Masters of the House

by Robert Barnard

  One day, later in the week of the doctor’s visit, Peter Leary watched for Matthew from the window of Mr Patel’s minimarket and signed himself off from policing duty as he approached.

  “I hear your dad’s had a nervous breakdown,” he said.

  It wasn’t the subtlest of approaches, but Matthew didn’t take it amiss because he regarded Peter as a person of good will.

  “That’s right.”

  “People are saying he’s been like that for months—pretty much since your mum died.”

  “Well, yes, he has.”

  “And you’ve been covering up for him all this time?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Wow! That must have taken some doing.”

  Matthew looked down at the pavement modestly.

  “We weren’t exactly covering up. We were afraid of being taken into care and split up.”

  “But it was brilliant never to let slip anything. . . . Have you heard where she is?”

  “Where who is?”

  “Carmen O’Keefe, you berk.”

  Matthew tried, vainly of course, to suppress a blush. The question had caught him off guard because he knew very well where Carmen O’Keefe was. Luckily, Peter Leary’s eyes were on some lad playing with a football on the grass verge some way ahead.

  “No, I don’t know any more than anyone else.”

  “She’s her mother-in-law, isn’t she, the woman who’s looking after you?”

  “Yes. She doesn’t know anything, though. But she doesn’t think she’s in Leeds anywhere.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Carmen is an outdoor person, always out and around, not sticking at home tied to the kitchen sink. Mrs O’Keefe thinks someone would have seen her.”

  “I suppose that makes sense. . . . Has she told you what happened on the day she disappeared?”

  “No, I haven’t even asked.”

  “It’d be worth knowing if there was a big row and what it was about.”

  “I suppose so. . . . But it’s not an easy subject to bring up, not with Dad upstairs.”

  “Does she not want to talk about her?”

  “Oh, she’ll talk about her. Says she was a woman with no morals, that kind of thing, and that everyone’s better off without her, especially her Rob. But I don’t think she’d be happy if I started asking questions.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Like I was blaming her or suspecting her or something.”

  “I suppose we should all just be glad that she’s gone. . . .” The boy thought. “That’s a point, isn’t it? You say she might get the idea you suspected her. She just might have been done in, mightn’t she? A woman like that . . .”

  Matthew’s heart thumped.

  “The police don’t think so. They went to the police as soon as she went missing.”

  “And they think she’s just run off with a man?”

  “Yes.” Matthew collected his thoughts. “You say ‘a woman like that,’ but a woman like that’s more likely to run off with someone than get herself murdered.”

  “I suppose so. My turning. Keep in touch.”

  And with a raise of the hand, he went off. Matthew went on, troubled. For the first time the question of murder had been raised. He thought he’d coped with it all right, but it was there now between them.

  And there was another thing. He had resolved, whenever the subject of Carmen O’Keefe came up, to talk of her in the present tense. Yet somehow he always made the odd slip into the past tense. Usually it could be justified, as speaking of someone who used to be among them but was no longer. But what if, sometime, he used the past tense about her and it couldn’t be justified in that way? He wished he could transform the memories of that dreadful night, when they’d buried her, into nothing worse than a bad dream and think of her as everyone else did, flaunting a new fur coat or diamonds, on the arm of a rich, new fancy man in Birmingham, Glasgow or Manchester.

  The problem was that the more questions he asked about her, the more the possibility of murder insinuated itself into people’s minds.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The One Who Got Away

  THE PSYCHIATRIST DIDN’T COME till nearly a fortnight later, when the children were in their last week of school. Mrs O’Keefe had very much hoped that he would come when they were not in the house, and her wish was granted. He first talked the case over with her for a few minutes, and she retailed the slightly sanitised version which she had previously served up for Dr. Maclennan. This emphasized—indeed misrepresented—the slowness of Dermot Heenan’s descent to the state he was now in, as a way of explaining the children’s slowness of action. The man—in his forties, a slovenly dresser with tired eyes and a little beard—listened, nodded noncommittally, then let her take him upstairs. When he saw Dermot he turned and gave Auntie Connie a nod of dismissal, so she was forced to go down and wait for him in the kitchen.

  He was up there for three-quarters of an hour, and Auntie Connie was at a loss as to what he could be getting out of the poor soul he was dealing with in all that time. She had never had more than barely comprehensible mumblings of self-accusation from him. When the psychiatrist finally came down, he used a lot of long terms she had never met with before and then tried hard to put them simply for her. He said he thought the children must have exaggerated the slowness of the progression of the man’s illness. She was glad, though, that he didn’t say this in any accusing way.

  “I expect it frightened them,” he said, “and they didn’t want to face up to it. They were alone here with him, you said?”

  “They were, I’m sad to say. Everyone thought he was all right—the fine, healthy, straightforward soul that he was!”

  “I’ve seen all too many healthy and straightforward people in states even worse than his,” commented the psychiatrist.

  “Sure, you must see many a sad sight,” said Mrs O’Keefe, a phrase she often used with doctors and nurses, and no less sincerely meant for that.

  The rest of what he said was told, suitably censored, to the older children when they came home.

