The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

  “Four children. I stand corrected. Or rather five. Miss Helena has kept herself pretty much in the background of the picture so far as our investigations are concerned. Or should we say six, remembering Olivia? Still a child, with its typical want, want, want. But back to the real, actual child: the one who, so far as we know, has never seen his father. I don’t fancy Pete Bagshaw’s alibi at all. At home watching television with his mother. Backed up in a too-pat way by his mother. He could have been anywhere.”

  “Not quite,” said Oddie. “If he was with a lot of other people—fellow students, say—he would have told us. But he could have come into Leeds. He could, if he has a car or the use of one, have gone to Alderley to snatch a look at his dad, or to do something more drastic. There again he could have heard that the star of Opera North’s new production was Olivia Fawley, and that she was the actress Caroline Fawley’s daughter, and concluded that his father was likely to be at the first night.”

  “But not that he was likely to leave after half an hour and go to a crap hotel like the Crescent,” said Rani.

  “Unlikely, I admit. But there is one possibility.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That Pete Bagshaw lied—if he did—because his mother was not home that night. He lied to give her an alibi, not vice versa.”

  They pondered this for some time.

  “Right,” said Charlie. “Anybody else?”

  “The sister,” said Mike. “We really can rule out the father I’m sure, but not the sister. She fits into the pattern of the women in Fleetwood’s life—a strong, independent personality. I have only her word for it that the contact between ‘their Bert’ and the Winterbottoms was practically nonexistent. It could have been much more frequent, and it could have left wounds.”

  “There’s the same difficulty as with Pete Bagshaw and his mother,” said Rani. “How could she guess his movements?”

  “Yes, there is. Less so perhaps with another group—Olivia’s lovers at the theater. They would have had ways of finding out—in fact, I wouldn’t put it past that awful piece of self-obsession herself to tell them about the assignation, boast about it, taunt them with it.”

  “A nearly limitless pool of suspects opens up,” sighed Charlie. “And there’s a related one as well.”

  “Related?”

  “Someone who may have been enraged by the Fleetwood-Olivia affair—if he knew about it—out of sheer chivalry.”

  “Jack Mortyn-Crosse?”

  “Yes. He has this enormous protectiveness towards Caroline. I would have said he was the gentlest, most ineffectual of men, but then we’re not into the quagmire of character, and any or all of us could be wrong about people we don’t know beyond an interview or two.”

  “And he has a sister, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes. A nasty woman—a racist, probably a classist as well: she could well have thought of Marius as a common little tyke. Could have thought of Caroline as an actress in the old-fashioned sense of the word, tantamount to a prostitute. But those are not motives for murder. And I have to say she seems to me to be comic-nasty rather than dangerous-nasty.”

  “Character again,” said Oddie. “The awful fact is, almost all these people could have had the opportunity, and unless we make a breakthrough over the weekend we’ll have to get down to breaking alibis and charting opportunities.”

  “I still think,” said Rani, “of those three kids wandering around Leeds at just the right time. What was the estimated time of death?”

  “The doc says any time between around half past seven and nine o’clock. With his betting being on the earlier part of the time span.”

  “There you are, then: just when they were all three wandering around, not very sure what they were going to do with their freedom in the big city.”

  “But it’s a part of Leeds nobody goes to,” objected Charlie.

  “The less you know of a city, the more likely you are to land up in dead ends and back alleyways,” said Rani.

  They thought about that.

  “Guy,” said Oddie. “A first-time visitor. But I don’t fancy him.”

  “They could have landed up in that area by following someone,” said Charlie. “Most obviously they could have followed Marius.”

  “But unless they followed him with the intention of murdering him, I can’t see them doing it. They were out of bounds in Leeds, and Marius was the only real danger of their being caught, since they all knew he was likely to leave the theater. To follow him would be to enormously increase the risk. It’s much more likely they’d have turned away and slunk in the opposite direction.”

