A Fatal Attachment

by Robert Barnard

  “You did a good job sucking up to her.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “She thought you were the brightest of us.”

  “And she was dead right.”

  “Oh yes? Then how come the moment the cop mentions the legacy you let out the fact that you knew about it? Intended!”

  Colin, his face red with rage, turned on his stomach and began maniacally punching the pillow.

  “Yes—not so bright after all, are you?”

  “I’m punching that stupid cow’s head! I’m punching her because she never signed that bleeding will!”

  • • •

  Jamie Loxton sat on the sofa in Fieldhay Farm near Kedgely, his arm around his fiancée, the pair of them companionably warm and close. Mary Scully still slept most nights over her little shop, and she still hadn’t named a date for marriage, but more and more they were emerging from, in cant phrase, “having a relationship,” and were becoming a pair. The living room of Fieldhay Farm was evidence of how well they went together. The rest of the old farm was cheerless and run-down, just as Jamie had taken it over, but this room, on which they had really worked, was bright and inviting: red and orange cushions, warm-coloured rugs, posters and pictures around the walls. No great expense had been incurred, and nothing done to prevent it being the living space of a working farmer, but already it felt to them like a real home. Jamie, for once in his life, felt that this was a place in which he belonged.

  “I’m glad I saw Lydia once before she died,” he said. “It seems in a way to have rounded things off.”

  “Yes . . . I hope the police will see it like that.”

  “Well, it was a perfectly amiable meeting. I don’t believe Lydia would have told anyone anything to the contrary.”

  Jamie Loxton had a habit of ignoring unpalatable facts which could explain his blithe progress from disaster to disaster. His fiancée was trying to cure him of it.

  “You did say she was trying to niggle you all the time,” she said.

  “She was. But that’s not likely to be something she’ll have confided in anyone else, is it? Especially as I conspicuously refused to be niggled. I’ve learnt to live with my past.”

  “That’s because it is a past,” said Mary, the ring of confidence in her voice. She was very conscious that Jamie was potentially one of her successes. “You’ve come through all that. This really is a new start.”

  “Yes . . . I sometimes wonder how far it was Lydia made me what I was. I’d never lost a job when I married her.”

  “Blame isn’t a very productive emotion.”

  “Stop lecturing! Leave me some illusions! . . . But you’re right, of course. You’re wasted on me, you know. You should he exercising your wisdom on a wider circle.”

  “I’ve done that. I’ll settle for you . . . I’m glad we were out together last night. And I’m glad we were seen. The police wouldn’t have been very impressed if we’d just been here together alone.”

  “No . . . But I wish we knew when she was killed.”

  “Well, Mrs Wetherby says it was around ten.”

  “What Mrs Wetherby says isn’t evidence. It isn’t even usually true. You always say that with half the gossip she passes on she gets the wrong end of the stick.”

  “Village postmistresses are not infallible. But the police have talked to her, so I think this is true.”

  “I hope so, that’s all. I don’t fancy being suspected. With my sort of record the less attention I get from the police the better I like it.”

  “You’ve no actual police record.”

  “I must have had special protection from God, rather as He is said to protect drunks.”

  “Anyway, you dropped me off at the shop at ten to ten. That clock on the Methodist Chapel is never wrong. There’s no way you could have got to Bly by ten, not on these roads.”

  “That’s all very well, but there’s only your word that it was ten to.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. If a car comes through Kedgely at night everyone rushes to the window to see who it is. It’s that kind of place. Anyway, we came straight here from the White Rose. They’ll remember when we left.”

  “Why on earth should they?”

  “We were the last ones in the restaurant, and you made that frightful fuss when you thought you’d lost your car keys.”

  “Oh, that’s right. It’s incredible how you can look in a pocket for your keys, and then eventually find they’re there after all.”

  “It’s all the other junk you’ve got in there as well.”

  “Anyway, I felt a right noodle.”

