“How long had Patrick been there?”
“Since Saturday afternoon, I believe.”
“How many people knew he was there?”
“I . . . I really don’t know. Possibly some did. But he busied himself around the house, helping Ranulph and Melanie, and he didn’t go out to tramp the countryside or anything like that. Anyway, Melanie and Ranulph knew about my little instrument.”
“The garrote, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“An instrument of execution.”
“Yes,” she agreed composedly. “A memento of a trip around Spain. It was used there until quite recently. It was a little secret, a little joke between us, especially in view of the use I’d put it to. And it was agreed we would all do a performance for Ranulph—a mock garroting. Patrick was a rough, good-natured boy, none too sensitive. He thought it was a huge joke. Ranulph directed the details. The boy was naked . . . though afterward we put a pair of underpants on him, for decency’s sake. He played up tremendously—he was really quite an actor. We tied his hands and his legs, and I played the sadistic executioner. I put the collar round his neck, and got the screw in place in the hole. He pleaded for mercy—all part of the scenario, and awfully well done! Then I began to turn the screw, and the collar tightened around his neck, and quite soon he was gagging and trying to scream, and I thought it could be tightened just a little bit more, and I’m afraid the sharp tip of the screw must have penetrated the spinal column—well, that was it for him.”
She might have been describing a tea party at which the fish paste in the sandwiches had been found to be slightly off. Oddie found he had an overwhelming urge to put an end to the charade.
“Jennifer Birdsell, I am arresting you . . .”
She remained quite calm, practicing the sort of expression she imagined martyrs assumed, and nodding at the import of his words. As the three of them got up to go out to the car, Mary Ann appeared at the top of the stairs, then followed them down into the sunlight. She said nothing, watching without emotion. A little knot of Ashworth people had gathered in the lane. Mary Ann went over and stood by Joe Paisley.
“I knew she was evil,” she said, in her clear, piercing voice. “I always recognized the Devil peering out of her eyes.”
Joe Paisley put his arm around her.
“Come on, little chicken. You’re coming back with me and Mother to Burnley.”
Charlie, watching, realized suddenly that they had been children together. He waited for her reaction, hoping she would not plead an engagement to preach the Word in Keighley market. But after a moment she nodded, then buried her head in Joe’s chest.
As Charlie helped Jenny Birdsell, still smiling pityingly, into the police car, Oddie bent over and had a word in his ear.
“Go and bring in Byatt. There’s no way we can avoid that now.”
“I wouldn’t want to,” said Charlie. “Would you?”
But he was conscious, as he watched the car disappear up the lane and then started back toward the house, of hostility in the group of Ashworth residents, a stony-faced, implacable sort of hostility, mitigated by personal apprehension—he guessed they were conscious of the part their own passivity had played, and wondered whether that passivity amounted to complicity. The exceptions were Joe and Mary Ann: Charlie could almost feel the force with which they were egging him on to do his duty.
The front door was unlocked as they had left it, and he let himself in. Almost immediately Martha appeared in the sitting room door.
“You’re going to arrest him, aren’t you? You can’t think—”
“Will you go back in, please?”
“He’s ill. Can’t you hear?”
He could hear. From upstairs came sounds that were like grunts, interspersed with small cries. Charlie was up the stairs like a flash. The sounds got louder. In the door of Byatt’s bedroom he paused.
The policewoman had allowed him watercolors. Her eyes showed her regret and her bewilderment. He was sitting at a little table in the center of the room, paper covering the top of it, and on the paper a picture was taking shape. The lower part of it, a burnished brown-yellow, was circular, forming the shape of a broad collar. Above that the outline of a face was beginning to appear, with the only features so far realized a hideously prominent pair of protruding, terrified eyes, almost popping out from the face and from the paper, and a mouth, torn apart in an agonized shriek, from which a blackened tongue was protruding.
Gradually Charlie started to make sense of the cries.
“Tighter. Turn the screw. Tighter. Kill him! Kill him!”
The old man’s face was straining, the eyes filled with a corrosive lust, the feeble old limbs trembling with excitement, only the hands still applying paint being under some semblance of control.
“He’ll be sectioned,” said Charlie. “There’s no way they’ll let him stand trial.”
Charlie was not a vengeful person, but he found he could not keep the regret from his voice.
• • •
Declan wondered whether he was choosing the wrong songs, or whether he had chosen the wrong street entirely. “The Mountains of Mourne” had gone down like a lead balloon, and so had “Danny Boy.” The passersby had bustled on with no reaction on their hard or harried faces. Declan had chosen Bond Street because he’d understood—mainly, it must be said, from the Monopoly board—that it was one of the resorts of the well-heeled in London. Perhaps it was true what he’d read: that the rich were rich because they had no taste for giving away money.
