The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  “The Case of the Parr Children” was originally published in Ms. Murder, edited by Marie Smith (London, Xanadu, 1989); it was first collected in Jemima Shore’s First Case (New York, Norton, 1987).

  The Case of the Parr Children

  ANTONIA FRASER

  “I’VE COME ABOUT THE CHILDREN.”

  The woman who stood outside the door of the flat, her finger poised to ring the bell again, looked desperate. She also looked quite unknown to the owner of the flat, Jemima Shore. It was ten o’clock on Sunday morning; an odd time for anyone to be paying a social call on the celebrated television reporter. Jemima Shore had no children. Outside her work she led a very free and very private existence. As she stood at the door, unusually dishevelled, pulling a dark-blue towelling robe round her, she had time to wonder rather dazedly: Whose children? Why here? Before she decided that the stranger had rung the wrong bell of the flat, and very likely in the wrong house in Holland Park. “I’ve come about the children.”

  The woman before her was panting slightly as she repeated the words. But then Jemima Shore’s flat was the top floor. It was her appearance which on closer inspection was odd: she looked smudged and dirty in like a charcoal drawing which has been abandoned. Her beltless mackintosh had presumably once been white; as had perhaps her ancient tennis shoes with their gaping canvas, and her thick woollen socks. The thin dark dress she wore beneath her mackintosh, hem hanging down, gave the impression of being too old for her until Jemima realized that it was the dress itself which was decrepit. Only her hair showed any sign of care: that had at least been brushed. Short and brown, it hung down straight on either side of her face: in this case the style was too young.

  The woman before Jemima might have been a tramp. Then there was the clink of a bottle at her feet as she moved uneasily towards Jemima. In a brown paper bag were the remains of a picnic which had clearly been predominantly alcoholic. The image of the tramp was confirmed.

  “Jemima Shore Investigator?” she gasped. “You’ve got to help me.” And she repeated for the third time: “You see, I’ve come about the children.”

  Jemima recoiled slightly. It was true that she was billed by this title in her programmes of serious social reportage. It was also true that the general public had from time to time mistaken her for a real investigator as a result. Furthermore, lured by the magic spell of know-all television, people had on occasion brought her problems to solve; and she had on occasions solved them. Nevertheless early on a Sunday morning, well before the first cup of coffee, seemed an inauspicious moment for such an appeal. In any case by the sound of it, the woman needed a professional social worker rather than an amateur investigator.

  Jemima decided that the lack of coffee could at least be remedied. Pulling her robe still further around her, and feeling more than slightly cross, she led the way into her elegant little kitchen. The effect of the delicate pink formica surfaces was to make the tramp-woman look grubbier than ever. At which point her visitor leant forward on her kitchen stool, covered in pretty rose-coloured denim, and started to sob loudly and incontrolledly into her hands. Tears trickled between her fingers. Jemima noticed with distaste that the finger-nails too were dirty. Coffee was by now not so much desirable as essential. Jemima proceeded first to make it, and then to administer it.

  Ten minutes later she found herself listening to a very strange story indeed. The woman who was telling it described herself as Mrs. Catharine Parr.

  “Yes, just like the wretched Queen who lost her head, and I’m just as wretched, I’m quite lost too.” Jemima raised her eyebrows briefly at the historical inaccuracy—hadn’t Catharine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII, died in her bed? But as Mrs. Parr rushed on with her dramatic tale, she reflected that here was a woman who probably embellished everything with unnecessary flourishes. Mrs. Parr was certainly wretched enough; that went without question. Scotland. She had come overnight from Scotland. Hence of course the mackintosh, even the picnic (although the empty wine bottles remained unexplained). Hence the early hour, for Mrs. Parr had come straight from Euston Station, off her sleeper. And now it was back to the children again.

  At this point, Jemima Shore managed at last to get a word in edgeways: “Whose children? Your children?”

  Mrs. Parr, tears checked, looked at Jemima as though she must already know the answer to that question: “Why, the Parr children of course. Don’t you remember the case of the Parr children? There was a lot about it on television,” she added reproachfully.

