The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

“I’m going up to the Grand Theatre. Margaret is there for Forza, so I know the eldest Fawley is there. I thought she might be willing to talk to me, either at interval or after the performance. Then we can say we’ve done all the Fawleys, at least for the moment.”

  But when he put the same request to the stage doorkeeper the man raised his eyebrows, then scribbled the request on a bit of paper and sent his junior off with it.

  “Bit of a tartar when the fancy takes her,” he said, with a wink to Oddie. “I didn’t want her blasting my ear off down the phone with you standing by listening. Between ourselves, I don’t give much for your chances before the thing ends at ten-fifteen or so. The talk is she likes to have it off with someone in interval. Says it does wonders for her voice. Someone said Dame Nellie thought the same, but she had to pay them or lasso them. This one doesn’t have to. Quite tasty for an opera singer.”

  Oddie heard the five-minute warning bell when the boy came back with the expected response: she would see him after the opera, and definitely not at interval time. He nodded to the stage doorkeeper, and on an impulse went round to the main entrance, where the last stragglers were hurrying to their places in the stalls. He flashed his ID at the woman on the door and the woman selling programs.

  “It’s the Marius Fleetwood murder inquiry,” he said.

  “Really! We wondered if you’d want to quiz us!” said one.

  “Everyone’s talking about it,” said the other.

  “Saturday night, the first night: You were here then?”

  “Oh yes! Very exciting. Best first night in a long time” was the collective response.

  “Were you around here when Mr. Fleetwood left the stalls?”

  “Oh yes, if we’ve got the right one. Very smart man, well setup, someone you’d notice. He hurried down the corridor, smiled at us, then out towards the street. We commented on what a shame it was when tickets were at a premium. We didn’t know of his…connection, you might say, with Miss Fawley.”

  “And did anyone else leave, maybe soon afterwards?”

  “No one else left,” the program seller said emphatically. “Not from the stalls, nor from the circle or gallery. We’ve been talking about it among ourselves. If anyone left it would have to have been during interval, and I doubt anyone did. No one spotted empty seats in the second half. It was such an exciting night, everyone stayed.”

  “Well, I hope tonight’s the same,” said Oddie, calculatingly. “My wife’s there.”

  “Would you like to stand at the back?” asked the program seller. “You being police it would be perfectly all right.”

  So Oddie let her lead him up the corridor, then through the door into the stalls. As he took up his position he could feel the excitement in the house, become part of it, even though the overture was still being played. And when the dumb show finished and the scene started, he shared in the thrill of hearing a gorgeous voice: fresh, expressive, of seemingly limitless power. He was no expert, but no expertise is necessary to respond to the human voice in full flood. By the time the scene ended with Don Alvaro’s flagrant disregard of elementary firearms precautions, a dying father, and the lovers escaping separately into the night, Oddie was hooked on the opera, on the voice.

  But he looked at his watch. Twenty to eight. That was when Fleetwood had slipped out of the theater, then.

  By interval Oddie was half in love with Olivia Fawley. The scene with the Padre Guardiano and the monks was like a benison after a grueling day, but the cheers of the audience set his adrenaline flowing again. He slipped out to be the first at the bar, and eventually found his wife, Margaret, having a quiet cigarette with a friend in Briggate.

  “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Watching the opera, as it’s turned out. Actually, waiting to interview the star. I’ve been allowed to stand at the back because I’m a policeman, and therefore not like ordinary mortals. Can I borrow your program to discover what’s going on, or do I have to buy one?”

  “Borrow mine—they cost the earth.”

  So when the curtain went up on the tenor agonizing, as he was to do for much of the rest of the opera, Oddie was clued up on the tortuous events that made up the plot. Some twenty minutes into the second half a thought struck him—a possibility. Twenty minutes after that the possibility was becoming a conviction. He slipped out into the corridor and read the program again. Then he scribbled a note to Olivia Fawley telling her he was called away and would talk to her the next day. He slipped round to the stage door again, and left it with the keeper.

  Then he strode in the direction of the Crescent Hotel.

