Blood Sinister

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Maybe she’d found out something about him – some nasty secret,’ Hollis suggested.

  ‘I should have thought that was a biographer’s dream,’ Atherton pointed out. ‘It’d make her happy, not miserable.’

  ‘Yeah, but if the papers are missing – all the stuff she did on Tyler,’ Anderson began.

  ‘Well, we don’t know they are,’ said Swilley fairly. ‘We only know we haven’t found them. She might have sent them to someone. Or be keeping them somewhere else.’

  ‘Anyway, if a rival biographer had stolen the papers, I don’t see why he would have killed her,’ said Atherton. ‘That’s a bit extreme, wouldn’t you say? I mean, I know the literary world is cut-throat, but surely not literally.’

  ‘Anyway, she’d apparently stopped work on that,’ Swilley said. ‘Stopped her researcher, anyway.’

  ‘We do know from several sources that she was deeply worried about something,’ Slider said, ‘and I think our best bet is that the murder’s connected with that. But what was it?’

  ‘It’s got to be something in her life, some area we haven’t uncovered,’ Hollis said. ‘Something she was involved in or someone from her past who had a grudge against her.’

  ‘Yes, I can’t believe it was just random,’ Slider said. ‘But it’s hard to see what Piers Prentiss had to do with it. There doesn’t seem to be any mystery about him.’

  ‘Boss,’ said Swilley, ‘it seems to me the one big question mark we’ve got that we haven’t gone into is what she was doing during those years after university when she was so-called missing.’

  ‘Not much of a mystery there,’ Mackay said. ‘She was off protesting, doing the hippie bit.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s a hell of a long time ago,’ Atherton said. ‘Even if you could find out, I doubt if it would have any relevance. Who’s going to hold a grudge for thirty years?’

  ‘Well, you just never know, do you?’ Swilley said, annoyed.

  ‘And nor will you, unless you can find someone to ask.’

  ‘Don’t get snitty, you two,’ Slider intervened.

  McLaren, who had been scratching a bit of egg yolk off his tie with his thumb nail, looked up. ‘You could ask her sister. We’ve not had a go at her yet.’

  There was a brief silence, and then Swilley said, ‘Maurice, that’s a stroke of genius. All those things I said about you – I take ’em back.’

  ‘You said he wasn’t fit to live with pigs,’ Hollis supplied obligingly.

  ‘Well I was wrong,’ said Swilley. ‘He is fit to live with pigs.’

  ‘Har har,’ said McLaren. ‘So what about it, guv?’

  ‘Yes, why not,’ said Slider. ‘But not you. Swilley, you can go and see her.’

  ‘Why does she get all the trips out, just because she’s a bird?’ McLaren said resentfully.

  ‘I want you’, Slider told him, ‘to re-interview the witness who saw the man tying his tie. Try and get a more detailed description from him, and if he thinks he can, get him in to do an e-fit. Atherton, you’re good with women. You can go and see Noni Prentiss again, try and get a better description of the man she saw leaving the house. Hollis, we’re going to go over everything we’ve got so far and look at it from the perspective of Piers Prentiss, see if anything clicks. And Mackay, get our notes on Piers Prentiss and Marjorie Babbington over to Keith Heaveysides at Chelmsford and make sure he keeps us informed of anything that comes up at their end – especially if it turns out that anything was missing from the house. Not goods and chattels, but papers of any kind. Come on, boys and girls, let’s get cracking.’

  The tiny county of Rutland had not only laboured under the disadvantage of being abolished and reinstated by successive governments, subsumed into Leicestershire and then exhumed again, but a large part of it had been drowned by the making of Rutland Water, a vast reservoir. Still, it was pretty country – quintessentially English shire country, of the green rolling hills, woods, river valleys, thick hedges and stone walls variety. Good hunting country – not that Swilley thought of that. She was a Town girl, and green was not her favourite colour. If she went too far from a tube station for any length of time she got the bends.

  Phoebe Agnew’s sister, Chloe Cosworth, lived in a new square stone house, slipped in amongst the old square stone houses, in Upper Hambleton, the village on the tongue of land that stuck out like a jetty into Rutland Water. The tongue had once been a steep hill, rising above Middle and Nether Hambletons, which accounted for its survival: its sister villages were deep under the water.

