The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

  “Yes, of course you can. And then would you like to go home? We can leave detailed questions for the moment and concentrate on things this end, rather than on the background. There is a chance this is a sort of mugging or random attack.”

  “I would like to go home, very much. But first could I…I’d like to see the place where he died. Or, where he was found. So I could have some idea of his end, of his last hours—if he had that long.”

  “That will be all right. Sergeant Peace here can take you before he drives you home. You won’t be able to be alone there, I’m afraid—at the scene of the crime, I mean: there will be policemen all over the place.”

  “I understand.”

  They had got to Oddie’s office, and he opened the door and gestured toward the phone. Caroline stood still for a moment, seeming to steel herself, or perhaps deciding how she would break the news. Then she sat down at the desk and took up the phone and dialed.

  “Stella? Darling, it’s Mummy. I’m afraid it’s bad news. Yes, he’s dead. Murder.” She looked up at Oddie, who nodded. “Yes, it couldn’t be worse. They’re bringing me home when I’ve seen where he was…found. Will you tell Guy, darling, and ask him to ring his mother…. Yes, darling. I love you both. Be brave, be gentle with Guy, and I’ll be home very soon.”

  Caroline let herself be taken by Sergeant Peace out to a car and seemed oblivious to her surroundings as he drove her up Eastgate, turning into Upper Briggate, then stopping in North Street. He led her to the grassed area, and her eyes immediately caught the knot of uniformed policemen and a little gang of people in white. She and Peace stopped at the ring of blue and white tape.

  “Could we go closer?”

  “Better not. It might complicate things. The body was found over there, behind that bush—Genesia, I think it’s called. The one with the yellow flowers.”

  “Behind? So he was probably not killed there?”

  “Probably not. Hidden there so he wouldn’t be found too soon.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He was stabbed.”

  “Was the weapon still—”

  “No weapon has been found.” Charlie Peace looked at one of the men in white, who nodded his head. Caroline frowned, then looked around her at the surrounding cityscape, as Reg Liversedge had done a few hours earlier.

  “But I don’t understand.”

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “I imagined Marius going to the town—to a pub, a restaurant, the Playhouse—something like that. But that’s the Grand Theatre there, isn’t it? If he was killed here he was coming away from anything he might have wanted to go to, to fill in time. There’s nothing much here, is there?”

  “Nothing much,” agreed Charlie. “Those new flats. The odd seedy hotel. Otherwise just run-down businesses.”

  “That’s what I thought, looking at it. I don’t know Leeds well, but Marius did. He worked for the Morrison’s supermarket chain in Manchester when he was starting out, but he was often in Leeds. He always knew where to go, where to park…. Oh, the car must still be in the parking garage off Woodhouse Lane.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll see about it. The SOCO people will want to go over it.”

  “I see.”

  She gave him the Mercedes’s number, then they went back to the police car and began the drive home. Caroline was still in a slightly hysterical, talkative mood, and she hardly needed asking before she began filling Charlie in on Marius’s background.

  “Guy’s mother is called Sheila, and they’re still married. In name only, but he lives with her, and she sometimes goes with him to events that interest her…. I’m sorry, I must use the past tense, mustn’t I? Marius came up to Alderley every weekend, and that suited both of us rather well.”

  “Are you still acting?”

  “No, that’s a thing of the past, thank God.”

  “Is Guy an only child?”

  “No, there’s a daughter, Helena. Guy’s twenty, she’s only fifteen. I met her once, and she and my brood got on very well, as they do with Guy. I never wanted to destroy Marius’s home arrangements, though we’ve had to talk about things recently.”

  “Oh? Why was that?”

  “Sheila seems to have got herself some kind of boyfriend, and she’s pregnant by him. That made Marius wonder a bit, naturally—I mean there were questions, like whether he wanted to bring up someone else’s child as his own.”

  “Yes, I can see that. So what about you? How many children have you got?”

  “Three. The eldest, Olivia, is twenty-nine and she’s an opera singer; that’s why we were at the Grand Theatre last night. She was singing the lead soprano role in La Forza del Destino. The other two are much younger—Alexander’s sixteen, Stella is fourteen.”

  “Not the same father as Olivia’s, then?”

  “No. Olivia’s by my first husband, Rick Radshaw. Actor, with a reputation of sorts for musicals. He was there last night with his…current. The younger ones are from my second husband, Evelyn Cottle, who is always abroad at some embassy or consulate in some insignificant part of the globe where his total witlessness will not do too much harm…. Sorry about the cattiness. If you can’t be catty about your former husbands, who can you be catty about?”

  “So your name is a stage name, is it?”

  “That’s right. And it’s also my maiden name. The children have all taken that too.”

  “But now you’ve retired, and don’t miss the life.”

