by Paul Charles
‘No, you don’t understand. I can’t give it to you. I need to be able to give it to him. He’s going to be mad at me. I don’t like it when he’s mad.’
It didn’t take much stone-walling from the detectives before Judy went to the fridge, followed closely by Irvine, and returned with a cold set of photocopies of Esther Bluewood’s unique but very readable writing.
All Judy’s continued protests were in vain.
Kennedy thought, she doth protest too much, as he and Irvine escaped the rain for the comfort of the car and the return to the comfort and safety of North Bridge House, where a cup of tea would only be minutes away.
Chapter 28
CONSIDERING THAT Mrs Violet Bluewood was (a) at least sixty, (b) had recently lost her daughter in circumstances which could only be described as suspicious, and (c) had just spent seven hours breathing in recycled air at 35,000 feet, she was in remarkably good fettle, added to which, Anne Coles was surprised at her mildness, as – thanks to the stories she’d heard about Esther and her mother – she’d been half expecting an ogress.
‘You know,’ Bluewood senior began, immediately adopting a familiarity usually reserved between friends of several years’ standing, ‘I have this emptiness inside of me, I keep feeling I should break down and cry or something. Sadly, I haven’t the capacity for that. Edna, that’s my good friend in the States who took me to the airport, she didn’t really need to do that, you know, I could have just as easily got a cab, but she wanted to, so I thought it would have been a little ungracious not to have allowed her; anyway, Edna was saying to me, “Vi”, my real name’s Violet, but my friends all call me Vi, I’ll never know why, but where were we? Yes, Edna said, “Vi, you’re just going to be strong and then the dam will burst and the tears will come”.’
Violet ‘Vi’ Bluewood could have won any glamorous granny competition she chose to enter. She was wearing an ice-blue two-piece suit with a waisted jacket. It looked good but the effect was spoiled by the brown shirt she was wearing. She didn’t have the kind eyes one usually finds with grandmothers, more those of a neighbour you tolerate rather than become friends with. She sported an auburn, short-haired curly wig, or at least Coles thought it was a wig. Violet’s make-up was thick, as though she first covered all visible facial surface with a base and then painted a face on top. The overall effect was, Coles thought, a presentation of who she wanted to be, rather than who she was; something like Hillary Clinton. Yes, a lot like Hillary Clinton, Coles thought.
They were sitting in the hotel lobby of the Marriot at Swiss Cottage, formerly the Holiday Inn, sharing coffee and biscuits. The illusion of space, which the hotel tried to create by dividing the lobby into lots of small areas, hadn’t really come off and, unless you actually sat in the reception area, it could be quite stifling. Coles was thankful, nonetheless, that they were occupying one of these small compartments off the main area, as it afforded her and Mrs Violet Bluewood complete privacy.
‘Have you spoken with Paul Yeats, yet?’ Coles asked.
‘What, since the death, or since I got here? If both, the answers would be yes and no, in that order,’ Violet replied.
‘How was he?’
‘Well, he seemed a little like myself, shell-shocked. Not really knowing how to feel, if the truth be told,’ Violet said. ‘I think that may be because I rarely saw Esther these days – different continents, let alone spoke to her – different time zones. So, you see, in a way, she was out of my focus, awareness, as it were, so it’s hard to miss her. What I mean is if she lived around the corner and I saw her every day and was always nipping in for coffee and a chat, then it would probably be a much bigger loss and I would be feeling differently, wouldn’t I?’
‘You know,’ Coles started, not sure what she should say, ‘we all deal with our grief in our own private ways.’
‘I think Paul is numb because he feels he failed her, you know, wasn’t around when she needed him. He’s convinced she took her own life.’
‘And you?’ Coles asked.
‘No way,’ was the stern and firm reply.
‘Even with her earlier…’ Coles searched for the correct word.
‘Sickness?’ Violet was polite and generous with her assistance, helping Coles out of a tricky situation.
‘Yes.’