  “People do it all the time. You’ve got to get out of the habit of thinking of yourself as a noodle.” She put into her voice a ring of confidence that was stronger than she actually felt. “You’ll see: everything will check out. The police will see that you couldn’t have done it.”

  “You’re so good for me.”

  “We’re good for each other.”

  She smiled up at him, and brushed her lips tenderly against his clean-shaven cheek.

  • • •

  In The Wheatsheaf it was well past closing time, and the last of the regulars were nursing the last of their pints of beer. Stan Podmore, the landlord, was busying himself with a succession of closing-down tasks, obviously and noisily.

  “Are you going to tell the police about last night?” Jim Scattergood shouted from the other end of the bar, more to delay going home than because he wanted an answer.

  “What about last night?”

  “About the argy-bargy in here.”

  “There wasn’t any argy-bargy in here.”

  “Little confrontation—whatever you like to call it. ’Course, I couldn’t mention it while that Bellingham man was here. . . .”

  Stan Podmore came over and pointed a fat finger at his customer.

  “Look here, Jim Scattergood, there wasn’t any argy-bargy and there wasn’t any confrontation. Bellingham was sounding off about how Mrs Perceval had taken his boys under her wing, and what a good thing it was, and how she’d just been down to talk things over with him, and young Hoddle went over and said something to him. That was all that happened. If you call that an argument you’ve got an over-vivid imagination.”

  “You didn’t hear what Hoddle said?”

  “No, I didn’t. Hardly anything. Bellingham was at the far end of the bar, and I was serving down this end.”

  “He got pretty angry, did Bellingham.”

  “That’s as maybe.”

  “Went red, like he was going to choke.”

  “He often does. It’s blood pressure.”

  “Like I said, it’s something you should tell the police.”

  Stan Podmore shook his head contemptuously.

  “What you don’t realize, Jim, is that the police and publicans are natural enemies. You can suck up to them any amount of times, but come the crunch they’re your enemies still. I’ll tell them if they ask, and that’s all I’ll do. Nick Bellingham may be a foreigner, but he drinks double Scotches when he’s in funds. Show me a policeman as does that and happen I’ll go volunteering information to him. Not before.”

  • • •

  When she had fed her children, home from school, fielded their questions about the murder, told them of the visit of the two policemen, adjudicated in their quarrels, supervised their television watching, boiled milk for their goodnight drinks and got them off to bed, Molly Kegan went around the house doing all the necessary late-night things. Then she took herself off to her lonely bedroom, where she wept herself to sleep, grieving for the only person in her life with wit and strength of purpose, the only woman she had known who had shown her there was something better than the life of drudgery and limited horizons that was what she had known since her marriage. In this house Lydia was mourned.

  • • •

  And thousands of miles away, at a sparsely attended press conference, the topic of Lydia Perceval’s death surfaced too. Robert Loxton presided, with prac
tised good-humour. His expedition had tested U.S. Army survival kit and rations during a four months period, winter to summer, on Mount McKinley. Interest had been high when he gave a press conference in Anchorage, but then there isn’t a great deal of interest going on in Alaska. Here the reporters were bored, and were only interested in getting quotable quotes about the survival rations, which had come in for a great deal of criticism from American servicemen during the Gulf War.

  “The curry was diabolical,” said Loxton obligingly. “Like stewed Indian socks. On the other hand the goulash was palatable, and we found the dehydrated orange juice a real life-saver.”

  “You look pretty fit,” drawled one reporter.

  “Of course I’m fit. I’ve been doing this sort of expedition all my life. And I hope to go on doing them for a while yet.”

  The next question came out of the blue.

  “Lydia Perceval was your aunt, wasn’t she?” asked a young reporter.

  Robert Loxton’s brow creased.

  “Lydia Perceval is my cousin. . . . What do you mean was?”

  “Came through on the line a few hours ago. She’s dead. Been murdered.”

  “Murdered? . . . You’re not serious?”

  Several men in the Defense Department room nodded.

  “Found murdered in Yorkshire, England,” said one.

