An Untidy Death

by Simon Brett

  I couldn’t deny it. I had no reason to deny it.

  ‘I hope you didn’t mind.’

  ‘Mind? Why should I mind?’

  ‘They asked me about people who’d visited Ingrid recently and I mentioned you.’

  ‘Not a problem. Telling the truth to the police can often save you a lot of trouble.’

  ‘Mm. And when they heard why you’d visited her, they were keen to get your views on, you know, how safe she was in the flat?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what the detective sergeant asked me about.’ I realized she must have given me her name, but I couldn’t remember it.

  Alexandra took another long swallow of Pinot Grigio. When she resumed, there was a new note in her voice, as if she was fishing for something. ‘He didn’t say anything else, did he?’

  ‘She. It was a woman.’

  ‘Ah. It was only men who talked to me.’

  ‘Probably quite a big team on an investigation like that.’

  ‘Yes.’ Again, the wheedling note. ‘So, did this detective sergeant ask about anything else?’

  ‘No. Why should she?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was just wondering whether she gave any indication of what they thought had happened … you know, with Ingrid …?’

  ‘I’m sure, if the police had reached any conclusions on the subject, they wouldn’t be about to share them with me, would they?’

  ‘No. No, probably not.’ Another slurp of wine. Then, ‘Did she actually use the word “accident”?’

  ‘Not so far as I recall.’ I took a sip of mineral water. ‘Why? Is there some thought it might not have been an accident?’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. Too quickly? She certainly seemed keen to change the subject. ‘Do you mind if I put someone else in touch with you?’

  ‘Someone else with a hoarding problem?’

  ‘No. This is still about Ingrid.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The fact is …’ She seemed both embarrassed and excited as she said, ‘There’s someone else who’s very intrigued by what happened in Ingrid’s last hours.’

  She paused, controlling the narrative at her own pace. ‘He’s a journalist. Called Niall Connor.’ A dramatic pause. ‘He’s my father.’

  She had unleashed the revelation so dramatically that I hadn’t the heart to tell her I already knew about her paternity.

  ‘Anyway, he’s been knocked sideways by the news about Ingrid’s death.’

  ‘I thought you told me you weren’t in touch with him,’ I said.

  ‘No, not for a long time.’ She blushed. ‘But he has contacted me recently.’

  ‘I hope that’s good news.’

  ‘Oh, it is. But, anyway, Niall would love to talk to you.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘So, I can give him your number?’

  ‘Of course. It’s on my website, in all the directories, under SpaceWoman.’ I have no qualms about giving anyone my work number. My personal mobile I’m less generous with.

  ‘That’s great, Ellen.’ She seemed disproportionately relieved. ‘So … expect a call from Niall Connor.’

  ‘I will.’

  At that moment, our food arrived, and we settled down to the serious business of eating fish and chips. Alexandra ordered herself another Pinot Grigio.

  We didn’t talk much more about Ingrid Richards. Alexandra told me a few more details of her personal history. How much she’d disliked being a primary school teacher. How relieved she had been when the legacy from her grandmother had allowed her to give it up.

  I discovered that the charity she worked for, on a voluntary basis, was a donkey sanctuary near Battle, just a bit north of Hastings. Apparently, she’d always liked donkeys.

  Right through that lunch, though, she remained much more upbeat than she had been at our previous meeting. And I was left asking myself: Was it just her mother’s death that had made her so cheerful? Or the reappearance in her life of her absent father? Or something else?

  ‘Hello, it’s Niall Connor.’ There was more than a hint of Irish in his voice, which had the relaxed, deep tone of a professional charmer. ‘I assume that’s Ellen Curtis.’

  ‘You assume correctly.’

  ‘Good. “SpaceWoman” had me expecting Svetlana Savitskaya.’

  I had got used to most of the witticisms surrounding the company name (for which I have to thank Ben originally), but only a journalist would have referenced the Russian cosmonaut.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid you’ve got me,’ I said.

