An Untidy Death

by Simon Brett

  And decided it was my turn to ask some questions. ‘When did you last see Ingrid, Niall?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because you suggested you knew that she was getting “older and frailer”.’

  ‘I didn’t have to have seen her to make that assumption. I know how old she is – was. Always eight years older than me. That’s not going to change, is it? So, at seventy-five she could well have been starting to get frail. Women tend to get brittle bones and all that, don’t they?’

  I wasn’t about to take issue with this sweeping statement about women’s health. ‘As I say, Ingrid looked pretty robust to me.’

  ‘And what about the marbles?’

  ‘All firmly in place.’

  ‘So, the fact that at times she almost raised self-neglect to an art form …?’

  ‘Seemed to have done her no harm at all.’

  ‘Except, of course, now she’s dead. So, something’s done her some harm.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed.

  Our conversation was interrupted by Grace suggesting we moved to the table. Lunch was ready.

  And, of course, it too could have been photographed for a cookbook. Chicken tagine with almonds and apricots. Couscous, a salad of peas, broad beans and, yes, edamame beans. I can cook but these days I’d very rarely go to that kind of trouble. Truth is, I’m usually cooking for just me. And that’s a pleasure of diminishing returns.

  For the first bit of the lunch, Niall took it upon himself to entertain me with anecdotes of dangerous times in foreign parts. They were well-polished stories and he told them well. Grace reacted as if they were new to her, for which I gave her full marks. In his day, and after a few drinks, Oliver had been an expert and very funny raconteur, so I had been cast in Grace’s role, never revealing that I’d heard it all before. Many times.

  I politely refused refills of my glass, but Niall had soon polished off the first bottle of Burgundy and picked up another which had already been opened. With identical label, I noticed. I felt sure that, underneath us, there was a well-stocked cellar.

  Grace was making her very diluted spritzer last. She was extremely – almost excessively – pleasant to me, but I couldn’t lose awareness of the distance between us. I got the impression that she was one of those people who’s so accomplished no one ever gets close to them. Though maybe Niall did. Or didn’t.

  Having recharged his glass from the new bottle, he homed back in on the subject of Ingrid Richards.

  ‘Ellen, when you said you thought she was risk-aware, did you mean you thought she was unlikely to have started the fire by accident?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I meant.’ Then, feeling that might sound a bit bald, I added, ‘But unlikely things do happen.’

  ‘Oh, they do, sure. You don’t need to tell a war correspondent that.’

  ‘Incidentally,’ I said, ‘I think even more unlikely is the possibility that Ingrid might have deliberately lit the fire herself.’

  ‘Ellen, I’m with you all the way there. She had a very well-developed instinct for self-preservation – not to mention self-love. And she was far too curious about the future to want to top herself.’

  ‘I agree.’ I didn’t say more. I wanted to know in which direction he was angling the conversation. There was certainly something he wanted from me. An opinion, a vindication …? I didn’t know.

  ‘So,’ Niall continued, ‘if you’re ruling out an accident …’

  ‘I didn’t rule it out. Just said I thought it was unlikely.’

  ‘I stand corrected, Ellen. And you also rule out – or perhaps consider unlikely – the notion of suicide …’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘As do I. So, what are we left with?’

  I could now see where he was heading and cut to the chase. ‘The possibility that someone else lit the fire …’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’

  ‘Which could perhaps make Ingrid Richards’ death a case of murder.’

  ‘So it could, Ellen. And, if we were to pursue this rather fanciful – but appealing – conjecture, I think our reading of crime fiction would provide the question we should ask next.’

  ‘Who done it?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. And are you, Ellen, at this moment in a position to name any suspects?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. I had my own views, but this was not a game for more than one player in which I wished to participate.

  ‘Probably very wise.’ Niall Connor noticed that his glass needed topping up again. This time he didn’t even make the gesture of offering me more.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ he said, as if he were broaching a new subject, ‘how cheerful Alex has seemed since the news of Ingrid’s death?’

