The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

  “Yes, of course it is.”

  Sheila Fleetwood had obviously been standing right by the phone, because she came on at once.

  “Mrs. Fawley?”

  “Caroline, please. And Marius always called you Sheila to me.”

  “Yes, he always does. I know it’s too early to talk about the funeral, with the police and the coroner and so on involved, but I just wanted to say, Caroline, that I do hope you will come.”

  “That’s very kind.”

  “I didn’t want there to be any embarrassment about it. Of course you should be there. He would have wanted it, we both know that. I shan’t actually be ringing anyone else, I mean any of his earlier girlfriends, because I wouldn’t want it to become a sort of circus, but we’ll expect to see you.”

  “Thank you. Perhaps the children would like to come too—I don’t know.”

  “Alexander and Stella will be very welcome. I feel I know them already.”

  Caroline thought she needed to make some kind of return gesture.

  “How are you coping?” she asked.

  “Just about. It’s so totally out of the blue, isn’t it? And there’s the complication of the baby on the way. I feel I’d like someone adult around the house, at least until it comes. Some really competent au pair, perhaps. Not like me to feel so nervous and uncertain.”

  “It’s totally understandable.”

  “And then there’s the daunting thought of bringing it up without a father…. I’ll get used to all these things before long, but at the moment…Well, I expect you can guess how I feel.”

  “Yes, I think I can—something of it, anyway.”

  “Anyway, I must go. So sad that this has spoiled your excitement over Forza. It sounds a fabulous debut. I’m determined to see it, but I think it will have to be on tour in Nottingham or Hull now.”

  “Good. I hope you enjoy it. I thought she was very good, but then I would, wouldn’t I.”

  When she had put the phone down Caroline felt rather dissatisfied with the conversation. Going through it as she might go through a play script she realized she had first felt unease when Sheila had said “He always does,” which was compounded when she had mentioned that she wouldn’t be ringing any of her predecessors as Marius’s bed partner. Perfectly reasonable things to say, but both things bringing it home to her rather brutally that she was the latest in a long line. Well, she was, wasn’t she?

  No, she wasn’t. She was special. Though, trying to be fair, she could understand that Sheila might not want to see it like that.

  Then there was the bit about bringing up the new baby without a father. Well, she had been planning to bring it up without its real father before that, even if she’d been unaware that Marius was not sure he was willing to treat the baby as his own. Perhaps she hadn’t realized how much Marius had told her. But why bring it up at all?

  Caroline wished she hadn’t thanked Sheila for saying she would be welcome at the funeral. She wished she had just gone.

  “Was that Guy’s mother?” asked Mrs. Hogbin from the kitchen passage.

  “That’s right. Marius’s wife.”

  “Mr. Fleetwood’s widow. You could have been that.”

  Big deal, thought Caroline.

  She got rid of Mrs. Hogbin eventually, explaining that she couldn’t drive her to the bus stop because the police had put a seal on the garage and the car. This was news to Mrs. Hogbin, who opened her eyes wide and then looked ominous. She obviously was conceiving the idea that the police were about to arrest someone in the house. The thought made her day, and she trotted off to make the most of this information in Marsham, and then in her home village.

  When the children came home from school Caroline told them about the phone call from Sheila, and when she mentioned the funeral they said they’d think about whether they wanted to go. That means no, she thought. What child or adolescent wants to go to a funeral? A thought struck her.

  “Have either of you been using the garden toolshed?”

  “No,” they both said.

  “Only, I found the padlock hanging open, and I know I locked it securely when I last put tools away.”

  “Alex has probably been using the toolshed to smoke in,” said Stella.

  “Sneak!” shouted Alexander. “How did you know?”

  “I saw you up a dark alleyway in Leeds. I thought you were peeing, but you turned out to be smoking. I expect you’ve been skulking out to have a quick drag in the garden shed for months, haven’t you?”

  Caroline felt obliged to chip in.

