The Bad Samaritan

by Robert Barnard

  “It didn’t develop into any sort of row?”

  Charlie noted Rosemary looking up at him sharply.

  “Good heavens, no.”

  “How did the group break up?”

  “The food arrived, and everybody got plates and we began to serve it.”

  “And the later group?”

  “I was too far away to hear anything.”

  “Was he still there when you left?”

  Rosemary had a sudden sharp picture of Mills going up to Janet, and the surprising rebuff he had received.

  “Yes, I’m pretty sure he was still there,” she said.

  “Could you tell me the names of the businessmen he was talking to, if I should need them?”

  “One or two. They weren’t all churchgoers by any means, but I expect if I were to get together with the other women who were serving the food we could come up with most of the names.”

  “I got the impression . . .” Here Charlie paused, having difficulty in finding an appropriately roundabout way of putting his impression into words, “that when you made your assumption about Stephen Mills you—well, let’s say either you weren’t surprised, or you weren’t upset.”

  In spite of the tentativeness of his words Rosemary suddenly sensed something formidable about Charlie and realised she had to go very carefully.

  “Certainly I was surprised,” she said. “Sudden death is always surprising, isn’t it? . . . If that’s what it is . . . . But yes, if that’s what it is I suppose I shan’t be too upset. It sounds unfeeling, but that’s the truth.”

  Charlie smiled encouragingly. He had not expected such honesty from a vicar’s wife.

  “You didn’t like him?”

  “Not much. And didn’t trust him either.”

  “Why not?”

  Rosemary paused before replying.

  “Oh dear—this is going to sound silly. Because he was too handsome, too smooth, too ingratiating. He always had for me the air of a fraudster, a con man, a sharper.”

  “But you’ve no evidence that’s what he was?”

  “None at all.”

  “And he was a member of your husband’s congregation.”

  “He was indeed. He’d been coming to St Saviour’s for years . . . . Congregations include all sorts.”

  “Of course they do. What did he do for a living?”

  “Business of some kind—I’ve very little idea what.”

  “Did he have a family?”

  “He had a . . . Goodness, we have gone into the past tense, haven’t we?” She registered Charlie’s expression of annoyance with himself and went on hurriedly: “That’s between ourselves. He has a wife. She comes to church now and then, but she isn’t regular, not these days at any rate.”

  “But he is? Every Sunday?”

  “Pretty much so. And quite active otherwise. Also in with other bodies such as the Rotarians, helps with the local youth groups, and so on.”

  “Sounds a model citizen.”

  “Oh, no doubt he . . . is. Don’t take any notice of a cynical old body like me.”

  “But you think he’s in it for what he can get out of it?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do.”

  “What could that be?”

  “Well, with groups like the Rotarians and the Masons it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? No need for me to spell it out. With the Church I’m not at all sure. I’ve often asked myself, but I’ve never come up with an answer.”

  “You sound as if you’ve thought a lot about Mr Mills.”

  It was a sudden, sharp jab. Rosemary said, too hurriedly: “Oh, that’s putting it too high. But he intrigued me. Intrigues me.”

  “I must be getting back,” said Charlie. “My boss will probably want to talk to you and your husband later.” But he paused in the act of turning away. “I saw you standing here one Sunday about a month or so ago. This sounds silly, but you looked . . . quite strange. As if you were having some kind of experience. Or maybe a vision. Something mystical, it looked like.”

  “Yes, I remember. Goodness, how embarrassing. Was it so obvious? I remember thinking I was making an awful exhibition of myself. How awful! It makes me feel sort of spiritually naked.”

  “I was right? It was a mystical experience?”

  “In reverse. Very much in reverse. I suddenly realised I no longer believed in God.”

  “Just like that? Belief just . . . left you?”

  “Yes. That exactly describes it. When you saw me I was suddenly alone, without God. That was the beginning . . . .”

  She stopped. He watched her closely.

  “Of what?”

  “Oh, of a lot of nastiness in the parish. You can imagine what people have been saying. I mustn’t keep you. I’ll tell my husband you may want to talk to him.”

  She walked on towards her semidetached vicarage, and Charlie wondered why he had been given what amounted to a dismissal. It was as if she had declined to enter what could be an area of danger. When he got back to Mike Oddie and the activity around the body, he said, “Interesting.”

  “What she told you, or the woman herself?”

  “Both. But she’s keeping something back.”

  “She knew him, did she? Maybe she disliked him. Murdered people tend to be disliked.”

  “She did know him, but she’s not keeping back the fact that she disliked him. She made that perfectly clear.”

  “What did she tell you about him?”

  Charlie ticked off each piece of information on his fingers.

  “Local businessman, business unknown, keen churchgoer, reason unknown but probably not ardent faith. Smooth, good-looking, likes to keep in with people, particularly other businessmen. Has a wife but no family.”

  “And he was at the parish party?”

  “Yes, and still there when she left, towards ten.”

  “Anything else?”

  Charlie thought for a moment, feeling he was not yet at the heart of Rosemary’s reticence.

