A Fall from Grace

by Robert Barnard

  Ben was still at the bar, talking to no one but looking and listening. Charlie understood the instinct.

  “He’s thinking about a case, or about paperwork, or promotion,” he said.

  “Don’t I know the problem,” said Felicity. Then she added, “But he’s always got time for Carola.”

  “I suppose Ben would, if we had any. There again, perhaps not. He knew we couldn’t have children when we married. I’d had a messy miscarriage with my first husband, and any further pregnancies were out. I’ve always felt a bit guilty about not wanting children more. If I’m so lukewarm about it, why did I get pregnant in the first place?”

  “Have you both settled down well in Westowram?”

  “Oh yes! I love it here. It’s just about the right size for me, and having Halifax near and Leeds not too far off is ideal. Ben would be happy anywhere where he’s got a policing job. He stands around looking glowering and you think he’s auditioning for Heathcliff, but he’s not unhappy, just thinking about his job.”

  “I sometimes think that when Charlie’s being sociable that’s him doing his job in his way.”

  “Don’t mind me—dissect me if you want to,” said Charlie.

  “So you don’t feel you come second to his job?” said Felicity, ignoring her husband.

  “I know I come second. It doesn’t worry me. Liberates me, in a way. Someone asked me the other day if we were thinking of moving, and I got quite wild, thinking he’d applied for a job somewhere else without consulting me. That really would cause World War Three! I don’t settle in a new place or new job easily, but I have done here now, and so here I’m staying. But it was all a misunderstanding. They meant were we moving house in Slepton, and I could tell them we aren’t.”

  “I think we’re roughly the same. We all want to jog along pretty much as we are now,” said Felicity. Honesty forced her to add, “Only, my father’s death will ease the financial pressures on us—pretty much remove them, in fact.”

  “And instead of them we’ll have the pressures on you to make your second novel even better than your first,” said Charlie.

  Felicity nodded, smiling.

  “I regard those as the pleasantest kind of pressures there could be.”

  “For you. What about the baby, who screams because he’s unchanged, Carola, who’s screaming because you won’t let her have a puppy, me, who is screaming because there’s nothing in the fridge to eat when I get home?”

  “You all have your different ways of getting your views across, including the baby when he or she comes,” said Felicity. “Oh, is Desmond going to make a speech?”

  It seemed he was. The vicar had just said a few words of introduction without being able to enforce silence, and now Desmond was getting up and enforcing it without doing anything at all except standing there. That was what being a stage actor did for you, thought Charlie.

  When all the talking had stopped Desmond began.

  “This is quite unexpected, and really quite unnecessary too. But I am delighted, because it gives me a chance to express my thanks for all the friendship and welcome you have given me in Slepton over the years. Why should that be said now? I’m not leaving, am I? Well, no, I’m not. Nevertheless it does seem as if I shall only be among you occasionally in the months—maybe years—ahead. You will be surprised to hear (as surprised as my agent was) that offers have been streaming in for me since my much-agonized-over reappearance on ‘the boards,’ as we in the profession say, and I am now choosing among . . .”

  And so he went on. It didn’t sound like an extempore speech. Charlie felt pressure building up in his bladder, and since he was in the far reaches of the pub, with many heads and bodies between him and the speaker, he ducked down and slipped out toward the corridor and the gents’. He loved Desmond, but he didn’t love thespian mannerisms and clichés.

  When he pushed open the door marked with a figure in trousers (as if that separated the sexes these days!) his first thought was that he had made a mistake. Sitting on the radiator, looking fresh and tempting, was Anne Michaels. The only thing about her that was not inviting was her eyes—steely, daggerlike flashes sent in Charlie’s direction.

  “Seeing how the other half pees?” he asked politely.

  “That’s right. You could call it research.”

  She looked at him challengingly. Charlie was tempted to go and pee at the urinal. She wouldn’t be seeing anything she hadn’t already seen a great number of. But he thought it would do no good to his image at police headquarters, at least in the upper echelons, if it got out, so he went into a cubicle and shut the door.