  Chapter 12

  Love Nest

  Oddie dallied as he began up North Street. To his left were the CASPAR flats, with perhaps half of the visible windows lit up. Beyond that circular block were the sloping lawns, at the top of which, among the straggly bushes, Marius Fleetwood had been found dead. There were no police there now, but the occasional streetlamp showed some remaining lengths of police tape near where the body had been. Oddie continued along to where Rani’s witness had seen the smartly dressed man about to cross the road. The traffic, by this time of night, was spasmodic. Oddie was able to cross toward the dingy exterior of the Crescent Hotel without difficulty.

  All that could be said for the hotel was that its name was not totally mendacious. North Street, at that point, did form a sort of curve that might be dignified as a crescent. But the wooden sign that announced the name was cracked, the paint on the letters peeling, as it was on the window frames and door. Through the window he could see the foyer. At the desk a man was reading the West Yorkshire Chronicle with his feet up on the shelf behind it. When Oddie pushed open the doors the griminess of the foyer almost choked him, as if a dusty gray blanket had been thrown over his head. Maybe the place would appeal to a connoisseur of Leeds Rugby League teams of yesteryear. The team members, replete with self-satisfaction and thuggish glares, glowered from photos on the walls. But otherwise there was nothing to attract anyone even of the oddest tastes to the place.

  The man behind the desk folded his newspaper without haste.

  “Want a room? I can do you one for thirty-seven fifty.”

  His dirty white shirt was open at the neck, and he wore trainer bottoms. His teeth were stained and gapped, and strands of his hair had been halfheartedly combed over his prevailing baldness. Oddie reflected that the rate for the room was probably no worse value than the hundred and fifty pounds charged by some very ordinary London hotels.

  “No thanks,” he said, taking out his ID. “Police.”

  The man screwed up his face, but Oddie would have bet that he knew what was coming.

  “Police! Well, that’s a bleedin’ turn-up. We’ve never had much ’assle from the police before.”

  That at any rate was true. Oddie had checked, and the computer had only showed three suicides and a natural death in the last five years. The suicides he could understand.

  “You mean the police haven’t had much hassle from you,” he said. “I knew that.”

  “Is it that death over near the CASPAR?” asked the man.

  “Yes, it is. And you are?”

  “Les Cartwright. I own this place, worse bleedin’ luck.”

  Oddie nodded.

  “We’re checking the last hours of Marius Fleetwood, the dead man. He had a chain of supermarkets down south. We think it possible he came here, or to one of the shops or offices near here. Swish, well-setup man of around fifty.”

  “Doesn’t sound much like our customers, does it?” said Les Cartwright. He paused as if he were awaiting Oddie’s next question, but when he spoke it was obvious he was considering his own position. “I suppose I better come clean. No, I never seen a swish, well-setup man ’ere on Saturday night—that is when we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Towards eight o’clock.”

  “Well, the fact is, like I said, our customers aren’t great dressers, so I’ve never had in ’ere the sort of
man you described, so far as I can call to mind. Still, to tell the truth, I was half expecting someone like that on Saturday night.”

  “Half expecting? What do you mean?”

  Cartwright looked straight at him for the first time, cunning and guilt mingled in his face.

  “I don’t know how I’m gunna make you believe this. Maybe the best way would be to show you. Come wi’ me.”

  He raised the flap of his desk and came out into the foyer, heading toward the stairs. Oddie noticed there was a sign saying LIFT, but it looked as if it had been out of order since the days of Harold Wilson. Cartwright walked boldly up the stairs, automatically avoiding all the places where the carpet was worn through to the boards. Oddie followed more cautiously. On the first floor they proceeded along a landing that had clearly not known the feel of a paintbrush in decades, and whose carpet was in a state of such decrepitude that its onetime pattern could only be guessed at. From one or two of the rooms came the sounds of transistor radios. At the end of the corridor Cartwright selected a key from the bunch in his hand.

  “Prepare for a surprise,” he said, and put his hand into the room to press a switch.

