A Fatal Attachment

by Robert Barnard

  “Well, not exactly that, but I phoned him and said I’d take responsibility for the boys in the evenings: see that they get one really good meal a day, and so on.”

  “That’s awfully good of you. And it will give you an interest.”

  “I hardly need an interest, Dorothy.”

  “No, I mean a personal interest: people. . . .”

  Dorothy felt she had made a blunder. Lydia left a pause.

  “Anyway, it means I’m cooking a lot more, making pies and custards and cakes, getting back all the old skills I’ve let fall into disuse since my nephews . . . grew up.”

  “Oh yes. You told me how fond you used to be of your nephews. How old are these boys?”

  Lydia somehow didn’t like the way she said “these boys,” as if they were replacements ordered from Harrods.

  “Colin and Ted? Colin is thirteen, Ted fifteen.”

  “Oh, so old. I thought you meant younger children.”

  “Oh no. The early teens are just the age I find most interesting. There is so much possibility and promise there.”

  “I’m sure you’ll bring it out.” Dorothy said it very sincerely, but she was conscious she had made bloomers she had to atone for. “What plans do you have for them?”

  “No plans at all, beyond what to give them for tonight’s dinner. To have plans is to invite disappointment. I shall watch and see how they develop. Oh—I do plan to leave them a little money. I’m stopping off at my solicitor’s in Halifax on the way home. Goodness, look at the time. We must rush. I’ve acres of things to get through and I really must finish by four fifteen. Heavens, what shall I give them for their dinner?”

  “There’s a good butcher two or three doors down from here.”

  “Is there? Dotty, you are a treasure! What would I do without you?”

  She settled the bill, brushing aside Dorothy’s attempts to pay her share, and they picked up a couple of rump steaks before getting in Lydia’s car.

  “I’ll just have scrambled eggs,” said Lydia. “Two proper meals a day is too much for me. I think I’ll do chips for them. Children do love chips, don’t they? I’ll try to teach them about good food, but I’ll do it slowly. Looking at Maurice I wonder whether I should do it at all.”

  “Is that the one in television?”

  “That’s right—Gavin’s brother. He called over the weekend. He was up visiting Thea. He is most definitely overweight. A man of thirty-odd should not be that shape.”

  “How nice that he keeps in touch.”

  “Hmmm. He’s married to the most appalling woman. An actress, for want of a better word. The sort of woman who uses four-letter words in public. I’m afraid Maurice is never going to come to anything.”

  “What a disappointment for you.”

  Lydia nodded and drove on. When they got back to the library she said “To work, to work!”, waved briefly to Dorothy and settled down at her desk. So absorbed did she become in the clericals and anti-clericals, going off on to an enticing by-way concerning Stendahl, that it was after half past four when Dorothy leaned over her shoulder and said:

  “I thought you were aiming to be off by a quarter past, Lydia.”

  “Oh, my God! Why didn’t you—? Sorry, not your fault at all, Dorothy. Look, can this and this and this be kept for me for another week or ten days?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re a treasure. I must fly.”

  By the time Lydia had got to her car she had decided to give her solicitor a miss: she could go in at any time and sign the codicil. Much better to be home by the time she had told the boys she would be in. But when she got back to the cottage she found a note from Molly Kegan saying the boys had rung during their lunch-break to say they were going swimming after school, and wouldn’t be back at the cottage before six.

  Lydia was pleased they showed such signs of responsibility. She peeled potatoes and cut them up into chips, then got the grill ready for the steaks. She cracked eggs into a saucepan and added cream and butter, and put a slice of bread under the grill.

  The boys were boisterous and happy when they arrived. They had enjoyed their swim and were now ravenously hungry.

  “Steak and chips—super!” said Ted.

  “How do you like your steak done?” asked Lydia.

  “Properly done,” said Colin.

  “Not red—yuck!” said Ted.

  “In France,” said Lydia, when they were all sat down and eating, “they would just give the steak a quick burst of heat on both sides, and that would be it.”