  “The Parr children: yes, I think I do remember something—your children, I suppose.”

  To Jemima’s surprise there was a pause. Then Mrs. Parr said with great solemnity:

  “Miss Shore, that’s just what I want you to find out. I just don’t know whether they’re my children or not. I just don’t know.”

  “I think,” said Jemima Shore Investigator, resignedly drinking her third cup of coffee, “you had better tell me all about it from the beginning.”

  Oddly enough Jemima genuinely did remember something about the episode. Not from television, but from the newspapers where it had been much discussed, notably in the Guardian; and Jemima was a Guardian reader. It had been a peculiarly rancorous divorce case. The elderly judge had come down heavily on the side of the father. Not only had he taken the unusual step of awarding Mr. Parr care and custody of the two children of the marriage—mere babies—but he had also summed up the case in full for the benefit of the Press.

  In particular he had dwelt venomously on the imperfections of Mrs. Parr and her “trendy amoral Bohemianism unsuitable for contact with any young creature.” This was because Mrs. Parr had admitted having an affair with a gypsy or something equally exotic. She now proposed to take her children off with him for the glorious life of the open road; which, she suggested, would enable her children to grow up uninhibited, loving human beings. Mr. Parr responded with a solid bourgeois proposition, including a highly responsible Nanny, a general atmosphere of nursery tea now, private schools later. Columnists had had a field-day for a week or two, discussing the relative merits of bourgeois and Bohemian life-styles for children. On the whole Jemima herself had sympathized with the warm-blooded Mrs. Parr.

  It transpired that Jemima’s recollection of the case was substantially correct. Except that she had forgotten the crucial role played by the so-called Nanny; in fact no Nanny but a kind of poor relation, a trained nurse named Zillah. It was Zillah who had spoken with calm assurance of the father’s love for his children, reluctantly of the selfish flightiness of the mother. She had known her cousin Catharine all her life, she said, although their material circumstances had been very different. She pronounced with regret that in her opinion Catharine Parr was simply not fitted to have sole responsibility for young children. It was one of the reasons which had prompted her to leave her nursing career in order to look after the Parr babies.

  Since Zillah was clearly a detached witness who had the welfare of the children at heart, her evidence was regarded as crucial by the judge. He contrasted Catharine and Zillah: “two young women so outwardly alike, so inwardly different.” He made this also a feature of his summing-up. “Miss Zillah Roberts, who has had none of the benefits of money and education of the mother in the case, has nevertheless demonstrated the kind of firm moral character most appropriate to the care of infants…etc. etc.”

  In vain Mrs. Parr had exploded in court: “Don’t believe her! She’s his mistress! They’re sleeping together. She’s been jealous of me all her life. She always wanted everything I had, my husband, now my children.” Such wild unsubstantiated talk did Mrs. Parr no good at all, especially in view of her own admitted “uninhibited and loving” behaviour. If anything, the judge’s summing-up gained in vinegar from the interruption.

  Mrs. Parr skated over the next part of her story. Deprived of her children, she had set off for the south of Ireland with her lover. Jemima had the impress
ion, listening to her, that drink had played a considerable part in the story—drink and perhaps despair too. Nor did Mrs. Parr enlarge on the death of her lover, except to say that he had died as he had lived: “violently.” As a result Jemima had no idea whether Mrs. Parr regretted her bold leap out of the bourgeois nest. All she discovered was that Mrs. Parr had had no contact whatsoever with her children for seven years. Neither sought nor proffered. Not sought because Mr. Parr had confirmed Mrs. Parr’s suspicions by marrying Zillah the moment his divorce became absolute: “and she would never have permitted it. Zillah.” Not proffered, of course, because Mrs. Parr had left no address behind her.

  “I had to make a new life. I wouldn’t take any money from him. They’d taken my children away from me and I had to make a new life.”