  “There seems to have been something going on in the parish recently. Some nastiness or other. It seems to have started with Mrs Sheffield—the vicar’s wife, that is—losing her belief in God.”

  “Good heavens, that must be awkward. Like a surgeon’s wife taking up alternative medicine.”

  “Yes. I get the impression the nastiness in the parish is not just about that, though. Some other factor has entered in. And she doesn’t want to talk about it. She chatted quite happily about the loss of faith, but she cut the conversation short when we seemed to be straying towards other matters.”

  “Then we’ll have to talk to some of the parishioners, won’t we? In the meantime we’ll have to talk to Mills’s wife. As soon as we find out how she’s taken the news I’ll decide if it’s worth going there when we finish here.”

  “I have the feeling that his wife was a bit of an irrelevance in Stephen Mills’s life,” said Charlie thoughtfully. “A sideshow, an optional extra.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I got the impression he was the parish Lothario.”

  “Good Lord—I find it difficult to imagine any such thing.”

  “You just don’t know anything about religion,” said Charlie.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Little Wife

  The Millses lived in a substantial, square Victorian house which gazed out at the world like one of the industrialists of the time: hard, confident, holding his secrets. Bentham Road was a “good” street off the Ilkley Road. The house had ample gardens around it and was shielded from curious gazes by trees and hedges. The imposing bay windows, curtained, on either side of the front door clearly belonged to large, formal rooms; further back the symmetry of the facade was lost, giving way to a more rambling, built-onto structure. It was a large house for two people and, built in a cul-de-sac, very quiet. It was even quieter than usual that day.

  Mike Oddie had ascertained by telephoning the WPC on duty there that Mrs Mills would talk to them. He was told that
she would prefer to get it over. When they rang the front doorbell the young woman who had fulfilled the traditional role of comforter opened it to them and beckoned them into the living room.

  “She’s upstairs—a bit upset, I think.”

  Oddie raised his eyebrows at the inappropriate cliché. He and Charlie looked around them. The room was not quite what they expected, being full of old furniture, including bookshelves with well-thumbed books and worn carpets and rugs. Charlie wondered whether it was a room that Stephen Mills had come into, rather than one he had made himself. It certainly wasn’t a room that suggested the usual modern businessman, still less the parish Lothario.

  “How did she take the news when you broke it to her?” Mike Oddie asked.

  “Very well . . . more dazed than anything else,” said Constable Morrison. “Kept asking questions about the details, but not crying or anything. When I told her you’d be coming soon she said she’d go upstairs and get tidy, but she went into the bathroom, and I’ve heard crying.”

  “That’s a pretty common sequence.”

  “Oh, I don’t need you to tell me that,” said the woman, with a trace of bitterness in her voice. “I’ve had my share of breaking bad news and holding hands afterwards. It’s a burden that ought to be shared more equally.”

  She looked at Charlie, who bared his teeth in one of his more fearsome smiles, designed to suggest in this case that as a comforter he was a nonstarter.

  “Should I go and tell her you’re here?” Morrison asked. But even as she spoke they heard the sound of soft footsteps coming down the stairs.

  When she entered the room their first impression was of someone small and insignificant. She had put on a dark grey skirt and a cream blouse with halfhearted bits of frill here and there. Her eyes were red and she had no makeup on, though her hair, nondescript brown, had been neatly combed back into a little bun at the neck. It was only when Charlie looked into the reddened eyes that he saw how large, dark and beautiful they were. It was like diving into a pool and discovering it was bottomless.

  “Hello. I’m Dorothy Mills.”

  Oddie shook her hand.

  “I’m Superintendent Oddie, and this is DC Peace.”

  “Please sit down. I’d like to get this over so I can be alone and start to come to terms with it.” She gestured them to seats, worn but comfortable like the rest of the furniture, and sat down herself. “Could you perhaps tell me a little about what happened? Constable Morrison has been very kind, but she couldn’t tell me much. I do need to know where he was found and what . . . what had been done to him.”

  “Of course I’ll tell you what I can,” said Oddie. “He was found on the edge of Herrick Park by one of the early-morning joggers. He had had his throat cut. He’d been dead for some hours when he was found.”

  “I see.” The words came out calmly, but she dabbed at her eyes as if the calmness was an effort. “Oh it all seems so . . . incredible, so impossible! I mean, Stephen was perfectly capable of looking after himself. How could he—this sounds silly—how could he let someone cut his throat? Was it someone who came up behind him? Was it someone he knew and trusted?”

  “There had been a fight.”

  There was silence. She looked down into her lap.

  “Oh dear. I wish it had been sudden . . . . I suppose he was on his way home from the St Saviour’s party?”

  “That’s certainly what it looks like.”

  “I should have gone.” Her hands began working as she started to blame herself—pudgy, unglamorous hands, hands that worked around the house. “Not that I could have done much, I suppose, if there had been a fight.” She looked up at them again. “But we wouldn’t have walked back through the park if I’d been with him, would we?”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  “The cat was missing, and I didn’t want to go out before he turned up . . . . To tell you the truth, with these church do’s Stephen usually bought two tickets to support them financially, but I was never frightfully keen.”

