A Fatal Attachment

by Robert Barnard

  Mike Oddie nodded, and looked at Charlie.

  “Yes, that was rather our impression of her. And on your side, sir?”

  Jamie frowned, and for the first time looked uncertain.

  “You mean why did I marry her? That’s a tough one . . . I suppose I sort of fell into it, like I’ve fallen into most things in my life. She was always so bright and funny and determined as a child—really a vibrant personality. There was a will of iron there too, but I don’t know if I understood that. Perhaps I did, and thought that was what I needed. But it didn’t work out like that. She didn’t transfer some of her strong will to me. She just made me feel inadequate. Lydia was good at making people feel inadequate.”

  “You say it was short,” Oddie said. “How long?”

  “Just a few months. It’s all a bit of a haze, really—from being in a clinch with her on a river-boat going up the Thames, to marrying her in a Registry Office, to being shown the door. She married me—and then unmarried herself. I don’t, to be honest, remember all that much about being married to her, and I suspect Lydia would have said the same. A piece of adolescent folly.”

  “When was this, sir?”

  “Oh . . . nineteen fifty-nine. Thea was breast-feeding Maurice, I remember, and Gavin was already chattering brightly. At the time I wondered whether Lydia had married me because she wanted a child. If so she soon decided she didn’t want one by me.”

  “And that—the few months’ marriage—was the end of all connection with Lydia?”

  “Absolutely,” said Loxton, with a decisive nod of the head. “I occasionally heard about her from my parents. Read one of her books once—rather good, though not my sort of thing. I like thrillers, when I read at all. Yes, that was it.”

  “Except that you went to see her a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Oh yes. Right. Thought it would be the done thing, under the circumstances.”

  “And how . . . how did the meeting go?”

  “Perfectly well. . . .” Jamie Loxton suddenly decided on honesty. He grinned again. “Well, a bit frostily, I suppose. Once she had wiped you off her slate, Lydia really didn’t want you popping up on that slate again. If she decided you’d never amount to anything, then she didn’t want you to get anything right. But we kept up appearances, talked for—what?—a quarter of an hour, said unfond farewells, and I took my leave.”

  “There was no row?”

  “No row.”

  “We hear that Mrs Perceval was . . . rather upset after you left. Threw things around, and so on.”

  His eyebrows flew up in genuine surprise.

  “Really? Good Lord! I wouldn’t have thought she’d consider me worth getting angry about. I’m flattered, in a way.”

  “That you . . . made an impression?”

  “Yes. Not much got through to Lydia emotionally, you know. I’ve always had the impression she regarded me as roughly on the level of the common caterpillar.”

  Oddie shifted his buttocks on his chilly perch, and Charlie did the same.

  “You’ve had rather a . . . varied career, haven’t you, sir?” Oddie asked.

  “Chequered is the word you want, Superintendent. No need to aim at tactfulness with me. I’ve gone from job to job, expedient to expedient. Everybody likes me, nobody thinks I’m up to much. I’ve sold everything from Encyclopaedia Britannicas to Christmas wrapping paper. I’ve worked in national government, local government, British Rail, a pawnbroker’s in a back street in Bolton. I’ve wielded a pick on the roads, I’ve carried a hod on a building site, I’ve worked in a travel agent’s, which was perhaps the worst of all. You name it, I’ve done it.”

  “All perfectly legal occupations.”

  “All perfectly legal. If you’re asking if I have a record—”

  “I’m not. I know you haven’t. Of course you were questioned by police about—”

  Jamie Loxton put up his hand.

  “Spare me! I know what I was questioned by police about. I’d be willing to admit that now and then I’ve been lucky. That questions could have been asked that I wouldn’t have been able to wriggle out of. In fact, generally speaking I’ve been lucky. I’ve seldom gone hungry, usually had friends to help me out of scrapes, and my family were bricks. I’m like a slice of bread that somehow lands buttered side up every time.”

  “And now you’ve got a regular girlfriend and a farm of your own.”