  Mrs Cosworth was a tall woman in her fifties, as tall as Swilley herself; slim to the point of gauntness, and plain. She had a long face and bad skin – presumably from childhood acne, for it was pocked, and looked thick and puckered over her cheeks. She wore no make-up, and her lips were thin and grey; but her grey hair, cut short, was expensively layered, and her clothes, though dull, were also expensive, so it wasn’t lack of money but by intent that she looked as she did – which was pretty well as different from Phoebe as it was possible to get. Phoebe had been beautiful, wild and untidy; Chloe was plain, conventional and neat.

  The inside of the house was just as much of a contrast with Phoebe’s flat. Everything seemed new and almost grimly clean and shining: reproduction antique furniture, John Lewis fabrics and plain-coloured, thick Wilton carpets. There was no speck of dust, nothing lying around, no newspaper or discarded shoe. It was like a brand new showhouse. The only personal touch was a surprising collection of china figurines, modern mass-produced ones of the sentimental girls-in-long-dresses sort that you see advertised on the backs of colour supplements. It seemed oddly out of character, for Mrs Cosworth was horsily brisk, and her husband, it quickly transpired, owned a very large engineering firm.

  She was perfectly willing to talk, provided Swilley with coffee and a coaster depicting the middle bit of Constable’s The Hay Wain, and settled down in the immaculate, bare living room to tell whatever Swilley wanted to know, and more.

  ‘I haven’t had much to do with Phoebe in recent years,’ she said. She had a toneless voice, rather hard, accentless, as though it too had been purged and swept and redecorated like the house to show nothing. ‘Our lives have always been very different, as you can probably tell. I never approved of the way she carried on, but blood is thicker than water, and I’ve always been willing to see her whenever she wanted to visit. But I suppose as we’ve got older we’ve got more set in our separate ways. It’s not that we’ve fallen out, it’s just that we don’t get around to seeing each other.’ She paused a moment. ‘Well, it’s too late now, of course.’

  ‘Do you mind about that – that it’s too late?’ Swilley asked, curious about this impassivity.

  ‘Of course I mind,’ she said. ‘Phoebe was all the family I had – apart from Nigel, of course, but you don’t count a husband as family, do you?’

  Swilley left that one alone. ‘There were just the two of you? No other brothers or sisters?’

  ‘Just us. Literally.’ She glanced to see if Swilley wanted to know more and, seeing receptiveness, went on to tell, in clipped and unemotional tones, the circumstances. Chloe and Phoebe’s father, headmaster of a private boarding school in Leicestershire, had walked out on his wife and family one summer day during the school holidays and was never seen again. It was one of life’s great mysteries what had happened to him. Phoebe had always inclined to the theory that his bones were lying undiscovered at the bottom of some quarry or lake; Chloe believed he had simply gone off with another woman and successfully changed his identity – still fairly easy to do in the fifties. What their mother thought, she never divulged. The three of them were left particularly badly off, since until he was declared dead, there could be no question of a widow’s pension; and the accommodation had gone with the job.

  Mrs Agnew moved with her children back to Oakham, her home town, took rented accommodation and found a job. Phoebe was ten and Chloe twelve at the time. Swilley gathered, with a bit of reading bet
ween the lines, that Phoebe was her mother’s pet and had also been her father’s: she was very pretty, exceptionally intelligent, bright and lively. Chloe had gone to secondary mod, Phoebe to grammar school; Chloe was doing typing, shorthand and housewifery while Phoebe did Latin, philosophy and higher maths; and Phoebe had a gaggle of boys hanging around the school gates for her every afternoon, where Chloe had only one swain, a very dull boy called Barry, who had short legs and wore glasses and was a swot. The other boys called him Barold. She disliked him in a mild way, but since she was not pretty it was assumed, even by Barold, that she’d be grateful for his lordly attentions.

  Chloe grew up believing in ‘the baby’s’ superiority in every sense, and that the superiority must be nurtured by the rest of them. When their mother died six years later, probably of overwork and underinterest in life, it seemed natural to Chloe that she should support her sister.

