Death of a Perfect Mother

by Robert Barnard

  He really believed it. He would never have understood that, though their opinions might sometimes overlap, his standards were a mere assemblage of conventionalities that happened to boost his self-love and his vision of his own place in the universal scheme of things; whereas in her there remained, however perverted by the strait-jacket of nonconformity, some sense of a Deity who had to be served, irrespective of personal inclination.

  Mrs Casey nodded grimly and said: ‘Aye. There’s not so many has standards these days.’

  ‘That was what I was meaning,’ said McHale. He paused.

  ‘I don’t know where I went wrong,’ said Mrs Casey, ruminating as she caught his line of thought. ‘But go wrong I did.’

  ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself,’ said McHale.

  ‘Who else is there to blame? Alf—that was my husband—was hardly ever home, not during t’war and after. And you can’t blame the father for how a daughter turns out.’

  ‘You must have seen a lot of things, things that went on next door, that pained you?’

  Mrs Casey nodded—but with a hint of wariness.

  ‘I should tell you that we have a pretty good idea that your daughter had—shall we say boy-friends? The name of Wilf Hamilton Corby has come up.’

  She seemed to breathe out. ‘There’s plenty could have told you that. That’s no great discovery.’

  ‘Precisely. But then there are the other names. This Mr Achituko, for example.’

  ‘Not her,’ said Mrs Casey, then pulled herself up. ‘I’ve no evidence Lill ever went outside her own colour.’

  McHale registered the moment, but imperceptibly. ‘And then some people have mentioned the next-door neighbour, Mr Fawcett.’

  Mrs Casey looked straight ahead of her.

  ‘What would you say to that?’

  ‘You haven’t asked me anything.’

  ‘Do you think your daughter was—carrying on with Mr Fawcett?’

  Mrs Casey choked. ‘I can’t tell a lie,’ she muttered. And really she almost couldn’t. ‘I—I think she was.’

  ‘What makes you think so? Did you see anything?’

  And suddenly a great tear welled up at the sides of Mrs Casey’s eyes, and she gulped back a sob. ‘I don’t know what’s for the best,’ she cried. ‘He’s wicked. Coming to me like that.’

  ‘Don’t you think,’ said McHale, leaning forward with a gentleness whose genuineness she was not in a position to examine, ‘that it’s always best to tell the whole truth?’

  The tawdry truism went straight to Mrs Casey’s methodistical heart, with its impulse for open public confession. Since Guy Fawcett’s visit she had been unhappy about covering the family shame with lies and concealments. She was not even sure what she was concealing. McHale’s simplistic appeal went straight to her heart.

  ‘She was a dreadful woman, my daughter!’ she wailed. ‘A scandal and a shame! To think that any woman could throw herself like that at a man—practically asking to be . . . to be made wicked! And a man like him, too! And Fred thinking her the perfect wife!’

  And then it all came out. The scene in the garden, the retreat to the house, and what she imagined went on in the house. And then Guy Fawcett’s visit to her, and his threats. And then, under McHale’s gentle probing, the implications about Debbie and Mr Achituko.

  ‘But there can’t be anything there, can there?’ she cried. ‘Debbie’s just a little girl. It must be something in his horrible mind!’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ said McHale soothingly. ‘Just don’t worry your head about it. You feel better now you’ve had a good cry, don’t you?’

  And certainly she did. He could see she did. When he went to his car he felt much like a parish priest who has just shriven a particularly tough sinner in his flock. And his mind was buzzing with the names of Corby and Fawcett, of Achituko and Debbie Hodsden.

  • • •

  Brian, at the sitting-room window, watched McHale leaving his gran’s, and felt a dull sense of being inside a net, a net contracting with every day that passed.

  The family was in danger of breaking up. He could see it coming, all the time. Not on the surface. Everything was normal on the surface. Debbie was out at her friend’s—going off half an hour since, turning ostentatiously in the opposite direction from Achituko’s lodging and walking down the road with indecent perkiness. Gordon had put on his track suit and gone on a training run. Fred had more or less woken up—how much sleep he seemed to need these days!—and was attempting the Sunday Grub crossword. He had filled in the answers to three clues, probably wrongly.