  Jamie looked up at him with that expression of guileless amiability that must have won him numberless floats from casual acquaintances in bars and clubs.

  “Exactly. You’re asking how it came about, are you?”

  “Well, there does seem to have been some transformation in your fortunes,” Oddie suggested. “One might say a transformation in your character.”

  “Fair enough. No one’s more conscious of that than I am. The love of a good woman, I suppose you’d say. Mary’s a cracker—a rock. The sort of support, you might say, that Lydia could have been, but wasn’t.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “Just a year. That was the anniversary we were celebrating on Monday. We met in a pub in Sowerby Bridge. She’d been finalising arrangements to take over the shop and post office here, and I’d been looking at a farm near Halifax. We clicked. Then this farm came on the market. One day I hope she’ll marry me. End of fairy story in which the frog becomes the handsome prince. Only I never was repulsively froggy, I hope, and I’m a very middle-aged prince.”

  There was still something that puzzled Oddie.

  “Buying this farm, sir: I don’t get the feeling you’ve been very flush with money in the past. . . .”

  “Oh, that’s easy. No mystery about that. My parents died—my mother about four years ago, my father eighteen months ago. They left everything to me.”

  Charlie put in: “Isn’t that a bit surprising?”

  “Frankly I was flabbergasted.” Jamie Loxton turned his ingenuous gaze in his direction. “They hadn’t told me, you see, in case I started trading on my ‘great expectations.’ They knew me.”

  “But why?—”

  “Why throw good money down such a gaping hole? Well, they were very remarkable people—not at all the caricature North Country businessmen you get in television plays. They were open-minded, intelligent people. They loved and admired Robert, supported his ventures and schemes early on. But over the years they came to the conclusion that he’d gone on with them altogether too long—lived in a sort of perpetual adventure novel. And they knew he was a manager and a survivor: he’d go on doing what he wanted, and raising the money for it, whatever they did. If he got the cash they knew he’d blow it on one spectacular trek across the Gobi Desert, or whatever. They exercised their option to say that wasn’t what they wanted their money to go on, and preferred to give the lot to me. It was to provide one last, really good chance of making good. I don’t mean it was a fortune, but the sum I inherited does mean that I can make losses on this place for quite a number of years and not go under.”

  “Wasn’t your brother shat off about that?” Charlie asked. Jamie Loxton shook his head.

  “He was very good about it. He’d been consulted years before—either by letter, or when he visited my parents, which wasn’t very often. He wrote to me from some god-forsaken hole when he heard Father was dead. Said he’d known about it for years, congratulated me, said he understood why they did it. I remember he wrote: ‘It will enable you to settle down in comfort, if that’s what you want, or blow it all gloriously if you prefer.’ I suspect he’d have thought better of me if I’d blown it. I guess that what he thought would happen would be that I’d let it slip through my fingers somehow or other. Anyway, now he’ll be able to make his own choices with Lydia’s money. He’ll blow it gloriously, I’m sure. Siberia or the Kalahari Desert will be the gainers.”

  “He knew he was her heir?” Oddie asked.

  “Oh yes, I think so. Maybe I shouldn’t say that?” He looked anxiously from face to face.

 
“He was an awfully long way away at the time,” said Oddie. Jamie relaxed.

  “That’s right. Well yes, she did tell him. I expect it was originally Gavin and Maurice—in fact I’m quite sure it was. Then, when Gavin was dead and Maurice disappointed her—something Lydia never forgave—she changed her will entirely to leave it to Robert. As I said, the received idea when they were young was that she loved him.”

  “But it was not returned?”

  “Robert has casual women, never just one woman.”

  “And he told you he knew?”

  “My father did. Mentioned several times that Robert knew he would get the bulk of Lydia’s estate. Maybe Dad was trying to justify what they’d done, without actually telling me. Because there was no guarantee that Lydia would die first.”

  “Right,” said Oddie. “I don’t think there’s anything else for the moment. All the stuff about your movements will have to be checked, of course.” He turned to Charlie enquiringly. “Is there anything I’ve forgotten?”