  “Alexander, I am disappointed in you! Smoking is so bad for the voice, you know.”

  “Mother, I’m not thinking of becoming an actor or a singer.”

  “Well, no, I don’t suppose you are. But what a habit to take up nowadays! So old-fashioned!”

  “Mum, don’t you ever look at young people? We’re all smoking these days. It’s a way of living dangerously. But I haven’t been smoking in the toolshed. I’d probably set fire to something and get myself incinerated. Anyway, it hasn’t rained for ages, so I’ve just gone to the little bit of lawn under the apple trees, where you can’t be seen from the house.” A look passed between brother and sister that was not one of hostility. “I think you should tell the police about it.”

  “The police?” said Caroline. “Oh, surely not. It can’t have anything to do with Marius’s murder. It was probably just some rough-sleeper finding shelter for the night.”

  “The rough-sleeper would have had to get into our kitchen and find the key if you really shut it properly.”

  “I’ll ask Mrs. Hogbin if she’s been out there for something. Or perhaps Wilks has been up while we’ve been out. He sometimes borrows tools from us for his other gardening jobs.”

  “Mum—tell the police,” said Stella.

  PC Omkar Rani was used to getting racial abuse in his job. He got more than if he were working in a corner shop, though rather less than if he had been a traffic warden. Words like “wog,” “blackie,” and “Paki” (this last no longer geographical, merely a synonym of the others) could be heard in the police canteen as well as in the street, in spite of all the pious words and intermittent efforts of chief constables. In this matter Detective Sergeant Peace had been his role model, though Rani had not always found his advice easy to follow. “Just smile, as if you thoroughly enjoy being racially abused,” he had said when Rani had asked him how he coped. “Then, if the opportunity arises, thump him in the bollocks as hard as you’re able. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  PC Rani had asked what he should do if it was a woman, and was told it was perfectly possible to thump a woman in the bollocks, metaphorically speaking.

  “And remember, you’ll probably only be able to do it to one in five of the bastards who’ve abused you, but the feeling is so sweet you can forget the other four you’ve had to let get away with it.”

  But that Monday night Rani’s problem was quite different. He was one of the team trying to do blanket coverage of the people in the CASPAR flats, and the woman he was currently talking to was just too nice for words, pressing coffee on him, talking as if he were her oldest friend, praising his courage in going into the police, and generally trying to make him feel he was the answer to all the country’s ills and woes. She has a problem with me, he said to himself. If I was white she would treat me politely, but she would be cool and businesslike. Her name was Rhoda Moncrieff, and she was the third tenant he had interviewed on the floor he had been allotted after the team had penetrated the wire gates and got past the staff security men. Miss Moncrieff was assistant manager of one of the big stores in Briggate, and Rani wondered what it was like to be black and one of her counter assistants.

  “Just tell me what you want, give me time to think because I only heard of this awful thing today, and I’ll try to tell you what you need to know.” The gush was less in the words than the manner, and she capped it with a winning smile from her end of the long white leather sofa. “I w
ant to do my best for Mr. Fleetwood, because really we were both in the same trade.”

  “Saturday night,” said PC Rani. “From seven-thirty onwards. What were you doing?”

  “Right,” said Rhoda Moncrieff, and she really did think. Then she reached over to a coffee table and took up a copy of the Radio Times. “I’m ashamed to say I ate a risotto off my lap watching Blind Date. Are you a bachelor? Can you understand?”

  “I am, but I live with my parents.”

  “Of course. Now Blind Date was a bit later than usual, and I finished my meal and switched it off before it ended. That would be around seven-thirty.”

  “Good. And what did you do then?”

  “I took my plate to the kitchen, put it under the tap, then poured myself another glass of wine, and went over to the window.”

  She pointed to a wide window, with a view over to North Street. Rani had taken a peek while she was pouring him his coffee.

  “Why did you go over to the window?”