  I couldn’t deny that I had.

  ‘Now, Ellen, I make no claims to have been a good father to the girl. Complete absence from a child’s life is not the route recommended in most parenting books. But I think, from the girl’s point of view, Ingrid’s track record is at least as bad.’

  I had views on this but kept them to myself.

  ‘In the crime novels we were talking about just then,’ he observed, ‘the first suspect is always the last person to see the victim alive.’

  Having planted the suspicion, he left it at that. The conversation opened out. Grace contributed more to it. She talked about her weekend plans for the garden, which was as perfectly maintained as everything else in her life. (Including her marriage? I asked myself again.)

  I couldn’t go far up that conversational avenue with her. Not gardening. The garden at the house in Chichester is unadorned and functional. Everything was cut back in the days when the children still played in it, and since then I haven’t had time to play with it. I was never much interested in gardens, anyway. I get my energy from people, not plants.

  The dessert course was predictably excellent too. Fresh soft fruit with home-made sorbets, an expertly chosen cheeseboard, impeccable coffee. They may have been pushing the boat out in my honour, but I got the feeling Grace Bellamy’s perfectionism meant they always lived like that.

  I found it all very pleasant but not relaxing. I was glad when the appropriate time came for me to say my goodbyes.

  Niall Connor saw me out to the front door. His stood in the columned porch, his eyes screwed up against the afternoon sun.

  ‘What do you think of my daughter?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Alexandra? She seems pleasant enough. I don’t know her well.’

  ‘No? You had lunch with her yesterday.’

  ‘True. That still doesn’t mean I know her.’

  ‘No.’ A silence. ‘Pity her parents got all the looks in the family, wasn’t it?’

  This remark seemed so gratuitously unpleasant that I made no comment.

  ‘When you had lunch,’ Niall went on, ‘did Alex mention the memoir Ingrid was writing?’

  ‘No. Ingrid herself had mentioned it to me.’

  ‘Mm. Alex didn’t mention helping Ingrid with her research in any way, did she?’

  ‘No. But that would have been very unlikely to have happened, wouldn’t it? Given the way Alexandra described her relationship with her mother to me.’

  ‘I suppose it would, yes.’ But this was a bone he had to keep chewing. ‘I wonder if Alex took any documentation from Brunswick Square …?’

  ‘If she did, she certainly didn’t mention it to me. Not that there’s any reason why she should have done. Most likely any documentation there was around went up in flames along with the flat.’

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right.’ I couldn’t tell whether he looked relieved or regretful. ‘Anyway, Ellen, one thing we can guarantee … in a few months’ time there’ll be one hell of a big memorial service for Ingrid.’

  ‘I’m sure there will.’

  ‘The question is: who will organize the thing? The BBC’ll have something to do with it, obviously …’ He seemed to be talking to himself rather than me.

  ‘And presumably Alexandra will be involved?’
<
br />   ‘I suppose she’ll have to be there,’ he said grudgingly.

  ‘I meant involved in the organization.’

  ‘God, no. She’d make a right pig’s breakfast of it. No, we’ll probably have to sort it out.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Grace and I. By which I mean Grace. She’s much better at that organizational stuff than I am.’

  I didn’t doubt it. But there still seemed something odd about the idea of Grace Bellamy organizing a memorial service for the mother of her husband’s illegitimate child.

  ‘Look,’ said Niall, ‘let me give you a card. All our contacts, you know, if you do … if you hear anything …’

  I didn’t look at the card in detail then – I did later – but I was struck by the fact that it was for both of them – ‘Niall Connor and Grace Bellamy’. I thought that was odd. They were both still working, they must have had individual business cards. But this one, presumably to be given to new private acquaintances like me, seemed like it was asserting the strength of their marriage.

  Given what Ingrid Richards had said about Niall’s habitual womanizing, I wondered how faithful he had been to Grace.