  ‘I am very fortunate to have got you.’ It was a cheesy line, but his air of sending himself up took the edge off it. ‘Alex told you I might call?’

  ‘She did.’ I wondered if he’d always called her ‘Alex’. Or if he’d ever spoken to her before her that week?

  ‘It is, needless to say, in relation to Ingrid Richards’ death that I’m calling. You know my connection with …?’

  ‘Ingrid told me.’

  ‘Right. Well, that was all a long time ago, but I’m surprised by how much I have been shaken by the news about Ingrid. We did see a lot of each other for a while and, of course, I had great admiration for her as a journalist.’

  ‘I’ve been reading the obituaries,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know the half of her achievements.’

  ‘No. Once Ingrid had been created, they broke the mould.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a silence. ‘So, what do you want to ask me?’

  ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘would it be possible for us to meet?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. But you’re based in London, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Primrose Hill. But the thing is, Ellen, my wife Grace and I also have a country place, down near Petworth.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And you’re Chichester, are you not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, listen, here’s a suggestion. Grace and I are driving down to Petworth this evening. Might you be able to join us for lunch there tomorrow?’

  Normally, I try to keep my weekends free of work. But was talking to Alexandra Richards’ father work or not? The way I saw it, I was being offered an opportunity to find out more about a subject with which I was becoming increasingly intrigued.

  Ingrid Richards’ death.

  I agreed to the lunch.

  ELEVEN

  I use the satnav a lot in the Yeti. West Sussex contains some substantial towns but outside them the population density is a lot thinner. There are few house numbers and lots of house names. I pride myself on punctuality and keying a postcode into the satnav is the best way of ensuring it.

  Petworth’s a pretty little town which spreads out from Petworth House and Park, now owned by the National Trust. A bit like Arundel, it’s a great place if you want to buy an antique brass warming pan or a cream tea, but is not so well stocked with essentials. For their basic shopping, most residents drive their SUVs to supermarkets in less genteel parts of the county.

  I was guided to the address Niall Connor had given me, buried in the South Downs, off a side road between Petworth and Fittleworth. The house had a frontage of Georgian rect-angular symmetries. A gravelled parking area surrounded a circular space of carefully cultivated wild-flower garden. It looked familiar. I somehow felt I had encountered its perfection before.

  One o’clock had been suggested and I arrived on the dot, just as I would have done for a business meeting. Perhaps this was a business meeting. I wouldn’t be able to say until Niall Connor told me what he wanted to talk about.

  I had to wait before my ring at the old-fashioned bell-pull was answered and the way Niall Connor slouched against the doorway suggested the delay had been deliberate. His keeping me waiting expressed some kind of power game or one-upmanship. He had the look of someone who liked to be in control.

  Not wanting to make the mistake I had with Ingrid Richards, I’d done my Wikipedia homework on him. In many ways, their journalistic careers had followed similar trajectories, though he was some eight years younger.
They had covered many of the same wars and conflicts and had no doubt been frequently thrown together in terrifying circumstances. Offering plenty of opportunities for we-might-die-tomorrow sexual encounters.

  Niall Connor’s journalistic career had been hugely successful. He’d won lots of awards for his intrepid reportage. His greatest coup had been in 1986, when he’d sprung the British hostage, fellow journalist Paul McClennan, from his captors in Beirut. As soon as I saw the name the details came back to me. The escape plan had involved Niall Connor in complex secret contacts, bribery of McClennan’s captors, a hazardous drive across the war-torn city with the released hostage in his car boot and smuggling him on to an aeroplane. The climax had been a triumphal media-crowded arrival to Heathrow. The photograph of Niall Connor raising the arm of Paul McClennan as they stepped off the plane was one of the iconic images of the 1980s, almost on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  The exploit had led to a predictable circus of press and television coverage. The inevitable book had followed, written by Niall Connor ‘with the cooperation of Paul McClennan’. It sold in its millions to a public who seemed in those days to have an insatiable appetite for hostage stories. There was even a movie, in which the parts of Connor and McClennan were taken by two very good-looking Hollywood A-listers.

