So far, so familiar. Barnaby became resigned. But then Daniel Carter leaned forward. He looked left to right as if about to cross a busy road and seemed on the point of tapping the side of his shiny red nose.
“Now if it was Alan who had disappeared, you wouldn’t have to look far.”
“Really? Why is that?” countered the Chief Inspector.
“You should know,” said Elsie. “You’re the fuzz.”
“He was had up for it?”
“Gray Patterson.”
“GBH.”
“Common assault, weren’t it?”
“Same difference.”
“All over some theft or other,” said the landlord. “They worked together, see, him and Hollingsworth. Partners supposedly, in this computer business. Pen something.”
“Penstemon,” shouted deaf Elsie.
“That’s it. Then, according to the report at the magistrates’ hearing, Patterson designed some new programme or whatever they reckon to call it. Something really special that should have made him thousands. And Alan ripped him off.”
“Stole it like.” A fat man, having finished his steak and kidney pie, chipped in for the first time.
“I don’t know all the ins and outs,” continued Daniel Carter, “but there weren’t half a ruckus. Ended with Patterson blowing his top.”
“Is that right?” asked Barnaby.
“Beat the shit out of Mr. H,” said the old lady, daintily tipping back her glass.
“Now he’s stony-broke, Gray. Owes money on the house, can’t sell it, can’t move. In schtuck, as the saying goes.”
“I heard he was trying to let.”
Barnaby finished his drink. He would have thought it excellent had he never been exposed to the velvety soft bitter sweetness of the Irish version. A year ago he and Joyce had been in Sligo for the Music Festival and the Guinness had been a revelation. The difference, they told him, lay in the water.
Troy, having finished banging and thumping and cursing Astaroth and Co. was now leaning up against the machine chatting to a youth who was banging, thumping and cursing in his turn. Now, catching the boss’s eye, he murmured, “Cheers, mate,” and moved towards the door.
“Get anything?” said the Chief Inspector as they walked back down the lane.
“Only that Mrs. Hollingsworth was a great looker but seemingly kept it all for her husband. Bloke I was talking to’s the brother of the bird who cleans for that old woman.”
“Which old woman? This place is swarming with them.”
“That daft one who came in to see you.”
“Not so daft, as things are turning out.”
Since the event of Perrot’s Open Text report, Barnaby had thought more than once of the eccentrically dressed and supersonically bewigged Mrs. Molfrey. His memory of their recent meeting had become imbued with a charming piquancy which he feared had not been present at the time. He didn’t really want to talk to her again, suspecting she might well turn out simply to be a chaotic-minded and garrulous old bore.
“What about you, chief?” said Troy. “Any luck?”
“If it turns out we’re looking at murder, I’ve a nice juicy suspect. Someone who beat up Hollingsworth after the man had apparently swindled him out of a lot of money.”
Troy whistled. “No longer Mr. Nice Guy then, our Alan.”
“If he ever was.”
They had reached Nightingales. There were a handful of people outside but, as the gates were closed and the constable on the front doorstep was a silent and unforthcoming stranger, no one lingered.
“Got a message for you, sir,” said the constable. “Lady next door, to the left, wanted a word with a senior person.”
PC Ramsey had got this information from his colleague guarding the rear of the house. Apparently Kevin, hearing a rustle just beyond the fence, had gone to investigate and found a face peering at him through a tangle of green stuff. The whispered request having been delivered, the face vanished, as if its owner had been sharply pulled away.
Barnaby, wrongly assuming a prurient interest in the goings-on at the Hollingsworths, made his way to The Larches. Troy rapped on the fruit-gum panels. They moved inwards, as if by magic.
Barnaby called out, “Hullo?”
“Come in.”
The words, whispered from directly behind the door, were barely audible. The two detectives stepped inside.
Ten minutes later, though the tension in the room twanged like a harp, Barnaby had still not been told exactly why they were there. He sat on a sofa eating a sandwich so fine it dissolved on the tongue like a Communion wafer. It was thinly filled with bland, almost tasteless cheese and had a droopy fringe of cress. It was also ice-cold. Mrs. Brockley obviously kept her bread in the fridge. Barnaby’s teeth had started to ache and he drank some tea hoping to warm them up.
The Brockleys were looking at each other. Not the silent “You,” “No, you” matey joshing that couples sometimes go in for. Their glances did not quite meet. His seemed to say, don’t you dare. Hers was harder to read. She was plainly distressed and under a lot of strain but she was also angry. Her eyes glittered.
“You asked us to come round, Mrs. Brockley?” said the Chief Inspector, not for the first time.
“Yes.” She looked directly at him and he realised that her eyes were glittering not with anger but with tears. “Something very—”
“Iris!”
“We’ll have to talk to them sooner or later.”
“You needn’t have asked them here. The whole place will know.”
Barnaby, becoming impatient with all this prevarication, attempted reassurance. “Mr. Brockley, we are going to be carrying out a house-to-house inquiry shortly regarding Mrs. Hollingsworth’s—”
“What’s that? House to . . . ?”
“It means everyone in the village will be visited. I’m sure, once this gets underway, people will simply think we happened to start here.”