  Charlie smiled his intimidating smile at Jamie Loxton.

  “Your beard, sir: when did you shave it off?”

  Loxton’s expression was one of amused surprise.

  “My beard? What on earth has that to do with anything? Oh, let me see: several days ago. Sunday, I think. Yes, I rather think I’ve shaved four mornings now.”

  “I see. . . . So you would have been clean-shaven when you were at the White Rose on Monday night?”

  “Oh yes. And probably looking a bit odd, too: part brown, part white. It’s getting a bit more even now.”

  “Why did you shave it off?” Mike asked.

  “Difficult to say,” said Jamie, hardly taking the question seriously. “It had come to seem like a prop. Designed to give me the sort of feeling American men get from carrying a gun. I didn’t need it anymore . . . I seem to remember Lydia being sarcastic on the subject.”

  “Well, I think that’s it. We’ll be back to you if necessary.”

  The two men jumped gratefully off the wall, dusted down their backsides, shook hands with Jamie Loxton, and began the trudge back to their car. When Charlie turned his head Jamie was already bent over his carrots, his face hidden.

  “First impressions?” Oddie asked.

  “I liked him. But then, as he said, people do like him, and I can believe that. That could be a dangerous position to be in—or at least, it could put you in the way of pretty powerful temptations. . . . But that wasn’t what you wanted, was it?”

  “Not really, though I agree, for what it’s worth. First impressions of what he said was what I was after. Did it make sense, did you believe him?”

  Charlie had thought about it, and replied at once.

  “The first thing he said to us was ‘brother of the more famous Robert.’ The last thing he said was something about Lydia making sarcastic remarks about his beard. You wonder whether he is quite the changed character he thinks he is.”

  “Defines himself in terms of other people?”

  Charlie grinned.

  “That sounds like psychologists’ jargon to me. Let’s say he’s very lacking in self-confidence, self-trust.”

  “Maybe. But regaining confidence must be a gradual process, after all those years of being an unsatisfactory blob whom people shook their heads over. Anyway, it’s never easy being the relation of a famous person. Think of being Dickens’s brother. Or Margaret Thatcher’s sister. Anything else?”

  “The meal at the White Rose. That’s the crux, isn’t it? If he was there at around nine thirty, and letting his fiancée out of the car at ten to ten, then he can’t have been the man in the wood the boy saw, beard or no beard. And I don’t see he can be whoever interrupted Lydia’s phone call just before ten.”

  “So, subject to checking, you’d rule him out?”

  Charlie thought.

  “Only if we make the assumption that the person who interrupted her phone call then strangled her.”

  “Good man,” said Oddie approvingly. “And that seems a probability, but it’s far from a fact. Anything else?”

  “Obviously we’d like to know if Robert Loxton really took his being cut out of his parents’ will in the relaxed way his brother said he did. Must be a bit of a saint.”

  “Or someone who isn’t primarily interested in money.”

  “He seems to have spent a lot of his life raising it,” Charlie pointed out. “Then I wasn’t too happy about all that business of mislaying his keys at the White Rose. Too coincidental. Too much like a ploy to make sure he was remembered.”

  “You speak like a man who has never lost his car keys in his life.”

  “Can’t recall that I have. I’ve had them nicked.”

  “There is a sort of person who puts his glasses down somewhere and goes all round the house looking for them later, and there’s also the sort who never does. I’d have put this chap down as the first sort, just on his life record. Most probably his brother is just as definitely in the second category. . . . Here we are. I’ll just get on to Halifax and see if anything has come up.”

  As they started the car and began down the lane to the road Oddie got the message from Halifax that Robert Loxton had heard of his cousin’s murder in Washington, had flown home overnight, and had contacted the Halifax police from Heathrow. He was on his way north in a hired car, and would meet Oddie at his cousin’s cottage some time between two and three, if there were no major hold-ups on the M1.

  “Splendid!” said Oddie, as Charlie emerged onto the winding little country road. “I have the feeling that if anyone knew and understood Lydia Perceval it was the more famous Robert.”

