by Jessica Mann
‘I know,’ Tamara said. ‘That crowd was wholly spontaneous, right?’
‘As in combustion. An unstoppable burst of support.’
‘All right. I’ll remember. Where is she, anyway?’
‘She went home, and she’s going to Carmell too. I wanted to drive her, but she insisted on going alone.’
‘Good Lord, the woman’s indefatigable.’
‘That’s putting it mildly. Noelle and I are exhausted. Guess where we went last night?’
‘Don’t tell me she had you swimming lengths in the Sports Centre?’
‘We went with Dame Viola to a private dinner at the house of the Lord Lieutenant of the County, where a meeting had been arranged with the Leader of the Opposition. He’s offered her a seat in the Cabinet if she comes out for him at the election.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ Tamara said.
‘As serious as I’ve ever been in my life,’ said Annie Hamilton. ‘A Life Peerage and a new portfolio.’
‘Did she agree?’
‘It depends on the manifesto. She wants to see an undeniable commitment. Which is what she said to the other lot too, only that time it was the Chairman of the Party.’
‘They are as afraid of her as that, are they?’ Tamara said thoughtfully.
‘It must be the most powerful and successful pressure group ever,’ Annie said proudly.
‘Rather precariously dependent on one person,’ Tamara murmured. ‘She isn’t immortal.’
‘Don’t even say it. Her brother died after she saw him yesterday, that’s why she had to go back to Carmell, and then there was this.’ She held out a copy of The Scotsman. ‘The early editions of the nationals didn’t have it, and of course the later ones don’t get this far north, so I don’t suppose you’ve seen it.’
‘Reformed Robber?’ Tamara read the headline aloud, and then glanced rapidly down the paragraph. Police had discovered another break-in at the home of Watchwomen’s Leader Dame Viola Hutber, but this time, instead of taking anything, the thieves had returned what had been stolen a few months previously. Dame Viola was quoted as saying that she would be very happy to have her treasures back, and even happier to think that Watchwomen had made another convert.
‘I made up the quote, of course,’ Annie said.
‘What did Dame Viola really say?’
‘She didn’t say much. I think she was too tired. It was quite some day. And now she’s having another one. And all before the Watchwomen Festival in Edinburgh. It’s too much.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Rainsford said, ‘It is being treated as foul play.’
The Corys knew that already. Lawrence had been interviewed by Inspector North earlier in the day.
Mr Cory said that he found Mr Hutber asleep? How did he know?
Because his head was on the pillow and his eyes were closed.
Was he breathing?
Lawrence had not thought to make sure.
Had he tried to waken him?
If not, why not?
‘I don’t know, why doesn’t one try to wake up patients in hospital? I just didn’t.’
But Mr Cory had been in an agitated state, according to the nurses.
‘I was upset, as it happens.’
‘Why?’
‘It was something to do with the school. With running the school.’
‘If it was important enough to upset you, why didn’t you try to wake Mr Hutber?’
‘I said his name. Do you think I should have shaken the old man or something?’
Somebody had done the ‘or something’; that was the trouble. Inspector North said, ‘Did you touch him?’
‘No, I told you. I saw from the doorway that he was asleep so I closed it again as softly as I could and left.’
Over and over again, the same questions, marginally rephrased. Lawrence’s answers remained the same too. He had seen Basil Hutber was sleeping and had left. ‘I drove around for a while, and then I came home.’
‘He was here the whole evening,’ Zoe said.
‘I suppose that you’re trying to tell me that he was dead when I saw him,’ Lawrence said.
‘I am not telling you anything. I’m asking you.’
The Inspector would not tell them how the old man had died. It was Rainsford who did that, driving up to park by the headmaster’s house, and glance about him, like a surveyor come to value the property, before coming into the house where he almost absent-mindedly, proprietorially, fingered the paintwork and tested the swing of the doors. ‘It seems that he was smothered by one of his own feather pillows.’
Lawrence remembered that Rainsford was professionally inured to violent death. Zoe, feeling as sick as at any time in the last few weeks, said, ‘Murder, Rainsford? It’s too awful. Who could possibly have . . .’