  “Well, that’s France,” said Ted. “Just because the French do it one way doesn’t mean it’s the best, does it?”

  “The French know an awful lot about cooking.”

  “I think you should have food as you like it,” said Colin, “not as someone else thinks you ought to like it.”

  “And if you’re a natural vegetarian,” said Ted, “I mean, if you’d like to be a vegetarian, and think that killing animals for food is pretty nasty when you come to think about it, only you can’t be one because most vegetables are so yucky, then you wouldn’t want to eat your meat red, would you? I mean, you cut into it and it sits there saying: ‘Flesh’.”

  “Shut up, you nerd,” said Colin, brandishing his knife. “You’re putting me off.”

  “Well, I hope you’ll put off being a vegetarian until your mother is better,” said Lydia. “I really wouldn’t know what to cook for you. I’m an unrepentant meat-eater myself, and I have a fur coat—call me a wicked woman if you will.”

  After dinner Ted rang the hospital to say they wouldn’t be going in that evening.

  “Did you say you would?” asked Lydia.

  “Well, we did, but the swimming really tired us out. I’ve said we’ll be in tomorrow, definitely.”

  “She barely recognises us, you know,” said Colin.

  “Or we hardly know her,” said Ted, clearly very troubled.

  “It’s like talking to someone who is almost someone you know.”

  “Eerie,” said Colin.

  Then they played Monopoly, which was Colin’s favourite game. Lydia had given her set away when the Hoddle boys grew up, but the Bellinghams had brought theirs up two nights before, and had left it with her. They’re settling in, Lydia had thought.

  Lydia played well, and played to win. She had no patience with people who pandered to children and let them win. The boys were more haywire in their approach, but Colin had a run of luck and finally drove Lydia to the wall.

  “Perhaps I’ll become a great capitalist,” he said.

  It was twilight, and time for them to leave.

  “Thanks for a super meal,” said Ted.

  “My pleasure. Will your father be in?”

  “Oh yes. He’s got a lot of paperwork to go over for the firm. He was going to have bacon and eggs and get stuck into it.”

  “I think I’ll walk down the hill and say hello to him. It’s such a lovely evening, and we really ought at least to recognise each other if we pass in the street.”

  So the boys collected up their things, including a little pile of homework they had managed to forget about, and all three left the cottage, Lydia locking up behind her. It was indeed a lovely evening, with birds singing in the gathering darkness, and the air still warm. The boys collected their bicycles from beside the gate and wheeled them down the hill, the three of them talking animatedly. When they got to the bottom and the little collection of houses, shops and pub that constituted Bly, they turned right.

  “I’ll find out which your house is too,” said Lydia. “I think I know which it is, but now I’ll be sure.”

  They went past Andy and Thea’s house, that regrettable mixture of stone on the ground floor and half-hearted timbering on the first. There was a dusty Volvo parked outside.

  “I think that must be Maurice’s,” said Lydia, peering at it in the gloom. “I thought he said he’d be gone by now.”

  “It’s a Midlands number plate,” said Ted. />
  “Something must have kept him,” said Lydia, speeding up a little. “Andy and Thea will be pleased.”

  “Andy Hoddle,” said Colin. “Isn’t it an awful name?”

  “It doesn’t have any ring to it,” agreed Lydia.

  “He’s a good teacher, though,” said Ted.

  “I’m glad to hear it. Though I never could take science seriously somehow.”

  The house Nick Bellingham had bought when the family moved North was even more regrettable than the Hoddles’. It was a mean, four-square brick construction, with a skimpy apron of garden in the front, and a larger stretch of wilderness at the back. Lydia, in fact, could remember the house being built, and how she had thought it disfigured the village. The boys barged in through the front door and shouted to their father.

  “Dad! Mrs Perceval’s here.”

  Nick Bellingham had obviously been doing his paperwork in a state of comfortable dishabille. His shirt was open to his paunch, and he was struggling with his belt. His fly was just about done up, but it looked like a near thing. He was in his stockinged feet, and wildly looking round for somewhere to stub out his cigarette. He looked, in fact, a mess.