‘No. Sorry. That was a bit of silliness that Esther had to go through. I know, and God knows, I’ve paid for most of her therapy, that she talked to people until she was blue in the face and she dealt with her problems and resolved them. But that was all when she was much younger. You have to realise that Esther was a much-changed woman since she’d had her songs on the radio and was married and had children. She’s very resourceful and determined. She was no longer one to waste her life. I always thought that’s why there was a bit of an air between her and me, you know, because I’d known both of the Esther Bluewoods. Few people did. Maybe she’s rather ashamed of the younger one and when she dealt with me she’d be acknowledging the younger one existed, and I think she was rather ashamed of the way she dealt with things in those days.’
‘Did you ever talk about it?’
‘Oh, my dear, you obviously didn’t know Esther,’ Violet began, warming to the memory of her daughter. ‘Everything was black and white with her. She would have totally disowned me years ago if I hadn’t kept persisting, refusing to go away, refusing to give up on her, as it were.’
The waiter brought the bill. Violet took a pair of pink horn-rimmed glasses out of her bag and put them on as she checked it. ‘What’s the rate of the dollar to the pound these days? I need to know what this costs in real money, honey.’
The waiter didn’t know. Coles suggested it might be around one dollar forty to a pound sterling.
‘Would you like anything else?’ Violet asked Coles.
‘No, I’m fine, ta.’
‘You don’t fancy a cigarette, do you?’ Violet asked, a hint of desperation creeping in.
‘No, thanks, I gave up a few years ago.’
‘Do you mind if I do? I’m actually gagging for a ciggy, as Paul Yeats would say.’
‘Totally fine,’ Coles said, and a pack of something American and a new pot of coffee were ordered.
‘I hate to smoke by myself and I hate others doing it in the same room. Sorry, where were we?’ Esther Bluewood’s unlikely mother asked.
‘You were saying you didn’t agree with Paul Yeats on whether or not Esther committed suicide.’
‘Yes, that’s right. I mean, it’s not right. She didn’t commit suicide, positively not,’ Violet said, as her cigarettes arrived. They’d already been opened and presented more like a box of delicious chocolates than the leaves of tar and nicotine destined to eat and eventually destroy the cells of the human body. The waiter offered her a cigarette, she accepted, and he extended his other hand with a lighter already in flame. She held his hand to steady the flame close to the top of the cigarette. She took that first important drag and closed her eyes as she did so, continuing to keep a hold on the waiter’s hand. She blew the smoke out, turning her head to the right, away from the waiter and Coles, and guarded it behind her hand. ‘Thank you, honey, that was just great for me,’ she said to the waiter. ‘Sorry, that was crass, wasn’t it?’ she said to Coles, as the waiter walked away.
‘Ah…’
‘Not to worry,’ Violet continued, unperturbed, ‘let’s get back to Esther. Look, tell you the truth, Esther didn’t really try very hard the first time. She could have killed herself, if she had wanted to. I know that must sound terribly cruel to you. But she could have gone to the forest behind our house and no one would ever have found her. I do mean ever. Instead, she took some pills and went and hid in a place she and her brother had always gone to – the basement. No, that was just Esther crying for attention. She was forever seeking attention since way before her father died. He was a cold fish, I don’t even know what it was I ever saw in him. Maybe it was his brain, it certainly wasn’t…’
The ‘glam gran’ had
obviously thought better of finishing her sentence.
I’ll bet she’s a wild one after a few G&Ts, Coles thought, but asked, ‘When was the last time you and Esther spoke?’
‘She rang me on Thursday of last week.’
‘How did she sound?’
‘She sounded fine, same as usual. She was even threatening to come over soon with the kids. She said it was going to get a bit hot in London and she’d be better out of it until things quietened down.’
‘Did you have any idea what she was referring to?’ Coles asked.
‘Not really, not at all, in fact. She never really went into personal things with me. She kept most things to herself. She’d be quite obscure, saying things like “Paul’s not around much”, which I took to mean he was cheating on her. But there was nothing new in that. He was doing that early on in their relationship.’
‘What do you think she was talking about, when she said, “things might get a bit hot in London”?’ Coles asked.
‘Again, I assumed it must have something to do with Paul, maybe she was planning to leave him. But I learned never to ask her personal or potentially embarrassing questions. If I got into stuff she didn’t want to talk about, she wouldn’t ring me again for ages, and all the letters I’d write would go unanswered. So I used to write letters without questions, which pretty well made them ramblings. But what else could it have been, other than Paul? She’d no business problems to speak of, or at least that I was aware of. She always talked about stuff like that. I think it was because she thought it was above my head. When Esther and I spoke on the phone it was like making a duty call. We both felt we should be making some kind of effort to stay in touch, but we had little time for each other really. I know it’s horrible to admit, but it’s the truth.’
