubt, me, though he didn’t say so) at the relevant period of the afternoon, how the army had put the drunken lout who threw Marcus’s body into the river on a charge, and so on. I never got any sense that he was any forrader, and I don’t think he did either.

  ‘I sometimes think,’ he had said to me the day before, ‘that this murder was done on the spur of the moment, and it was pure luck that there was no one around to see it.’

  ‘That’s what Father Battersby thinks,’ I said.

  ‘That sort of murder is the very devil to solve, especially if the chap keeps his head afterwards.’

  ‘Or her head,’ I had said.

  Now I got on to him and explained some of the things I had been thinking of, the way some little, unnoticed things had begun to form a pattern in my mind. He was sympathetic, but quiet—very quiet. I presumed he was unimpressed.

  ‘What you have there is a motive, not a case,’ he said.

  ‘I realize that. I was hoping that establishing the motive might be the first step to establishing the case.’

  ‘Certainly there are things there we could check up on—things we would want to check up on before we did anything at all in the way of confrontation. Basically, what we would be depending on would be the suspect breaking down. A chancy thing, that. The suspect clearly hasn’t broken down so far.’

  ‘What I was wondering,’ I said, ‘was whether I might not be more likely to effect the breaking-down than you. The personal touch, rather than the majesty of the law.’

  Well, we talked about this for some time, and the Super did not greatly like it, but as he said: he could not dictate to me who I could see and who I could not see. And as I said, I had a fair bit to do before I would be ready. Finally he said he would have a man keeping an eye on me all the next day, and he would call for a second, to police both front and back doors, any time I should go into a house other than my own. I said that was all right by me. I had not, to tell you the truth, given much thought to my own safety, probably because I was still in the numbness of the newly-bereaved, taking each day as it came. ‘Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life’ is no doubt a fine inspirational text for some, but not for those for whom the rest of their lives yawns empty and lonely compared with what had gone before. I was not very interested in the rest of my life, so I didn’t greatly care about my own safety.

  But I did very much want to get the murderer of Marcus.

  CHAPTER 17

  FINAL ACCOUNTS

  The next day I took Jasper for his walk very early on. We went to the meadows—the first time I had been there since the day of the fête. There was nobody around on them, except the police constable who was keeping an eye on me from a distance. Jasper was delighted with his company, and kept running up to him, wagging his tail, and trying to persuade him to throw balls. The young man looked embarrassed, as if he were a spy whose cover had been blown.

  If he has an early walk, Jasper is usually all right until tea-time. I didn’t know how long things were likely to take that day. When I got in I had a cup of coffee, did some checking in Marcus’s records, and planned things out. It should look as like a normal day as possible, I thought. I put some library books in my shopping-bag and sallied forth.

  People were getting used to seeing me in the streets by now. They had decided it was all right just to nod and pass on. When I went into the shops, though, the other shoppers felt trapped. Even if it was only a supermarket, they felt our trolleys might meet round a corner and they be compelled to make some unorthodox gesture. That morning I went into Mr Hussein’s to get some of his pâté, and said brightly to the other waiting souls:

  ‘Did you see Mary Morse’s brother on television last night?’

  No, they all nodded dumbly.

  ‘Oh yes. The NUM spokesman for the miners at Scunthorpe. He was so articulate. Mary must be awfully proud.’

  And I smiled wickedly. She’s back to her normal bitch form, the other shoppers thought, or some Hexton formulation that meant the same thing. But I’m sure they went away and passed it on. In Hexton that is the sort of thing that is bound to be passed on.

  Then I went to the library. It is a rather damp, dreary building on the outskirts of the old town, and a general air of Mary Morse hangs over it. Since the sort of middle-brow, middle-class, middle-IQ novel that is approved of here is not produced much these days, they will buy almost anything you specially order, but they do so with an air of ‘Are you sure this is the sort of thing you want to read?’ The librarians are scraps of gentility who look as if they had been personally screened by Thyrza Primp, as very probably they had. They made no comment on my un-Hexton reappearance in the first week of widowhood, merely compressing their lips and handing me my cards. They noticed me, though—noticed that I didn’t do my usual thing of flipping through the books on the ‘Recently Returned’ trolley, in the faint hope of finding a vintage Christie I hadn’t read, or the new Fay Weldon. Instead I went straight along to the super-dreary reference section—roped off, for some reason, from the rest—and settled myself down at a table. ‘What on earth is she doing?’ I could almost hear them asking each other. The reference library is quite unfrequented as a rule, like the mausoleum of a once-proud family that has died out. I was rather surprised to find that it had what I wanted. ‘She’s at the dictionaries!’ I could imagine the librarians saying in their bewilderment. ‘The foreign dictionaries! Do you think she’s doing crosswords to while away the time?’ When I left I just grabbed a volume from the shelves to take out. The librarians looked at me through narrowed slits of eyes, and when I got outside I found out why. The book was called It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet.