  “He says he needs to have him into a . . . psychiatric clinic for a few weeks, maybe a month, to do a number of tests and try a few treatments,” she said, in her comfortable, Irish countrywoman’s voice. “I’ve emphasized that his home is here, and he’ll always be properly cared for in his own place as long as that’s what’s best for him and what he wants. The psychiatrist says we’re to prepare him for the move and for the treatment, though how we’re to do that the good Lord only knows.”

  What she had omitted from her account was the psychiatrist’s regrets that he had not been called earlier and his feelings that it might now be too late to help the man upstairs. Matthew and Annie therefore felt fairly hopeful; and when they took food to the bedroom or helped to wash their father and keep him generally presentable, they kept saying encouraging things about getting help for him and about his going somewhere for treatment that would make him right again.

  “Don’t send me away!” was one of the things they distinguished in his mumbled protests. “Matthew, Annie, don’t send me away from my little place here!”

  “Don’t you want to be well again, Dad?” they said urgently, but could see no sign that he did.

  When the day came for his going away, Auntie Connie decided the best thing to do was to get the children out of the house entirely. It was a fine day in late July, and school had broken up. She gave Matthew and Annie five pounds and told them to take Greg and Jamie off to Roundhay Park for the day.

  “We want to spare them any distress, don’t we?” she said, though she didn’t deceive them, and they realised that it was they, too, who were being spared.

  When they got back their father was gone, and the little bedroom had been aired and spring-cleaned, though Auntie Connie said it should be kept exactly as it had been so that he would feel at home when he came back. That meant keeping there Gregory’s discarded Postman Pat books and the posters for The Railway Ch
ildren and Mary Poppins. Matthew realised that Auntie Connie, for one, didn’t expect him to come back cured.

  Dermot’s going meant a very relaxed summer holiday for the children. It was almost like their last days as a real family, when their father had been away most of the time and their mother had been there as a stable centre. Auntie Connie filled that role very well, and it was clear that by the end of the holidays she would be completely accepted. Annie in particular came to love and cling to her, accepting her views, following her rules, referring to her all her perplexities. Matthew accepted her presence gratefully, but he kept his innermost feelings shut up and warned Annie against confiding in her totally.

  “That we’ve got to keep secret—always,” he insisted.

  Both the elder children accepted that there was a lot of schoolwork to catch up on. One of the things that would have troubled them if they had had time to think about it during their time as masters of the house was the way they had gradually fallen behind their classmates at school. Matthew in particular was ambitious, though as yet in an unspecified direction, feeling he wanted to “make something of his life”—as his father, even before his madness, so obviously hadn’t done. Since he was undecided what that “something” would be, he felt the need to learn as much as possible on as many subjects as possible. Annie fell behind because she had other, more important goals to aim at; but she was a child who valued the approval of her elders, and when the chance came to catch up with her fellows she seized it. The two hours a day were largely pleasurable, never merely a fag, and for the rest of the time they played hard, recognising that this could be a last late flowering of childhood, the sweeter for being unexpected.

  They still, of course, did things around the house, as all elder children in big families do, as well as shopping and errands. Mrs O’Keefe wondered sometimes at the time it took them to shop at the supermarket until she realised that they walked to it along the Ring Road instead of going across the field. When she asked them why, Annie said she didn’t much like sheep—she knew it was silly, but that was the reason. Mrs O’Keefe accepted their help and often listened to their opinions. She recognised that these were children who had of necessity grown up fast and had shouldered burdens long before they should have had to. She did not fence them round with too many of the unnecessary restrictions of childhood.

  “Heavens above!” she exclaimed one evening when she was doing the ironing in the kitchen and the iron exploded in a dangerous-looking blue flash. “Haven’t I been saying this auld thing was going to give up the ghost?”

  “Are you hurt?” asked Annie anxiously, and she and Matthew ran over to see she was all right. She said that she’d had nothing worse than a bad turn.

  “Mother used to say it was about to go,” said Annie.

  “It can probably be mended,” said Matthew. “I think it’s mainly the cord. We oughtn’t to buy a new one unless we have to, because I think the washing machine’s about to conk out.”

  “Will you let me worry about things like that now?” said Auntie Connie with humorous resignation. “I’ve a bit of money of my own, and we’re not going to want.”

  “You shouldn’t have to use your own money. And we might as well get it repaired if we can,” said Matthew, with childish persistence. “There’s a man in Bramley Town Street Dad and Mum used to take things to.”

  “You can take it to him tomorrow if you’ve a mind to,” said Auntie Connie. “There may be a year or two of life in it yet. That’s an end to ironing for tonight, but it was almost finished anyway.”

  Later that night, while Auntie Connie was boiling milk for their bedtime drink, Matthew and Annie talked over what they would do next day.

  “I’m going to take it to Andy Patterson’s,” Matthew said.

  “Oh?”

  “You can come,” he said solemnly, “but I don’t think you should come in. I don’t think he’d talk about her with a girl present.”

  “I don’t think he’ll talk about his love life with a fourteen-year-old boy anyway,” said Annie, stung into dismissiveness. “What are you going to say to him, ‘I hear you slept with Carmen O’Keefe, just like our dad did’? I think you should let it drop. It’s in the past.”