  “What’s wrong? Ashamed of it?” came Anne Michaels’s voice, the vulgarity of the question contrasting with her already actressy tones.

  “Not at all. Quite satisfied, actually,” shouted Charlie back. When the stream lessened and ran out he pulled the flush and went out into the open part of the lavatory.

  “So what is this research for?” he asked, running water into the basin.

  “A French play—a one-acter. Le Pissoir. By a dramatist you wouldn’t have heard of called Ionesco.”

  Charlie shook the water from his hands.

  “Sounds as if he was born in the United Nations building, but actually Romanian, I believe, who left the country during the war and became a French citizen. I don’t recall a play called Le Pissoir, though.”

  “Unpublished,” said Anne, quick as a flash. “An early work.” She blinked with beguiling innocence at him. “I suppose you’ve heard of him from your wife. Or from your father-in-law.”

  “Don’t bother to flutter your eyelids at me, love. No, I don’t think Rupert was an expert on Romanian-French dramatists. He regarded anything even vaguely avant-garde as pretentious rubbish. He was not an adventurous writer, as you would have found out if you’d known him for longer.”

  “He was going to branch out. Become more up-to-date.”

  “So I heard. Was he taking advice from you?”

  “Yes, he was. So you needn’t be sarky. It was a two-way process, and he was hearing all about the modern world from me.”

  “Local stuff, I suppose?”

  “Local’s all I can do—so far.”

  “That’s fine,” said Charlie, sitting at his ease on a basin. “Better not let any of the locals know you’ve used their stories to wise up poor old Rupert on the modern world. They might not like their private business being trumpeted around to a man who makes his living by stories. Or was that part of the pleasure, landing people in it? Watching them wriggling? Did it ever strike you that that could be dangerous?”

  A flicker had crossed her face as soon as he brought up the possibility. It told him all he needed to know, though it was replaced by a sort of come-hither look. Charlie shook his head.

  “Don’t play those games with me, Anne. I’m just a thick copper, aren’t I? Not worth your trouble.” There came a sound of applause from the body of the pub. Desmond’s extempore (or previously memorized) speech had come to an end. People would be coming to relieve themselves.

  “Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” said Charlie, his hand on the doorknob. “Shall I tell your parents where you are?”

  A few seconds after he emerged into the saloon bar he saw Anne Michaels follow him out.

  In the car going home he and Felicity discussed their evening.

  “I think Harvey Buckworth is getting desperate about the future of the drama stream,” Charlie said. “As desperate as the children in it will be. I suppose in the end there will be some kind of fudge: a statement that drama is still of paramount importance at the school, but children interested in it will no longer be set apart in the divisive way they have been.”

  “Probably,” agreed Felicity. “Do you know, when you use the word ‘children,’ I react? I find it difficult to see the ones I know from the stream as children at all. And I don’t think using the word ‘adolescents’ would help either.”

  “Theme for your next novel: the death of
childhood. All right title too. But you know, when you talk to Desmond Pinkhurst—infuriatingly mock-modest and showbizzy as he is—he’s not a bad advertisement for life on the stage or in the media. At least he is still a person.”

  “Oh, I love Desmond, and I’ll miss him if he’s not around so much . . . But the odd thing was—”

  “Belle Costello. Yes.”

  “If she was meeting someone in the empty house up Forsythia Avenue, that would explain how the rumor of them moving started.”

  “It raises all sorts of possibilities,” said Charlie, speaking as one with an enormous relish for possibilities.

  CHAPTER 16

  Higher Authority

  “I’ve got a job for you, Peace.”

  The chief superintendent had put his head around the cubicle that served Charlie for an office. He had always been a face in Charlie’s professional life, but a remote one. They were not on first-name terms. Charlie got up and collected his jacket from the back of his chair.