  This daring escapade had raised Niall Connor’s status from a respected English war correspondent to an internationally known guru of journalism. His byline on a report was highly sought-after the world over. That one scoop had also considerably raised his market value and the success of the hostage story had a powerful effect on the sales of the many books he subsequently produced about various international wars and crises.

  Paul McClennan soon dropped off the public radar. Traumatized by his hostage experience, he had no taste for the ferocious public scrutiny it brought him. He gave up journalism and, after a series of mental breakdowns, changed his name and lived the life of a recluse.

  Whereas Niall Connor luxuriated in his enhanced profile.

  The big difference between him and Ingrid Richards, however, was that, while she had been a fixture on the television screens of every family in the country, almost all of Niall Connor’s work had been in print. So, though he looked vaguely familiar when I met him, he did not have that Ingrid Richards instant recognition factor.

  He must once have been a strikingly attractive man, and wasn’t looking bad in his late sixties. He had the manner of someone who’d never doubted his attractiveness, an arrogance which he had learned to leaven with charm. His hair had all once been black and, though he was greying round the edges and at the back where it nestled on top of his collar, there was still some blackness in the lock that flopped over his forehead. His face was weather-beaten – or life-beaten – but his lips were surprisingly full, almost feminine.

  He wore an open-necked denim shirt, under a crumpled linen jacket, frayed round the lapels and cuffs. The bottoms of his jeans were frayed too, drawing attention to the fact that he wore no socks under his faded navy deck shoes. The impression was of shabbiness, but very calculated shabbiness.

  The appearance of Grace Bellamy, who had just entered the hall behind her husband, was equally calculated but in a very different way. I know roughly how old she was. Ingrid, after all, had told me she’d written a book about her own menopause. For God’s sake! But Grace had been very expensively buffered against the depredations of age. In fact, she looked as if she’d just stepped out of the pages of a magazine.

  Which, of course, in a way, she had. I recognized her much more immediately than I did Niall because, almost as long as I can remember, I’d been reading features by her. Magazines, colour supplements, everywhere. And the centre of them all was her own life. I’d read about her sleep deprivation with a teething baby – clearly from a marriage before her current one – when I was going through the same problem with Juliet. I’d empathized with her difficulties over what to cook when a dinner guest espoused vegetarianism (a much rarer occurrence back then than it is now). I’d disagreed with her over how tight a leash teenage children should be kept on. I’d been given God-knows-how-many collections of her columns as Christmas presents.

  No, it was no surprise she’d written a book about her own menopause.

  It struck me too that that was why I’d recognized the frontage of the house. I must have seen it in a colour supplement somewhere, no doubt in a feature by Grace Bellamy on ‘Second Home Secrets’.

  As I was led through the hall (‘How to Make your Entrance Entrancing’) to the large kitchen at the back of the house (‘By Hook or By Cook’), I was impressed by how long Grace Bellamy had managed to get paid for having opinions about everything.

  I was also impressed by how perfectly preserved she was. No, that’s the wrong word, ‘preserved’ makes me think of gates and creosote. ‘Well-maintained’ doesn’t hack it, either. ‘Soigné’ is probably the best – or actually, in her case, remembering language lessons at school, soignée. The French do descriptions of women better than we do. Grace was in a pale blue cotton top and light grey linen trousers, dressed down for the country but still ready to face a photographer.

  I got the feeling the kitchen had once been two or more separate rooms. Now it had a cooking area focused on the Aga, a sitting area focused on two deep sofas, and a dining area focused on a long pine table. There was a Belfast sink, a butcher’s block and a lot of tall vases full of grasses. No discordant modern elements like steel and glass, though I bet lots of that was on display in their London home. Again, the country kitchen was all ready for the moment the colour supplement camera clicked.

  Slumped by the Aga was an endearingly tatty Golden Retriever (‘Is yours a Town Dog or a Country Dog?’). Grace introduced him to me as Trigorin. Of course.

