A Fatal Attachment

by Robert Barnard

  He edged his way out of the working melee, gave another wave of the hand, and was off, leaving Mike and Charlie with an unobstructed view of the body.

  “Oh,” said Charlie.

  “Take it slowly,” advised Oddie. “Look away, keep calm, and then look back again.”

  Charlie looked at the ceiling, holding his heaving stomach. He took another peek, looked away, then contemplated the awful thing full on. Lydia was indeed a horrible sight, the elegant legs and cream-frocked body ending in the livid horror of her face, and the hideous, thin, discoloured line around her neck.

  “She’s by the phone,” said the inspector from Halifax, coming up behind them and shaking hands with Oddie. He seemed to be relieved at handing the case over. “We think that may have been how she was surprised. She seems perfectly fit, but there was no great evidence of struggle—just some strands of rope under her fingernails, which luckily were fairly long. The phone was put back—he even seems to have turned off a saucepan of milk in the kitchen.”

  “Tidy muderer.”

  “There’s a pane missing in one of the sitting-room windows, and some dirt on the sill. Doesn’t look awfully convincing to me.”

  “You think he came through the door?”

  “That would be my bet. Either it wasn’t locked, or he had a key—probably the latter, since he tried to fake a break-in. But you’ll make up your own minds about that. We’ll be finished in twenty minutes or so, then we’ll do some routine things that we can do in the village or from HQ: see if we can chase up any relatives, see if anyone was seen around last night. Ah—they’re coming for the body now.”

  When the men with the stretcher had removed the livid remains of the elegant body that had been Lydia Perceval, and when the technical men from Halifax had packed up their little boxes and their cameras, Mike Oddie looked at Charlie.

  “Blank sheet,” he said. “Let’s go round and see what impressions we get. Ask if there’s anything that puzzles you.”

  So they went their separate ways around the study, then into the living room, the kitchen, and upstairs to the unrevealing bedrooms. It was, perhaps not surprisingly, the room where they had started, the study, that told them most.

  “Charles the tenth,” said Charlie, bending over a pile of typescript on a table beside tie desk. “Our Charles will be the third when his time comes. Who’s Charles the tenth?”

  Mike came over and looked at the early pages.

  “ ‘The last king of France,’ ” he read out.

  “I thought that was Louis the sixteenth,” said Charlie, with a vivid downward chop of the hand.

  “No, there was a restoration after Napoleon,” said Mike. He read on. “Then another revolution in 1830, fallowed by Louis Philippe, who called himself King of the French, not of France.”

  “So now I know,” said Charlie.

  He went over to the bookcase set on its own under the window, full of volumes in pristine condition.

  “Her books,” he said. “Horatio and Emma—that’s Nelson and Lady Whatsit, isn’t it? Richelieu, Richard II, Lawrence of Arabia—wouldn’t you need Arabic to write that?”

  “I think an awful lot of people have managed without” said Oddie.

  “Byron, Frederick the Great—talented lady.”

  “Yes they’re a varied bunch. And look at all those paperback editions—American ones too. And translations. Looks like she must have made a packet.”

  Charlie turned away from the stuffed-full bookcase and peered at a framed photograph on the wall.

  “Who are Tweedledum and Tweedledee?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’ve seen that photograph before,” said Oddle, coming up behind him. “It’s very well known. It’s George V and the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas the whatever.”

  The two gazed gravely at the camera, the modest and successful constitutional monarch, the disastrous autocrat. The lower part of both their faces was covered by thick but neat beards. It was impossible to tell them apart.

  “Like as two peas,” said Charlie.

  “There was a book of hers you missed out on,” said Oddie. “The Girlhood of the Last Tsarina. A slim volume—looked older than the rest. Maybe her first go.”

  “Russian too? She must have been a marvellous linguist.”

  “No, the last Tsarina was a German princess, that I do know. She became more Russians than the Russians, but it counted against her in the First World War. Lydia Perceval probably had French and German, like most people of her generation. She’d have had to manage medieval French, though, to write some of those books.”

