A Fall from Grace

by Robert Barnard

  “What was the advice about?”

  Charlie shifted uneasily in his chair.

  “A relationship that seemed to be developing with a young girl—a fifteen-year-old one. I stress ‘seemed,’ because Felicity and I don’t think it was a sexual thing at all, more a master-and-willing-slave one. Something of the sort had happened in Coombe Barton, where he used to live. He’d been forced to decamp and come north.”

  “To live with you? How did you get on?”

  “Edgily. No explosions, no warmth. But he was near, not with.”

  “And it’s this Chris Carlson you want investigated?”

  “Yes, and I feel rotten about it.”

  “Save me your moral agonies. What is it you want to know?”

  “Parents, birth, education, medical career, why that career was given up. And anything you can pick up by the wayside.”

  “Shouldn’t be too much trouble. I don’t think we’ll get much on the usual electronic information purveyors—”

  “No, I thought not.”

  “—but once I get the place and date of birth it should be fairly plain sailing. There are medical directories and so on, and they’re fairly up to date, though of course we won’t find any scandals there, any more than we would in Crockfords.”

  “If you want scandals about vicars you go to the local newspapers and The News of the World. Both of these are pretty good on scandals involving professional men or women in general.”

  “They are. So leave it with me. I’m shutting for lunch now. Come with me and we’ll take Margaret out for a pub lunch.”

  The lunch was hasty but pleasant, and Oddie’s wife was delighted to renew her acquaintanceship with Charlie. She asked who the mystery man was that her husband was to look into.

  “A friend,” said Charlie. “And a friend with only the slightest connection with Rupert Coggenhoe. He tried to warn him—usually silly, and with Rupert predictably useless. He was bound to just continue on his way.”

  “And who is this friend?”

  “He was a hospital consultant. He quit the job because of disgust at the way the Health Service is being run—becoming a sausage machine, run by management men obsessed with waiting times and patient turnover: heartless, soulless, that’s what he thinks. I’ve every reason to believe those really were his feelings. But were they the reason he quit? Why is he so cagey about everything that he did or that happened to him before he came to Slepton Edge? I’d like to clear up that definite mystery and see if there is any possible connection with how Felicity’s father met his death.” It sounded feeble, but he knew that both Mike and Margaret trusted his judgment. The question wouldn’t go away as he worked through the afternoon at Millgarth Police Headquarters in Leeds. It was pure coincidence that on his way home he had to call in at the general infirmary to collect a confidential report on a uniformed constable who was showing signs of breaking up. He was just taking charge of the gray folder in the foyer when he saw Alison Carlson coming slowly and heavily down the stairs. Her face looked frazzled and exhausted.

  “Hi, Alison. Have you got the car or do you want a lift home?”

  She smiled at him warmly.

  “What I want more than anything is a cup of coffee. No—Chris has got the car. The campaign comes first.”

  “We’ll take the long way home, then. I know of a nice little coffee place in Horsforth. You look as if you could do with it.” She let him take her arm and lead her out into the street.

  “I ought to be over the moon,” she said as Charlie eased her into the car. “I’ve been given a clean bill of health, the pregnancy is proceeding on course without any problems beyond the normal ones—I should be dancing. It’s all the waiting and waiting, the being passed from doctor to nurse to consultant like a parcel in a children’s game. You lose sight of the fact that what you’re going through is a perfectly normal process, in spite of the fact that you’re surrounded by others in the same boat.”

  “Felicity feels a bit like that, though it’s much easier the second time around. There’s one consolation: you can tell Chris all about it and it’ll be grist to his mill.”

  But he was conscious that as he spoke Alison was nodding off to sleep. He drove in silence through Kirk-stall and out to Horsforth, stopped at the Coffee Bean and got a cup of coffee into her before they really started talking again over the second cup.

  “That’s better!” said Alison. “Now I feel human, not some sort of specimen for analysis. It’s so easy, when you’re going through the mill of the infirmary, to think: This isn’t worth it. Not worth all this fuss. But of course it is.”

  “You’ve been waiting a long time for it.”

  “For a baby? Yes, we have. Though actually if it had been an intentional wait, it wouldn’t have been a long time in present-day terms. I just look around me in the infirmary to see a host of women in their late thirties who I know are having their first babies. But we did want one earlier.”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Chris mentioned this the first time we met, in the square at Slepton. We talked about it, and he put your success down to the fact that he had packed in his job and was living a life with all the bad pressures removed.”

  “I think he’s right,” said Alison, smiling. “It worked, anyway. But I think that even if he went back to hospital work now, the pressures would be less, once we’ve actually got a child.”

  “Is that what you want? Him going back to hospital work?”

  She frowned.

  “Well, in some respects it’s the last thing I want. What could be better than the life we have now? But thinking less selfishly, it does seem an awful waste—of his training, expertise, genuine interest in what he was doing and helping people in concrete ways. Part of me hopes that this mayor business, much more serious than last time, will be the catalyst to sending him back to medicine.”

  “Why should it be?”

