Death of a Perfect Mother

by Robert Barnard

  ‘But you might have nodded off. People do.’

  ‘Oh no. No. Lill was very . . .’ Again he pulled himself up and shook himself, as if bewildered by the web of deception he was entangling himself in. ‘Lill didn’t like me falling asleep. Said it was dangerous, ’specially if I had my pipe in. No, I definitely didn’t fall asleep.’

  ‘I see. But that means nobody can vouch for you, I suppose. Nobody came to the door, or anything?’

  ‘No—not as I mind. It’s all become a bit of a blur, like, after hearing about . . . it. Still, it doesn’t do to give way, does it? Life’s got to go on, and there’s the family to see to.’ Fred seemed suddenly to become conscious that he was rambling into matters irrelevant to the police investigation, and asked: ‘Was there anything more?’

  ‘No, nothing for the moment, I think. Of course, the police will be around your place quite a lot in the future, I’m afraid. So if there’s anything else crops up I want to ask about, I can contact you there.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ said Fred. ‘Well, we all want to help you, you can bank on that. The main thing is, you catch the bugger who done it.’ He got up and shambled to the door, but once there he hesitated, as if thinking hard. Then he turned and said: ‘Still, you want to be careful what you say about my Lill and other men. That’s libel, that is. You ought to watch your tongue!’

  ‘Mr Hodsden, I was implying nothing—’

  ‘Well, you ought to watch it. I nearly fetched you one then, I did!’

  • • •

  As Fred Hodsden fumbled his way out of the room, McHale smiled a thin smile like winter sunshine on Northern waters. He did not see Fred Hodsden as a murderer. In fact, he held to his opinion that none of the Hodsdens looked like murderers. Still, there might be some amusement to be got out of them on the way.

  Dominic McHale was born and brought up near Bristol. His family was doubtless Scottish from way back, but there was nothing of the border ruffian or the highland savage left in their blood. They had obviously been respectable for centuries. His father was a tax official, and one who brought a good deal of cold enthusiasm to his job. His mother was local president of the Mothers’ Union, and wonderful at organizing bazaars. Dominic had been a superior child: at school he was good at games and held his own in academic subjects, but he was aloof, and less than popular. The High School girls went with boys who were less good-looking but more forthcoming. He was sure he would get into Oxford, and he very nearly did: he was on the borderline, but in the end the commoner’s place went to a boy from a Northern comprehensive, to make the intake tables look more respectable. ‘If my father had been a bloody miner I’d have got in,’ he remarked bitterly to his contemporaries. A tax-inspector father was neither fish nor fowl as far as admissions committees were concerned, and could never swing a vote in his favour.

  He did not settle for red-brick, or white tile, or plate glass. People so sure of themselves never settle for anything less than their deserts. The only thing that could salve his pride was a complete change of course. He went into the police force. When all was said and done, people in general always felt at a disadvantage when dealing with a policeman. Even a little afraid . . .

  He thought, too, that his (as he saw it) cool, rational mind would make him a cinch for promotion in the Detective branch—even for mild local fame. At last—distinctly more slowly than he had expected—the promotion had come. He was now a Chief Inspector. He had also a cool wife with two well-drilled children in a tasteful home in a nice suburb of Cumbledon. He had arrived. Until the next move upwards.

  He strolled confidently into the outer office, a hive of activity, with junior personnel rushing hither and thither in the excitement of the first murder in Todmarsh’s living memory. McHale said to Inspector Haggart, who was standing by the desk, ‘Send someone up for the elder Hodsden boy, would you?’ and then seemed inclined to linger.

  ‘Didn’t get much out of Fred Hodsden, I reckon,’ said Inspector Haggart, when he had made all the necessary arrangements.

  ‘Hmmm—so-so,’ said McHale. ‘Not the brightest of intellects. Not the strongest of bodies either: can’t see him strangling a fit, hulking woman like that one in there.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of the morgue and Lill’s body (white topped with claret red, like some hideous Andy Warhol woman).

  The Inspector looked dubious: ‘You can’t tell with these skinny, wiry types. I’ve known farm labourers you’d think the first March winds’d blow away, but you get in their way in a pub brawl and you wonder what hit you.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said McHale.