  ‘I’d left school at fifteen. I did a secretarial course and then started work with a local firm. But when Mother died Phoebe was ready to go into the sixth form and then on to university. It would have been a crime to make her leave and get a job. So we stuck together. I got a better job with more money, and Phoebe stayed on at school. Once she got into university, she got the full grant, naturally, so the strain was taken off, but it was a hard couple of years.’

  ‘What did you think of her going off to Chile?’ Norma asked, just out of curiosity.

  ‘I never liked her political activities,’ Mrs Cosworth said harshly. ‘And frankly, they’ve been an embarrassment sometimes. Nigel never approved. He’s very – conventional. He’s fifteen years older than me, and his generation has strict ideas about what’s right and wrong.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘I worked at his firm. I was his secretary, in fact.’

  How conventional, thought Norma. It’s nice to hear of old traditions being upheld. He must have been attracted by her youth, she supposed, because she didn’t seem to have any other charisma.

  ‘We married in 1968, when Phoebe was still at university,’ Mrs Cosworth went on. ‘He was very good about helping support her, and giving her a home during the vacations. Not that she was home much – always off somewhere, to some peace camp or something.’

  I bet she was, thought Swilley. Old Nigel must have been a good incentive to stay away.

  ‘But she worried Nigel dreadfully. He was always terrified she was going to get into the papers or end up in gaol. In the end, of course, it was trouble of a different kind she got into, and that was just as bad in its own way.’

  ‘What trouble was that?’ Norma asked, though she had guessed.

  ‘She turned up at our house one day and said, “Chloe I need your help. I’m pregnant.” Just like that.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘It would be – oh, September 1969. It was tactless even by her standards,’ Mrs Cosworth went on, ‘because I’d just had a miscarriage.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  The eyes moved away. ‘It was a bad one,’ she said tonelessly. ‘And I was never able to have a child afterwards. We didn’t know that then, of course. Nigel was furious that Phoebe had dumped this thing on us, but I told him I was the only family she had and we had to help. So he offered to pay for her to have an abortion. He said any child of hers was bound to grow up a criminal so that was the best thing.’

  My God, thought Swilley, as a world of pity opened up before her. She could see it all. The meek, cowed Chloe, grateful for having been married and still under discipline to her boss; the pompous, stiff-necked man without the slightest sensitivity to his young wife’s feelings; the wild, red-haired beauty, full of passionate feelings about everything. Chloe, having lost her own child, was told she had to persuade her sister deliberately to do the same.

  ‘What did Phoebe say to that?’

  ‘She wouldn’t do it,’ said Mrs Cosworth abruptly, and stopped. Swilley waited. At last she went on, ‘Nigel was surprised – he’d thought, being the sort of girl she was, she’d jump at the offer and be grateful. But she went absolutely mad, said it was murder, jumped down poor Nigel’s throat. They had terrible arguments about it. Screaming matches. It was dreadful. In the end he said if she wouldn’t have the abortion, he washed his hands of the whole business, and she could get out of his house, too.’

  So that, thought Swilley, was the origin of the stance against abortion. She could imagine a hot-blooded girl like Phoebe Agnew, an intelligent girl, flying into a rage at the tactlessness of this man, flying to the defence of the sister who had worked to put her through school. ‘So what happened?’ she asked.

  ‘In the end I persuaded him to let Phoebe stay until after Christmas. It was a dreadful time, though.’ Understatement of the year, thought Swilley. She could imagine it. ‘Then I helped her get into one of those mother-and-baby homes, in Nottingham. The baby was born in March 1970 and they arranged for it to be adopted.’ She stopped again, staring at the illuminated plastic coals of the electric fire in the imitation Adam fireplace. ‘She came to see me just after she’d signed the adoption papers. It was in the daytime, when Nigel was at work. She cried and cried and cried. I’ve never seen anyone cry so much. And then she stopped and blew her nose and said, “Well, that’s that.” And she started talking about Vietnam.’ She shook her head. ‘She never spoke about it from that moment onwards, and I don’t think she ever cried again, for anything. At least, I never saw her. She just put it out of her head. I never understood how she could do that. And then Nigel came home and she got up and left. Not a word of thanks to him for all he’d done for her. She went off, and we didn’t see her for a couple of years.’