  “Why shouldn’t it? After all, he won’t get in, will he? Independents don’t in British elections. And he’ll have a serious, stimulating, taxing few weeks and will—I know—come through it unscathed, still able to enjoy life. So it could show him that he could go back to some kind of medical practice and not wear himself down emotionally to a wet rag. And not just emotionally—physically too. He’s naturally resilient, and this could show him he could do a demanding job and survive.”

  “Hmmm,” said Charlie. “I think you’re out of date about independents. Think of that man who became an MP by campaigning on the one point of the closure of the local hospital. People are pretty disillusioned about politicians at the moment, and Chris’s campaign—centering on the Health Service but broadening out from that—could be just what the average Halifax elector wants.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Well, I rather hope not. And I’m being unselfish not selfish when I say that. I hope he does well, but not that well. You think he’s started the campaign too early, don’t you?”

  “I do rather. But what do I know?”

  “Intelligent observer. Someone who watches and listens as part of his daily work. Chris should have listened to you.”

  “I was just reacting along the lines of the general feeling that when there’s a death you pause, take a few breaths, reflect a bit, before you get back to the real world and start replacing the dead person. Everyone believes that apart from journalists.”

  “You make clear what you don’t like, don’t you, Charlie?”

  “Only when I’m off-duty. It doesn’t do to be anything but neutral when you’re questioning suspects.”

  “So you’re off-duty, are you, when you show that you’re disillusioned with Chris?”

  “I don’t show that I’m disillusioned with Chris, because I’m not.”

  “Chris thinks you are.”

  “Then Chris expects a lot too much uncritical adulation.”

  “There you are! You wouldn’t have thought that a few weeks ago.”

  “It’s just that over tim
e one sees around a subject, sees it or him from all angles. Take these ‘personal problem’ programs on television: Do they do anything but harm by parading exhibitionists before a mass audience to pour out what passes for their souls? OK, that’s different to what Chris does, but he does give rise to a notion that he can solve problems, rather than just help by listening to them. I have this feeling that the person who has the problem needs to look into himself and solve it.”

  “You’re an old-fashioned nonconformist type.”

  “Maybe,” said Charlie, getting up from their table. “I think my attitude comes from my mother. She’s an expert in creating problems and then solving them. As I was growing up that usually meant turfing out unsatisfactory men . . . Two—no four—cappuccinos, please.”

  The girl behind the cash desk was looking at him with calf eyes.

  “Hello, Mr. Peace,” she said, talking through her nose. “I met you when you came to arrest my brother.” She handed him his change and he dropped a coin into the saucer on the desk. “You did it ever so nicely.”

  “Well,” said Charlie as they went out into the street, “she’s got an original line in chat-up patter, but I don’t care for the accent.”

  “I hated Midlands accents when I first heard them, but it was only a matter of months before I didn’t notice them at all.”

  They drove across the wasteland that was Keighley Moor, then on the steep road to Halifax. For the first miles Alison was silent, but then she came out with what was on her mind.

  “Have you read today’s papers?”

  “Not yet. Why?”

  “Review of The Wild Duck. The two I read while I was waiting in Leeds Infirmary were full of praise for Desmond Pinkhurst’s performance. ‘Frail and infinitely touching’ was one. ‘Rare moments of feeling come from Desmond Pinkhurst’s funny and clever portrayal of Old Ekdal.’ ”

  “Good. I’m happy for him. He’ll be enormously chuffed.”

  “He will. And it will give him the confidence to take on other things if they get offered.”

  “Best not take on King Lear if that’s offered,” said Charlie. “I suspect he could do the pathos but not the grandeur.”

  “Maybe. But I’m just trying to say that Chris can do good, and quite often he does.”

  “I’m sure he does.”

  “He’s a good man, Charlie. I’m not just talking as a wife. I love Chris, but I also like him. Often the two don’t go together. And I like him because he’s warm and caring and wants to help people. That’s why he went into medicine. Probably if he’d just consulted his own inclinations he would have gone to art school. But he needed to do good and to see it working. And because he couldn’t give less than all of himself he hated all the conveyor-belt diagnosis and treatment that he was forced to provide as a consultant. But one day he’ll go back to it, maybe as a GP, maybe in the third world—whatever. We take so many doctors from poor countries that can’t afford to lose them that I can see him wanting to go there and in a tiny way redress the balance. You may be skeptical, even cynical—I expect that goes with your job. But you’ll see: there’s a practical, down-to-earth side to Chris’s character, and it’ll be put to good use before long.”

  Charlie left a pause, then said, “I’m sure you’re right. You know him best.”

  Soon they were driving up one of Halifax’s daunting hills toward Westowram. When they got to the Carlsons’ stone house, set imposingly back from the road, Chris was loading posters and improvised banners into the back of his car.

  “Hi, Charlie! Picking up other people’s wives now, are you? I’m just taking these to headquarters, love, and then I’ll be back to hear about your day. I’ll cook dinner—or get a takeaway if we’ve got nothing in.”

  Charlie watched Alison kiss her husband, thinking there was an element of a mother kissing a beloved child. Then he drove the two-minute route to home.