His eye was caught by a notice on the side door of the building that he had stationed himself outside. It was Christerby’s, the art dealers. He strolled over, still plucking the strings and turning the tuning screw of his guitar. The handwritten notice read:
WANTED
Capable young man for packing and deliveries
Underneath there was an arrow pointing to a still more obscure door. Declan went back to his pitch thoughtfully.
He launched into one of his favorites. His voice, had he but known it, was particularly responsive to the pathetic.
The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone
In the ranks of death you’ll find him.
The picture of the innocent musician in the midst of carnage and horror had always touched him. It seemed to touch the passing public too. An elderly woman, heavily made up, actually smiled, and one young man began feeling in his pocket when he was still yards away. The chink was a substantial sound. Declan refrained from looking down, but thought it could be 50 pence, or even one pound. He thought he might try “The Last Rose of Summer” next.
His mind went back to the handwritten notice. Christerby’s—that was a fine firm, he was sure of it. He could just fancy working in the art world, learning more about it. Would it be a plus for him if he mentioned he’d worked for Ranulph Byatt, even mixed his colors and generally helped in the artistic process? Not if they rang Ashworth and heard how he’d decamped without warning, that was sure. But perhaps he could explain how he’d found the whole setup there unsettling, even a little sinister.
“And that’s no more than the truth, so help me God,” he said to himself.
“The Last Rose” and “Home, Sweet Home” went down just as well. Several preoccupied faces betrayed by a flicker that the songs said something to them, brought back something in their past, maybe their childhood. His little cap on the pavement clinked several times, twice with satisfyingly substantial rings.
He was just bringing the song to a yearning close—for he did yearn sometimes for home, which had been a good home to him after his father had died—when he saw approaching from the direction of Savile Row a policeman with a purposeful tread. Quick as a flash he scooped up the money, popped his guitar back in its case, and, on an impulse, instead of walking up toward Oxford Street or down toward Piccadilly, turned and went to the door around the side of Christerby’s that the notice directed him to.
It opened directly onto a staircase leading
down. The basement, where the packing and unpacking would be done. Declan started down, wondering who it was he would have to charm or impress. He was surprised when he heard the door behind and above him open again, and heard a voice with authority.
“Excuse me.”
He turned reluctantly. It was the policeman he had seen approaching.
“Are you Declan O’Hearn?”
Declan’s face showed his surprise.
“Yes. How—”
“Look, could you come back up and come with me? We can’t talk here.”
Declan stood his ground.
“Why do you want to talk to me? I’ve moved on.”
“Could you just come up, please?”
Declan cast a regretful look back down the stairs. Perhaps it would be better to come back without his guitar. He started up the stairs again. When they got into the open air Declan looked at the policeman. He was a young man with an insignificant mustache but compassionate eyes.
“What is it?”
There was a break in Declan’s voice, perhaps the result of a twinge of fear.
“Look, I think you’d better come to the station. I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you.”
And, well trained, he set off, his arm on Declan’s, at a cracking pace that did not allow the boy to protest that if there was bad news he would prefer to hear it there and then. As they made their way through the bustling streets a conviction came to him: this was something to do with Ashworth. A shiver went up his spine, as it several times had done while he was there. It was as if this moment marked the end of his youth, the dawn of adult understanding, the coming of darkness.
ALSO BY ROBERT BARNARD
No Place of Safety
The Habit of Widowhood
The Bad Samaritan
The Masters of the House
A Hovering of Vultures
A Fatal Attachment
A Scandal in Belgravia
A City of Strangers
Death of a Salesperson
Death and the Chaste Apprentice
At Death’s Door
The Skeleton in the Grass
The Cherry Blossom Corpse
Bodies
Political Suicide
Fête Fatale
Out of the Blackout
Corpse in a Gilded Cage
School for Murder
The Case of the Missing Brontë
A Little Local Murder
Death and the Princess
Death by Sheer Torture
Death in a Cold Climate
Death of a Perfect Mother
Death of a Literary Widow
Death of a Mystery Writer
Blood Brotherhood
Death on the High C’s
Death of an Old Goat
We hope you enjoyed reading this Scribner eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
SCRIBNER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Robert Barnard
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole of in part in any form.
SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Research USA, Inc. under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.
Designed by Brooke Zimmer
Text set in Scala
Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Barnard, Robert.
The corpse at the Haworth Tandoori/Robert Barnard.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PR6052.A665C59 1999
823’.914—dc21 98-39263
CIP
ISBN 0-7432-2427-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-4391-2580-9 (eBook)
The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori Page 22