  “Why? Well, I often do. I’d switched on the television again because there was a concert on BBC2. You can’t say I’m not catholic in my tastes, can you? Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. I wasn’t interested in the first piece—the Daphnis and Chloe Suite—but I wanted to watch the next one, which was Beethoven’s Seventh.”

  “So you were at the window, watching what?”

  “Not the stars, anyway! I like people. I watch them. In a way it’s my job. You must understand, Constable. It’s your job too, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is,” said Rani, feeling that the false sincerity in his voice was almost as bad as the gush in hers. “Is this area good for people-watching?”

  “Not really, no. Not as good as my last flat. It’s near to places—lots of clubs, and the Grand Theatre, and of course the main shops—but it’s not on the way to anywhere. Around here there’s really nothing much, is there? So you see a few drunks, taking the air and not really sure where they are—but that’s later on as a rule.”

  “What about when you were watching: seven-thirty to eightish?”

  “A bit betwixt and between. Earlier you’d see the shop people and the office people leaving work, some of the residents in these flats coming home. Those are regulars, and after a time you don’t notice people you see regularly anymore. There’d have been a few of our residents coming back on Saturday, those in the retail trade probably, though we must have a few workaholics in all sorts of jobs, but mostly from restaurants, trips to London or Manchester, visits to elderly mums and dads. So those would be the sort I wouldn’t particularly notice…. I do remember a courting couple, very sweet and swoony and old-fashioned they looked—”

  “Young?”

  “Oh yes. Late teens, I should think…. Then there was a roughly dressed young man—weather-beaten, in jeans, open-necked shirt, though there was a nip in the air, and a long coat. I thought he might be one of those that beg outside the theater…. Then there was—yes! this might be it, I think—there was an older man, who I noticed because he was wearing a very swish suit.”

  “Yes, this could be it,” said Rani. “When?”

  She thought.

  “It was when the Ravel was ending and the Beethoven was about to start. Because I watched him: he was walking up North Street, and he seemed to be about to cross the road—towards where the Crescent Hotel is—come and see.” She drew him to the window. “There.”

  “Right,” said Rani, looking toward the shabby establishment on the far side of the street below.

  “And I thought: ‘He’s not going to be staying in a dump like the Crescent,’” said Rhoda Moncrieff, “and he stepped back onto the pavement, probably because a car was coming, and at that point there was applause on the television, so I came away from the window for the introduction to the Beethoven, and I didn’t see anything else.”

  “Pity—but not your fault,” said Rani, not wanting to seem to criticize so obliging, and so potentially valuable, a witness. “So you stayed on this sofa for however long the Beethoven is, did you?”

  “Yes—say between thirty and forty minutes.”

  “And did you go back to the window after that?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did. Say by then it was around half past eight.” She took up the Radio Times again. “Yes, the concert ended at eight twenty-five. By then the light was definitely poor. And I’m afraid I didn’t see the smartly dressed man again though I stood here, watching and sipping, for some time.” She saw Rani’s face, and fell over herself to make up for his disappointment. “But I did see something funny. This time it was a woman. Smartly dressed again—oh, definitely: long fur coat down to the calves—possibly not real fur these days, of course, even if she was really fashionable. Long dress underneath, I could just see that, and I think heavily made-up. There was an operatic first night at the Grand, so I thought she might have come out at interval time. And she really did go to the Crescent Hotel. Because I thought it must be going up in the world. Or getting a reputation for a certain sort of assignation.”

  “Let’s be quite clear about this,” said Rani. “You actually saw her go in?”

  “Oh, definitely.”

  “And she didn’t come straight out, having found out she’d gone to the wrong place or something?”

  “She didn’t come out in the next twenty minutes.”

  When Rani gave a detailed account of this interview next day to Charlie and Mike Oddie, he found receptive ears; they even made a tape of his account, to make sure that nothing was missed.

  “What can a fashionably dressed lady do in a hotel that takes twenty-plus minutes?” asked Charlie cheekily.

  “Borrow my copy of Alan Clark’s diaries,” said Oddie.