  But underneath everything was cracking up. Debbie and Gordon were at war, just as Debbie and Lill had always been. Fred was making foredoomed attempts to assert himself, and would soon retire, defeated and resentful, before Gordon’s greater force of personality. He, Brian—he, Brian . . .

  He, Brian, was wondering if things hadn’t been better on the whole with Lill alive. He was scanning the past to see whether there hadn’t been happy times then as well. Lill and her boys at the Fair, twice a year regular, when the fair came to Todmarsh. Lill and her boys at Torquay, walking up the beach and scandalizing the residents.

  Had it been so bad? Hadn’t it been something, some stable centre, which was now missing, leaving him lost and bewildered? Was it so dreadful, Lill’s ghastly vulgarity, which raked the beaches of Tunisia with its screeching laughter and drew forth the shivering distaste of the other British holidaymakers?

  Brian remembered Tunisia, and stirred uneasily in his chair. Remembered the sun, the camel rides, the endless sands. Remembered the tightness in his chest, like an intimation of mortality. Remembered Fred wandering lost around the grounds of the hotel, grateful for a casual word thrown in his direction. Remembered Gordon making up to a gross German Frau, bathing topless under stony Moslem gazes. Remembered the lemons and the figs, the little Arab cakes, the Berber women in town . . .

  Remembered the boys who danced around them as they walked past the medina—their handstands, their importunities, their mocking imitations, and their haunting, inviting cries: ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec ma sœur?’

  And then: ‘Êtes-vous anglais? Voulez-vous coucher avec mon frère?’

  CHAPTER 14

  THE TWA CORBIES

  Wilf Hamilton Corby did all he knew how to stop his wife getting in touch with the police. The cleaning lady came on Mondays, and, purchasing her loyalty with a five-pound note, Wilf impressed upon her that on no account was she to ring them if his wife asked her to. He also told her to stick around the house till he got home. ‘Sick fancies,’ he said: ‘that’s what she’s got—sick fancies.’

  But he was no match for his wife. Drusilla Corby sent the char down to the shop with another five-pound note for a box of tissues: ‘Keep the change—you’ve been so good to me,’ she said, with a smile that would have made the Albert Memorial blanch. The char found she might have multiple loyalties, and trotted off obediently. Then Drusilla Corby simply rose from her bed and tottered interestingly downstairs to the telephone. Wilf Hamilton Corby, had he seen, might have regarded it as a miracle of nearly New Testament proportions, but then he knew almost as little about his wife’s condition as we know about the gentleman who took up his bed in that interesting volume. Within ten minutes of the phone call Chief Inspector McHale was ensconced in an uncomfortable reproduction Chippendale chair, prepared for the goods.

  Mrs Corby regarded him speculatively from her bed. Not as a man, or as any kind of sexual object. She had never greatly liked men, and her marriage had by now contributed to a positive aversion. She regarded McHale solely from the point of view of the degree of discomfort, fear and sheer panic he might induce in her husband. And she thought that—properly worked on—he would do very well. She saw an element of the bully, the respectable moral thug in McHale, and she liked what she saw.

  ‘I suppose you’re wondering what made me call you,’ she said, her voice soft with physical weakness.

  ‘People d
o still call us, even in this day and age, when they have information,’ said McHale.

  ‘I mean what I suppose you’d call my motive,’ said Drusilla Corby. ‘I’m sure there are still public-spirited people in the world, but I’m quite sure I couldn’t claim to be one of them. I’m not even a good wife, or perhaps I would have held back. I’m afraid all my motives would seem to you intolerably vengeful. I have to tell you, Inspector, that the reason I am—like this—is that my husband . . . But I won’t go into details. Much better not. I merely give you the hint so that you won’t think me mentally sick, as well as physically—destroyed!’

  ‘There’s no question of that, Mrs Corby,’ said McHale, whose sympathy was marginally more genuine than her story. ‘I can see that you’ve suffered.’

  ‘So much! But that’s enough of that subject. I wanted to see you, and talk to you, because I knew you would have heard by now about my connection with this—this creature that has been murdered.’