  While Felicity, with help from Carola, made the evening meal he thought over the last hour, and what it meant. He had purposely not asked Alison any questions. It would have been so easy to say, “Where was he working as a consultant?” at various points in the conversation, but he had held back. With most other people (not just suspects) such questions would have been perfectly natural, but now he realized both Chris and Alison did not want to talk about their past, and the questions might have resulted in an embarrassing blackout curtain descending that would ruin their friendship. And that would have been disastrous at any time, but particularly now. During the whole conversation Alison had not given the tiniest indication of where she and Chris originated and where they had worked. Only the remark about the Midlands accent of the girl on the till, made when she was off her guard, had given any indication at all, and that could have referred to a move her family had made in her childhood. Such secretiveness in a couple who were much occupied with the doings of other people was surely unnatural.

  And yet, for all that, he was inclined to accept Alison’s assurances that Chris was what he had first seemed when they had met in the village square: warm, intensely alive, genuinely more interested in everybody else rather than himself. All the things about Chris that had begun to seem self-promotional were also explicable as a result of this strong care for others and their happiness.

  Many of his ideas and actions could be naive and mistaken. The mayoral ambitions would surely turn out to be a delusion: if he won the contest to be mayor of Halifax he would find himself impotent to bring in any changes. He would be no more than a figurehead, stymied at every turn by the party politics of the council members. When all was said and done, Chris was trying to bring about a change of heart—something miles away from the ambitions and mendacities of party politics in this or any other democratic society. What good could an individual do, even at a local level, to change people’s psyches, elevate their hopes and ambitions? Charlie could not avoid a thought that echoed one of Alison’s: that for Chris the physician there was a future of undoubted usefulness; but for Chris the agony uncle, only one of frustration and failure.

  “She mentioned the Midlands,” he said as he wound up his account of the conversation with Alison to Felicity, over their pork chops. “The accent, and how horrible it sounds at first hearing. It didn’t sound as if the experience she had of it was when she was a child. I’m going to tell Mike Oddie to concentrate his attention on the Midlands.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Trouble Way Back

  It was nearly a week later—a week in which Charlie had been busy with yet another demanding case involving municipal corruption in Bradford—that he and Felicity sat in the house that was gradually becoming “their” house, and she watched as he crumbled toast and toyed uninterestedly with the scrambled egg.

  “You’re bored and frustrated, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes. I won’t ask how you know. There are probably fifty different indicators that give me away.”

  “There are. And you’re frustrated because you’ve been stymied in your urge to investigate Dad’s death.”

  “Of course.”

  “Which police regulations, quite rightly, as you keep saying, stop you doing.”

  “Yes, quite rightly. It would be ridiculous otherwise. But that doesn’t stop me wanting to.”

  “You sound rather like a spoilt child. But since neither you nor I was that, I’ll treat it as an automatic reaction to a murder on your own doorstep. What you want to do, I take it, is to go round and interview a few suspects, possible witnesses and so on?”

  “If there’d been any possible witnesses in the quarry they’d surely have come forward by now. The quarry in late afternoon on a Sunday in December isn’t likely to attract crowds.”

  “A point worth considering. Why was Dad there?”

  “Yes, true. Of course the person I would really like to have across the table in an interview room is my very self-confident acquaintance Anne Michaels.”

  “I bet,” said Felicity. “I presume self-confidence is a quality alm
ost always fatal in a witness.”

  “Never say always, but usually. But there’s no question of talking to her because if Ben Costello got on to it—and he quite likely would, because Anne Michaels would probably talk, even boast about it, to her little circle of admirers—he would make sure the powers that be in the West Yorkshire Police came down like a ton of bricks on my head. So there’s a big ‘No Entry’ sign up, as far as she’s concerned.”

  “And we have no one else who might be second-best to talk to. Anne seems to have acted on her own in her machinations with Dad.”

  Charlie was spreading marmalade on cold toast when an idea seemed to strike both of them simultaneously.

  “There is—”

  They looked at each other.

  “Did you transmit that idea to me, or me to you?” asked Felicity.

  “Doesn’t matter. ‘With all my worldly goods’ and so on. Is it the same idea? Who is there?”

  “I don’t know her name. The other leader of the children’s gang.”

  “Yes,” agreed Charlie enthusiastically. “And talking to her would be a lot easier than talking to Anne Michaels. Ben Costello may very well not be on to her, may not even know that there were two leaders of the gang. Come to that, he may not be interested in the gang at all. The interest he must have—or ought to have—in Anne Michaels springs from her connection with your father.”

  “How do we find out her name?”

  Charlie pondered.

  “Any of the children could tell us. Then talk immediately, so that wouldn’t do. What about a parent? Would you trust Mrs. Postgate to keep quiet if you sounded her out?”

  “The mother, yes. Not the daughter.”

  “Could you get on the phone to her, try to see if she knows anything? If she’s got a chatterbox of a child it’s quite likely that she’s been told something, or has overheard something, since you were there.”

  “I’ll talk to her today, or tomorrow if I’m too busy at work. I need to catch her alone at home, I think. Right. I’m off to Leeds and teaching—”