A Fatal Attachment

by Robert Barnard

  “Why was that?”

  “Because she used to be Sharon Turner in Waterloo Terrace.”

  “Her with the tight short skirts?” asked Charlie, the glint of lust in his eye.

  “Yes. Pretty much the same off-screen as on it, so they say. They kept her away from Lydia.”

  “Oh?”

  “Wise of them. The one time they met Lydia said her language was unprintable. Lydia was very sensitive to language, and she hated vulgarity or crudeness. Maurice went up to see her, but Kelly stayed down here.”

  “And was Lydia pleased to see him?”

  “I haven’t spoken to her since. On Monday—yesterday—I went up but she was in Boston Spa, doing work on her book. I had the key to come and go as I like. That’s how I came to go up there this morning and—”

  Her face crumpled. The two policemen made their excuses and left. As they made towards the car Oddie said:

  “That was a rather different view of the woman to the one we formed in the cottage. Would you say she was reliable?”

  “I’d say she was in love,” said Charlie.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE village of Bly, which to the policemen had seemed at first sight no more than a street on either side of a cross-road, turned out on closer acquaintance to have rather more ramifications than that. The small council estate on which Molly Kegan lived and brought up her children swelled the population by a hundred or so, and when one walked it one realized that the main street had sprouted appendages: a crescent of semis nestled behind the pub, two or three stumps of roads leading to nowhere were bordered by pre-and post-war family housing. Even so Mike Oddie estimated that the number of souls living within the village area would amount to well under a thousand.

  “The new sheriff and his deputy come to town,” murmured Charlie as they turned again into the main street. “And everyone waits, and watches, and wonders.”

  “Nonsense—we’re the FBI,” said Oddie. “Sent to the Deep South and wondering what makes people tick there. What say we take half an hour off for a pint, and see if there is any village gossip to be gleaned?”

  But when he turned his head in Charlie’s direction he saw that something else had seized the constable’s attention.

  “Someone wants to talk to us,” he said.

  In a town the incidence of murder might have brought little knots of people onto street corners to watch the police with unconcealed interest, even occasionally to offer information and advice. A village was different. In this one the people had kept to their own houses, communicating and commenting on the intelligence by telephone, and watching the police activity from darkened rooms with field-glasses, or through cracks produced by infinitesimally opening their front doors. If they had legitimate business outside the house they scuttled about it in an embarrassed fashion, as if afraid of being accused by their neighbours of showing vulgar curiosity. But the boy Charlie had his eye on was perhaps too young to have absorbed village mores, or perhaps he simply didn’t care about them: he was around thirteen, afflicted by the sort of facial blemishes that television advertisements claim to be able to remove as if by magic, and eating avidly from a packet of crisps. He was watching them with interest, and with a concentrated expression that suggested he was trying to make up his mind.

  “Now,” wondered Charlie aloud, “will he talk more openly to you because you’re white, or to me because I’m more his age?”

  The question was only answered indirectly. As they approached on the other side of the road the boy made a decision: he crossed the road and went up to Mike Oddie.

  “My mum says you ought to talk to her.”

  “Oh?” The two policemen stopped, and Mike looked down at the blemished, heavy-featured face. “Why is that? Does she have any special information about the murder?”

  “Well, not special, I don’t think. But like she says, if you run the village post office everyone comes in and you hear everyone’s news. My mum says there’s nothing goes on in Bly but what she knows about it. . . . Though a lot of it’s not very interesting,” the boy concluded lamely but honestly.

  “Well, maybe we’ll just drop in on your mother,” said Mike Oddie, thinking this might be an alternative to pub gossip. “The post office is—where?”

  “Oh, it’s not a real post office—just a shop with a post office counter,” said the boy. “Come on, I’ll show you.” He walked self-importantly along the main street, decidedly pleased with his own prominence. When they got to the door of the general-store-cum-post-office, with the name M. Wetherby over the door, the boy pointed Oddie inside and then threw a glance in Charlie’s direction which said as clearly as words: Don’t you go with him. I’ve got something to tell you.