  “Later on she went for men, didn’t she? I mean to write books on. Particularly strong, magnetic men.”

  “Ye-e-es. That does roughly seem to be the pattern, though I suspect also subjects whom she thought people might get interested in, who had had no biography of themselves written in English. Well, what general impressions have you got?”

  “General?” Charlie sat himself down, sprawling, in a chair and thought. “A dominating sort of person, though perhaps subtle about it. She commands her space rather than just lives in it. It’s a distinguished house, but it has no cosy, lived-in feel to it: everything has its place, everything in its place.”

  “Except perhaps here,” Oddie pointed out.

  “Yes—the study seems the centre of the house, and here the research has token over, making a bit of a mess, though no more than you might expect—it’s ordered mess, really.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Conservative with a small c. Probably with a large C too, with her admiration of strong men. Writes in longhand, beautifully clear, then types it up. All the china was traditional in design, all the ornaments in good, old-fashioned taste. Curtains and furnishings good quality but far from modern. A spinster’s home, wouldn’t you say? A very self-sufficient person.”

  “Yes—and some of the guest bedrooms didn’t feel as if they’d been used in years. But there was that picture of two boys.”

  “That was ages old,” Charlie pointed out. “Boys don’t dress like that these days.”

  “One of them is this naval chap.” Oddie pointed to the photograph on the bookcase. Charlie got out of his seat and strolled over to look at it again.

  “Doesn’t he think he’s the cat’s whiskers!” he said derisively.

  “Hmmm. Doesn’t look entirely comfortable to me. There’s an element of play-acting or perhaps bravado there. You haven’t mentioned the three sets of plates and cutlery in the dishwasher.”

  Charlie hadn’t mentioned them because they hadn’t struck him as having any significance.

  “Breakfast, lunch and dinner?” he hazarded. “Sorry, I didn’t look all that closely.”

  “Nobody eats full meals three times a day these days,” said Mike.

  “You should talk to some of the body-builders I know.”

  “I think you can be quite sure, Charlie, that Lydia Perceval didn’t go in for weight-training. Actually one of the plates had traces of scrambled egg on it. The other two were big meals, and there were three dessert plates—ice-cream, I think.”

  “Right,” said Charlie equably. “I missed that. She had someone in for a meal, either at mid-day or in the evening.”

  “I think so. And if it was dinner they left early, Or perhaps they murdered her, faked a forced entry, then took their leave.”

  “Unlikely, since their finger-prints would be everywhere,” said Charlie. “You could hardly keep your gloves on all evening. And that faked forced entry—”

  “Yes?”

  “Doesn’t seem to have gone to a lot of trouble over it, does he?”

  “No,” agreed Oddie, “There’s a ridge of earth on the top of the sill, as if he’d just raised a boot from inside the house and wiped it down.”

  “Proving it wasn’t an arthritic pensioner anyway.”

  “Was he pushed for time? Was he half-hearted about it because he thought there was no way this could be brought back to him? Or is there some
other reason why he hardly bothered to make it convincing?”

  “In other respects he was so careful: he put back the phone, turned the milk off on the hot-plate.”

  “We don’t know he did either of those things,” Oddie pointed out, congenitally cautious. “She may herself have forgotten to turn the milk on. It would be a sensible precaution in the murderer to turn it off, if he didn’t want the body found too soon: there could have been a minor fire. And the idea that she was on the phone is just an assumption.”

  As if on cue the phone rang. Mike Oddie raised his eyebrows at Charlie and picked it up.

  “Yes?”

  There was a moment’s silence at the other end.

  “Who is that?” an uncertain female voice asked.

  “This is the police.”

  “Oh, don’t say it’s true!” The woman’s voice cracked with anguish. “She’s not dead, is she?”

  Oddie registered the concern bordering on hysteria. So this woman whom they had been dissecting as cool, self-contained, was capable of inspiring affection, was she?