  Oddie’s first impression was of a flood of light. He blinked, then took a step from the dimness of the corridor into cascading brilliance. The room he entered was larger than he would have expected the Crescent to possess, with a massive bed covered by a blue-and-cream silk eiderdown, with an imposing headboard in the same colors, a thick green carpet on the floor, a wonderful Art Deco nightstand, chairs, and occasional tables, most of them with vases, ashtrays, and cigarette or jewel boxes in the same style. It was a wonderfully stylish room, almost like a stage set, and the impression of taste and imagination at work was supplemented by a sense of fun, of tongue in cheek. Whoever had designed this room had seen it as a challenge, perhaps, but also as a big joke.

  “Bathroom in similar style,” said Les Cartwright. “But I suppose you get the idea.”

  “But how—how come—?” began Oddie. “It all looks so new and—”

  “Well, you won’t need me to tell you this wasn’t dreamed up by me as part of my regular renovation and redecoration program,” said Cartwright.

  “No,” said Oddie.

  “Sit down. Might as well make use of the place. Can’t see it getting much bleedin’ use in the future.”

  Oddie eased himself onto a sofa of nice, clean lines in immaculate aquamarine linen covers. Les Cartwright perched himself on a similar chair opposite.

  “It was three weeks since, and even then half of me said I was dreaming, and the other half said: ‘’Ang on—this is too good to be true. There’s something funny ’ere. Maybe something that could get me into trouble.’ And I was right. It was, wasn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Oddie. “Go on.”

  “Well, it all started wi’ a phone call, and that was a funny one too. Man at the other end asked how large was my biggest bedroom, an’ I said they were all much of a muchness, give or take a foot ’ere and a foot there. And the man said that was a shame, because he’d ’ad it in mind to make me an interesting offer. I perked up at that. And that’s when I remembered this place. ’Asn’t been used in years, ’asn’t this one. Not in my time, any road, and not for years before, I’d be willing to bet. All the rooms at one time were pretty much of a size wi’ this one, but they were all divided up into two, even three, and for some reason this one was left.”

  “Money run out?” suggested Oddie.

  “Story o’ this ’otel, that would be,” agreed Cartwright. “So I told him we had this disused room we used as a store, and I estimated it at about twenty by fifteen. I was near enough too. I’ve been a builder in my time.”

  Cowboy variety, Oddie said to himself.

  “So anyway, he came along to look at it, this chap: Mr. Fairlie ’is name was, Walter. And he saw this room, and said ‘Ideal,’ and put the proposition to me.”

  “And that was?”

  “That Fairlie would redecorate the room, furnish it, put in a new bathroom, all the works, and it would be available to ’is employer for three weeks starting last Saturday, and after that it would be mine to let as I saw fit, on a par with the other rooms.”

  “And the catch?”

  “There was none that I could see. Still can’t. There was to be no cost to me. You might say a room like this will be precious little use in a hotel like the Crescent, but it’s a sight more likely to make me a bob or two than a bloody box room.”

  “Fair enough. So you said yes.”

  “Course I did. He ’ad the builders and painters in next day, first putting in the new wall for the bathroom, then the plumbing, then a swish new bath and shower—bit too fancy for my liking, but there you are: it was meant to appeal to a lady, that much I could guess, slow on the uptake though I might be. Then the painters did this room, then Fairlie moved in to furnish it. I tell you, it was like a dream. I used to come up ’ere every evening—late, after they’d knocked off, which often was nine, ten, even later, and I couldn’t believe my luck. The ’ole thing was finished last Tuesday, with three days to spare.”

  “You were always given to understand that Fairlie’s employer would be using the room last Saturday?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And a woman?”

  “That was mentioned on Fairlie’s last visit. I winked at him to show I’d guessed that, but ’e just smiled vaguely. The arrangement was, I ’ad to ’ave two keys made for the room as well as my own: one for each. They wouldn’t be arriving together. Beyond that I wasn’t told anything about either of them—just one man and one woman. The classic formula, you might say.”

  “But it didn’t take place, did it? Tell me what happened on Saturday.”