  ‘Was he at home last night?’

  ‘So he says. Him and the daughter.’

  ‘They certainly were when the police arrived. But it’s funny—’

  ‘What is?’ McHale raised those bored, superior eyebrows.

  ‘Jim—that’s Partridge, the constable that got there first. He—oh, there he is: he can tell you himself. Jim! Tell the Inspector what you told me—about what happened when you got to the Hodsdens’ last night.’

  Jim Partridge had ambled over, a big, slow Devonshire man. ‘Aye, that were odd,’ he said. ‘I told him—gentle, like—what had happened, and he were, well, you’d say he were overcome. I’d swear it were genuine. And then, he pulled himself together like, and instead of calling to his daughter upstairs, he went up to her. And it’s funny, but I thought I heard a key turn in the lock. Then he told her, and she came down.’

  ‘Ah!’ said McHale. And then, with that condescending smile that robbed his compliments of any warmth, he said: ‘Good observation, Partridge!’

  CHAPTER 10

  HALF TRUTHS

  Fred arrived back home in an uncertain mood. He was unsure whether the interview had been a success or not, whether he had imposed his importance, as husband of the deceased, on the mind of the rather distant young Chief Inspector from Cumbledon. It was a question, as even Fred realized, whether he had been impressive or ridiculous. And then there were those questions about Debbie . . . He did not feel he had shone there. If only Lill were still around to tell him what to do.

  He came through the kitchen and hall and into the front room, and immediately blinked in bewilderment. Something was different; something was wrong. He sensed it immediately. Gordon and Brian were there: Brian reading in the easy chair by the window, Gordon standing by the fireplace exuding caged energy. He was smoking—he’d taken it up again. But still, something else was different. Fred blinked again, and looked around.

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Gordon. ‘What’s the bloke like? What did he ask you?’

  ‘Here,’ said Fred, his voice rising in pitch to a tone of feeble bluster. ‘What’ve you been doing? There’s something wrong here. Where are them ornaments of Lill’s?’

  He’d got it. The room was different: it had been denuded. Lill had prided herself on her bits and pieces. The little brass knick-knacks on the mantelpiece—a bell, a yacht, a tiny candlestick of vaguely Jewish design. The flower stand, silvered plastic, depicting a reclining Venus, which always sat on the television. The souvenir novelties from Blackpool, Southsea and Torquay. All the vases from Tunisia, bought from the beach vendors around Hammamet. They had festered over every surface, becoming more huddled together as their numbers had grown. Once a week Lill had flipped a duster lovingly in their direction. They were her pride, and each one had a story attached to it, to be told to the occasional visitor to the front room. Now many were missing: hardly more than half were there, newly distributed around. The room had indefinably become less Lill. That’s what was annoying Fred.

  ‘What’ve you done with her bits and pieces?’ he repeated.

  ‘We sort of sorted them out,’ said Brian.

  ‘Well, what do you mean by it? What’ve you done with them?’

  ‘We put them away—just some of them. None of us would want to dust that lot.’

  ‘Putting her things away the day after she dies! I never heard the like.’

  ‘We had
to,’ said Gordon, his voice deep with emotion. ‘They reminded us of Mum. It was too—poignant.’

  Fred looked at him. That was a funny word for Gordon to use. Fred wasn’t sure what to make of it. Anyone might think Gordon wasn’t serious. He felt uncertain, frustrated. Now it was the boys who were bewildering him; yesterday it had been Debbie.

  ‘Well, get ’em out and put ’em back where they should be,’ he muttered. ‘You don’t know what people might think . . . Any road, Lill’d hate to think of them mouldering away in some drawer.’

  He bumbled along querulously to his chair, fished out his tin of tobacco and began rolling himself a scraggy cigarette, dropping strands of tobacco into his lap from his shaking hands.

  ‘Well, how did it go?’ repeated Gordon, apparently unperturbed. ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Told him everything I know, of course,’ said Fred, still dimly bellicose. ‘We’ve got to help the police as much as we can . . . naturally.’

  ‘Did you tell him about Mum and Debbie?’ asked Brian.