  “The obits will be in tomorrow’s papers,” put in another. “Her books were very well thought of in this country.”

  Robert Loxton’s face crumpled, and he looked down at the table for a few moments.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking up again. “It’s a bit of a shock. Lydia was a friend as well as a relation. If there are no more questions. . . .”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE signpost that said Fieldhay Farm was very old, its wood cracked, but someone had painted over the letters so that they were easily legible. Charlie swung the car into the lane, and they bumped and swayed their way along to the farmhouse. It was a smallish, rickety structure that did not look as if it had ever housed prosperity. They got out and stretched their legs, Charlie feeling like an alien intruder. Mike Oddie went up to the door and banged with the hefty iron knocker. Inside all was silence. They peered through the window of the sitting room.

  “Cheerier inside than out,” commented Mike.

  They went round to the back of the farm. Hens scratching around in a coop, grunts from a sty some way away. It was a dirty, disorderly, healthy scene, though Charlie Peace thought the smell was something he would not care to get used to.

  “Your eyes must be better than mine,” said Mike. “Can you see him anywhere?”

  Charlie jumped on an oil drum near the back door of the farm, and scanned the landscape. Rolling green hills in a summer haze. The nearest village, he estimated, must be all of five miles away. Eerie. He concentrated on nearer at hand.

  “There’s a moving speck on a field over there,” he said, pointing to his left. “If that’s still Fieldhay Farm that will probably be our man. But it’s ten minutes’ walk away.”

  “Then we walk,” said Mike, setting out along a well-defined path. “Don’t you Londoners ever walk?”

  Charlie sighed, jumped off the drum, and followed him.

  “ ’Course we do. From the pub to the Underground. And often just changing lines involves a hell of a hike. If it wasn’t for the buskers we’d go mad with boredom.”

  When they had got a fair way Mike Oddie registered the speck working in the field, then registered that the speck had straightened and was watching their approach.

  “Well, at least he isn’t going and lying on the sacrificial slab like Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” he said. Charlie raised his eyebrows.

  “What on earth put Tess of the D’Urbervilles into your head, sir?”

  “Oh, I don’t know: farms, fields, backbreaking work.”

  “Yeah, I saw the film. Tess didn’t have a beard though . . . Oh! Neither does this bloke.”

  The man coming towards them was indeed clean-shaven.

  “But it seems this is our man,” said Mike. “And apparently he knows who we are.”

  He was wearing an old khaki shirt, decidedly dirty trousers and boots. His body was sliding into plumpness, and his hairline was receding, but it was an open, attractive face. He was fairly tall, but would he seem to a youngster to be fit, Charlie wondered? Perhaps to Jason Wetherby, he concluded. And he suspected that hard, physical work was getting him into the sort of shape he would not have been in a year or two back. He had been harvesting carrots, and Charlie could see them lying in cases. Jamie Loxton could hardly be blamed for the carrots, which must have been sown by someone else, but still Charlie registered that, like most organic produce he had ever seen, they looked knobbly, meagre and dirty. He didn’t doubt that they were chock-a-block full of all sorts of things that gave an added zing to life, but aesthetically he preferred the supermarket variety. The man was now upon them, smiling, hand outstretched.

  “I’m Jamie Loxton, brother of the more famous Robert,” he said with a grin. “You must be the policemen.”

  “I’m Detective Superintendent Oddie. This is Detective Constable Peace. You were expecting us?”

  He nodded, the frank smile still on his face.

  “Of course. Someone will have told you that Lydia’s ex was back in the area. I should think you already know that I went to see her a couple of weeks ago. Now”—he looked around him, sizing things up—“how shall we organise this? Do we need to go back to the house?”

  “Not at all,” said Mike. “We don’t want to keep you from your work longer than necessary.”

  “Right.” Jamie Loxton upended a case and took it over towards the walled border of the field. “I’m quite happy with this, if you two can take the wall.”