Coles felt that was very sad. Violet may have been honest, but her honesty didn’t hide the sadness of the situation.
As Coles left the hotel, she resolved to ring her mum that very evening and have a good old-fashioned natter with her.
Chapter 29
‘OH NO, not again.’ This was Paul Yeats’ greeting to Kennedy and Irvine as he opened the door to 123 Fitzroy Road. It was five o’clock on the Wednesday evening, and Kennedy was keenly aware that the third day of the case was drawing to a close.
‘Oh yes,’ Kennedy announced. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘We didn’t. We tried on the off chance,’ Kennedy admitted.
‘I shouldn’t have answered the door. Ah well, you’re here now, you might as well come in,’ Yeats announced, finding some manners hidden in the dark recesses of his mind.
The kitchen, the very same one where Esther Bluewood had met her end, was still sealed with police ‘do not cross’ tape, and Yeats had camped in the small living room. Kennedy couldn’t work out how Yeats was managing to stay there, so soon after the death of his wife. Was there anything to be read into that, he wondered? The living room reminded Kennedy of a hippie squat in the sixties. Yeats was sleeping on the sofa but had not tidied away the bed linen. Nor had he cleared away a few days’ worth of pizza boxes, polystyrene coffee cups, ashtrays filled with pipe scrapings and burnt matches, soiled shirts, dirty socks, newspapers. A guitar case was lying open on the table, a guitar resting half in and half out of it, with a sheaf of pages scattered all around it.
‘I’ve been trying to do a bit of writing, to be honest. I felt it was important I did it here. The songs are about here and I felt I needed to do them in her space. I realise that’s quite morbid. But in literary circles it’s not unusual for one writer to tune into the muse of another,’ Yeats said. He was dressed in his usual uniform of brown corduroy suit with crew-neck jumper. The suit was a constant but the jumper colour varied to suit his mood. Today it was a bottle green.
All three stood in a relatively small space. There were no seats available to sit on. Yeats had them all burdened down with bric-a-brac. The sofa, with the worn bed linen, looked about as inviting as a pot of stale Irish stew. So, with Yeats’ hands deep in his pockets, occasionally taking his right one out for a few seconds to run through his curly hair, Irvine and Kennedy looked like two students summoned to the master’s untidy study for a dressing down.
‘How’s is it coming, then?’ Kennedy felt obliged to ask.
‘Ha, talk about struggling for your art,’ Yeats began. ‘The songwriting lark is not as easy as it used to be. Perhaps I’m too old to rock and too young to die.’
He paused to think about what he’d just said. It seemed he’d impressed himself, because he wrote down the line ‘too old to rock and too young to die’ on his legal pad. He viewed it, tried to hum some melody to fit, gave up and returned the pad to the top of the guitar case.
‘Tell me, did you and Esther ever write songs together?’ Kennedy asked, fighting for Yeats’ attention.
‘Sadly not, I mean in the early days when we met we used to write loads in each other’s company, and sometimes she’d tighten up some of my stuff and I’d do the same for her. But they were never really co-writes. I don’t think either of us was capable of that. It seemed somewhat too calculated. Even the great Lennon and McCartney wrote their own parts of their songs. Sometimes, even though their songs were always credited to the both of them, one of them would have been responsible for the lion’s share, if not all, of the writing.’
Kennedy felt something wasn’t right about the situation. He still couldn’t understand how the husband of a young woman, the mother of his two children, who had died very recently (not to mention in such tragic circumstances), could carry on as normal, business as usual. Well, not even business as usual; he was writing songs, ‘in her muse’ he claimed. But, apart from all of that, Paul Yeats hadn’t even mentioned the situation with Rosslyn. Nor had Kennedy. At the beginning of the conversation, Kennedy had avoided the issue in the hope Yeats would introduce it. Now it was getting to the point of embarrassment. If Yeats genuinely didn’t know about the recent developments then Kennedy felt it was cruel not to enlighten him.
‘Tell me, have you spoken to Rosslyn St Clair today?’ Kennedy asked, as if the idea had just dawned on him.