‘He had at least three visitors that afternoon,’ Lawrence said coldly. ‘Your aunt, your wife and myself. I don’t know whose motive was stronger than mine, but I didn’t kill him.’
‘Darling, not just now. When Rainsford has only just heard of his father’s death . . . don’t talk about it now,’ Zoe pleaded.
‘Rainsford’s father! And who else’s?’
‘My sister died five years ago,’ Rainsford Hutber said. ‘Though I don’t see the relevance. You don’t seem to be quite yourself, Lawrence. Perhaps it would be better if I had a word with George Jenkin.’
‘What about?’
‘There will be letters to the parents and staff. They will need some warning, some time to make alternative arrangements.’
‘Arrangements?’
‘For their future. Their children’s future. I have warned you repeatedly, Lawrence. But it isn’t suitable to discuss it today. You clearly aren’t in a fit state.’
‘You can’t sentence me for contempt of court you know,’ Lawrence said.
Rainsford stared at Lawrence in a mixture of anger and perplexity. ‘I can’t understand what’s come over you. It’s not as though I hadn’t made it perfectly clear before you took the step of moving here. I intend to make different dispositions of the Abbey and that’s all there is to it. You can’t imagine that this hostile attitude—’
‘You think you are free to do as you like, do you?’ Lawrence said.
‘Well, of course I am. What else? Nobody else has any standing at all, least of all a mere employee like you.’
When the Corys moved into the headmaster’s house, Gillian had advised Zoe that there should always be a tray of full bottles and clean glasses on the sideboard, even if the Corys themselves never drank anything stronger than wine. It was what parents of public-school boys expected. Now Lawrence walked across to pour himself some whisky. ‘Drink, Rainsford? Too early for you? So conventional.’ He splashed some mineral water into the glass and went to stand with his back to the empty fireplace. For the first time Zoe saw a likeness between his face and Rainsford’s, two angry, beaked profiles, identical long lobed ears. But what a difference a millimetre here and a shadow there could make. She felt an access of pitying, protective love for Lawrence, and rose to stand beside him, gazing at Rainsford Hutber.
‘As I see it,’ Lawrence said magisterially, ‘there are two possibilities. You may decide to keep the school running as before, and with that decision I might cooperate, at least for the time being.’
‘I have decided not to do so. The place is going on the market.’
‘Or I shall make public what your father was. Your own position in Carmell depends on his reputation, that’s become perfectly plain to me in the time I have been here. Not to mention Gillian’s respectability, and Dame Viola’s Watchwomen. You know, I’d rather enjoy the scandal. The local worthies would make such a meal of it.’
‘Scandal? What my father was?’ Rainsford stood up. ‘I can’t stay here and listen to—’
In his headmaster’s voice of command Lawrence said, ‘Sit down.’ To Zoe’s surprise, Rainsford did so. ‘I am going to tell you a story,’ Lawrence went on. Rainsford, pulli
ng at the long Hutber ear, watched Lawrence as though he were a savage animal. ‘My story is about a murderer and pornographer. About a hyprocrite. It begins with a boy called Basil Hutber who was born too late to have to fought in the First World War, and went off to London to join the bright young things instead. He called himself by the Latin version of his Greek name, arrogant as always. He called himself Rex. The King.’
‘Be silent! How dare you?’
‘I see you know who I’m talking about. Rex, the pornographer, the artist, the man who went to prison for obscene libel. A jailbird.’
‘You are stark mad.’
‘I am not and he wasn’t. Perfectly sane, just selfish and uncaring and out for number one. Indifferent to his girlfriend, whom he abandoned, to his child, about whom he never thought, to the victim of his desires, whose death he used as a disguise for his own. Disguise is a good word in the context. His whole life was disguises.’
‘I shan’t stay to listen to you.’
Lawrence pushed Rainsford’s chest so that he sank back on to the chair. Zoe, watching the man to whom she had been married for seven years, wondered whether she had ever known him.