  It was only after the death of Mrs. Parr’s lover that, destitute and friendless, she had returned to England. Contacting perforce her ex-husband’s lawyer for funds of some sort, she had discovered to her astonishment that Mr. Parr had died suddenly several months earlier. The lawyers had been trying in their dignified and leisurely fashion to contact his first wife, the mother of his children. In the meantime the second Mrs. Parr, Zillah, the children’s ex-Nanny and step-mother had taken them from Sussex off to a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands. As she put it to the lawyer, she intended “to get them and me away from it all.” The lawyer had demurred with the question of the children’s future outstanding. But Zillah, with that same quiet air of authority which had swayed the divorce-court judge, convinced him. It might be months before the first Mrs. Parr was contacted, she pointed out. In the meantime they had her address. And the children’s.

  “And suddenly there I was!” exclaimed Mrs. Catharine Parr to Jemima Shore, the vehemence returning to her voice. “But it was too late.”

  “Too late?”

  “Too late for Zillah. You see, Miss Shore, Zillah was dead. She was drowned in a boating accident in Scotland. It was too late for Zillah.” Jemima, sensing the depth of Mrs. Parr’s bitterness, realized that what she really meant was: Too late for vengeance.

  Even then, Mrs. Parr’s troubles were not over. The encounter with the children had been even more upsetting. Two children, Tamsin nearly nine and Tara nearly eight, who confronted her with scared and hostile eyes. They were being cared for at the lodge which Zillah had so precipitately rented. A local woman from the village, responsible for the caretaking of the lodge, had volunteered. Various suggestions had been made to transfer the children to somewhere less lonely, attended by less tragic memories. However, Tamsin and Tara had shown such extreme distress at the idea of moving away from their belongings and the home they knew that the plan had been abandoned. In the meantime their real mother had announced her arrival.

  So Mrs. Parr took the sleeper to Inverness.

  “But when I got to Scotland I didn’t recognize them!” cried Mrs. Parr in a return to her dramatic style. “So I want you to come back to Scotland with me and interview them. Find out who they are. You’re an expert interviewer: I’ve seen you on television. That programme about refugee children. You talk to them. I beg you, Miss Shore. You see before you a desperate woman and a fearful mother.”

  “But were you likely to recognize them?” enquired Jemima rather dryly. “I mean you hadn’t seen either of them for seven years. How old was Tamsin then—eighteen months? Tara—what—six months?”

  “It wasn’t a question of physical recognition, I assure you. In a way, they looked more or less as I expected. Fair. Healthy. She’d looked after them all right, Zillah, whoever they are. She always looked after people, Zillah. That’s how she got him of course.”

  “Then why—” began Jemima hastily.

  Mrs. Parr leant forward and said in a conspiratorial tone: “It was spiritual recognition I meant. Nothing spoke to me and said: these are my children. In fact a voice deep in me cried out: Zillah! These are Zillah’s children. This is Zillah’s revenge. Even from the grave, she won’t let me have my own children.” She paused for effect.

  “You see Zillah had this sister Kitty. We were cousins, I think I told you. Quite close cousins even though we had been brought up so differently. That’s how Zillah came to look after the children in the first place: she wanted a proper home, she said, after the impersonality of nursing. But that didn’t satisfy Zillah. She was always on at me to do something about this sister and her family—as though their awful lives were my fault!”

  She went on: “Kitty had two little girls, almost exactly the same ages as my two. Quite fair then, though not as fair as Zillah and not as fair as my children. But there was a resemblance, everyone said so. People sometimes took them for my children. I suppose our relationship accounted for it. Kitty was a wretched creature but physically we were not unalike. Anyway, Zillah thought the world of these babies and was always having them round. Kitty was unhappily married: I believe the husband ran off before the last baby was born. Suddenly, looking at this pair, I thought: little cuckoos. Zillah has taken her own nieces, and put them into my nest—”

  “—Which you had left of your own accord.” But Jemima did not say the words aloud. Instead she asked with much greater strength:

  “But why?”