“You see,” cried Iris.
Reg seemed unconvinced. Looking at them both, the word “corseted” entered Barnaby’s mind. Practically obsolete in these days of teddys and bodys, Lycra and Spandex, but a word surely made flesh by these two rigorously constrained people. Tightly-laced, pushed and pulled and whaleboned into a respectably shaped life that was beyond reproach. A life that surely could not properly breathe.
“Our daughter’s disappeared.”
It was Iris who had spoken. Reg covered his face with his hands as if suddenly exposed to public shame.
“Brenda went out on Monday evening in the car. Rather suddenly, actually. When she wasn’t back by ten—”
“She did ring up Inspector,” interrupted her husband.
“That was two days ago,” shouted Iris.
Sergeant Troy, sussing that he was about to partake in the most boring non-event in the history of mankind, polished off his fourth scone, scooped up a couple of chocolate biscuits and let his attention wander. He glanced at the clock yet again.
It was hard to miss this splendid timepiece. Wherever one looked in the room its movement caught the eye. Diamanté numerals on a black velvet face and golden hands. On the tip of the minute hand perched a large pink and yellow butterfly with sequined wings and long wobbly antennae. Every sixty seconds it jumped forward and Troy’s nerves were starting to jump with it.
“Is she usually back by ten, Mrs. Brockley?” asked Barnaby.
“No,” said Reg. “She doesn’t go out, you see.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Well, to work of course. And occasionally shopping.”
“But not at night.”
“How old is Brenda?”
“Twenty-nine.” Though Barnaby’s face remained expressionless, Iris must have sensed incredulity, for she added, “I realise she’s not a child but she’s never, ever done anything like this before.”
“In her entire life,” said Reg.
“So when did she telephone?”
“About nine o’clock. Said sh
e was staying with a friend.”
“Not staying with,” Reg corrected his wife. “Just with. As in being with. Talking to.”
“We didn’t even know she had a friend,” said Iris with unconscious pathos.
Even if she had not been twenty-nine, Troy, having glanced at the elaborately framed studio portrait on the sideboard, would not have given her as much as the wax from his ears. Talk about a dog. Worst in show at Crufts and then you were insulting the canines. No point tuning up your whanger for that one.
“It’s all very well her saying not to worry,” said Iris. “But of course we did.”
“All night long.”
“And in the morning . . .”
They had argued for nearly two hours about ringing Brenda’s office. Iris, black shadows round her eyes, was a thousand per cent for, Reg totally against at first then wavering in the face of his wife’s extreme agitation. They had faced each other over the unlaid kitchen table—breakfast would have choked them—torn between doing what was socially acceptable and correct and easing the sick uncertainty in their hearts.
“What on earth will they think?”
“Fiddle to what they think.”
“It’s not business etiquette, Iris.”
“I don’t care.”
“Personal calls are frowned on. Brenda’s always been very hot on that.”
“You don’t have to talk to—”
“We’ll get her into trouble.”
“Just ask if she’s there. Say it’s business. Pretend to be a customer.”
“She’ll be home at half past six.”
“I can’t wait nine hours,” screamed Iris.
So, to the accompaniment of his wife wailing and the poodle barking, Reg had rung the Coalport and National Building Society. He had been put on hold and exposed to a bagpipe and electric organ rendering of “Ye Banks and Braes,” a tune that, for the rest of his life, he could never listen to without a cold and nauseous upsurge of reminiscent dread.
Eventually he was transferred to Personnel to be told that Miss Brockley had not arrived for work that morning and that there was no message. After Reg put the phone down, he and Iris had sat very quietly for a long time. Even Shona crept back to her basket uninstructed.
The next twenty four hours crawled by. The Brockleys couldn’t eat. Cups of tea were made and stood around, uncoastered, on various pieces of furniture until they were stone cold.
It was Iris, by Wednesday morning nearly demented, who had seen the policeman in the Hollingsworths’ back garden and impulsively spoken to to him. Reg had hurried to stop her, a second too late.
“Do you think,” Barnaby was asking now, “that this was a boyfriend she was referring to?”
The Brockleys opposed this suggestion with what the Chief Inspector could not help thinking was a ridiculous degree of certainty. After all their daughter was nearly thirty and, even if her social life was somewhat limited, must have met plenty of men in the course of her work. Brenda’s photograph was on the edge of Barnaby’s sight-lines and registered only as part of the background.
“Nothing like that,” Reg was saying.
“Brenda’s a most particular girl.”
“We’ve brought her up to be very choosy.”
“Tell me again if you would,” said Barnaby, “about the phone call. Her actual words, if you remember them.”
If they remembered them! The eager, breathless sentences were engraved on both their hearts.
“Daddy, I might not be home for a little while. I’ve run into a friend. We’re going for something to eat. Don’t worry if I’m a bit late. See you soon. Bye.”
“The strange thing was—”
“Apart from getting such a message in the first place,” Iris interjected.
“—she seemed to be speaking from a railway station.”
“Oh yes?” said Barnaby.
Troy glanced covertly at his watch and yawned inwardly, stretching his lips without parting them and lifting the roof of his mouth. He glanced covetously at the rest of the chocolate wafers. Amazing, no matter what state people were in they always made some tea and prised open the biccy box.