  ‘I had heard,’ said McHale cautiously, ‘that Mrs Hodsden was a friend of yours.’

  ‘False!’ said Mrs Corby, with whiplash scorn. ‘I never set eyes on the woman in my life.’ She paused. ‘And do you have the impression, Inspector, that Lill Hodsden was the kind of woman likely to be my friend?’

  ‘The point had struck me as odd,’ admitted McHale.

  ‘Ah, you have realized, have you, that she was a creature of quite stupendous vulgarity? Very perceptive of you. And whatever else may be said of me, I am not that. I am comforted that you understand—but now I have seen you I realize you were bound to. I think Mrs Hodsden’s connection with this house will be quite plain to you when you meet my husband. Like clings to like, they say, don’t they? And those two certainly did cling.’

  ‘What you are saying, then, ma’am, is that Mrs Hodsden came to this house solely to see your husband, never to visit you.’

  ‘Precisely. She came to minister to his sexual needs—needs of a minimal and totally ridiculous nature, I would conjecture. She came on Monday and Thursday nights, regular as clockwork, and—doubly insulting—she had her own key, and went straight through to the study, where these acts of passion took place.’

  Mrs Corby leaned back against her pillow and cultivated her fragile invalid look. In fact she was bewildered by her impulse to swing between two roles, that of bitch (which came naturally) and that of pathetic victim of a brutal man’s aggression (which was a rarer assumption). Like most people shut away from society at large, she was not in the habit of preparing faces to meet the people that she met. But McHale barely noticed her amateur dramatic assumptions. He was too interested in what she was saying.

  ‘So in fact,’ he said, ‘these visits on Mondays and Thursdays were exclusively to your husband, were they?’

  ‘Certainly. How monotonously regular they were, weren’t they? Even Shakespeare couldn’t have made much out of two hours on Mondays and Thursdays.’

  ‘Do you know anything more about the visits?’

  ‘Certainly. First of all, she exacted her price. Gifts at first. Money now and then, on an irregular basis. She was also starting to mention marriage.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Precisely. Bizarre in the circumstances, isn’t it? But that is exactly what she did on Monday night.’

  ‘And did your husband seem of the same mind?’

  ‘I have nothing but contempt for Wilf Corby,’ enunciated his wife, gazing ahead like a dyspeptic Jane Austen as she made the judgment; ‘In general he has the brains of a lemming. But even I will admit that were he to divorce me or encompass my death (which he will not, because he hasn’t got the nerve) he would not be foolish enough to do it in order to marry Lill Hodsden.’

  ‘Still,’ said McHale, ‘that’s a bit of a stunner.’

  ‘Quite. And that,’ said Drusilla Corby, ‘is why he tried to buy her off, I wouldn’t mind betting.’

  ‘Buy her off?’

  ‘My other piece of information. My last, I’m afraid. Shut away up here one is so . . . out of things. But this I do know. It was on Thursday night . . .’

  ‘The night of the murder?’

  ‘As I now know. She arrived, I suspect, in a temper. She slammed the door of the study, a thing she’d never done before. Wilf was up here with me, fussing around the bedroom as usual. When the door slammed he muttered “wind”—just the sort of idiotic lie he would jump into, since it was a perfectly still night. Anyway, he went down, and I heard nothing for a bit. But half an hour before she was due to go—she always went at half past nine—I heard the study door open and Wilf walk through to the lounge. The lounge is little used these days, as you can imagine, and I wondered what he could be doing. There’s a fine old cabinet there, wonderful craftsmanship and solid as rock. It holds a lot of china and glass—stuff I inherited, wasted on him. In the bottom section my jewels are kept. I have no use for them now, a worn-out old invalid woman—no, no, don’t protest. Anyway, I know he opened the cabinet: I can’t mistake that sound. I think I heard him get out my jewel case and rummage in my jewellery. And that seems the most likely reason he’d go to the cabinet: that painted creature would have had no use for fine china.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Now do you understand why I called you? Rifling my jewel-box for something to placate his ill-tempered whore?’

  ‘I can understand very well. But there is one thing: there was no jewellery of any consequence on the body.’