  “Would you mind telling me who I’m talking to?”

  “Dorothy Eccles. I had lunch with her only yesterday!”

  “With?—”

  “With Lydia. Lydia Perceval. Someone just came on duty here and said they’d heard on the car radio that she was dead, and foul play was suspected. It was a bit fuzzy and they weren’t quite sure it was Lydia. Is it true?”

  “I’m afraid Mrs Perceval is dead. The circumstances point to murder.”

  Self-stranglings and accidental stranglings being rare, he said to himself.

  “Oh God! Poor Lydia. Was it some intruder?”

  “Things are in their early stages as yet. We’ve come to no conclusions. You say you had lunch with Mrs—was it Mrs?”

  “She’d been married, but she reverted to her maiden name. She called herself Mrs Perceval, if pressed.”

  “You had lunch with Mrs Perceval yesterday?”

  “Yes. So happy she was.”

  “You are?—”

  “A librarian. At the British Museum at Boston Spa. We mostly do inter-library loans and international ones, but there is a small readers’ area which was very convenient for Lydia. She used to come over at least once a month.”

  “I see. You say she was happy.”

  “Yes. Happy in her personal life. There were two boys she had become interested in.”

  Oddie’s antennae twitched.

  “Relations?”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so. No, she’d just got to know them. Local boys—from the village, I think.”

  “You don’t remember their names?”

  “Oh dear . . . Colin was one. The other was something very ordinary. Lydia was greatly taken with them. Talked about leaving them something in her will.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, she was. She intended calling in on her solicitor in Halifax on the way home. I gathered it was all arranged.”

  “Her solicitor—you don’t remember his name?”

  “I don’t think she told me. I do remember she mentioned Halifax.”

  Mike Oddie mouthed “solicitor” at Charlie, and pointed towards the filing cabinet. They had already noted that various sorts of correspondence were stored there under a variety of business-like headings.

  “You don’t know anything about her relatives?”

  “She had a sister in the village—a sister and a brother-in-law.”

  “Really? Do you know their names?”

  “Thea is the sister. . . . I don’t remember the surname, but something rather comic-sounding. . . . The brother-in-law-is, well, unsatisfactory. Unemployed, I think, and he has a drink problem.”

  Why don’t you just say he drinks too much, Mike wondered?

  “You can’t remember anything else?”

  “She’d had a visit from her nephew over the weekend. Thea’s son. He was one of the boys who . . .” She seemed to catch herself up. “Well, Lydia was always very fond of her two nephews. The other one is dead, and she said Maurice was being dragged down by a very common wife. Lydia had very high standards—for herself, but also for others.”

  Mike Oddie raised his eyebrows. He could guess what having high standards for others meant: snobbishness and censoriousness.

  “I see,” he said neutrally. “There’s nothing else you can remember?”

  “No.” The voice broke, as if the fact of the murder suddenly caught up with her again. “It’s so dreadful . . . I’d like to give all the help I can. . . . We didn’t as a rule talk about personal things, you know. Not family or things like that. I knew Lydia as a writer. I used to help her in her research—just in my humble way, of course. I was never a research assistant or anything grand like that. But what we usually talked about was whatever subject she had on the stocks at that moment.”

  “Charles the tenth.”

  “Charles the tenth, at this particular time. Oh dear, that’s a book that never will be finished. And it was going so well.”

  “Well, you’ve been very helpful, Mrs—”

  “Miss.”

  “Miss Eccles. I may need to talk to you again, and if I do I can get in touch with you at the library, I suppose?”

  “Yes . . . Such a loss. It’s like a light going out.”

  Mike Oddie heard her gulp and put the phone down. He shook his head and turned to Charlie, who was brandishing a file.

  “Oliver Marwick, of Marwick, Chester and Jones. It’s Halifax 271463.”

  Mike was already dialling as he spoke.