  “Oh, it’s the police, is it? Well, you’ve come to the right place, I’ll say that for you.” The voice started the moment Oddie set foot over the shop’s threshold. It proceeded from a fleshy woman in an unwisely summery dress, from which her flabby arms protruded like a string of pink grapefruit. Her accent was not northern but her voice had a staying power that made the heart sink. This, presumably, was M. Wetherby. “Well, we can’t talk here. Never know who might come in. Come into my back room: with the door closed you can’t hear nothing out here. You too, young man”—for Charlie had lurked on the pavement outside, intending to have a private session with the woman’s son—“you’ll be needed to take notes. Jason—mind the shop.”

  “Mum, do I have to? You know I’m not supposed to do any of the post office stuff—”

  “Bugger post office regulations.” She waddled ahead into the back room built on as an extension to the shop and post office. “He’s off school with an upset tummy. No reason why he shouldn’t make hisself useful. Now, what was it you wanted to know? She wasn’t liked, you know. That’s not to say there wasn’t plenty as admired her, or talked her up, because it was something to have a famous writer in the village, or just outside it, and those that read her books said she told a good tale, for all it was true, not fiction, which is where my tastes lie. But liked she was not. Well, it’s not surprising, is it? She’d nothing in common with us, not the ordinary people of the village, and if she exchanged the time of day with us that was as much as she would do.” She put on her idea of an upper-class drawl: “ ‘Mrs Wetherby, my publishers sent off my proofs three days ago and they’re not here yet,’ she’d say to me, though I’d tell her time and time again that delivery comes from Halifax and in’t nothing to do with me. Always very snooty she was when she came down into the village, as if living in three cottages thrown together gave you lady-of-the-manor rights, I ask you. But that’s not to say that one of us would do a thing like that to her, naturally we wouldn’t, we was proud of her in a way, no, the obvious place you’ve got to look—and I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you—is the village newcomers. Well, it stands to reason, don’t it, she lives here year after year and nothing happens to her, and suddenly they move in and she’s done in, not that I’ve anything against the boys themselves, they’ve been in here and been polite enough, as polite as boys are these days, and standards have gone down as we all know, and Jason says that they’re not disliked at school, for all they’ve begun boasting to their mates about being left money, which puts other boys’ backs up as I’m sure you’ll understand. But the mother is a poor thing, there’s nobody can say different to that, without a sparkle of life in her, and the father, for all his noise and bluster, is nothing but a braggart and a boozer, and I know the type, because I had a braggart and a boozer for a husband, God’s pity on the woman as has to put up with him now, for woman there must be, because he has a way with him—”

  “Pad run out,” said Charlie, snapping his notebook shut and making for the door. “I’ll get another one from the car.”

  That was enough time to waste on that woman, he thought, as he made his escape. She was nothing but a leaky mouth, one who blabbed on autocue. That was interesting, though, what she said about the boys boasting at school—if it was tru
e, and if it was money from Lydia. Still, Oddie could pick up jewels like that from the garbage without his notebook at the ready. The boy was someone who should be questioned while he was still willing to talk.

  There were no customers in the shop, or at the post office counter. Jason was just standing there, bored. But he brightened up when Charlie came through the door.

  “She thinks she knows everything, but she don’t,” he said, nodding contemptuously towards the door. “She just talks and never listens.”

  “Can be useful at times, I suppose,” said Charlie.

  The boy thought ponderously, then nodded.

  “Like I can say ‘I told you’ and not be telling a lie? Yes, well that works sometimes. Only there’s some things she always does manage to hear.”

  “Oh? Like if you tell her where you’re going to be in the evening, and she finds out you weren’t?”

  “Yeah . . . How did you guess?”

  “Not difficult. Where did you say you’d be last night?”