  “Good, sir.”

  “I’ve got a bigwig from another division needs to be driven home.”

  “But I’m not—” A police driver, Charlie had been going to say. But he was interrupted.

  “Name of Trench. Superintendent Trench, from Halifax. You go off duty at three, so you needn’t come back. Be at the desk in ten minutes, will you?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Charlie sank back into his chair. His dissatisfaction with the investigation of Rupert Coggenhoe’s death must have been noted by his colleagues and reported to the chief superintendent. Who had done him a good turn. Very satisfying on all counts.

  He had been wavering in his mind between writing Trench a letter detailing his unhappiness with the course the investigation had taken, and giving detailed reasons, and asking for an interview with Trench to do the same. Letters enabled you to master your thought and put an argument in the most cogent and convincing terms. Getting an interview would present all sorts of logistical problems to avoid the wrath of Costello, so he had been veering toward the letter option, which had one great disadvantage: a letter could be chucked straight into the wastepaper basket. Now the decision had been made for him.

  He got up again, slipped on his jacket and went down to the public area of Millgarth station.

  As soon as he got there he recognized Superintendent Trench. He was short for a policeman, with an incipient pot. He did not exude energy, but there did seem to be a basic integrity there, which was not something you could take for granted in a top policeman.

  “Inspector Peace—I’m grateful to you for doing this.”

  “On the contrary—I’m grateful to you, and to Chief Superintendent Collins for suggesting it.”

  “I’ve heard quite a lot about you.”

  “From Inspector Costello?”

  “Of course. He reports to me on the Coggenhoe case. But several people have mentioned you since you came to live in the area. And Mike Oddie is a good friend . . . Shall we get going?”

  Once in the car, and while Charlie negotiated by fits and starts the fiendish puzzle which is the road system of central Leeds, he began to talk about what they both knew they were there to talk about.

  “I was wondering how to approach you, sir. On the Coggenhoe case, of course. My wife and I have naturally a special interest in it. And I would intensely dislike having in my background the death of someone closely related to me if it was still possible for people to say it was an unsolved murder—even if they didn’t add that there’d been a cover-up.”

  “Quite. I’m sure you’ve made this clear to Ben Costello.”

  “I have. And he has made it clear—what I knew very well—that I could have no part in the investigation.”

  “But I gather you’re not quarreling with that.”

  “Of course not. But inevitably my wife and I have intimate knowledge of the victim—no, let’s say the dead man—and the circumstances and lead-up to his death.”

  “And have you not been able to go into these with Ben or anyone else on the investigation?”

  “I’ve talked to Ben, but I think from the start he’s been of the opinion that this was an open-and-shut case: an accident.”

  Trench raised his eyebrows.

  “But that would seem to be the obvious conclusion. Though I’m bound to say that the PM doctor discovered no signs of a heart attack, or reasons why he might be expected to have one.”

  “Yes, Ben Costello did tell us that . . . Could I tell you how we all ended up in Slepton Edge, my beloved father-in-law and the three (soon to be four) Peaces?”

  “Do.”

  “We suddenly learned that my father-in-law was very keen to move up north to be with or near us. Felicity had broken away from her family, and communications between us, particularly since her mother’s death, had been occasional and cool.”

  “Did they object to her marrying you?”

  “Yes. They weren’t racial objections, by the way. They would have objected to anyone. Even the Archangel Gabriel would have had his credentials gone over with a tooth comb. Felicity was not willing to join the Rupert Coggenhoe fan club, and she was assigned on marriage to outer darkness.”

  “I can see problems with that if he came up to live with you.”

  “That was never on the cards. We made that clear: near, but not with. We did things in the best way we could think of: we accepted financial help with our mortgage, and we found a bungalow five minutes’ walk away for him. We’d have liked to be a bit farther, but for a time everything seemed to be going smoothly.”

  “And then?”