  “That knowing girl Stella had some experience, saw something, that night,” said Charlie. “I was sure of it when I interviewed her, and I’m sure of it now. But nothing likely has come up.”

  “I think you should have another go at her,” said Oddie.

  There was silence in the CID room.

  “Then there’s the weapon,” said Oddie dispiritedly. “Where is the knife? Who had one, and why? Where has it gone?”

  “I read the review of the opera in The Times,” said Rani. “Wasn’t there a lot of sword-fighting in it?”

  “Yes, I think so, but that would have been in the second half,” said Oddie. “I missed a lot of that. Bears looking into. But the description of the wound suggests a dagger rather than a sword. And carrying a sword around in the vicinity of a security-conscious new block of flats is likely to get you noticed. My wife tells me that the Olivia character gets stabbed offstage at the end. I can’t imagine she staggers on for the finale with a dagger protruding from her bos, but it’s a mad world, and you never know. A word with the props man is called for.”

  A little voice in the back of Charlie’s mind said that a visit to the Grand Theatre was called for, and not just to investigate the props. But before that he had to have another go at the pert young miss, Stella Fawley.

  *

  Caroline and Sheila found themselves in the odd position of wanting to ring each other up the whole time. Somehow, without any desire on their part, they seemed connected by some umbilical cord. Caroline had the best excuse, that of wanting to hear how things were going with Guy, then using that gambit to tell Sheila how things were going with the Doncaster Little Theatre chairman. For the truth was she suddenly cared very little about Guy, who had revealed his feet of clay quite as spectacularly as his father had. But Sheila herself she did care about, and felt with her a kind of kinship that she thought could burgeon into a real friendship.

  “No, I haven’t changed my mind about coming to the funeral,” she said when they talked on Saturday afternoon. “The wounds have not healed yet. There will be so much advance publicity for it that perhaps some of his other girlfriends will turn up—women whose wounds are less raw than mine. You should take their names and addresses and we could form a club.”

  “I have their names and addresses,” said Sheila laconically. The two women laughed. “The idea of a club is not a bad one. ‘The Women of Marius Fleetwood.’ Just so long as we don’t discuss sex.”

  “Why shouldn’t we? It was the best thing about him.”

  “You’d find he used exactly the same techniques and ploys with all his women. It’s humiliating. It makes one feel like one of several puppets, reacting the same way when he pulled the same strings. Otherwise we could talk about money, the legal status of mistresses, their financial rights…. Oh dear, the wife might feel out of things in all this. She has all the rights and standing. It would have to be you, Caroline, who went on all the chat shows and outlined the aims of the organization.”

  The two women laughed again.

  “How’s Guy?”

  “Pretty much the same,” said Sheila with a sigh. “Going on about how he only wanted to go up to St. Andrew’s with a bit of money to make a splash.”

  “Funny, my two are saying now that Guy never talked about anything except money. They never complained before.”

  “Because they wa
nted you to think that everything was fine and dandy between the young of the two families. Children shield their parents. Well, Helena does. I can’t say I remember Guy doing any shielding.”

  “Don’t give up on him, Sheila.”

  “Of course I’m not giving up on him. It’s just that I’m realizing that quite soon I shall be mothering two babies.”

  “Yes, I suppose he is a sort of moral baby…. Ooops, I must go.”

  “What’s come up?”

  “A car’s driven up. DS Peace has just got out.”

  “Oh dear. I was hoping the police had finished with us for the moment. Watch Peace. He’s sharp.”

  Caroline had been making the call from her bedroom. She slipped downstairs, but not fast enough to prevent the bell sounding through the house. She swallowed, then put on her most welcoming smile as she opened the door.

  “Hello. I wasn’t expecting you back so soon…. I don’t think I’ve met your constable.”

  “This is PC Rani. It was actually your daughter we’ve come to see, Mrs. Fawley.”

  “My daughter? My daughter Stella?”

  “That’s right.”

  Caroline looked at him uncertainly for a moment, than backed into the hall.