  ‘ ’Course I didn’t. What business is it of theirs? It’s got nowt to do with it. Just a little family squabble. So don’t you two go telling him neither.’

  ‘So you didn’t tell him all you know,’ said Brian.

  ‘None of your smartyboots remarks. I told him everything he needed to know. Just because for once in their lives your mum and Debbie fell out . . .’

  For once in their lives! Brian put aside his book and looked at Fred in wonder. Talk about pity my simplicity! Was Fred completely stupid, or did he just genuinely fail to notice things? Debbie and Lill had disliked each other, it seemed, all Debbie’s short life: open warfare had been declared when Debbie was twelve. That was the occasion when Lill, in one superbly timed swoop of her brawny arms, had shoved her daughter’s head into the plate of cornflakes she was supposed to be eating. Since then life at the Hodsdens had been punctuated by such incidents: Debbie’s first fashionable shoes thrown into the kitchen stove; her first lipstick ground under Lill’s heel into the rose-bed; Debbie herself pulled upstairs by her hair after some piece of cheek. Culminating in that fight in the kitchen and the damaging bruise seen by everybody on the school bus, by all the girls and mistresses at school.

  As if reading his brother’s thoughts, Gordon turned to Fred and said: ‘It’s not us you have to tell to keep quiet. It’s Debbie. We’re not ones to wash the family’s dirty linen in public, but she wouldn’t care tuppence who she told.’

  ‘She’s not that daft,’ said Fred, totally without conviction. ‘Why should she go blabbing?’

  ‘To get attention. She’s that age.’

  ‘And have them on her back, thinking she done it?’

  ‘She’s got a perfect alibi, remember. She was locked in upstairs and you were down here on guard. She’s only got to tell them that and they’ll see she couldn’t have done it.’

  ‘I might have dropped off,’ said Fred reluctantly, looking down at his knees in embarrassment. ‘I don’t say I did, mind.’

  ‘There’s still the locked door. I bet you didn’t tell the Chief Inspector about that, either.’

  ‘Well, how could I, when I didn’t tell him about the other?’ Fred grumbled his way into silence and digested the points that had been made. He said at last: ‘Well, one of you’d better talk to our Debbie. Make her see sense. Keep her mouth shut. We don’t want to get ourselves talked about.’

  It seemed a curious hope after a murder in the family. But Brian’s attention was focused on something else he’d said.

  ‘Why one of us? Why not you?’

  ‘Eh,’ said Fred uneasily. ‘I’ve never had that much to say to Debbie. You two are more her own age. She’ll take it better coming from you.’

  Gordon and Brian looked at each other. But at that moment a constable appeared at the sitting-room door and asked Gordon to come with him to the Station. As he straightened up and walked lightly from the room with his impressive athlete’s walk, Fred turned to Brian with a new access of confidence and said: ‘It’ll have to be you then, as talks to her.’ He got up and marched from the room, turning at the door to say:

  ‘And put them ornaments back, double quick!’

  • • •

  Gordon, squatting on the hard kitchen chair opposite McHale’s desk, his dark wavy head in his large workingman’s hands, said: ‘She was a wonderful person. We loved her. There was nobody like her. ’Course, old Fred—Dad—does his best, but she was head of the family. She had so much personality.’ He straightened up, and swallowed. ‘Everything’s so different, now she’s gone. The world’s a different place.’

  (Am I overdoing it? I’ve got to get the message across, but enough is enough. He’ll think I’m a right softie. Brian thought he wasn’t too bright. Hope he’s right about that. Don’t like the type myself. We had officers like that in the army. One of them damn near led us into an IRA booby-trap. Perhaps that’s what Brian means.)

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said more normally. ‘Haven’t really got over the shock yet. Somehow it all seemed to happen in such a rush.’

  McHale showed standard sympathy. ‘Perfectly natural. You and your brother were at the pub, is that right? You heard down there?’

  ‘That’s it. That made it worse. All that singing, all those people. And we were a bit high: there was a celebration on—bachelor party, you know what they’re like. What a time to hear your mother’s been done in!’

  ‘Yes, I can understand that. I suppose you were there all evening, were you?’