  “Said I was doing homework with Garry Mathers.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “Well, I was. I mean I went there, in case anything was said, or questions asked. We always go upstairs to Garry’s bedroom, and Mrs Mathers has the telly on loud downstairs, so she never knows when I leave the house.”

  “So where did you and your girlfriend go?”

  “Up the—how did you know?”

  He really was a very slow boy. Still, often the best witnesses were stupid.

  “I know. I remember what I did at your age. So you went up the hill, did you?”

  “Yes, I did. I went past Mrs Perceval’s house, but I didn’t notice anything. Don’t suppose I looked. Then I met me girlfriend in the little wood near the gravel pit—by arrangement, like.”

  “I see. What time was this?”

  “I went up about quarter past eight, near enough. It was getting dark when we came away—about half past nine, I suppose. I know I was home well before ten.”

  “Was it as you both came down the hill that you noticed something?”

  The boy’s lip curled.

  “No, we came down separately. We’re not daft. Julie took the back path, and I took the road past the cottage. They notice everything in this place. . . . No, it was earlier, while we were up in the woods, like.”

  He shuffled and picked at a spot. Julie, thought Charlie, must be hard up.

  “I suppose you were . . . down in the undergrowth,” he suggested. “Not very visible.”

  “ ’Course we were! Practically burrowed in. We weren’t trying to hide, and maybe he wasn’t either. But it was just where he put his car, like.”

  “Where he put his car?” said Charlie, repressing impatience.

  “Yes, he drove it up the path towards the pit and left it in the little clearing there. He could easily have left it by the road—it’s wide enough. But he drove it into the wood.”

  “You say he. That means you saw him?”

  “Yes. We—well, we just stayed and watched him. He got out of the car—”

  “What sort of car?”

  “Ford Fiesta. Dark blue. We looked at it as we left.”

  “Number plate?”

  “Don’t remember. But it was F reg.”

  “Right. Sorry I interrupted.”

  “Well, there’s not much more. He got out, shut and locked the doors, and walked down the path towards the road.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I didn’t see his face full on, only sideways. He had a beard—a dark, bushy one.”

  “That’s interesting. What sort of height was he?”

  “Fairly tall, I’d say. Going on six foot.”

  “Clothing?”

  “Wore a dark shirt, open at the neck. And jeans.”

  “Any guess at his age?”

  “Didn’t see him well enough. He wasn’t grey, and he walked like he was pretty fit and active.”

  “I see. And when you went past the cottage, did you look at it the second time?”

  “Yes, I did. It’s the only house before you get back to the village, so I thought he might have gone there. But he’d left the woods ten minutes or so by then. There were lights on at Hilltop Cottage, but I couldn’t see anyone or anything unusual there. Wasn’t all that interested—then.”

  The door to the little back sitting room began to open gradually. “I’m afraid we really have a great deal to do,” Charlie heard. He’s giving up—thinks I should have got all I need, he thought. She’s nothing but a time-waster. But as the judgment went through his mind he heard Mrs Wetherby say:

  “You’ll be talking to the husband, I dare say?”

  She was standing, wobbling gently, in the doorway.

  “I expect so,” said Mike Oddie, clearly ready for a hurried departure. “Though since we gather that they’d been divorced for many years—”

  “Why come back here, that’s what I’d like to know? She couldn’t explain that.”

  “Who couldn’t?”

  “His girlfriend. Runs the post office and shop up at Kedgely, so naturally we’re in touch now and then, and we’ve met at a P.O. course in Halifax. I knew what sort he was as soon as she started talking about him: drifter, wastrel, sponger—that’s the sort he is, for all she puts it nicely and says he’s ‘never found his niche.’ Niche! Who does find their bloody niche? I wouldn’t say my niche was a shop-cum-post-office, but I have to buckle down and make a go of it, don’t I?” The chins wobbled with self-righteousness. “Oh no, I’d got him summed up, for all he’s got a beard and goes striding through the place looking so macho. He’s what Australians call a no-hoper—a walking lost cause. Some women go for that, but not me. If I’m going to throw meself into the sea of matrimony I’ll attach meself to a life-boat, not a concrete block!”