  “Stella!” A door opened upstairs almost immediately. The call had been waited for. In a moment Stella was coming down the stairs, a false brightness on her face.

  “Do you think we could use the little study, as before?” Charlie asked. Caroline nodded. Charlie led the way, then closed the door and leaned his back against it, looking at Stella and saying nothing.

  “You think I’m holding something back,” said the girl.

  “I know you are. But I want to hear what you saw in your own words.”

  It was a disgraceful imposture, old as the hills. It should never have worked. But Stella was only fourteen. She turned away to avoid his gaze and began to tell them.

  Chapter 19

  Coup de Théâtre

  Charlie and Rani stood at the back of the stalls in the Grand Theatre as the seats began to fill up. It was ten past seven, and as at all the performances of Forza the sense of expectation was palpable. Charlie found he was excited just by the experience of a packed theater, and especially so at one that was clearly not just doing its cultural duty. Rani was cooler, more analytical: theater was not in his blood, and he was not going to wallow in the experience, merely dissect and tabulate it.

  The ladies on the door were rather satirical when the pair had used their ID to gain admittance to the performance. “Is the whole Leeds police force being given a musical education,” asked the lady selling programs, “and are you all getting free admission to our shows?” Privately, though, when she had a moment, she took the two of them aside and said, “Joking apart, you get it sorted, and quickly. They say there’s a really terrible atmosphere backstage, and even us front-of-house people are looking at each other and wondering—daft, isn’t it? Mind you, every cloud has a silver lining: there’s been full houses even for Love for Three Oranges, which they were papering half the house for last time it was on. Folk are strange, aren’t they?”

  “Papering,” muttered Charlie as they walked away: “I think it means they beg people to come in for free.”

  And now the lights went down, and the heavy-framed conductor took his place and his applause, and the opera started. Charlie wished he could have been closer, to get a more authoritative view of what was going on onstage, but close views were reserved for luckier mortals who had paid money. At seven-thirty-one Charlie, who had done a bit of homework on the opera in the Leeds Public Library, muttered, “Beginning the tenor-soprano duet—the only one in the opera.” Rani wasn’t sure whether this was just conversation or was meant to be noted down, so he entered the information in the little book Charlie had instructed him to carry. The pair were interrupted in midduet by the heroine’s father, in a state of outrage. The gun was thrown down, went off with a crack and a flash that evoked little screams from parts of the stalls, and within a minute the stage had gone almost completely dark. Charlie glanced quickly down at his phosphorescent watch.

  “Scene one ends seven forty-two,” he announced, then resumed his intense scrutiny of the stage. A shadow flitted across it, barely glimpsed in the intense dark, and seemed to retrieve the gun, before darting off. “The hero is supposed to be of Indian blood,” Charlie noted to Rani in the brief pause. “South American Indian, of course. They don’t seem to have browned him up even a titsybitsy little bit. Like the retired colonels say in letters to the Telegraph, ‘political correctness gone mad.’”

  The music began again, and in the darkness the set had acquired a couple of benches and tables. In the bright light of a daytime scene Charlie distinguished much more clearly the gunlike shape of the basic set. Subtle, he thought sardonically. At the inn the solitary and lost Leonora, confronted by the sight of her vengeful brother, did the normal operatic gesture of concealment: she raised her arm so that the sleeve of her dress formed an impromptu yashmak. The music went on its full-blooded but boding way, until the scene was succeeded by the monastery—monks, the prior, and the acceptance of Leonora as nonresident hermit. The music of the scene had Charlie’s spine in a perpetual tingle, but when the curtain went down he looked at his watch in a businesslike way.

  “Eight-thirty,” he announced to Rani. “Interval.”

  They slipped out in advance of the thirsty mob, and went to the main entrance on Briggate.

  “What put you up to it?” Rani asked, as they walked round to the side of the theater.