  ‘Do you know where she went?’

  ‘To America, to join the anti-Vietnam movement. She was there until her visa ran out. Then it was back to Chile, I think, and then – oh, I forget. She was always off somewhere. She used to phone me sometimes, but that was all. She lived on a commune in Wales for a while, I think. She was such an embarrassment to Nigel. I sometimes half think she did it deliberately to annoy him.’

  She said it idly, as if she didn’t mean it, but Swilley wondered if she hadn’t hit on a truth, or at least a part of it. A life spent not just protesting against man’s general inhumanity to man, but against Nigel Cosworth’s specific inumanity to the Agnew sisters.

  ‘Eventually, of course, she settled down – or at least, she became a bit more respectable. Once she was established as a proper journalist and started to get famous, Nigel took to her a bit more, and she started visiting us again. Of course, he disapproved of her subject matter a lot of the time. Well, most of the time, if I’m honest. But she was very well thought of in her own circles, and he respected that.’

  I bet he did, the nasty snob.

  ‘I can’t say they ever liked each other, but they were polite to each other – for my sake, I suppose.’ She looked up. ‘And now she’s dead. Do you know who did it?’

  ‘No,’ said Swilley. ‘I’m afraid we don’t yet.’

  Mrs Cosworth sighed. ‘Nigel says it must have been one of her hippie friends. That living the way she did, it’s only surprising it didn’t happen before. He said—’ She stopped.

  ‘That it served her right?’ Swilley suggested. She had a fair picture of the sort of conversation that went on between the Cosworths regarding the sister-in-law.

  Mrs Cosworth didn’t answer directly. ‘He’s a good man,’ she said. ‘He’s just of a different generation. He never understood Phoebe. Well, frankly, neither did I. She was my own sister, but I never understood how she got to be so hard. She never seemed to have any feelings for anyone. She never married, you know, despite being so beautiful. Nigel said she wasn’t like a woman at all, so it wasn’t surprising no-one would have her; but it’s my belief that plenty wanted her, she just didn’t want them.’

  ‘What about the father of the baby?’ Swilley asked. ‘Did she want to marry him?’

  ‘She never said anything about him. I asked
, of course, but she wouldn’t even tell me his name. I never knew from that day to this who it was. Nigel said’, she added, seeming to have lost some of her protective reserve about her husband, ‘that she probably didn’t know herself.’

  Nigel, thought Swilley, was just a total peach.

  According to the Nottingham police, the mother-and-baby home had closed down in 1975.

  ‘It’s interesting,’ Swilley commented to Slider. ‘There’s just this window of about ten years when hundreds of thousands of babies went for adoption. Before that girls didn’t have sex, or the boys married them. After that, they knew about contraception, or they kept the babies themselves.’

  It had been a privately run home, but the premises it used were council-owned. In the absence of any other information, it was to be assumed that the records would have gone back to City Hall and stored somewhere there; but it would be a long job, as preliminary enquiries proved, to find anyone who knew where they were precisely, or would even be willing to look. The other way would be through the County Courts, or the Central Register, almost equally time-consuming.

  ‘Does it matter, boss?’ Swilley asked, when she came to report failure so far. ‘I mean, what’s the baby got to do with anything?’

  Slider got up and walked to the window, and Atherton shifted over to make room for him. The short afternoon was fading, and the yellow of shop lights made the grey seem greyer. ‘It occurred to me, you see,’ he said, ‘that the weirdest thing about her last day was that supper. This woman who hated cooking and lived a gypsy life in a reconstructed student bedsit. Who would she cook chicken casserole and tiramisu for? She even went out and bought a cookery book for the occasion. Who is the only person in the world who cooks for you, apart from your lover or wife?’

  ‘Your mum,’ Atherton said, getting there.

  Swilley stared. ‘You think she’d somehow traced her kid and invited him round for a nosh?’