  “Miss it like you miss an aching tooth. Of course if something absolutely unrefusable turned up, I suppose I could be persuaded, just for the one thing. My giving it all up just like that does worry some people. Jack—that’s my best friend in the village, Sir John Mortyn-Crosse, Bart.—he insists on that last to distinguish him from a mere knight, though I don’t know the difference so it’s lost on me—Jack thinks I’m forsaking my Art, or some nonsense like that, and is always encouraging me not to regard myself as retired, to maintain all my contacts and that sort of thing. I tell him I have the most wonderful feeling of peace in that house, and it comes from having severed all links with the theater…. Though whether that will be quite the same without Marius, who can say?”

  She paused for a moment, but then the hysterical impulse to talk and talk took her over again, and Charlie heard all about the opera the previous night and the party afterward, her life with Marius, the idyll of country living, her joy at having so much time with her children, how she had been welcomed by the people of Marsham—and on and on. Charlie listened, because he needed to pick up all the background information and atmosphere that he could. But with another part of his mind he was picking out the things that were of most interest, planning possible future moves.

  Jack, for example. Sir John Whatsit-Whatsit. He sounded of interest. Was he the sort of concerned friend who could be counted on to have a cool outsider’s view of the situation at Alderley—a view that might counter, or at least augment, the rather rose-tinted account of it that he was getting from Caroline Fawley? He hoped, and rather suspected, that he might be.

  Caroline directing him, he drove through Marsham and drew up outside Alderley. He got out and opened the passenger door for Caroline, and since she seemed uncertain whether to say good-bye to him, he began to escort her into the house. When the children heard the front door open they came to the sitting-room door, and Stella threw herself into her mother’s arms. After a few seconds Caroline disentangled herself from her youngest child and drew them all, Charlie Peace following, into the room.

  “This is Sergeant Peace. He’s very kindly brought me home. This is Guy, Stella, Alexander…. Now, could someone make us all a cup of tea?” And when the tea was brought in Caroline told all the young people, in a low voice drained of all emotion, the facts of Marius’s murder. Charlie put in a word here and there, realizing that Caroline had asked him no questions beyond how Marius had been killed—presumably because the mere fact of his death was more than enough for her t
o absorb in the hour or so since the body had been shown to her. He stood by the window looking out over the long garden, its lawns and rosebushes, its sheds and greenhouses and tennis court. This was gracious living, Charlie thought.

  “So you see,” Caroline was saying in that flat voice that seemed so unnatural coming from her, “we’re all going to have to learn to live without him.” She took up her cup to her lips for the first taste, but then suddenly burst into a passion of sobbing and fled from the room. Stella showed signs of running after her, but Charlie slipped swiftly over to stand against the door.

  “I think she’d rather be alone,” he said. “Wouldn’t you, in her situation?”

  They looked at each other.

  “Probably,” said Alexander. “We’ve only known Granny Cottle dying, and she wasn’t close.”

  Charlie looked at Guy, who simply nodded.

  “Now, before I go and leave you to yourselves for a bit, perhaps you’d all tell me what you did last night.”

  Again, and rather surprisingly, it was Alexander who spoke.

  “Oh, we just watched a bit of television.”

  Charlie left a second or two’s silence after this.

  “Well, well,” he said silkily, his eyebrows raised, “the oldies go off for the evening, and you use your freedom by just sitting in front of the box, eh? What was it that got you so hooked? Cilla Black? Michael Barrymore? The National Lottery draw? Come off it! Saturday-night television—it’s crap! Only idiots and invalids can watch it. Here are all you bright young things off to university this year, next year, some time in the future, and the best you can think of doing is to sit watching a pile of infantile rubbish.”

  “It was pretty childish,” said Alexander. “So after a bit we played a game.”

  “What game?”

  “Monopoly. We hadn’t played for years.”

  “Really. Where did you find the box?”

  Alexander looked around him a bit wildly, then pointed to the sideboard. Charlie went over to it and opened the door. Files, boxes of place mats, old silver, a few letters, an unopened Christmas present all fell out onto the floor. No Monopoly set. The sideboard clearly hadn’t been opened since they’d moved into Alderley.

  “So,” said Charlie, “you’re lying. I’d guess that Mrs. Fawley has a car in the garage. She’d need one in an out-of-the-way village like Marsham. And I suppose you, young man”—he looked at Guy—“have a driving license. So where do you decide to go? Doncaster? Sheffield? Leeds?”

  There was silence.

  “We went to Leeds,” said Stella.

  Chapter 9

  Paradise Lost

  Charlie left Alderley pondering. So the children had all been to Leeds the previous night. The two younger ones had been more specific about where they had been than the dead man’s son, but that was perfectly understandable: it was Guy Fleetwood’s first time in the city, so a vagueness about its geography was inevitable. What had they all been doing, as they went their separate ways? Their tale was one of pubs, burger bars, and cinemas. Natural, in themselves convincing—so why was Charlie dissatisfied?

  He put his finger on the cause as he was driving through the gates of the house: there was something about Guy—perhaps it was his very confidence, or the carapace of it—that repelled trust, and this affected his view of the other two. Though they all claimed to have done their own thing, only meeting up in time to drive home and be in bed well before their elders could be expected, somehow nothing that any of them said quite rang true. All of them had something to hide, including the youngest, Stella, who had never made eye contact with Charlie. But the one he was convinced was holding the most back was Guy Fleetwood.