  “The money! That’s why,” exclaimed Mrs. Parr in triumph. “The Parr money in trust for them. Parr Biscuits. Doesn’t that ring a bell? The money only went to the descendants of Ephraim Parr. She wouldn’t have got a penny—except what he left her. Her nieces had no Parr blood either. But my children, because they were Parrs, would have been, are rich. Maybe my poor little children died, ran away, maybe she put them in an orphanage—I don’t know. Or”—her voice suddenly changed totally, becoming dreamy, “Or perhaps these are my children after all. Perhaps I’m imagining it all, after all I’ve been through. Miss Shore, this is just what I’ve come all the way from Scotland to beg you to find out.”

  It was an extraordinary story. Jemima’s original impulse had been to give Mrs. Catharine Parr a cup of coffee and send her gently on her way. Now the overriding curiosity which was definitely her strongest attribute would not let her be. The appeals of the public to Jemima Shore Investigator certainly fell on compassionate ears; but they also fell on very inquisitive ones. In this instance she felt she owed it to the forces of common sense to point out first to Mrs. Parr that lawyers could investigate such matters far more efficiently than she. To this Mrs. Parr answered quite reasonably that lawyers would take an age, as they always did:

  “And in the meantime what would happen to me and the children? We’d be getting to know each other, getting fond of each other. No, Miss Shore, you can settle it. I know you can. Then we can all get on with our lives for better or for worse.”

  Then Jemima caved in and acceded to Mrs. Parr’s request.

  It was in this way, for better or for worse as Mrs. Parr had put it, that Jemima Shore Investigator found herself the following night taking the sleeper to Inverness.

  The sleeping-car attendant recognized Mrs. Parr quite merrily: “Why, it’s you again Mrs. Parr. You’ll keep British Rail in business with your travelling.” Then of course he recognized Jemima Shore with even greater delight. Later, taking her ticket, he was with difficulty restrained from confiding to her his full and rich life story which he was convinced would make an excellent television documentary. Staved off, he contented himself with approving Jemima’s modest order of late-night tea.

  “You’re not like your friend, then, Mrs. Parr…” he made a significant drinking gesture. “The trouble I had with her going north the first time. Crying and crying, and disturbing all the passengers. However, she was better the second time, and mebbe now you’ll have a good influence on her now, Miss Shore. I’ll be seeing her now and asking her if this time she’ll have a late-night cup of tea.” He bustled off, leaving Jemima faintly disquieted. She hoped that Mrs. Parr had no drink aboard. The north of Scotland with an alcoholic, probably
a fantasist into the bargain…

  Morning found her in a more robust mood. Which was fortunate since Jemima’s first sight of Kildrum Lodge, standing on the edge of a dark, seemingly endless loch, shut in by the mountains, was once again disquieting. It was difficult for her to believe that Zillah could have brought the children to such a place out of sheer love for Scottish scenery and country pursuits such as fishing, swimming, and walking. The situation of the lodge itself even for Scotland was so extremely isolated. Nor was the glen which led up to the lodge notably beautiful. A general lack of colour except blackness in the water reflected from the skies made it in fact peculiarly depressing. There was a lack of vegetation even on the lower slopes of the mountains, which slid down straight into the loch. The single-track road was bumpy and made of stones. It was difficult to imagine that much traffic passed that way. One could imagine a woman with something to hide—two children perhaps?—seeking out such a location, but not a warm comforting body hoping to cheer up her charges after the sudden death of their father.

  The notion of Zillah’s sinister purpose, far-fetched in London, suddenly seemed horribly plausible. And this was the loch, the very loch, in which Zillah herself had drowned. No, Kildrum to Jemima Shore did not have the air of a happy uncomplicated place. She looked across at Mrs. Parr, in the passenger seat of the hired car. Mrs. Parr looked pale. Whether she had passed the night consuming further bottles of wine or was merely dreading the next confrontation with the Parr children, the hands with which she was trying to light a cigarette were shaking. Jemima felt once more extremely sorry for her and glad that she had come to Kildrum.