‘Rex became well known. Notorious would be the word, partly because his work was good – though I hate to admit it now. Even you must have heard of Tumuli, or Drivers, haven’t you, Rainsford? But he was best known for his disreputable behaviour. He was dissipated. He was pitch. He defiled. He was prosecuted, you know, Rainsford, that famous do-gooder, the Freeman of Carmell, he’d been to prison, and he’d have gone again if he hadn’t dropped out, but it would have been for murder. The condemned cell and the gallows.’
‘Murder!’
‘Ironic, isn’t it, now that someone has murdered him. It wasn’t me, as I said, but I’m almost sorry for it. Just a tramp, a man of no importance. One of the heroes who had been fighting to keep people like Rex safe, I daresay Rex would have thought he was expendable, and expend him they did, him and his cronies, they killed him in an orgy. He’d probably only agreed to join in for the sake of a good meal, poor bloke. And murder was still a capital offence in those days, Rainsford. It was 1929, the year my father was born.’
‘What has your father—?’
‘Got to do with it? Well, Rainsford, it’s perfectly apparent that my father’s father thought he had nothing to do with it. The indifference he displayed to him was as masterly as any of the numerous betrayals in his long life. Actually his whole life was a betrayal, an implicit, explicit lie from the day he reappeared in Carmell as Basil Hutber. He came back, you see. The tramp’s body was identified as Rex’s, and the innocent, virtuous doctor’s son came back home, married the local heiress and set himself up as Carmell’s Mr Big.’
‘Rex was the father of Allan Cory,’ Zoe said softly. ‘You left that out, Lawrence.’
‘I did, didn’t I? Allan Cory was the son of Rex and his girlfriend known only as Stella. He was fostered by the Corys, which was arranged by Rex’s accomplice in most of his crimes. Chantal Digby. Do you know the name? No, well, you wouldn’t. Chantal Digby sent Allan Cory to be educated by his father as a joke. A bright idea, wasn’t it? By the saintly Basil Hutber, who encouraged his devotion and never said a word to help him. All those years when he was growing up under his natural father’s eye, and later, never a word from Basil Hutber to give him strength or pride or any hint of the identity he spent his life looking for. Pride! That was the wrong word. Who could have been proud of that background? But then, Rainsford, you are, aren’t you? You bask in your relationship with the small town’s great man.’
Lawrence’s laugh reminded Zoe of the villain’s cackle in some corny melodrama. As an actor, he would have been going over the top; but for the first time Zoe realised that such stereotyped actions and poses were derived from truth in the first place; and that truth itself could seem a cliché. For Lawrence was not acting. He was entirely unselfconscious, consumed by hatred, by frustrated malice for the dead man he had once admired, and by pity for the other, whom he had not admitted and whose preoccupations he had carelessly discounted. He was suffering that most irremediable of emotions, remorse.
Rainsford’s voice sounded thin and uninflected. ‘I can understand your distress at this discovery about Rex. It is some sort of excuse for your behaviour, I suppose. That far I can overlook it. But I’m quite at a loss to see what the connection is with my father. My late father – one really might have thought that a little respect at a time like this . . . however, let that pass. When you are in a calmer frame of mind you’ll see yourself how impossible all this is. Not worth talking about.’
‘You are going to have to talk about it, Rainsford. Actually I can see it’s hard on you; shocking, in a way. But it isn’t as hard as it was on Allan Cory. And I’ve got evidence; proof enough to satisfy any court of law. Rex came back to Carmell and stepped into the shoes he’d left behind ten years before, and if Chantal Digby hadn’t stirred things up by making sure that his illegitimate son got sent here to school the connection would never have come out As it is, it’s too late. However hard he tried Allan Cory couldn’t make it, and he was the one who would have cared. He really worshipped Basil. He’d have chosen him to be his father if he could.’
A little, icy question. ‘Do you understand the expression, without prejudice? It means, I don’t accept what you say, but if it were true, for the sake of argument, what would you intend to do about it?’
‘He has hardly had time to think about that,’ Zoe said. Lawrence walked across to the window. Two boys were larking on the forbidden grass in the quadrangle, and he raised his hand towards the window catch, and then let it fall as though he no longer cared about boys, or the grass, or the school at all. But then he turned round, and said, ‘Well, for a start, I don’t mean to be turned out of St Uny’s. Perhaps I’ve inherited the knack of running a school. I like it, I’m good at it, I’m damned well carrying on with it.’