  The policeman was loitering around in a conspicuous fashion when I came out into the street again. He followed me at a respectful distance as I made my way through town again, and up to Mrs Nielson’s. As usual, I heard Gustave’s staccato yap, and Gwen Nielson calming him down: ‘There’s a marvellous watch-dog! There’s a clever fellow! Will my boy go into the kitchen while Mumsie sees who it is?’

  When she came to the door she smiled deprecatingly as the hail of barks continued from inside the house.

  ‘Sorry about him. He’ll be all right when he knows it’s you. Come in. Is it too late for morning coffee?’

  ‘Actually, I’ve had more than my fair share of morning coffee and afternoon tea recently. I just wanted a bit of help, and I don’t need anything to go with it.’

  ‘Right. Here—Gustave, you daft animal. Got who it is? Right? Now, out you go and have a sniff around the garden!’

  And s
he heaved him out of the back door and led me through into the sitting-room.

  ‘Well, now: how are you getting on?’

  ‘Not bad, not bad. I’m finding out a variety of delectable little secrets, some of which I may tell you, some of which I cannot. Did you know, for example, that one of Mary’s brothers is helping to organize the miners’ strike?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘But he is! No great credit to my detective ability that I found it out. He happened to be on television a day or two after I had studied his picture in Mary’s sitting-room. I expect most of Hexton’s forgotten what he looks like by now. Imagine—a Marxist Morse! Worse than a blasphemous Bishop! No wonder they’ve kept quiet about him, and Mary has more or less turned his picture to the wall.’

  ‘I presume you’re telling everyone?’

  ‘What do you think? About some of the other things I have to be a little more circumspect . . . But that wasn’t really what I came to talk about today. I have found out one or two things, things that I think are relevant, and what I’m trying to do now is recreate what Marcus saw and heard during the last hour or two of his life. Now, you remember when he came along to talk to me by my stall, just before we two went off for lunch?’

  ‘Yes. We were waiting for Mr Horsforth to turn up.’

  ‘That’s it. Hexton’s Godot he was, wasn’t he? Now, it occurs to me that what Marcus saw when he was standing by my stall wasn’t necessarily what I saw. He was much taller than I, after all, and I was hemmed in behind my stall, looking straight over to you, and the people at stalls on either side of you. Now Marcus was much freer, and could look all around. I thought that you, being opposite, might have seen things that I wouldn’t have seen, but that Marcus would.’

  ‘Well, of course I could see the stalls on your side of the aisle—would you call it an aisle? There was Mrs Slackbridge on the one side, Mr Turnhill on the other. Those you would have seen yourself. Then, further down—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘On one side there was Mrs Fox with the clothing exchange, on the other, Howard Culpepper with the toys.’

  ‘That’s right, though in fact I didn’t notice Howard until very late in the day.’

  ‘Does one ever? He had a pile of toys and jigsaws and games, and they cost practically nothing, and the children were supposed to be able to bring their old ones along and swap them, though hardly any of them did, that I saw.’

  ‘He didn’t do good business?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not having any children, he doesn’t seem to have much of a touch with them. Talks down rather, and puts on false ho-ho chuckles. He didn’t seem to go down well at all. I really don’t know how people get chosen for these jobs. Look at me: I can tell a runny jam from a firm one, but I don’t even like the stuff, and I couldn’t for the life of me make a jar.’

  ‘Quite apart from the fact that, having lived abroad for so long, you had trouble giving the right change, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I . . . I can’t imagine what makes you think I’ve lived abroad.’

  There was silence in the room, and I let it tick on. Suddenly, seated deep in her capacious leather chair of Scandinavian design, she looked very small. I noticed her fingers were tearing away at a little lace handkerchief in her lap. When she spoke I sensed defeat already in her voice.

  ‘I come from down South. My husband was a doctor . . . a hospital doctor down South.’

  ‘No doubt the police could check that quite easily. For myself, I’m quite sure without checking that it’s not true. The first time I spoke to you properly, you had just given Mr Hussein at the delicatessen the wrong money. As Marcus stood with me that last time, people were coming away from your stall complaining that you’d given them the wrong change. Yet you give the impression of being a very competent person generally—capable, very much in control. There have been a lot of changes in the currency over the last decade or so, haven’t there? Decimalization, the new coins. But we’ve all caught up with them by now, those of us who’ve lived through the changes. The only people who get it wrong nowadays are the very old, and people who’ve been out of the country for a long time.’

  ‘I never was any good at mathematics.’

  ‘You don’t need to be good these days. It’s a perfectly simple currency. And you did a bit of sample mathematics perfectly competently while we were sitting outside having our lunch on the day of the fête. It was not mathematics that defeated you, it was the new coins. You were making the sort of mistakes that we all made in the early days of decimal coinage: the old two-shilling piece became ten pence, but we made it twenty, because we had the two firmly in our minds. Then there are all the completely new coins that have come in recently, too. And there were other things . . . ’

  I was interrupted by a crescendo of barking from the back garden.