  Tucking the card in my pocket, I said, ‘Sorry, I must go, thanks so much for the lunch. And do thank Grace again.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said distractedly. And then, ‘God, I’m going to miss Ingrid.’

  I looked up at him and saw, to my surprise, that there were tears in Niall Connor’s eyes.

  TWELVE

  My encounter with Niall and Grace had left me unsettled, wondering why they had actually wanted to see me. I say ‘they’, but I really mean ‘he’. I don’t think Grace did particularly want to see me, but her professionally civilized manner would never allow her to show it.

  It was Niall’s questions, though, that had left me unsettled, and I tried to analyse them as I drove back to Chichester. I could understand why he wanted to talk to me about the fire risk in the Brunswick Square flat, because that was the reason for my visit to Ingrid. In a business capacity. But he could have asked me about that on the phone. It hadn’t required the full charm offensive of Grace’s exquisite lunch.

  He had also definitely been sounding me out about Alexandra’s role in the proceedings. Even pushing me towards the idea that she might have had a role in her mother’s death. Which would have worried me less if I hadn’t already got suspicions of my own moving in that direction.

  A rather unpleasant chain of logic was forming in my mind. If one were being profoundly cynical, which I’m not by nature but have occasionally had to be, one might see a pattern. Alexandra had only called me in to check on her mother’s risk status, so that I could testify to the danger, in the event of something happening to Ingrid. In retrospect, it was striking how quickly both the police and Niall Connor had contacted me for my views. And the only person who could have put them on to me was Alexandra.

  Which meant of course that she might have been planning—

  My mobile rang. I looked at the in-car display. Ben.

  I answered immediately.

  ‘Hello, Ma,’ he said in that languid, sending-up voice I so love.

  ‘Look, I’m in the car. I’ll find somewhere to park.’

  ‘All that hands-free technology is wasted on you, isn’t it, Ma? The best minds in Silicon Valley worked for years to produce the ultimate high-tec safe in-car phone system, only for Ellen Curtis to pronounce that it’s not good enough for her.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ I said drily, as I edged the Yeti into a layby. ‘All right, I’m a dinosaur. But I can’t concentrate on driving and talking on the phone at the same time. You know that.’

  ‘If you say so, Ma.’

  ‘Anyway … putting my technophobia on one side … how are you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ His voice sounded worryingly light and brittle. ‘And you?’

  ‘Also fine. Just driving home after a very good lunch in Petworth.’

  ‘Who with?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘A couple who … It’s too complicated to explain now. And irrelevant.’

  ‘Oh, a couple.’ He larded the words with mock-disappointment. ‘I thought it might be Mr Right.’

  Ben has this running joke about me meeting someone else. I never know how serious he is about it. He was totally devastated by Oliver’s death. On the edge of his teens when it happened, a very vulnerable age. I wonder how he would react if I did start seeing someone else …?

  Not that he need have any worries on that score. Since being widowed, I have had my fair share of men coming on to me and, though it has led to some socially awkward problems of extrication, I’ve never been tempted. I think – and it’s not a thought that I always find comforting – that I’m a one-man woman. And that man, sadly, is no longer available.

  I treated Ben’s reference to Mr Right with another dry ‘Ha ha’ and asked how the course was going.

  ‘Good. I’m working on an animation project for the end of term.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘It’s funny. At least, it’s meant to be funny. Hope it is. Only three minutes.’

  I knew from Oliver’s dabbling in animation just how long it could take to produce three minutes. ‘Good luck with it.’

  ‘I’m basing it on “Riq and Raq” … you know, the strip that Dad did.’

  ‘Of course I know, Ben.’

  As well as his political cartoons, Oliver had developed ‘Riq and Raq’ as a kind of social commentary on a young couple with a small child negotiating the difficulties of life in London. I was delighted to hear that Ben was using his father’s work as an inspiration. It was rarely that he talked about Oliver. In that he was unlike his sister. Jools absolutely never talked about him.