Zoe, whose education had been so erratic, possessed various unrelated scraps of information derived from parts she had played. She said, ‘What did his will say?’
‘Whose will?’ Lawrence said, surprised at the interruption.
‘Basil Hutber’s.’
‘Well, Rainsford? Uncle?’
‘He left everything to his children and grandchildren.’
‘Legitimate? Born in wedlock?’
‘It didn’t specify.’
‘Then Lawrence was entitled to his share. He’s a grandchild.’
‘Are you sure?’ Lawrence said.
‘It was in an Agatha Christie thing. I was only the parlour-maid, years ago now, but I do remember that. So long as the will didn’t mention legitimacy, and so long as the illegitimate children weren’t legally adopted into another family, they all get equal rights. That’s so, isn’t it, Rainsford? I mean, you are a lawyer.’
As though the mention of Agatha Christie’s fictions had summoned up equivalent niceties of timing in real life, it was at this point that there was a loud triple knock on the door followed by a prolonged ring. Inspector North, accompanied by his plain clothed sergeant, did not wait for the door to be opened. He came into the drawing room, nodded to Rainsford, ignored Zoe, and invited Lawrence Cory to accompany him to the police station to assist with his enquiries into Basil Hutber’s death.
Chapter Thirty-Two
St Uny’s Abbey was under siege. The combination of the surname, Hutber, Dame Viola’s brother, with the name of Zoe Meredith, was enough to send the news media into a frenzy. Uniformed policemen stood guard at the three entrances into the grounds, keeping cameramen and anyone with a notebook out, but admitting visitors. None stayed long, and at midday the boys were sent home, escorted out of the place by masters and police officers. Some of the boys posed for the photographers and offered their stories to the reporters; all of them seemed pleased and excited by the death of the former headmaster and the questioning of the present one.
Rainsford Hutber drove towards the entrance, but when
he saw the scrum he went straight on into the town, holding a folded road map between his face and the cameras. More strangers were standing round outside the police station, so he went straight to his office to telephone the Chief Superintendent and ask how the news that Lawrence Cory was being questioned had got out so quickly. But he knew quite well, as he had to agree, how impossible it was to keep such secrets when every clerk and canteen worker had access to a telephone.
Lawrence Cory had not been charged. The Chief Superintendent did not add ‘yet’, but he had a familiar relationship with the Coroner, and said more than he should about circumstantial evidence and the difficulty of making charges stick. After all, as Rainsford told Gillian, who told Mrs Wiseman, who told two other people, so that by lunchtime it was all round the town, so far it all rested on motive and opportunity. Other people beside Lawrence had had the opportunity, even Dame Viola herself, and the motive, freely admitted by Lawrence Cory, and incredulously recounted by all except Rainsford and Gillian Hutber, was ludicrous. Even a madman could not believe that Basil Hutber actually had . . . ludicrous. Outrageous, as Rainsford said to the Chief Superintendent, who asked, ‘It doesn’t happen to be true, you don’t suppose? I mean, that your father was this Rex?’
He knew it was improper to ask; such questions between police officer and victim’s heir should wait for a formal interview; but he and Rainsford had known each other for years, on Rotary, at the golf club, and on at least half a dozen of Carmell’s committees.
‘I wouldn’t demean myself to consider it. The man’s mad,’ Rainsford Hutber said.
*
Carmell’s usual reaction to trouble or triumph was to contribute food. Useful and not too showy, home made cakes and pies changed hands on childbirth or death, illness or sorrow.
Mrs Jenkin delivered some jam tarts to the headmaster’s house, and said that her husband had already taken up the reins of the school and would keep it on an even keel.
Mrs Wiseman brought a raised pie.
Mrs Arnold, beside whom Zoe had queued at the antenatal clinic, and with whom she had expected to share years of pram pushing and the school run, delivered a plastic container of soup and was the only one to say that she was sure Lawrence hadn’t done it.