Swallow Hall Murder

by Noreen Wainwright

  She knew she must look like a petrified rabbit, but she couldn’t help it.

  Her sisters wouldn’t buckle under like this. Sylvia Casey wouldn’t. Even that young girl from the village hadn’t hung around to have something thrown at her a second time.

  “Well, cat got your tongue, Ivy? You have plenty to say for yourself when you and the cook are chatting away in the kitchen or when you’re talking to the police.”

  Ivy swallowed again, her mouth dry. What had she meant by that? She’d only answered the questions she’d been asked, same as everyone else.

  “I fancied a change, Miss Elizabeth, that’s all. Just a change of job.” Her voice sounded weak in her own ears and so did the words she’d spoken. Why was she such a pathetic worm?

  “Fancied a change, Miss Elizabeth…” The older woman’s voice came out as a pitiful whine.

  There was a painful ball of anger and hatred too in Ivy’s chest. God, she’d be glad to see the back of this place. She walked to the bedroom door, determined to escape this time.

  “Well, you’re better gone in that case. Be off to better yourself, if that’s what you’re thinking. I shouldn’t expect gratitude. But, remember, Missy, my mother took you in as a favour to your poor, pathetic mother. She wanted rid of at least one of the mouths she had to feed. How many children has she now? Twenty, is it?”

  “Seven,” muttered Ivy. Heaven only knew why she was answering the woman.

  “And your drunken brute of a father. Tell me, Ivy, has he ever actually done a day’s work in his life?”

  Ivy took in a big slow breath, and it sounded ragged and shaky to her ears.

  She turned the knob on the bedroom door and went out. The ball of anger in her chest burned now. She had the means to make that evil bitch suffer, and so help her, before she left Swallow Hall, she would do that.

  * * *

  Inspector Greene was in that mood again; decisive, restless.

  “At two o’clock, I want you to come with me back to the Crown and talk again to Eamon and Helen Bracken, or whatever her married name is. I want to hear more about whatever that water is that has flowed under the bridge. Then we go out to Swallow Hall again.

  This time, forget the servants, forget mad Elizabeth and old Mrs. Turner. We haven’t got far with the other two, Kate and Mary. I want to know why Kate is really living out there, a city woman like she evidently became, buried in a backwater like that. It doesn’t add up.

  I have telephoned, and they are expecting us, though I haven’t specified who we want to talk to. Let them all kick their heels for a while, do them no harm. The damn lot of them are holding back information and the trail is going cold on us.”

  Bill Brown hadn’t heard such a long and uninterrupted speech out of his boss for a long time.

  He’d disappeared for a time and returned as if buoyed up. The mystery surrounding the death of the Irishman deepened, but Bracken’s personality slipped further out of focus. Thinking about the other couple of murders he’d been involved in, this man was the one Brown couldn’t grasp. While they learned more about his life, the man himself was ever more elusive.

  His poetry…maybe if he were to read more, more would be revealed. More of the man. Brown had been nervous about poetry at school, absorbing a message that it wasn’t for him. Neither was it manly to show the slightest interest in it, though maybe the war poets had changed that?

  Helen Quinlan looked rested whereas her brother looked more haunted, his eyes now looking almost hooded, as he looked at the two policemen.

  “The inquest is tomorrow, as you know, Inspector. Then we’ll see what we need to do to bring…to bring Sean back to Ireland.” Helen put her hands over her eyes, like a child, unself-conscious in a shaft of grief.

  “Have you any more idea of what happened to our brother?” Eamon asked quickly though he’d laid his hand on his sister’s arm for the merest second.

  “We are pursuing…” Inspector Greene sighed, abandoning the official mode of speech.

  “Your brother is proving an elusive person, Mr. Bracken. It is difficult to assess whether he had enemies. He wasn’t what you’d call a recluse, but as they say, he kept himself to himself. That makes our job difficult.”

  “Could it be a random attack?” Helen asked.