  “We were always worried why he had come. Why move? And we found out quite soon. There had been trouble at Coombe Barton in Devon, where he lived before, about a young girl. Rumors had spread through the town about the nature of the relationship between them, and the parents stepped in about the amount of time she spent with him. After that he had become the moral leper in the town, and he was desperate to move out. He invented an impatient buyer for his cottage there as a reason to hasten the move.”

  “Worrying,” said Trench dryly. “Was there a history of him and younger women?”

  “No. And my wife, who knew him best, thought the relationship was probably not a sexual one: the girl was being groomed as a disciple-cum-slavey, not as his sex kitten. For what it’s worth I agree. But that view took a bit of a pasting when something of the sort started happening here.”

  “Was this the girl called Michaels?”

  “Yes. I realize you’ve heard most of this, sir. I would like you to have it from an insider’s point of view.”

  “You know the police, Peace: always wanting to hear the same story over again.”

  They were driving through Armley and Bramley, and the traffic was thinning out.

  “We first heard of Anne Michaels in a quite different context, not my father-in-law at all. She was leading a little group of children who were persecuting newcomers to the village. It wasn’t racial—I’m one of the very few black people in Slepton Edge, as I’m sure you know. It was any newcomers, including Britishers from other parts of the country. Some of the chanting and the abuse, which were well-coordinated and somehow rehearsed, led me to the drama stream at Westowram High. You’ll have read about it.”

  “Everyone has,” said Trench sourly. “Proper little forcing house for young exhibitionists.”

  “Right. But with some real talent as well. Anne Michaels being a case in point. She wasn’t only behind the little gang. She organized at school the persecution of a new teacher—getting the younger children to act out a play that the drama stream had performed in public.”

  “I knew nothing about that.”

  “You can imagine how thrilling they found it.”

  “I can,” said Trench grimly.

  “So you’ll understand how we felt when we realized, the day before he died, that Rupert was well advanced in forming with Anne Michaels a similar relationship to that he’d formed i
n Coombe Barton.”

  Trench thought for a moment.

  “I expect you thought the Michaels girl was in it for some kind of mischief.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what we thought, and still do. We’ve recently learned how the relationship started. The children’s group decided to target my father-in-law. He had the usual qualifications as an incomer, and they went about it in their usual way. When he came to the front door the children scattered, as they always did, but Anne remained, and had a brief conversation with Coggenhoe before going into the house. That was the beginning of the thing. You can check this by talking to Rachel Pickles, the deputy leader of the gang, and now Anne Michaels’s ex-friend, and very bitter about it.”

  “There’s only one thing worse than children, and that’s adolescents,” said Trench.

  “I shudder to think what my daughter will be like.”

  “A fearsome tyrant?”

  “None fearsomer. But she’ll probably turn out to be a sunny charmer later on. That’s children . . . Of course Felicity and I have talked over what kind of intimacy it was between my father-in-law and Anne. It’s safe to say there was no genuine affection on either side. Rupert craved admiration and subservience, Anne Michaels was an accomplished actress with an eye on future fame and everything it brings. Why would a sophisticated teenager pretend to give him that unquestioning adoration that he got from his dead wife, but from no one else?”

  “Money, perhaps?”

  “Yes, one possibility is blackmail: she intended compromising him in some way, probably sexual, and then bleeding him for all she could get. In a small way blackmail seems to have been one of the motivating forces behind Anne’s children’s army of persecutors. But when she went to demand money from the Nortons, a matter I reported to the Halifax force, it was a pathetically small sum, as if she wanted to call a halt to the group’s activities by convincing them it only brought in peanuts. Of course blackmailing Rupert Coggenhoe could conceivably have brought in a lot more, and all to her. But he wasn’t a bestseller by any means, and Anne was smart, so she could have found this out pretty quickly. He had only changed his will recently—and left a cool ten thousand to Anne Michaels. I can’t see him telling her at once—more likely he’d have held it out as a possibility.”