  ‘That’s right. From about eight till . . . till Jack Perkins came over and brought it out.’

  ‘Then there’ll be no difficulty in getting people to vouch for you, I imagine. You didn’t leave the party at all?’

  ‘No. I went to the . . . toilet, I expect. Yes, I must have. I was drinking beer. Otherwise I was around all the time. Having a great time. Makes you think.’

  ‘Now, before yesterday evening, in the last few days, for example, was there anything—in the family, say, or in your mother’s relationships with . . . friends—that had stood out, been in any way unusual?’

  Gordon seemed to have a big think. ‘Not that I can remember. She did all the things she usually did. She had a pretty fixed programme: had to, because she was a busy woman. Like she always went to the Corbys’ on Mondays and Thursdays.’

  (I can see it all: middle-aged body to middle-aged body in unlovely huddles on the sofa, bulges bouncing for a few minutes, and then Lill screwing out of him what she wanted: the odd quid here, the second-hand car there. I can just picture it.)

  ‘Ah yes. That was to see—to visit the sick lady, Mrs Corby, was it not?’

  Gordon made a quick decision.

  ‘Well, six of one and half a dozen of the other, I expect. Old Hamilton C. admired her, I can tell you that. He’s got an eye for a good-looking woman. Men who marry for money usually have. No harm in it, of course. For Mum it was just a bit of excitement. We’re not living in the nineteenth century, after all.’ He looked at Inspector McHale with a roguish glance of male conspiracy. ‘You’re a man of the world.’

  McHale responded with a similar glance, the small change of pub and police canteen, and sank back in his chair. ‘Very sensible of you to tell me. And what about your father?’

  ‘Old Fr—Dad? He didn’t know, naturally not. He’s not that bright, as you may have noticed.’ Gordon was now relaxed in his chair, sure he had done the right thing. ‘But don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying there was anything—anything really going on.’

  ‘I see . . .’

  ‘Not anything serious. It just gave a bit of spice to Mum’s life. After all, you’ve seen Dad. He’s no big pools win. He looks years older than Mum did, and sort of feeble, to put it bluntly. And Mum was still a woman in her prime.’

  (How does it look, that corpse in its prime, now lying probably in some police morgue here or in Cumbledon? The red hair with the line of brown roots, the flesh—white, wa
xy and transparent now, like when I identified that soldier in Londonderry, when they wouldn’t let me see more than his head and shoulders. She’s as lifeless as him now, more lifeless than a Tussaud waxwork, Lill who made me what I am.)

  ‘So you think, anyway, there was more to your mother’s visits to the Corbys’ than holding the invalid’s hands?’ said McHale with a pale smile.

  ‘Natch. I expect she gave Hamilton C. a bit of womanly sympathy after she’d been up with Mrs Corby. Poisonous woman that, everyone says. She’s hardly been seen by mortal eye for five years or more, other than poor old Hamilton’s. He doesn’t have much of a life when you think about it, poor old bugger. He’s been good to me too, in his way—got me a job at the shipyard, and that.’

  ‘Do you think your mother had other—friendships like that?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so. I’ve been away, in the army, so I wouldn’t know any of the details. But a woman like that’s bound to attract men friends, I’d say.’

  ‘I expect you’re right,’ said McHale smoothly. ‘Now, you don’t think there’d been anything else of interest—anything unusual happening in your mother’s life in the last few days? For example, in the family . . . ?’

  Gordon took another quick decision. ‘Oh no. We jog along pretty much as usual most of the time. I mean, nothing out of the ordinary happens. Fred—Dad—goes to work in the park, or the Memorial Gardens. Bri goes to school—he’ll be going to university next year. I work in the shipyard, do a bit of training some evenings. Debbie’s still at school. We go to the pub of an evening now and then, mostly Saturdays. That’s the usual pattern.’

  ‘So there hadn’t been any disturbances in the past week or so? Any . . . rows, for example?’

  ‘No,’ said Gordon. ‘We’re not much of a family for rows. Mum kept things on an even keel, mostly. And if anything else unusual had happened, we’d all have heard of it, that’s for sure. Mum wasn’t one to keep things back.’