  “It could have been but as time goes on that seems ever more unlikely. If it were a random attack, we’d be looking at a madman. It wasn’t a robbery. His wallet, with a small amount of money in it, was found nearby. If there was a madman, though I suppose I should say a disturbed individual, roaming the dales, he would either have attacked someone else or come to our attention in some other way, by now. We can’t rule it out, but it’s more likely that your brother was killed by someone he knew, who had a motive that we have yet to discover. And, that’s why I have to return again to pester you with even more questions.”

  Brown glanced quickly at his boss. Neat.

  “We do understand, Inspector. But we’ve told you, well everything…I’m repeating myself, but when someone emigrates you lost a lot of the closeness. Not the love, but the ins and outs of a person’s life. Well, you get out of the habit of it. If you only see each other once in a blue moon or only communicate through letters and Christmas cards, well…” He looked at his sister.

  “Eamon’s right. I wrote to him maybe every couple of months. I’d tell him family news and maybe about someone he was at school with…that sort of thing.”

  “Did he write back?”

  She smiled, eyes crinkling, a flash of teeth, a fleeting transformation. “For a poet, his letters were prosaic. He didn’t go in much for description or indeed anything much about his romantic life. We’d given up on that I think.”

  Inspector Greene took his gabardine coat off—the private lounge they were in had finally begun to heat up against the cold March air. He put it on the back of his chair. His suit and shirt looked more brushed and ironed than usual. What a thing to notice. Maybe Brown’s observational skills were improving. It wasn’t that the boss usually looked dishevelled. Come to think of it—that was what he looked sometimes. Not at the moment, though.

  “When we spoke to you the other day, Mrs. Quinlan, you made a reference to water under the bridge. It was when I asked about life in Ireland before Sean came across the water. What was it you meant by that?”

  The flush swept from her neck to her hairline in a second, and Eamon Bracken, uttered something that could have been, sod, or sod it.

  You didn’t need to be a mind reader to see that the inspector had touched a nerve.

  “I just meant that a lot of water had passed under the bridge since Sean had lived in Ireland, and since anything that happened back then…”

  It was a weak effort, and the four of them knew it.

  A grandfather clock in the corner of the old-fashioned room ticked a few tense seconds, and the smell of the wood smoke was homely.

  Greene allowed the silence to last several seconds.

  “Your reaction—the reaction of both of you is enough to tell me that there’s something. I’m guessing that it’s about your brother’s private life?”

  Eamon was stepping up to the mark, but first, he cleared his throat. “I’m getting myself a whiskey. Can I get anyone a drink?”

  Brown watched his boss. So far, he’d done all the talking. Now, he’d probably order a half of mild for Brown, like he was a penny boy, not a grown man. One step up from lemonade, at least. “A sherry, Eamon, a large one,” Helen said.

  “A couple of halves of mild for myself and Sergeant Brown. Thank you.”

  Eamon appeared to throw a glance of pity at him as he went out to the bar, and the heat on his face made Brown hope he wasn’t blushing like a girl, like Helen Quinlan had, a few minutes ago.

  Eamon took a good swallow of the drink, and Brown wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d downed a swift one while he waited for their glasses of beer to be filled.

  “There was a bit of trouble at home when Sean w
as a young fella.”

  “Woman trouble?” Greene asked.

  “Yes.”

  Again, the silence fell.

  “Did she become pregnant?”

  They both looked at him, startled.

  Brown remembered that religion was a big thing in Ireland, Catholicism. An unmarried girl getting pregnant would have been a big scandal. It was a bad enough thing, according to most people, here in Yorkshire. It would be much worse in a small place in rural Ireland.

  “No, she didn’t become pregnant. But, she wasn’t free to be going out with Sean, and he should certainly have kept his distance from her.”

  “She was married?” Brown was caught up in the story, and the words were out before he could consider them.

  The inspector threw him a sour look.

  “She was married to my, our, oldest brother Brendan. It all came out, and as you can imagine, all hell broke loose. Sheila had not long lost a baby, and as things eventually turned out, the blame for the affair was squarely put on Sean.”