  “Oh, Mrs Perceval. I wasn’t expecting you. You must excuse the mess—”

  Lydia was gracious.

  “I won’t notice it, because I won’t come in. I thought it was such a lovely evening that I’d just come down with the boys and make myself known to you.”

  Nick was still feverishly buttoning himself up.

  “Well, it’s a great pleasure—and I want you to know I appreciate what you’re doing—we all do—”

  Lydia waved his gratitude aside.

  “It’s pleasure on my part, I assure you, Mr Bellingham.”

  “They’ve been good, I hope.”

  “Oh Dad!—”

  “Of course they have. You’ve two very promising boys there. Now I won’t disturb you any more, and I must be off home.”

  And smiling goodbye to the boys Lydia wafted out, leaving Nick Bellingham with the vague feeling of having been visited by royalty.

  Lydia walked back through the village, rather pleased than otherwise that her image of the Bellingham father as pretty louche and unsatisfactory had been so thoroughly confirmed. She walked quickly past the Hoddle house, in case anyone should come out and she be asked in. The last person she ever wanted to meet again socially was that disastrous wife of Maurice’s. She turned up the hill, where street-lighting soon stopped. The way was so well known that she went without hesitation. She had left lights on in the cottage, so it stood gleaming at the top of the hill, a beacon. Lydia felt very happy—at peace with herself and with life.

  As she let herself in by the gate she thought: it’s years since I’ve been so happy, so hopeful. She took the key from her pocket and let herself in the front door. Coffee, she wondered? No, perhaps a cup of drinking chocolate. She went into the kitchen and put a saucepan of milk on the hot-plate.

  Then she remembered her missed appointment of the afternoon. Really it would be only courteous to ring Oliver Marwick at home and apologise. And make an appointment for Tuesday or Wednesday, because she wanted to get the thing done. She walked through to the study, picked up the phone, and dialled.

  “Oliver? I do apologise for this afternoon. I was over in the library at Boston Spa and I got so immersed in things I didn’t notice the time. The book’s at a very interesting stage . . . You’re sure? I do hate failing to keep appointments. Now when can I—?”

  She was disturbed by a tiny noise. She turned her head, startled.

  “What’s that? But—. Rob—?”

  That was the last Oliver Marwick heard. The line went dead, and thinking that “Lydia had had an unexpected visitor he went back to watching television.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE news was brought down to Bly by a farmer’s wife who had been hailed down by a distraught Molly Kegan at Lydia’s gate.

  “She’s been murdered!” she kept saying. “I can’t go back in there. And they say you mustn’t touch anything.”

  Molly had stayed at the cottage gate and the farmer’s wife, on her way into Halifax, had stopped at the post office to Bly and rung the police from there. The news had caused a great sensation among the two old people who were collecting their pensions and the postmistress, who saw her function as keeping the community alive by spreading any piece of information or misinformation that came her way. Within half an hour most people in the village had heard.

  The news stunned them, though there was no sorrow. There was a time when Thea and Lydia had both been popular in Bly—when Thea was a young mother, Lydia a divorcée, and the sisters always in and out of each other’s homes. Thea was still regarded with respect and affection, though there was also a sort of reserve on account of her great grief. Lydia, on the other hand, had become merely an occasional sight in Bly, and her dealings with the Hoddle boys in the past was a matter of general censure. The feeling towards her was little more than a vague feeling of pride that she was local and had made a name for herself in the world. She had been the most notable person in the area, and now she was a notable corpse.

  • • •

  “So, who is she—was she?” asked Charlie Peace of his superior as the police car from the West Yorkshire police headquarter to Leeds sped towards Bly.

  Mike Oddie frowned.

  “I ought to know more than I do, because I know the name. I wish I’d had time to ask my wife. Some kind of popular historian—biographer I think. People like Nelson, Lawrence of Arabia. There’s always a good solid market for biographies of the right sort, as I understand it. But she was very scholarly—not the gush and grovel kind. I know Margaret has read one or two of her books—they sell well in paperback.”