  “Saturday. Well, I thought it was in order to make a bit of a fuss. I got out the suit I was married in, and wi’ a bit of holding in and straining of the buttons I got meself into it, even bought a cheap tie at the supermarket, something bright but dignified, if you get me. Then I waited.”

  “No one came.”

  “Not at first. ‘Some time towards eight,’ Mr. Fairlie had said, so I sat here, reading the paper, just like when you came in, but a bit more on the watch, if you catch my meaning. For a long time no one came.”

  “You didn’t see anyone outside that fitted the description?”

  “I wasn’t looking outside. It’s a while since I cleaned them windows, any road. I was on the watch for that front door to open so I could get to my feet an’ salute, in a manner o’ speaking. Nothing ’appened. Then about—oh—a quarter to nine, in came this bird, and I thought, This must be ’er. And it was. Asked for the key to Room 118 cool as you like and went upstairs.”

  “What was she like, this woman?”

  Les Cartwright scratched his chin.

  “Not my line really, describin’ people.”

  “Take your time. What age, roughly?”

  “Say towards thirty.”

  “Face?”

  “’Eavily made-up. Lipstick, powder, the lot—more than most women would use nowadays. Eye color? ’Aven’t the faintest. Don’t spend my time looking for the color o’ people’s eyes. Full cheeks, strong voice.”

  “Dressed in?”

  “Long fur coat over long black dress. ‘Some classy bird who’s at the Grand Theatre,’ I said to meself, an’ I bet that’s what it was. Tells ’er bloke she’s at the opera, then slips away first chance she gets. Anyway, she comes up ’ere, finds a room several grades above what she’s been expecting, but no man to go with it.”

  “You’re quite sure of that? No back entrances or anything like that?”

  “Back door I’d’ve ’eard, fire escape maybe not, but ’e ’adn’t got a key, remember. I’d got the keys at the desk, to be called for. Anyway, when she went out not far off ten o’clock she wasn’t best pleased, that I can tell you.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “She did when she tripped on a bit o’ frayed carpet
‘alfway down the stairs. ‘Fuckin’ ’ell!’ she said, loud as you like, lady though she was or tried to pretend she was. Then she threw the key at the desk, muttered something about ’aving been made a fool of, and marched through the foyer and out. And that was the last I saw of the two who this room ’ad been dreamed up for.”

  “So what are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to phone that Walter Fairlie, if you tell me this was all up to that Fleetwood character.”

  “I’m telling you nothing as yet, but you can give me his number.”

  “’Ere, ’ave ’is card. I’ve got it by ’eart. Apart from that, what can I do? I’ve got a tarty room, but I ’aven’t the first idea what to do with it.”

  Oddie shook his head.

  “It’s not tarty. It’s what people call tasteful. Could be very convenient for people appearing at the Grand. You could charge so much for a quick naughty, so much for all night. They’d probably find it amusing. Slip the stage doorkeeper a tenner every time he got you a customer.”

  He had meant it as a joke. But as he left the room he saw the slow spread of enlightenment and calculation over Cartwright’s face. This could be the saving of the Crescent Hotel. Putting the thought from his mind, Oddie went back to the Grand Theatre and saw the last half hour of the opera.

  The next morning, when Oddie related his discovery to Charlie, the younger man sat for some time hunched forward in thought.

  “So you think this man, if he had appeared, would have been Fleetwood?”

  “It’s the best explanation we’ve had so far for his being in that part of the town. You don’t go there unless you’ve something specific to do there.”

  “You don’t think he did, in fact, turn up at the hotel, something went wrong, and Cartwright helped dispose of the body?”

  “I’ll keep it in mind, but no, I don’t.”

  “Next question: Who was the classy tart?”

  “She was—may have been—a lady having an assignation. These days that doesn’t make her a tart.”

  “Things were so much easier when it did,” sighed Charlie, and he went off to follow up the matter of Peter Bagshaw unenlightened about Oddie’s guess as to the identity of the woman. Guesses, in Oddie’s view, were always best left unshared until they could be rejoiced over.