  ‘Anyway, first things first,’ said Niall histrionically. ‘A drink! What is the weekend for if not for drinking?’ He turned to me. ‘So, Ellen … I may call you Ellen, I hope?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What is your particular poison? I’m already on the red wine, as you see.’ He raised a glass as an unnecessary visual aid. ‘But we have champagne, white wine, beer, whisky, gin, vodka and probably a lot of obscure Balkan and Middle Eastern spirits. What it is to be?’

  ‘A glass of red wine would be nice, thank you.’

  ‘Red wine it is.’ He strode across to the surface beside the Aga, on which stood glasses and a half-empty bottle of Burgundy. As he poured my drink, he turned to Grace. ‘And what will it be for you, my child bride?’

  ‘I’ll get myself some white,’ she replied.

  ‘Topped up, no doubt, with sparkling water?’ Niall sneered.

  ‘Topped up, indeed, with sparkling water,’ Grace said evenly. She spoke as someone who was used to his sneers and didn’t rise to them.

  ‘Why didn’t the Lord God supply me with a wife who enjoyed a drink?’ He aimed the question at me, but I don’t think he was expecting a response. He certainly didn’t get one.

  Handing my glass across, he said, ‘Slump on a sofa.’

  He slumped beside me. ‘Ingrid enjoyed a drink. I think we should raise a glass to her. God knows there were enough times I wished her dead, but now I’ve got what I wanted … In the immortal words of Joni Mitchell, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s no longer there”.’

  I couldn’t tell whether he knew he was misquoting or not. ‘Anyway, let’s raise a glass to Ingrid.’ He looked in the direction of the Aga. ‘You too, Grace.’

  ‘I haven’t poured myself a drink yet.’

  ‘Then we’ll just wait till you do.’

  There was a weariness in his tone. I felt they were playing out some marital game to which I didn’t know the rules. Whether Grace was needled by Niall’s passive-aggressive manner to her was hard to tell. Who could divine what went on behind that immaculately made-up façade? Grace Bellamy must have had a view of the recently deceased Ingrid Richards, on whom her husband had fathered a child, but I could
n’t see that ever being revealed to an outsider. Such a disclosure could shatter the carefully built-up image of domestic serenity.

  Grace did not hurry getting her drink. I could see that she barely dampened the bottom of her glass with white wine and was lavish with the sparkling water. ‘I’m ready now,’ she announced calmly.

  ‘Right.’ Niall did not get up from the sofa as he raised his glass. ‘To Ingrid! We shall not look upon her like again.’

  ‘Ingrid!’ Grace and I echoed. I touched my glass to Niall’s. Grace was too far away to clink.

  My first sip told me that the burgundy was of very high quality. Niall Connor as a wine snob? Yes, that would figure.

  He turned his lazy, condescending eyes on me. ‘So, Ellen … you only met the red-haired temptress the once, did you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she charmed the pants off you, I dare say?’

  ‘I did take an instant liking to her, yes.’

  ‘So did everyone. So did I, come to that. I must’ve done, mustn’t I, considering the outcome? The liking didn’t last, though.’

  He was looking at me, but he also knew that Grace, busying herself at the Aga, was hearing every word.

  Seeming to read my thoughts, he went on, ‘So aren’t I lucky that I found a nice, cosy, biddable little wife with whom to escape the clutches of that energy vampire?’

  Grace did not react, and I made no comment.

  ‘But the more important thing, Ellen, is not so much whether you liked Ingrid as whether you thought the Brunswick Square flat was a firetrap.’

  I didn’t answer, so he nudged, ‘And what was your professional assessment?’

  I gave pretty much the same answer as I had to the detective sergeant. ‘There was a lot of flammable material there, but I got the impression Ingrid was well aware of the risk.’

  ‘Maybe that would once have been true, but as she got older and frailer …’

  ‘“Frail” is the last word I would have used to describe Ingrid Richards.’

  ‘Hm.’ Niall had finished his wine. He reached for the bottle and topped himself up. Then he looked at me and offered it. I shook my head.