  “I have let it drop . . . only, this is an opportunity.”

  “An opportunity for what?”

  “To . . . well, to find out how she came to be killed.”

  “I don’t want to know. And what good would it do, us knowing? You can go on your own.”

  So next morning Matthew shoved the iron into an old leather bag and took the canal path to Bramley. Walking gave him time to think, though the problem that Annie had alluded to—that of ever getting around to the subject he wanted to talk about—was a ticklish one, and he hadn’t solved it by the time he left the towpath and went up the hill towards Bramley Town Street.

  He had no idea where Andy Patterson’s shop was, but he found it soon after he turned off Broad Lane. The centre of Bramley had been ruined some years before by local government vandals who had pulled down the old stone houses and shops and built a hideous shopping centre and dreary council flats in their place. Patterson’s Electrical Store was in one of the few old buildings remaining, and its title was more ambitious than the reality. It was a second-hand and repair shop presenting a motley array of appliances and implements up for sale or in for repair. All the surfaces—floor, counter, workbench—presented a great jumble of wires, parts, batteries and valves. Matthew did not know this, but shops of this kind were doomed, as people found they preferred to chuck away and start again rather than repair what had gone wrong.

  If Andy Patterson realised this, he was keeping very cheerful about it. When Matthew had pushed open the door and made a path for himself through the debris up to the counter, he found a little gnome of a man, bald-headed, glinting of eye, sitting contentedly on the other side with the entrails of an ancient vacuum cleaner around him. If Matthew had been privy to Bramley gossip he would have known that women preferred not to go into Patterson’s Electrical Store on their own. As it was, he registered almost subconsciously that Andy Patterson did not seem to conform to the usual pattern of Carmen O’Keefe’s boyfriends.

  “And what can I do for you?” the man asked with a friendly smile. Matthew rummaged in his bag.

  “There’s this iron—it sort of exploded last night.”

  “Oh, aye, I can see that.” He examined it with an undoubtedly expert eye, squinting through thick spectacles. “Looks as if it’s just the cord, but we should maybe have a look at its insides to see everything’s safe. Dangerous things sometimes, are irons. Will you come back for it?”

  “Could you possibly do it now? You see, I come from Rodley and I had to make the trip specially.”

  “I could probably do that for you. I’ve only this old Hoover to puzzle my brains with. Sit you down.”

  Matthew sat down on an old upright chair, considerately put there for waiting customers. The little gnome of a man began setting the Hoover pieces methodically around him on the floor, and Matthew could see that he was not only small but running to fat. He was just racking his brains how to start the conversational ball rolling when Andy Patterson began it for him.

  “Well now, young man, you say you’re not from round here?”

  “No, I’m from Rodley. I walked along the canal.”

  “Not often I get folks making the pilgrimage here all the way from Rodley.”

  “They said you were good with old things.”

  “Did they now?” Glint went the sharp little eyes. “Well, I’m always nice to pensioners, that’s true, but I prefer a younger bit of skirt if I can get it.” He gave a tinkling little laugh at his own joke. “And how do you like to pass your time, young fellow?”

  Matthew considered.

  “Oh, I like a bit of football. I’m not so keen on cricket. . . . And I like the girls, too.”

  It was just the right response. It was obviously the man’s favourite subject. His face li
t up.

  “At your age, young man? Though now I come to remember, I was pretty interested myself when I was no older than you. . . . Oh, those were the days.” He gazed ahead for a moment. “There was more mystery then. How do you get that delicious sense of discovery if there’s no mystery?”

  “Is there a Mrs Patterson?” asked Matthew.

  “There’s one or two.” Andy Patterson shot a sly glance in Matthew’s direction to see how he took this, then he grinned. “Oh, women are my downfall, no question of that. No—I tell a lie: not women, but wives.”

  “Haven’t you . . . stayed married, then?”

  “Not on your life. The mistake was to get married, and it would have been a greater one to stay married! Either they’ve walked out on me or I’ve walked out on them.”

  “I thought you were a Catholic.”

  “Now who would have told you that?” he asked, genuinely surprised. “Oh, I was once, true enough. Brought up in the faith. But I don’t think the Catholic faith is the right one for a happy-go-lucky chap like myself. It finds too many things that you need to struggle against. In the end you give up the struggle and say ‘What the hell—I’m going to do what I enjoy doing, whatever the Fathers say.’ Doing what I fancy has given me a lot of fun, a lot of pleasure—and a few scrapes and bloody noses too, but that’s life, isn’t it?”

  “Doesn’t it get . . . sort of dangerous, having lots of women? I mean, with husbands and that? And don’t they get jealous of each other?”

  “It can happen, young fellow—take it from me who knows!” He talked freely while his stubby finger poked around inside the iron. “The thing is to keep it all nice and free and easy. You’re just in it for the fun, and she’s just in it for the fun. She’s not your exclusive property, and you’re not her exclusive property. And neither of you is going to get plagued by fits of guilt because neither of you thinks it’s anything to feel guilty about. Ah, young man, you find a woman like that and you find a treasure!”