  “Aren’t you a churchgoer?”

  “An occasional one. I used to go, because Father was keen, but I suppose I got bored. It was the opposite of the usual in our household. Stephen was the churchgoer, and he’d take Dad when he was up to it.”

  “Your father lives with you?”

  “Yes—he has a little flat at the back.”

  “So you and he were together last night?”

  “Not together, but I was in and out to see how he was, and to give him a bit of supper and a cup of Ovaltine.”

  “You didn’t go out looking for your cat?”

  She looked at him with her unfathomable eyes and then over to Charlie Peace.

  “No, I didn’t, except just up and down the road here. If you go further you just find him by the front door when you get home after hours of looking and calling . . . . I do see where these questions are going, Superintendent. I wouldn’t have gone to Herrick Park to look for him. He never goes that far away, and he’d have had to cross the Ilkley Road to get there. He’s scared of busy roads, and he’d never have done that.”

  Oddie nodded, neutrally.

  “He’s home now?”

  “Yes. I found him in the front garden about half past ten.”

  All this was delivered in a firm but dull voice, but one that occasionally broke, paused for a moment, then resumed again its apparently calm course.

  “Mrs Mills, what did your husband do?”

  She sat back in her chair as if expecting the question, acknowledging his right to ask it.

  “He ran his own business, advising manufacturing firms about export opportunities in Europe and around the world. It was his own idea, and he built it up from nothing. He thought British businessmen fall behind because they are poor at foreign languages and they don’t understand the needs and preferences and customs of other countries. They treat Budapest as if it’s Whitehall and get nowhere as a consequence. He offered the sort of expert advice they needed. Stephen was very widely travelled, and he had friends and contacts everywhere.”

  “He was often away from home?”

  “Not so much in recent years, but earlier, when the business was starting up. In the last few years, with everything in place, he’s found he can do much of it by telephone or fax.”

  “Was it a business in which he would make enemies?”

  “No!” At that the voice really broke. “No! Why should it make him enemies? He was just giving a service. He wasn’t competing with anyone . . . . I keep trying to make sense of this in my mind. It would have been so much easier if he had been ill, if he had died naturally. Stephen didn’t have enemies. He was so active, busy in all sorts of things, and he made friends, not enemies!”

  He didn’t make a friend of Rosemary Sheffield, Charlie thought to himself.

  “How did you get to know him?” he asked.

  “Through the church, mainly,” she said, turning to him her deep eyes and unremarkable face. “As I say, I used to go much more regularly because I went with Dad. He’s always been keen, particularly after Mother died. That was when I was ten, and I suppose he was looking for an interest to fill the gap. So it was at St Saviour’s that Stephen and I met.”

  “Where was he from? Did he have any family?”

  “Not still alive. Both of his parents were dead.”

  “Where was he from?”

  “London. South of the river.”

  “Was there any special reason why he moved to Leeds?”

  “To get out of London, but still to have city amenities—theatre, music and so on.” She smiled reminiscently. “I remember talking to him about that when we were engaged. Stephen had a very sharp eye. He could see then that Leeds was a much better proposition for the future than Manchester or Birmingham.”

  “And so he set up his business, and it did well,” Charlie continued. “Was it still doing well? Businesses are going to the wall everywhere.”

  “It was—is—doing wonderfully well. There a
re all these new markets opening up in Eastern Europe. They want business know-how, and the British want to get into their markets. Oh no, the business is going better than ever.”

  “Who will take it over?”

  She shook her head.

  “Oh dear. I hadn’t thought about that at all . . . . There’s Brian Ferrett, his second in command. Perhaps he’d buy me out, or go on running it for me . . . . I can’t say anything about that because I simply haven’t had time to consider.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked,” Charlie said quietly. “Of course it’s much too early for you to have thought of that.”

  “You see we’re in a quandary,” resumed Mike Oddie. “Someone has murdered your husband, and yet you can’t think of anything that he’s done that might have made him enemies.”

  “But I can’t! It was a unique business where he had no competitors, and he and Brian Ferrett got on very well . . . . I just can’t think of anyone who’d do that.”

  Oddie tried to put the next question tactfully.

  “There are areas in his life you don’t know so well. If he travelled a lot . . . and of course the church.”

  An expression came over her face that could only be described as mulish.

  “I went to church now and then. I know the people there. Stephen did a lot of work for the church in all sorts of ways. If anyone resented him, then they’d be very ungrateful. But I don’t believe for a moment they did.”

  “And the travelling?”

  The mulish expression remained set.

  “As I said, he’d done much less recently, now the business was up and running. Probably not more than three or four times a year, short trips, within Europe.”

  “Your husband was a handsome man,” put in Charlie.

  She had to suppress a flush of irritation.

  “Please don’t treat me as if I were stupid,” she said sharply. “I can see the direction of these questions. You are a good-looking man, Constable. Does that mean I should take it for granted that you are stringing along five or six women at once?”

  “No, but it means that if I wanted to I’d find it easier than someone who wasn’t. I’m sorry if I offended you. I just meant that if he travelled a lot he might have had . . . relationships you knew nothing about.”