  CHAPTER 14

  THERE was a brisk wind, and puffy clouds were scudding across the sky when they arrived back at the cottage, giving it a more romantic appearance than the rich, classical complacence it had worn when they had first seen it. Both images, Oddie thought, were deceptive. And so was the image Lydia presented to the world.

  Reporters had lingered around the cottage for several hours after Lydia’s murder, but when they found there was nothing but policemen to see they had drifted off down the hill in search of refreshment, and by now most of them had left the village entirely. There was still a constable guarding the cottage—a fresh-faced and freckled young man called Holdsworth, of about Charlie’s age. He led them through to the study.

  “I’ve been looking through the books,” he explained. “Hoping to find some old letters used as a bookmark. No luck. She mostly used bits torn off a pad, and old bills. From the bills it looks as if she got most things delivered—meat, bread, drink. Then she made occasional visits to a supermarket in Halifax and really stocked up, including stuff for the freezer.”

  “Supermarket bills are very informative these days,” said Oddie, peering at some of them. “One day they’ll be a great help on a case, but I can’t see that this will be the one.”

  “One thing I did find was the appointments book,” said the young constable. He leaned forwards and took it from a row of books behind the typewriter on Lydia’s desk. “It’s a National Gallery one, with pictures, and it looks like any other book.”

  “Good work,” said Oddie. “Something we missed.” He turned to July, and to Monday the twelfth. Charlie looked over his shoulder as he pointed to the entry: “Boston Spa. Oliver Marwick 5 P.M.”

  “That’s what they call negative evidence,” Oddie said. “That’s to say, no bloody evidence at all.”

  “We never thought the chap murdered her by appointment,” Charlie pointed out. “All the evidence points to his having got in while she was down in the village, perhaps using his own key, then surprised her when she was on the phone and strangled her.”

  “Yes,” said Mike, flicking through the pages. “So long as we don’t assume that’s what happened. . . . Not much here. Maybe because she was writing the book. ‘Tea Ted and Colin.’ ‘Tea Maurice.’ She puts ‘The boys’ the first couple of days when they started coming up regularly, then didn’t b
other any longer. The story of a successful take-over.”

  “Are you happy with Lydia’s last words?” Charlie asked suddenly.

  Oddie swung round. Charlie’s question chimed in with a niggling doubt which had been rattling around in the back of his own mind and refusing to come forward.

  “Her last words?”

  “As Marwick remembers them: ‘What’s that? ‘But’ and ‘Rob.’ The last with a sort of questioning sound, you said. We’ve been taking it that she was surprised by a noise, was puzzled because there should have been no one in the house, that she started to say ‘robbers,’ and then was strangled.”

  “Actually I’m keeping a more open mind than that, but what’s wrong with that as a possible scenario?”

  “Nobody uses the word ‘robbers’ anymore,” said Charlie. “She would have said ‘burglars,’ or ‘housebreakers.’ If it was outside it would be ‘muggers.’ ‘Robbers’ has an old-fashioned sound to it, like highway robbers. I’d say the only time it’s used these days is when we talk of ‘bank-robbers,’ and even then people are starting to say ‘bank raiders’.”

  “Hmmm. You’ve got a point. But you’ve got to remember that Lydia Perceval was an old-fashioned person, and one who professionally lived in the past. In that solicitor’s file there were various copies of letters, and she usually signed off ‘Yours sincerely.’ Not many people do that these days, apart from old people. Also, this was heard over a telephone line, at a moment of great stress. It could be almost any word. But what was your idea?”

  “That there was someone hiding behind the door there, perhaps not expecting her to come into the study at that time of night. If she was standing in the way her body suggested she would surely have caught a glimpse of whoever it was coming towards her.”

  “And?”

  “And if she knew him she wouldn’t say ‘robbers,’ she’d say his name . . . Robert, for example.”

  “But that’s—” Mike Oddie began, then stopped. “Well, no, not impossible. Unlikely, but not impossible. Something that we’ll have to look into.”