  “I’m sure you will,” said Oddie, smiling his goodbyes in the interval of a caught breath and escaping through the door. “Next problem: find a life-boat that wants to be attached to a quivering mass of talkative jelly,” he muttered to Charlie as they marched down the street towards their car.

  “Still, there were a couple of things of interest, even in the bits I heard,” Charlie had to concede. “The boys talking about the will at school—”

  “Yes, that was interesting. I pressed her after you’d gone, during a brief pause, and it was money from Lydia Perceval that they were boasting about. What was the other thing?”

  “The husband having a beard.”

  “Oh? Why that?”

  “The boy—Jason—was up in the wood just beyond the cottage yesterday evening with his girlfriend. A man with a beard drove his car into the wood and left it in a clearing there—round about quarter, twenty past nine.”

  “Ah—did the boy recognise him?”

  “No. Only saw him side-face. But the husband only seems to have been around the village once or twice, probably in daytime, so it’s quite possible he wouldn’t.”

  “Interesting. Or possibly the usual red herring one gets in murder cases and all he wanted was a pee.”

  “Definitely not that, anyway. The kid says he strode towards the road. Of course he could have been having it off with a married woman in the village here—”

  Their hands were on the door-handles of their car when they heard an “I say!” and turned to see an overweight man emerging from a rather shoddy-looking semi-detached on the fringe of the village. He came up to them with an air of bluster and self-importance which was far from ingratiating.

  “They tell me you’re the policemen on the murder case.”

  “That’s right,” said Mike, with more geniality than he felt.

  “Then you’ll want to talk to me and my boys. We must have been among the last to see her.”

  “Ah yes. You must be Mr Bellingham.”

  “Nick Bellingham.” He held out his hand, which was surprisingly sweaty. “Glad to meet you. My boys were up with her last evening, and she came down with them—to make herself
known, so to speak.”

  “You hadn’t met her?”

  “Oh no—last night was the first time.”

  “Nor your wife?”

  “No, the friendship was with the boys. She’d been champion since their mother’s illness was diagnosed. Soon as I heard of the murder I begged the rest of the day off work—I was appalled. Terrible tragedy. Unthinkable. I phoned the headmaster at the boys’ school, and he was going to break it to them. I didn’t say they should come home specially—was I right?”

  “Quite right. We have a great deal of routine stuff to get through. But if we could talk to them this evening?”

  “No problem,” said Bellingham, rubbing his hands. “What’s the drill? Do I make myself scarce?”

  “No, no—not at all. This will just be a routine session, but one of the parents should be present. Till this evening then.”

  But as they drove away, Oddie said to Charlie: “If it should turn out that one of the boys, or both of them, are involved, then some other way of questioning them will have to be found.”

  “Headmaster or something?”

  “Yes, and each boy separately.”

  “He was odd, wasn’t he?” said Charlie thoughtfully. “Somehow the words and manner didn’t go together, and the words of regret were an afterthought. He seemed to be enjoying it.”

  “He was. But then people do. People a lot more intelligent than him.”

  “Or than he seemed,” amended Charlie. “One of the things you learn growing up in Brixton is to seem to the police to be a lot thicker than you really are.”

  “You may be right. Though I sensed a true-blue home-grown thickness in Mr Bellingham. Not that I’m prejudging matters: I’ve known plenty of stupid murderers—and sometimes they murder for stupid reasons, and sometimes for perfectly good ones like money or sex.”

  “Still, there’s no reason to suspect Bellingham, is there?”

  “None at all, except that he was one of the last to see her alive, and later left his house and was seen in the pub.”

  “She was being good to his boys and getting him off the hook of looking after them. You could say he had a sort of anti-motive.”