  The rich man’s son who’d had everything he wanted? Charlie asked himself. Or one who’d been kept on a tight financial rein, and wanted more?

  As he drove through Marsham, a fairly typical mixture of the picturesque old and the mass-produced new, an idea occurred to him. Seeing a man in a dog collar emerging through the gates of the churchyard, Charlie slowed to a stop beside him and lowered his car window.

  “Excuse me, sir: I’m a police officer.” He reached into his pocket and produced his ID.

  “Ah—have you come from Alderley? I do trust that the news is not bad.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows.

  “Why do you assume it may be, sir?”

  “Ah, well, the son of one of our oldest communicants was at the Opera North party in Leeds last night, and he’d rung his mother this morning to tell her—he knew she’d be interested, with him living at least partly in the village—that Marius Fleetwood didn’t appear there as expected, and that Mrs. Fawley was very worried.”

  “I see. So it’s all round the village?” The clergyman nodded. “Well, it will be on the news by tonight. I’m afraid Mr. Fleetwood is dead—found stabbed to death not far from the Grand Theatre.”

  “Really? How terrible!” It was a much-practiced response.

  “Mrs. Fawley, of course, is extremely upset at the moment. I’m sure at some point soon she would appreciate a call. She has no adult to talk to up at the house.”

  This was received less than wholeheartedly.

  “Ah—I appreciate your concern, but I don’t find calling too soon after a death is a sensible thing to do. In fact, the best thing would be to wait for her to contact me. Mrs. Fawley and Mr. Fleetwood have been to church here—and of course have been made very welcome—but it hasn’t been quite clear whether they are regular churchgoers or have just been making some kind of gesture.”

  “I see,” said Charlie, who did. A more obvious tactic of distancing he had seldom met with. Were there many places in England where the minister could afford to look gift worshipers in the mouth? “But it wasn’t Mrs. Fawley I stopped you to talk about. She mentioned a friend—Sir John Something-or-Other, double-barreled, I think, who seems to live locally.”

  “Sir John Mortyn-Crosse. One of the old Marsham families. In fact, the big family in the area at one time.”

  “Could you tell me where he lives?”

  “Oh yes. He lives with his sister—who is, well, let’s say quite a character—in the Dower House, which is all that’s left of the old manor lands. Go back the way you came, then where you’d turn right to get to Alderley, turn left. You can’t miss it: the Dower House stands out, because there are lots of…modern houses around it.”

  So Charlie turned his car around, left the pusillanimous cleric, and went in search of this lost paradise, the desecrated manor lands. He found it quite easily, on the edge of a wilderness of brick boxes like gingerbread houses. He left his car on the road, near the solitary stone house. It had obviously been built for some widowed Mortyn-Crosse, for whom her eldest son was willing to go to some expense in order to remove her from the manor house itself. It was solid and unpretentious—by no means small, yet perhaps too small to live in comfortably with a sister who was, well, quite a character.

  The bell was a large iron circle in the wall, and visitors were directed to turn it clockwise. A fearsome clatter ensued, followed by a set of footsteps. Bolts were tugged at, and the door was then opened by Sir John, who looked at Charlie benignantly.

  “Yes?”

  “Sir John Mortyn-Crosse? I’m Detective Sergeant Peace. Here’s my ID. I’ve just come from Alderley—”

  Sir John’s face crumpled in genuine distress.

  “Oh dear. I heard rumours after church. You’d better come in.”

  He led the way down a dismal hallway and into a larger, better-lit sitting room furnished with pieces Charlie couldn’t decide about—perhaps they had once been “good,” but he thought not very good. He sat in the fat easy chair that Sir John had gestured him to, and looked at the concerned, worried baronet.

  “I don’t know what you heard at church,” he began.

  “Merely that Marius had not been at the party last night, and had somehow…disappeared.”

  “I’m afraid he has been found, dead.”
>
  “Dead?”

  “Yes, stabbed to death in a little piece of open ground not far from the Grand Theatre.”

  Sir John opened his mouth to express shock, but he was forestalled.

  “What’s he doing here?” came a voice from the door. Turning his head Charlie saw a woman built like a trailer truck with an expression of puffy outrage on her face. She could have been a Tory spokesman on law and order matters.

  “Sit down, Meta,” said her brother. Irritation had entered his voice and a pungent smell had wafted in Charlie’s direction. “Sergeant Peace has some terrible news, I’m afraid. Marius has been found murdered.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question. What’s he doing here?” Charlie had a sense—one he had quite often—of being the first black person ever to have entered the house. Meta Mortyn-Crosse’s reaction was clearly one of outrage.

  “I came to see you, particularly your brother, because Mrs. Fawley mentioned him as her best friend in the village, and she has only children or young people with her now—”

  “I’ll go up and see her tonight,” said Sir John. “And I’ll get the rector to call.”

  “I just tried to, but I met with a certain…reluctance.”

  “He’ll call,” said Sir John. “Sorry we were interrupted. You were telling me about Marius.”