‘No. To be honest, all things considered, I thought it important we put a bit of space between us,’ Yeats answered, hand out of pocket and scratching his chin in a ‘how about this for a theory?’ pose.
‘So you didn’t know she was in hospital?’ Irvine asked.
‘Hospital? Where? Why? What happened?’ Yeats said, apparently panic-stricken.
‘Well, sir, from what we can gather, she’d an abortion and, well…it was not done professionally, and she was found by two of our colleagues just in the nick of time. They got her to hospital,’ Irvine added, sympathy creeping into his voice.
‘Abortion? Surely there’s some mistake? Abortion? Impossible. She wasn’t even preg… It must be a case of mistaken identity,’ Yeats spluttered.
‘No, sir, it’s definitely Miss St Clair. One of the neighbours confirmed it, before she was taken to hospital.’
‘God, I’ve got to get to her. I’ve got to get to her immediately. Poor Ross.’
‘We’ll take you to the railway station,’ Kennedy offered.
‘No. No, I’ll be fine, thanks. If you’re done with me?’ Yeats said, as he started packing some of his dirty clothes, the sheets of paper from the top of the guitar case and his mobile phone which was still lying beside his makeshift bed, into a Marks & Sparks bag.
‘Sure. Sure, that’s fine. We can finish this later. I’m sorry, sir, we thought you knew…’ Kennedy started.
‘Knew? Sure, if I knew I’d be there. I wouldn’t be moping around here,’ Yeats replied, not looking at either policeman. He grabbed the bag and left the house without bidding them goodbye.
‘Well,’ Kennedy started, ‘what did you make of that?’
‘He’s either sincere, or else he’s missed his vocation,’ Irvine replied.
‘Yeah, anyone that good should be on th
e stage, and I’m not sure I mean singing.’
‘You think he knew, then?’
‘I’m convinced he knew. I have the feeling that people like Paul Yeats live on the telephone, the same way Warren Beatty and Van Morrison are supposed to, connecting with their inner circle regularly. I bet he knows everything there is to know,’ Kennedy speculated.
‘But what’s to be gained by appearing not to know?’ Irvine said.
‘Well, for starters, so he’d not be connected with the abortion. Also, it would allow him to pretend he doesn’t know about the pregnancy. If, as Coles suspected, there is a chance Rosslyn St Clair was left to die, he would remove himself from any suspicion in that area,’ Kennedy said. Then he stopped and thought about what he had just said.
‘Does that put him in the frame for the death of his wife, then, sir?’ Irvine asked.
‘Now, there is a question, James,’ Kennedy said, turning to lead his DS out of the untidy room. ‘I suppose it does in a way. He’s lots of motives, maybe even too many. His wife was about to divorce him. Cut him off. He was living way beyond his means. His girlfriend was pregnant. If his soon-to-be ex-wife found out, perhaps it would have speeded things up. Perhaps it would have given her the grounds for kicking him out of the country cottage as well. Maybe he’d lived too long in her shadow, maybe he basked in her reflected glory and knew that was all the glory he was going to enjoy for the rest of his career. And by murdering his wife, he puts himself in a much better financial position, i.e. as the surviving spouse he more than likely inherits everything. When we’re back at the station, remind me to check with Tim Flynn if he managed to track down a will. But also, and maybe more importantly, he gets to control her work. He can remaster and remix her recordings, taking some of the credit for himself.’
‘But would he need to do that? Would it be so important for him to have his name on her recordings?’ Irvine asked.
‘I think so, yes,’ Kennedy said, stopping outside the kitchen door and looking inside the room. He turned his back on the room of death, leaned against the doorpost facing Irvine and continued, ‘Too old to rock, too young to die. I think Yeats is desperate for credit. I think he craves the sort of critical acclaim his wife received. It probably aggrieved him that she got so much acclaim and yet seemed disinterested in it. I think he’s the kind of artist who makes his every move in the hope of the attention he’d going to receive. Whereas Esther just had something she desperately needed to say and she said it in the verses of her songs. She wrote and sang songs not because she wanted to propel herself up the charts, but because she needed to.’ Kennedy stopped and laughed. ‘I don’t believe it, I’m on one of ann rea’s soap boxes.’