“There was a lot of background noise,” explained Reg.
“Announcements.”
“Well, Mr. Brockley,” Barnaby got up, his large frame blocking half the light from the window, “I suggest the best thing to do, if you haven’t heard from Brenda by tomorrow, is to come into the station and register her as a missing person.”
“The police station?”
“That’s right.”
“Couldn’t you do that for us now, Mr. Barnaby?” said Iris.
“I’m afraid not. There are certain procedures to be followed. Forms to be completed.” Barnaby did not add, as many of his colleagues seemed so easily able to do, I’m sure everything will be all right. He had knocked on too many doors and had to tell too many distraught families that the situation regarding their children was very much not all right.
They were shown out through the kitchen. Troy stopped at the poodle’s basket, bent down and patted the dog. Fondled its dejected ears.
“She’ll be back soon,” he said cheerily. “Keep your tail up.”
The preliminary stages of the postmortem were completed by six o’clock. The full report would not be on the Chief Inspector’s desk until the following afternoon but George Bullard rang the results through straightaway.
Alan Hollingsworth had died from an overdose of the tranquilliser Haloperidol in a solution of whisky. There was no food in the stomach. The drug was available only by prescription under various brand names usually in 0.5 milligram capsules. As near as could be reasonably assessed, around six or seven milligrams had been taken. No capsule casings appeared to have been swallowed. There were no unexplained marks on the body. The heart, lungs and other internal organs were sound.
“Good for another forty years,” concluded Dr. Bullard.
“What about times?”
“Late Monday night, I’d say. Or early Tuesday. It’s hard to be more precise after forty-eight hours.”
“Oh, come on, George.” Silently he cursed Constable Perrot.
“Sorry.”
Barnaby sighed then said, “Would such a dosage be enough to kill someone?”
“Probably. Especially with all that booze. From the way he was lying I’d say he took the stuff sitting on the sofa then, when he became unconscious, just rolled off. The rug was very thick and, let’s face it, dying is about as physically relaxed as you can get. Which was why he wasn’t bruised.”
“And what’s this about ‘no casings?’ Are you saying he took the stuff in tablet form?”
“Couldn’t have. Only made up in capsules.”
“Hang on.” Barnaby paused and felt again that strange and unsubstantiated conviction which had visited him when he first saw Alan Hollingsworth’s body. “Isn’t it bitter? The stuff in these tranquillisers?”
“Sometimes. Not in this case. Haloperidol’s pretty tasteless.”
“Wouldn’t the casings have dissolved anyway?”
“Perhaps. But there’d still be traces of gelatin in the stomach.”
“Right. Thanks, George.”
So there it was. A straightforward enough story. A man’s wife has left him. He tries to drown his sorrow in drink. But drink wears off. More must be taken, which in its turn will also wear off. And so on and wretchedly on. Much better to end it once and for all.
So, having been driven to this miserable conclusion, what does Hollingsworth do? Chuck the tablets in his mouth, wash them down with hooch and get it over with? No, he sits on the settee, carefully pulls the sixteen or so gelatin capsules apart, tips the contents into his glass and stirs till dissolved. Then disposes neatly of the cases. It was possible, of course. Some people would behave with such neatness and precision even in extremis—the Brockleys for example. But that was not how the dead man had acted so far. He had shown nothing but shambolic desperation.
&n
bsp; Though still wary of setting a full-scale investigation in motion, Barnaby now saw his next step as unavoidable. And so it was that early the next morning a Sherpa van turned into St. Chad’s Lane. Shortly afterwards, Scenes of Crime, to the intense excitement and satisfaction of the village, unloaded their stuff and set in motion the austere and impersonal machinery of investigation.
Chapter Four
Notified that his car was ready, Barnaby, rejecting the lift, made his way downstairs. Huffing and puffing to and from the car park to his room was practically the only regular exercise he got these days. He discounted gardening which was necessarily intermittent and, as his plot was now so old and well-established, involved very little in the way of hard digging.
He had quite a distance to huff and puff. In common with the headquarters of many civil businesses, the higher a person’s rank in the police force the further away from the ground floor his or her office would usually be found. The Chief Super was rumoured to reside in the crow’s nest, a steel and plastic anti-lightning device screwed halfway up the radio mast on the roof of the main building.
Passing through reception Barnaby noticed the Brockleys and could see straightaway that the stays of their lives had loosened further. They were sitting side by side in comfortless polystyrene shells. Plainly their daughter had not returned. There was a sad reversal in the manner of their appearance. Reg now looked as ill and distraught as had his wife the previous day. Iris sat like a rock. Her tightly folded arms pressed a framed photograph hard against her chest. Her face, though expressionless, was savagely compressed, appearing to spread outwards. She looked like the lemon on the old squash advertisement: Idris When I’s Dry.
They had indeed waited, as Barnaby suggested, almost another whole day before reporting Brenda missing. Such subjection to authority in a situation like this seemed to him almost unbelievable. Ridiculous even. He was about to go over when a policewoman came out from behind the desk and approached them.
Faithful unto Death Page 10