  It was Charlie Peace’s first experience of dry-stone walling as a perch. It was cold, hard, but a solid base. He took out his notebook as Mike Oddie began his questioning.

  “To get the obvious point out of the way first: what were you doing on Monday night?”

  “Right. Mary and I discussed that—”

  “You did?”

  “Naturally we did. I may be ‘unsatisfactory,’ you know, but you mustn’t think I’m completely stupid. My ex-wife is killed shortly after I return to the district—of course you’re going to be interested in me, and what I was doing when she was killed.”

  “Fair enough. So what were you doing?”

  “From about a quarter to eight until about half past nine we were in the White Rose restaurant at Luddenden.”

  “That’s one of a chain, isn’t it—attached to the Micklethwaite brewery pubs?”

  “That’s right. I drove from there to Kedgely, and dropped Mary off outside her post office shop at ten to ten—she saw it by the chapel clock, which is very reliable, she says. She thinks other people may have seen us too. They’re a nosey lot in Kedgely, and there was still a bit of light.”

  Mike Oddie had been doing some calculations.

  “Bly is—what?—ten to fifteen minutes from here?”

  “Easily fifteen in my car, and along those roads,” said Jamie Loxton. “If you’re toying with the idea I could do it in under ten, try doing it yourself. I take it village gossip is correct, and Lydia was killed around ten?”

  “I didn’t say that. Any back-up to your account of when you left the restaurant?”

  Loxton smiled.

  “Mary thinks the staff may remember. We were the last to leave, and they were willing us to go. Monday night’s hardly lively in a place like that. Then after we’d paid the bill I couldn’t find my car keys, and I got into a great flap. Typical Loxton cock-up—but I love Muriel, my old Volksie, and I didn’t want to leave her in their car park overnight. It’s the sort of car young layabouts think they have a right to commandeer and crash.”

  “I had a meal in a White Rose restaurant the other night,” put in Charlie. “Army surplus steaks and soggy vegetables. But the chit when I paid had the time on i
t. Probably that’s standard equipment throughout the chain.”

  He launched at Jamie Loxton one of his ferocious smiles, but Jamie just nodded calmly.

  “Good. That’ll be the best confirmation.”

  “And after you dropped your girlfriend off?” Mike asked.

  “Drove straight here, did one or two late-night things around the farm, then went to bed. I can’t imagine there will be anyone to confirm any of that.” He gestured around with his hand at the rolling landscape. “Nothing here to observe me—just the odd crow having a sleepless night.”

  “Right. Well, I think that covers all we need to know about Monday night.” Mike Oddie observed his man, still sitting as relaxedly as was possible on the upturned wooden crate. “Let’s get on to other things. Why did you come back to this district, sir?”

  Jamie Loxton grinned.

  “Easy. My girlfriend has kept the shop in Kedgely for the past year. Escapee from chronic overwork, due to government cuts in grants to local authorities. I was looking for a farm, so I looked in this area.”

  “It didn’t bother you, that you would be coming back to live near your ex-wife?”

  “It didn’t bother me. I went to see her, and she said it didn’t bother her. I’m a Yorkshireman, and I know this part of Yorkshire well, from childhood visits. It’s a perfectly natural place for me to settle.”

  “And you had lived with your wife in Bly while you were married?”

  “Nearby, but very briefly. We had a tiny flat in London while I had my job in the City. When I lost it her parents let us live in an equally tiny cottage they owned near Bly. While I was ‘finding my feet,’ they said. It soon became obvious that Lydia did not believe I ever would find my feet. She certainly made it clear that she wasn’t going to help in the search. She suggested over supper one evening that the marriage wasn’t working, and I obliged her by moving out.”

  “I see . . . What kind of marriage was it, sir?”

  “Short.”

  “You think she needed a . . . stronger personality as a husband?” Jamie grimaced.

  “The received wisdom then was that she married me because she couldn’t get Robert, my brother. There may be something in that. Certainly it’s true that she liked decisive men, who knew what they wanted and went after it.”