  “Good morning, this is the police. I need to speak to Oliver Marwick urgently . . . Mr Marwick? West Yorkshire CID here. I believe you had a visit yesterday from Mrs Lydia Perceval.”

  “No, as a matter of fact she didn’t make it.” The voice at the other end of the line was cool and lawyerly. Clearly he had not been listening to his radio.

  “Do you know why not?”

  “She failed to turn up. She got caught up in her research. It’s the only thing that can make Lydia unreliable. But why?—”

  “How do you know she got caught up in her research?”

  “Because she rang me last night. Look, before I answer any more questions, why are you asking me about this?”

  “Mrs Perceval was found dead this morning.”

  “Dead!”

  Mike felt he was in a play, and effortlessly hauled up the clichés.

  “Foul play is definitely suspected. What time did she ring you last night, Mr Marwick?”

  “Just before the news. A minute or two before ten. I know because I was rather—oh, my God!”

  “What?”

  “She . . . rang off, you see. The line went dead. And I was rather glad, because there was something I wanted to hear about on the news—compensation for haemophiliacs given blood infected with AIDS. I thought she might ring back, but she didn’t, and I saw the item. I thought . . . well, I just thought someone had come in.”

  “I see. Was that likely? Would someone just come in like that to the cottage?”

  “Well, I imagine they might. We aren’t—weren’t personally friendly, but I know she has a sister living in Bly. Thea Hoddle, her name is. I just thought someone like that had dropped in.”

  “Mr Marwick, how exactly did the phone call end?”

  “I’m trying to remember. . . . She seemed to be about to make a new appointment. She said something like ‘When can we meet?’ ”

  “Yes?”

  “Then . . . then there was a pause . . . I’m trying to remember. She said ‘What’s that?’ as if she was surprised—perhaps by a noise. Then she said ‘But’.”

  “ ‘But’? As if she was surprised by something she saw or heard?”

  “Yes. Surprised, or perhaps uncertain. Bewildered, maybe. The she said something like ‘Rob’.”

  “ ‘Rob’?”

  “Yes. With a sort of question in her voice. The voice going upwards, uncertainly. I took it to be a person, bu
t perhaps it was ‘robbers’ or something like that.”

  “Yes. Anything more?”

  “No. That’s when the line went dead.”

  And Lydia Perceval too, not long afterwards, thought Mike Oddie grimly.

  CHAPTER 10

  WHEN she was told by a fresh-faced constable of the death of her sister Thea Hoddle swayed, and had to steady herself by clutching at the door jamb. “Are you all right?” the constable asked, not used to conveying such messages, and almost as uncertain and upset as Thea herself. She nodded.

  “There’ll be a detective along later,” said the young man, retreating. “I’d make myself a cup of tea if I were you.”

  It was kindly-meant advice, and Thea took it, going through the motions in a daze. Pictures of the mature Lydia warred in her mind with pictures of Lydia with her and Andy, on holiday in France, sitting outside a gay little café in Rheims or toiling up Mont St Michel. Emotions were so difficult to disentangle, it was so impossible to say what she felt about her sister.

  No, it wasn’t. She hated her.

  But that was now, and there had been another time, and another Lydia.

  Or had that been an illusion, and had there been slumbering inside that gay, sophisticated outside a malignant little beast that was planning to one day steal from her what she valued most?

  She drank her tea, standing against the kitchen sink, not wanting to sit in case she broke down. Then she went to the phone and rang the school. Her voice quavering, she told the school secretary what had happened and asked that a message be given to Andy. Then she went into the living room and waited.

  She had never wanted more the comforting presence of her husband. But what were they going to say to each other?

  • • •

  Before they left Hilltop Cottage Mike Oddie contacted the Halifax police and spoke to Inspector Harkness, the policeman who had been on the scene when they arrived from Leeds, and who was organising the back-up.

  “I’ll need someone to guard the cottage,” Oddie said.

  “I’ll have someone there in ten minutes.”