  “We were younger, inspector,” Helen broke in. “We were children, really quite young. She sipped the sherry and then took a bigger drink. “This was a huge scandal, but it was also a big black secret, and really it’s only in later years that we learned the full story and then in dribs and drabs. It caused ructions in the family. It’s painful, to this day, not mentioned, especially not in our parents’ house.”

  “Did she leave him, your older brother’s wife?”

  Eamon shook his head. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen in Ireland. If you’re married in the eyes of the Catholic Church, you’re married for life. The church and the state are more or less the same thing. So, no, they knuckled down and got on with it.”

  Good God, that sounded grim.

  Eamon smiled and looked softer. “I think they’re all right. He forgave her. Not Sean, though. Sean’s card was marked after that, as far as Brendan was concerned.”

  “How about your parents?” The inspector was back in the driving seat again

  “Much as you would expect. The old man, my father, was savage, fit to be tied. Mom was angry with Sean too, but at the end of the day, he’s… he was her son. More than that, the golden boy. The best looking, sportiest and to cap it all, very gifted too.”

  Bitter, Brown thought then he caught Eamon Bracken’s eye and saw that it wasn’t bitterness; more irony. This sort of thing happened in big families—he’d seen it. Where the big stuff was turned on its head, into a joke almost and was defused in this way.

  * * *

  “I thought that story was too pat. Do you know what I mean, lad?”

  “No,” the monosyllable was out before he could stop it. They were on their way to Swallow Hall and already the thought of the place was giving him the creeps.

  “I mean, that I believed it, sir. Sorry. It was plausible, too that it would cause a rift in the family and maybe even explain why he joined up.” Not that any of the young men needed to be disowned or depressed to volunteer. Such had been the sweep of patriotism and whipped-up up outrage that they’d been tripping over each other on the way to the recruitment office.

  “You may be right. I just got the feeling that it was convenient. We were looking for trouble back in Wicklow, and lo and behold they come up with a story.”

  Brown kept quiet. When you disagreed with Inspector Greene as fundamentally as he did on this, the best policy was to keep your mouth shut.

  * * *

  Kate Beech looked for reasons not to see them. There was a crisis in the house because the housemaid was leaving them, and that had upset Elizabeth, and Hester was leaving for London, and Mother wasn’t very well with all this going on.

  In his quiet way, the way he could be sometimes - brooding was the word -Inspector Greene stood his ground. They would wait, come back again first thing in the morning if necessary, but they would speak to her.

  You could see her mind considering the option of the morning and dismissing it. They meant business, and she knew it. She’s very stubborn was Brown’s thought after they’d spoken to her for about ten minutes. She was more confident than the twittering Mary, and a lot more stable and normal than Elizabeth, but in her own way she was just as difficult.

  “I keep telling you, Inspector. I came back largely because my mother was getting older and because neither Elizabeth nor Mary was managing particularly well…”

  “But your daughter, Serena…she’d moved here. Surely she was capable of managing the house?” Greene was dogged, and Brown recalled his boss’s certainty that the roots of Bracken’s murder were here in Swallow Hall. He’d not been satisfied with their interview with Bracken’s brother and sister, but not because he seriously suspected the family or anyone back in Wicklow, a place Sean Bracken had left over twenty years ago. He’d been returning, mind…

  “Serena was a young woman. She had a job. It wasn’t fair to expect her to take on the running of this house.”

  “So, if I happened to hear…in the course of my investigation that you had reasons of your own to leave South London, that would be completely untrue?”

  She bowed her head and closed her eyes briefly.

  When she looked at the inspector again, it was with something. Disdain, thought Brown, and in that moment, you could see her mother in her. The most normal one in the family, and perfectly polite, but scratch under the surface and there was the arrogance. Old Mr. Turner may have been a self-made man, but his wife behaved like a lady of the manor. It still rankled, what Muriel had said about his mother…and then, the inspector’s wife. And the sisters and brother would have been brought up in privilege with a sense of their own place in the world.