  “Something Mike said. He’d seen it. He said, ‘They got separated.’ Of course I didn’t think at the time. You never do. But somehow it lodged there…. If Leonora was out of things for almost the whole of the second half—”

  They had got to the stage door, and Charlie just raised his eyebrows at his companion. Rani nodded, and seemed to file it away, as if he were compiling some kind of handbook of detection techniques. Charlie pushed open the stage door and they tripped down the murky steps to the little guichet at the bottom. Syd’s place.

  “Ah, Syd. Me again.”

  “So I see,” said Syd, trying to be genial. “No mistaking you, sir.”

  Charlie bared his teeth.

  “I need to have a few words with the props man.”

  Syd looked professionally dubious.

  “Not the best time, sir.”

  “I realize that.”

  Charlie waited.

  “I’ll try him on his mobile.” Syd dialed, and in a moment was talking. “I’ve got the police here, Bob. One of them’s the one who talked to Simon on Thursday. Yes, it would have been better if he’d talked to you then, but no doubt something has turned up…. OK, I’ll tell him.” He turned to the two policemen. “He says he can talk to you after the interval. It’s the big scene between the tenor and the baritone. It needs some setting up, but once that’s done it’s a good, long scene with nothing for him to do.”

  “Marvelous,” said Charlie, moving away. “All right if we go backstage?”

  “Er, no—if you wouldn’t mind. Madam might cut up rough.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows.

  “I take it you mean Olivia Fawley?” Syd nodded. “She has got you well trained.”

  “And not just me,” said Syd feelingly. “The whole theater.”

  “I was backstage on Thursday and they told me she was around.”

  “That was Oranges. That’s not her show. This is her show—and doesn’t she let us know it! Just find a place to park yourselves and I’ll give you a nod when the lights go down.”

  Charlie took Rani over to a bench in the far corner of the waiting space. He himself felt he’d had more than enough of Syd in the last few days, and he knew that Syd’s sense of “humor” would be irrepressible, faced with not one but two nonwhite policemen. Rani tried to be blasé but tended to fume inwardly, and people who fumed almost always did the wrong thing. The interval seemed endless, but ev
entually Syd raised his finger and pointed in the direction of backstage.

  Everyone there, of course, knew Charlie. It was like a remote village, where strangers were noted and watched. Even the baritone, waiting to go on, registered a police presence, and he was one that Charlie had not set eyes on before. The props man, Bob Holdsworth, came over to them, all no-nonsense and down-to-earthiness, said, “I’ve got about fifteen minutes,” and led them to a small, locked room so stuffed with this and that it had more the feel of an overgrown cupboard.

  “Now,” said Bob. “What can I do for you?”

  “Weapons,” said Charlie, “used in the opera: Are they real, and could they be used in earnest?”

  Bob nodded.

  “Borrowed from the Royal Armouries. All surplus to stock and of no particular value, but naturally we promise to take very good care of them. This room is locked, the cupboard where the swords are kept is locked, the case for the pistols is locked—we’re pretty strict about it, because we might well want to borrow from them again for some other opera.”

  “Why not the standard stage props?”

  Bob shrugged.

  “Verisimilitude, it’s called. The actors look and feel right if they’ve got the right gear, the right props—that’s the director’s theory, and if you ask me why he has Alvaro in the first scene wearing jeans when he’s wielding a flintlock pistol I couldn’t tell you, though it’s common enough in productions these days.”

  “The guns, of course, wouldn’t be loaded, would they?” asked Rani.

  “No, of course not. And quite possibly they wouldn’t go off if they were. The swords are not particularly sharp, but they clang brilliantly, and—yes—they do add to the feel that these are two macho eighteenth-century men engaged in a life-and-death duel.”

  “I’m sure they do,” said Charlie. “Can I see the swords?”

  Bob unlocked the cupboard.

  “These are not the actual ones. They’re onstage at the moment. But they’re pretty much like these two, which are spares.” He handed a sword over to each of the policemen. They were long, thin, deadly looking weapons, though when Charlie ran his finger down the edges he found they were far from sharp, as Bob had said. Charlie and Rani looked at each other and shook their heads.