  ‘Was there not? Certainly if there was cheap stuff he didn’t get it from my jewel-box. I’d like to think he fobbed her off with something cheap, because it would be so easy to do, but that doesn’t seem to fit the facts . . .’ She meditated eagerly and came up with the most damaging of all possible explanations. ‘Do you think he could have killed her to get it back?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said McHale, who wasn’t happy with a murder for that sort of motive a bare ten minutes after the jewel had been given. ‘I wouldn’t want to commit myself. You’ve certainly provided me with food for thought—and a possible motive for someone.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so. You know my husband has been sweating blood these last few days.’

  ‘Really? Well, he won’t have to do that much longer. You’re sure there’s nothing else you have to tell me?’

  Mrs Corby squirmed restlessly in her bed, greedy for the attention and excitement McHale provided her with. ‘I wish there was. But there’s nothing. I’m so cut off up here. Day after day, nothing but silence.’ She sighed, an April breeze through a willow tree.

  ‘I should have thought it was remarkable how much you managed to . . . be aware of,’ said McHale.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Drusilla Corby, switching roles, ‘I manage to totter to the top of the stairs.’

  • • •

  A quick trip to the Station put McHale in touch with the forensic people in Cumbledon. He had thought it all out in the car: it was possible Corby had loaded Lill with necklaces or rings, but on the whole McHale doubted it. Necklaces were difficult to explain away, and rings were nastily ambiguous. Natural parsimony would tempt him to get away with less if he could, and on the whole a brooch seemed more the ticket.

  It proved a lucky hit. The lab people confirmed that on Lill’s pre-Raphaelite green dress, under her leopard-skin coat, were two minute holes that probably were the marks of a brooch pin. It might be worth checking the position of the holes against Lill’s existing jewellery.

  But all things considered, McHale thought he could go for bust without checking. He chuckled with joy and self-love, sure he was on to something. The constable driving him to the Corby shipyard could feel the self-approbation oozing out of him, and gazed darkly ahead: McHale had not made himself loved in the Todmarsh Station. There was something else too: the anticipation of pleasure, the Achilles heel of a policeman about to grill a suspect. McHale’s lips twitched as they pulled up at the yard, for he could see, watching them from the office, the terrified eyes of Wilf Corby. But as he got out of the car th
e first person who came into his line of vision was Gordon Hodsden. And Gordon—overalled, dirty from sawdust and oil—was obviously wanting to waylay him.

  ‘Do you think I could have a word, sir?’ he asked. The ‘sir’ was deliberate and premeditated. McHale responded: he looked towards the office, and smiled at the thought of Wilf Corby waiting inside.

  ‘Certainly,’ he said. He glanced in the direction of a deserted wharf, and together they strolled away from the massive shed where the boats were built. McHale remained courteous but remote, and Gordon placatory rather than worried.

  ‘I’ve got to come clean,’ he began. ‘I wasn’t altogether open with you on Friday.’

  ‘No,’ said McHale. ‘I know you weren’t.’

  ‘It’s not easy when it’s your own sister.’

  ‘It’s foolish, whoever it concerns.’

  ‘Anyway, I want to give it to you straight now—’

  McHale was not going to let anyone claim virtue on such flimsy grounds. ‘You want to give it to me straight now because you know your grandmother has already told me all she knows.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Gordon, looking him straight in the eye. ‘But that’s not the whole truth. I couldn’t get out of Gran exactly what she said. She was too upset.’ He stopped at the end of the wharf and looked sombrely out to sea. ‘No, it’s not just that; it’s something else . . . I suppose you know the basic facts.’

  ‘I’ve guessed. But you tell me.’

  ‘Mum and Debbie had a row. Debbie got a bit bashed about (not serious—you saw the bruise). She disobeyed Mum, though, and went off to school the next day. Mum was furious with her when she got home, and locked her in her room. We didn’t tell you that because we . . . we felt it would give a wrong impression about Mum.’

  McHale kept silence. He had a half-sense that Gordon’s explanation of their motives for concealment was inadequate.

  ‘The point is this: the row was about Achituko. The bloody black who lives along the road. She’d been sleeping with him.’