  “You seem to already know what happened in London, Inspector. Please forgive me for saying this, but I think you’re overstretching the mark. There can be no connection between anything that happened in my previous life - before I even returned to Yorkshire—with some random killing of an Irish poet. I barely knew him.”

  “But he was a close friend of your daughter,” the inspector’s voice was unperturbed, dismissing her admonishment as a little tantrum.

  “That’s as may be, but we don’t live in each other’s pockets. My daughter is a grown woman. She’s been married, widowed. She doesn’t confide in me about her friendships. This isn’t that sort of household. Anyway, I’ll go back to my original point. What bearing does any of that, Sean Bracken, my daughter’s friendship with him, his unfortunate death, have on my earlier life in London?”

  “We have to look at everything and anything when we’re investigating an untimely death—especially when someone has been deliberately killed.”

  She pursed her lips and glanced at the window. Inexplicably, Brown was sorry for her. In that glance outside, she showed a longing to escape, which he could understand.

  The inspector shifted in the chair, getting himself more comfortable, and the ticking clock was unconscionably loud.

  “My husband was a good man whatever you might have heard to the contrary. He made a mistake, borrowed some money from a client’s account when some shares he held, fell rapidly. He thought he could recoup the money by investing in different shares, recommended to him by some old school pal. Unfortunately, they were just as poor an investment. Ironically, also because of a failed investment, one of Richard’s clients needed access to some of his money. Richard hadn’t had the time to make good the borrowing, and the whole thing erupted.”

  Greed. Brown could still hear the preacher in the little dales chapel he’d attended every Sunday of his childhood. Dragged there by his mother, more like. The preachers varied, but some of them had been wise. However, this woman sugar-coated what her husband had done, the Methodist preachers would have seen it in simple terms of temptation and greed, and they would have been right.

  “Your own involvement, Mrs. Beech, how were you involved?”

  Kate Beech ignored the question. “There was a day, perhaps two days, when things could have been cove
red up, put right. I approached my mother. Begged her really. She as good as laughed into my face. Told me Richard should take his medicine like a man, and he should have known better in the first place, and I should have known better than to have married a weak man.”

  How on earth did this woman manage to share a house with old Mrs. Turner after that? Brown couldn’t do it. But, he’d not been tried like that, not yet. Maybe when people were really up against it, they put up with all sorts of compromise.

  “You’ll be wondering how I tolerate living back here after that. Being turned away flat in my hour of need, all that?” There was a definite mocking tone in her voice now. Of course, she’d read accurately how they’d see her actions.

  She shrugged and even managed a quick smile. “You don’t know my mother, Inspector. Nor you, Sergeant,” Brown couldn’t stop the little jerk of his shoulders.

  “See, I can hear the cogs in your brain ticking. First of all, knowing my mother all my life, I wasn’t as distressed by her refusal to help as you might think. Well, not surprised at any rate. You get used to a person, and whereas a normal person might see behaviour as monstrous, you just think, oh, well, it’s Mother, what did I expect? More fool me for asking.”

  It was probably true, but took an adjustment in thinking. Brown couldn’t dream of his mother ever being like this. Thank God.

  “As for why I returned here? Needs must when the devil drives. Our descent was rapid. My husband was declared bankrupt and found guilty of fraud, theft, and there was something about failing in his fiduciary duty; or maybe that was in his hearing before the Law Society. I find a lot of things blur and merge together when I look back on that time. He was struck off, needless to say, and imprisoned.”

  Brown saw a rigidity in how she held herself and heard a brittleness behind her words. She’d developed a way of dealing with this and a way of telling the story.

  “He emerged from prison, a broken man, as they say. I’d rented a flat in Lewisham. The one thing I could do, the only beacon of light in a patchy, poor education was my ability to play the piano, and I had passed my grade exams. I established a handful of students. Not easy to teach the piano in a flat with neighbours upstairs and down, but I tried to fit it in when they were out at work.”