  ‘Yes, you would know,’ said Ben. ‘Anyway, I’m kind of updating that, seeing how Riq and Raq … or any young couple, really … would cope in today’s world … with electric cars and social media and fake news.’

  ‘Great idea.’

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘You know, of course, that “Riq and Raq” was based on us. Your father and I were Riq and Raq. And Juliet was the baby. You hadn’t arrived back then.’

  ‘No.’ The brightness with which he had started the conversation seemed to have dissipated.

  I couldn’t stop myself from saying, ‘You know, if you want to come down here for a weekend or something, you’re always welcome.’

  ‘I know that,’ he said flatly.

  There was a silence. I tried to jolly him along. ‘And is your “Riq and Raq” also based on a real couple?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I thought maybe you and Tracey …?’

  It was a clumsy way to introduce her into the conversation and probably deserved the sharp ‘No’ it got by way of response.

  ‘All all right there?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he replied airily. Too airily. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.’

  I should probably have stopped digging but I couldn’t. ‘I do look forward to meeting Tracey some time,’ I said.

  ‘Oh. Well.’ Ben sounded confused. ‘There might not be much point in you doing that.’

  ‘What do you mean? Are you not seeing her any more?’

  ‘Who knows?’ he replied unhelpfully.

  ‘Are you saying it’s over?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he replied, exactly as he had just said, ‘Oh yes’. ‘No, no, no, no, no.’

  ‘Then what are you saying, Ben?’

  ‘I’m just saying that there are plenty more fish in the sea. Plenty more pebbles on the beach. Plenty more fish on the beach. Gasping for breath,’ he concluded mournfully.

  ‘In other words, you and Tracey are no longer seeing each other?’

  ‘Oh, by no means. What I’m saying is that we are still in theory seeing each other.’

  ‘In theory?’

  ‘Neither of us is seeing anyone else, but …’

  With agonizing difficulty, I stopped myself from p
rompting him.

  After a long silence, Ben finished his sentence. ‘… we both feel we need a little space at the moment.’

  My heart sank. When speaking of relationships, ‘space’ is never a good word to hear.

  The conversation with my son ended unsatisfactorily. He got jokey and evasive. As he had with that riff about fish and pebbles. Not to put too fine a point on it, he got manic. Which is always worrying. As it had with his father, the manic phase is always followed by something worse.

  I tried to persuade Ben to come down to Chichester, just for a few days, a break. But he said he was far too busy with the deadline he’d got on his ‘Riq and Raq’ project. Then, with an almost brusque ‘Lots of love, Ma’, he rang off.

  My instinct was to ring him straight back, but I curbed it. Ben was a grown-up now. Even though I knew his terrible vulnerability, I must never try to reattach the apron strings. If he felt the need to come and chill out with me for a few days in Chichester, fine. But I couldn’t force the decision on him.

  I felt predictably restless when I got home. I’ve got a substantial collection of recorded medical soaps which I watch in my rare moments of mindless downtime, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything like that. I was preoccupied, not only by suspicions of Alexandra Richards, but now by worries about Ben too.

  For a long time after Oliver’s death, I hid away all his artwork, but gradually I’d been hanging up more of his framed cartoons. There was a particular favourite ‘Riq and Raq’ strip in the hall. As I looked at it, along with my anxiety about Ben, I also felt pleasure that he was using his father’s work as a springboard for his own creativity. But the anxiety was stronger.

  I went through to the kitchen and poured a large glass of Merlot. I’d restrained myself with Niall Connor’s excellent wine at lunchtime, but now I thought I deserved a drink.

  Just as I raised the glass to my lips, my mobile rang. It was Alexandra. ‘Did you go and see my father?’ she asked.

  ‘The fact that you ask that question,’ I said, ‘means you know I did.’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘Did he say anything about me?’