  Chapter 11

  Probing

  In the car from Leeds to Marsham on Tuesday morning, with two uniformed constables, male and female, in the back, Oddie and Charlie talked of strategies for the coming interviews.

  “You’ve seen more of Caroline Fawley than I have,” Oddie said. “What’s your opinion?”

  “Too contradictory and all-over-the-place to summarize easily,” said Charlie, keeping his eyes on the road, but trying to visualize her. “On the plus side: intelligent, perceptive, civilized. On the minus side: a dead loss where her own emotions are concerned. They paralyze her judgment. Presumably the two marriages are evidence of this. During all her talk about Marius I had this feeling of rose-colored spectacles: the wife being pregnant by an unknown boyfriend—couldn’t be Marius because it had been a marriage in name only for years. Smell of stinking fish there. And in his supposed ownership of Alderley, as I found out from Sir John: he was renting it. This was a temporary affair for him, not a ‘till death do us part’ one. So the intelligence, the human understanding, aren’t operative in certain situations. Unless, of course, she’s acting. I think she’s doing that a lot. She emphasizes words as if she’s in a play.”

  “And the children?”

  “Oh, that’s even more difficult, because I didn’t see enough of them to judge, and, of course, I’ve never met the eldest. Alexander and Stella are midteens, unformed—anything could happen to make them quite different people.”

  “You don’t believe the child is father to the man?”

  Charlie thought.

  “Sometimes, maybe. But often they change when they go out into the world—having independence, making their own decisions, makes them new people. Not surprising, is it? Dear old Wordsworth—yes, I do know who wrote that.”

  “Of course you would. Married to an academic.”

  “Ex-academic, aspirant novelist. Dear old Wordsworth may have felt the childhood him in the adult him, but other people look back on their early years and think: ‘Who the hell was that?’”

  “Fair enough. What are these children like now?”

  “The boy is quiet—far from the unbuttoned type. Computer geek. Likes secrets, I think. Whether he hugs them to himself or whether he can be persuaded to give them up through flattering
his self-importance I suppose we’ll find out. Also whether he’s interested in using them. Stella is more outgoing, I think. Starting to be very interested in men, something of a tease, with a mind of her own. Close to her mother, but I would guess she understands the situation there.”

  They were approaching Marsham, and Charlie concentrated on finding the right roads. From the back of the car the middle-aged PC, Stan Hargreaves, let out a cri de coeur.

  “I ’ope you’re right that the child isn’t father to the man—when it’s a woman anyway. Because if my daughter as a woman is anything like my daughter as a child, she’s goin’ to make some poor man the stroppiest wife in ’istory!”

  They split up when they got to Alderley, Mike Oddie interviewing Caroline in the big sitting room, with WPC Dutton at his side, and Charlie talking to the children individually in a small, underused study, with PC Hargreaves as his lieutenant. Stella went first, and marched in with no obvious shyness or fear of incriminating herself. Charlie introduced Hargreaves, but felt no further need to pander to her youth or make chat before the main business.

  “Now, I want you to go over what you did on Saturday night as if you haven’t talked to me about it at all. Talk to PC Hargreaves here if that will help: he hasn’t heard it and hasn’t been told it.”

  Stella turned to the middle-aged PC with a dazzling smile, as if rehearsing for a career as a vamp. She’s going to be a stunner, both policemen thought simultaneously.

  “Right,” she said, ticking events off on her fingers. “Parents go off to Leeds around six, I think. Guy immediately suggests we take Mum’s car and go off too. Seems like a good idea to us, so we go off to Leeds as well.”

  “Why Leeds, when there was a danger you’d bump into your parents?” asked Hargreaves.

  “Most of the other towns we could go to are a drag at weekends. Leeds is big enough for us to be able to keep away from the sort of place Marius might go to. He was the only one we had to watch for. Mum and Olivia—not that she’d care—would be busy in the theater.”

  “And when you got there?” prompted Charlie.