  “So fairly prosperous?”

  Mike shrugged.

  “Depends what sort of a spender she was, I suppose.”

  “And she was strangled?”

  “So I understand from the Halifax people.”

  “Someone with a fair degree of strength, then.”

  “Depending on whether she was awake or asleep, whether it was the culmination of a quarrel or she was caught by surprise. You’re jumping the gun, Charlie. You could be making all sorts of assumptions that will have to be revised when you get to the scene of the crime. That way trouble lies, especially if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t easily revise your ideas. Much better to get to the scene with your mind a blank sheet.”

  “OK—mind a perfect blank.”

  Charlie grinned at the Superintendent equably. Oddie had noticed him soon after he had arrived in Leeds. He was chatting with a group in the police canteen, apparently relaxed, but Oddie could see from his eyes that he was registering everything said, noting who was the thickie and who was the bright boy, who the rebel and who the greaser. Now he was sitting sprawled in the car as if his limbs were dough, but Mike knew he was registering everything, and keeping it filed.

  “How is Yorkshire treating you so far?” he asked.

  “Pretty well. I’m really liking it. Only problem is understanding the natives.”

  “They probably have the same problem with you.”

  “No they don’t. They all watch EastEnders.

  Charlie—Dexter to the registrar of his birth—Peace had transferred to the detective squad of the West Yorkshire Police only two months before. He still spoke, and probably always would, broad cockney.

  “Why did you decide to transfer up here?”

  “Girlfriend. Got a girlfriend lives in Wakefield.”

  “Going to be married?”

  “Oh, I don’t know that we’ll go that far.”

  They both laughed.

  “No problems with her parents?”

  Charlie grimaced.

  “No. They’re so liberal it’s almost depressing.”

  “Nothing to get your teeth into?”

  “That’s about it. I rather enjoy a bit of a barney.” Charlie gave one of his fer
ocious grins, but then he shifted in his seat. “When I said I applied for a transfer because of my girlfriend that wasn’t quite true. We’re fairly steady, but not that steady.”

  “Why did you then?”

  “I was born in London, brought up there. I’ve been on the windy side of the law once or twice myself, and I know a lot of people who are well on that side. I just know too much, know what I mean? Coming North was like coming to a foreign country.”

  “The blank sheet of paper again.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And is it? A foreign country, I mean.”

  “Yes,” said Charlie emphatically. “And people down South think of it like that. You know, I once had a girlfriend whose parents really cut up rough on the race thing, and she said: ‘You shouldn’t let it worry you. When I had a boyfriend from Bolton, all they could say was: “But he’s from the North!” ’ I never could work out whether that should make me feel better or worse.”

  They laughed, and drove on in companionable silence for the rest of the way.

  When they came to Bly, Mike Oddie said; “It’s through the village and up the hill, so the Halifax people tell me.” They went past a few houses and the odd depressed-looking shop, past The Wheatsheaf, and then saw a hilly road to their left. There was a little knot of police and other cars at the top. Charlie turned up the hill, then left the car with the others. The two men got out and stood looking at the cottage, shimmering in the sun.

  “Nice,” said Charlie appreciatively.

  “Exactly—that answers your question about whether she had money,” said Oddie.

  “I meant nice aesthetically,” said Charlie, from the height of his six O levels and one A.

  “Nice aesthetically costs money. You need brass to live in a place like this. Come on.”

  In the cottage the hive of activity that always succeeds a murder was beginning to scale down. He police surgeon, whom Oddie knew well, was snapping the clasps of his bag shut and getting to his feet.

  “Morning, Mike,” he said, raising his hand in greeting. “I’ll get the initial report to you as soon as I can. No great surprises beyond what you can see for yourself, so far as I can say at this time. Time of death—somewhere between eight thirty and midnight. Unofficially I’d say you could lop off an hour either side of that, just as a working hypothesis, but that’s unofficial.”