  ‘The second policeman taking up position,’ I said significantly.

  She started up from her lethargy.

  ‘You can’t think I’d—?’

  ‘Why not? You’ve done it before.’

  Slowly, miserably, knowing its significance, she said:

  ‘It’s because I have done it before that I could never do it again. You can’t know the feeling—’

  ‘I don’t want to know the feeling,’ I interrupted. ‘Let’s keep feelings out of this. I don’t think I’m likely to feel sympathy.’

  She drew back as it stung. I looked at her, crouched there, unutterably miserable and defeated, like a worn-out dish-rag. This was the confident, capable woman who had come to Hexton. I could not feel pity, however, only a horrible curiosity. I went on inexorably:

  ‘There were other things which, when I thought about it, set you apart. Little things, all of them, but when I put them together in my mind they added up: they suggested to me that you had been out of the country for some time. You always, whenever you spoke of them, referred to Father Battersby and Walter Primp as “priests”. Perfectly all right, of course, but a middle-class person from the South, like you or me, almost always refers to his Church of England minister as a “clergyman” or a “vicar”. There is something ever-so-slightly Catholic about priest, and something Mary Morse said reminded me of that. Yet you never once used those other words. I thought at first that you must have lived in a Catholic country, but that wasn’t what your name suggested. It’s perfectly common in England, of course, but it reminded me of Birgit Nilsson, the singer. I wondered if you hadn’t simply Anglicized your real name. And I went to a Swedish dictionary in the library and found out that a clergyman is a präst in Swedish. So it was a natural thing to do, if you were used to talking Swedish. If the police were to ask to see any official documents about you—your driving licence, or whatever—I think they would find that your name really is Mrs Nilsson.’

  ‘The miserable object in the chair nodded.

  ‘Similarly with Hexton. We might, in England, think of some kind of spell when we hear the word “hex”, but we don’t use it for a witch. When you said you thought Hexton meant “town of the witches” you were very embarrassed, not because you’d made a faux pas, but because you’d revealed special knowledge: häxa is the Swedish for “witch”. And the final thing—the thing that might have given me a clue earlier—was the little boy.’

  ‘Yes. I made a fool of myself there.’

  ‘He was lost and crying, and you comforted him, and I assumed you were talking nonsense language to him. But of course, if you’ve lived abroad, I imagine that, whatever language you talk to adults, you have to speak the native language to small children. It would come to be instinctive. You were talking to him in Swedish.’

  She nodded.

  ‘And Marcus was by, was nearer you, and could hear better. Nonsense language for a toddler never really sounds like an actual language. And Marcus, I suspect, had noticed something before?’

  She made no reply. Then suddenly she got up, went out to the kitchen, and let Gustave in by the back door. When she came back, Gustave jumped up into her
lap, and she crooned over him.

  ‘There, my precious. It’s all right. Nothing to worry his clever little head about. Have a snooze on Mummy’s lap . . . Yes, Marcus had been behind me one day in the tobacconist’s. I asked for two packets of Benson and Hedges. He shot me a look, one that I just didn’t understand. I started to listen to people, and they all asked for “twenty” or “forty” of whatever they smoked. If I had been a nonsmoker, Marcus possibly wouldn’t have been surprised: I just wasn’t used to asking for cigarettes. But he’d seen me smoking at your party for Father Battersby. In fact, I took up smoking after I went to Sweden, when my marriage started to go wrong, so naturally I asked for them in the Swedish way . . . There, my lovely boy. Mother’s all right. Calm down, there’s a lovely boy.’

  ‘There’s another thing I should have noticed,’ I said, harshly. ‘People who talk soppy to their dogs almost always do it in public as well as in private. As a vet’s wife I’d registered that. But you did it in private, and adopted a brisk, no-nonsense approach in public. It just didn’t come together. I should have realized that this all came back to Gustave.’

  ‘Gustaf. After the king.’

  ‘To Gustaf. And to Marcus not as churchwarden, but as vet.’

  She continued crooning over him, lovingly, weeping as she stroked him, and then wiped her eyes with the torn handkerchief she had been clutching in her fist.

  ‘I married twenty-five years ago. His name was Erik, and he was studying medicine here. Quite a lot of Scandinavians do. He was tall and fair and slim, and had the most beautiful light blue eyes I had ever seen. I didn’t see that they were cold. Perhaps they weren’t, then. When he graduated, we went back to Sweden, to Umeå, in the North. Lovely in summer—cold beyond belief in winter, the long, long winters. Erik got a post in the hospital. Eventually, when no children came, I went to work in the hospital too. I had trained as a nurse here, that was how we met. We talked about adopting children: there were Korean ones, and Vietnamese that were available. But he always said it would not be the same. I think at heart he was a racist. Many Scandinavians are. He let me have a dog, though. He did let me have a dog.’