Masters of the House

by Robert Barnard

  “She didn’t take off. She was murdered.”

  It was a decision taken suddenly but led up to by weeks of uncertainty. He had to have someone who shared his secret. Annie was no longer interested, having remade her safe nest. Peter was his friend—sensible, sympathetic, older and already involved. Sharing the secret with him was a sort of friendship oath.

  The word had stopped him in his tracks, and he stood looking at Matthew, his mouth open.

  “What?” he said.

  “She was murdered.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Annie and I found the body outside our kitchen window.”

  Peter put his hands on Matthew’s shoulders and looked into his eyes.

  “You’re having me on . . . aren’t you?”

  “I’m not. It was June the sixteenth, the night she is supposed to have taken herself off.”

  “But why didn’t you tell the police?”

  “They’d have found out about Dad’s state and taken us into care. It could have been even worse: They might have thought that we’d killed her. She was getting very inquisitive about Dad and why no one had seen him.”

  “But . . . she was killed, was she?”

  “Oh yes—with a kitchen knife. I’d left the knife on the window ledge earlier in the day, which would have made it worse for us. But anyone could have done it.”

  “But what did you do ? Where’s the body?”

  “We took it to the little wood by Greatbuys Supermarket and buried it there.”

  “You dragged Carmen all that way? But she was a toughie—a dead weight.”

  “No. We waited until midnight, and I drove. I don’t know how I did it, but I did.”

  Peter thought over all this new and staggering information. It was almost incredible to him that this young lad, three years younger than himself, should have done all this and should now be telling him of it in such a matter-of-fact way as if it was something only slightly out of the ordinary. He looked at Matthew with admiration as well as liking.

  “So everyone thinks Carmen has gone off with a new fancy man, but you and Annie know that she hasn’t because you found her body in your back garden?”

  “Yes.”

  “So someone else also came to your back garden that night, either with her or following her, and stabbed her?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It must be, mustn’t it? You’ve no idea who that might be?”

  “None at all. Of course I’d like to find out, but I wouldn’t dob them in to the police. I reckon Carmen asked for it. Anyway, we’re just settling down as a family again, and I don’t want us disturbed by the police barging in and going on about what we did that night and why.”

  “No, I can see that. . . . Is my dad one of the suspects?”

  “Well, all the old boyfriends are, except my dad. We’d have heard him, if he’d come downstairs. Anyway he’s just not there enough to commit a murder.”

  “Well, I must say you’re a cool customer. And young Annie, too. . . . Here’s a 32 bus. Shall we get on it?”

  Once on the bus they said no more about Carmen’s murder, except that Peter, thinking it all over, said, “Thank you for telling me. I appreciate it.”

  “I’ve wanted to for a long time.”

  “Total discretion, anyway.”

  “Total discretion.”

  But when Peter got off the bus at his stop Matthew thought, Now three people know.

  When Matthew got home, Rob and Grace—now permanently together as far as Rob’s job would permit—were there on a visit; and boisterous games were going on all over the living room floor.

  “You’re late, Matthew,” said Auntie Connie. “Where have you been?”

  “Peter’s thinking of buying an old car. We went to have a look at some. He’ll be seventeen in June.”

  “He’d do better to borrow ours. We’ve got no use for it, and leaving it idle’s the worst thing for a car.”

  Later, when Grace got up to make them all a cup of tea, Matthew followed her into the kitchen.

  “You know all that insurance money for Carmen, Grace?”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you heard anything more about it?”

  “Nothing beyond what we told you about it. They acknowledged that letter you wrote for Rob and asked him to let them know if she turned up or if we found out where she is.”

  “So it’s just sitting there waiting for her?”

  “Yes. Seems a waste, though I doubt she’d make good use of it.”

  “What sort of woman was Carmen’s mother?”

  “A terrible old harridan, if you believe Rob. Kept a pub—had done all her life.”

  “And how did she die?”

  “Didn’t you know? It was rather horrible. She died in a fire at her pub.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Connections

  FIRE.

  As soon as the word was said, Matthew knew that it gave him the key. He didn’t think it through directly—he just nodded at Grace and began carrying the tea things through to the living room—but the word lodged there at the back of his mind; and the implications began burgeoning in moments of quiet, when he was walking alone, watching something boring on television or, most of all, when he lay in his little bedroom, listening to Greg’s even breathing and engaged as he so often had been in his young life in thinking things through.

  A fire at a pub. A fire for which a large sum of insurance money would be paid if the person to whom it should be paid could be found. Money that was now sitting around, waiting. . . . Peter’s father was a fireman. His own father had been a fireman before he was invalided out by the accident which had left him with a limp. Kevin Holmes had been an insurance assessor. Andy Patterson was an electrician. These men were not a heterogeneous collection of no-hopers. They were men who could help Carmen stage the sort of fire that would convince the accident investigators and the insurance company that it was accidental.

  Carmen had been planning to murder her own mother. In fact, she had murdered her—and successfully. Thinking it through, Matthew had no doubt she had had help of some kind from the man in the smallest bedroom along the landing, the man who had once been his father. The question of what kind of help, how much help, he pushed to the back of his mind.

  “What kind of a woman was Carmen’s mother?” he asked Auntie Connie one evening when they were washing up in the kitchen. She shot him a glance.

  “Pretty much the kind of woman you would expect,” she said.

  “Like Carmen, you mean?”

  Auntie Connie thought.

  “In a way. I’d not want to speak ill of the dead, and in her style she was a clever woman, cleverer than Carmen; but I hated going near her. Early on in the marriage when I came to visit Rob and her, Carmen would say, ‘You must come over and see Mum—she’s so looking forward to meeting you again.’ I knew it wasn’t true, and she never gave any signs of pleasure, but I’d consent to be driven over. I hated every moment of it.”

  “Why?”

  Auntie Connie paused in her vigorous scrubbing of the plates.

  “She was a harridan. She could hide it from the customers, but it came out in private. She was as hard as nails, mad for money, scornful of anyone who wasn’t. Oh, I didn’t mind her sneering at me as a poor, dowdy country body with no go or ambition. But she sneered at Rob too: ‘He’s never going to make the big time, is he?’ she would say. In fact, she liked to jeer at anyone who was ordinary, nice, gentle.”

  “But you said she was clever.”

  “In her way she was. A good businesswoman. And she knew her limitations. She was a presence in her pub: She put in an appearance, everyone respected her, but she wasn’t there much. She knew she wasn’t right for that kind of pub. So she had a nice young manager who really was the pub to its customers—friendly, warm, welcoming—as she could never be. And she was clever enough to give him his head and not to quarrel with him.”

  “Was it a pub like the Rov
er’s Return?”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was rather upmarket. It was—is, I should say because a brewery bought it after the fire, and the young manager’s just reopened it—is in Tong Village, and they do a very good pub lunch. People came from miles around for it, because as well as the usual things—lasagna, steak and kidney, that sort of thing—they always had one unusual thing every day: coq au vin, fresh tuna, game pie. They had a very good chef, of course, and she was clever enough to pay him properly so as to keep him.”

  “Was it an old pub?” said Matthew, thinking about accidents.

  “Yes, it was. I’m not very good on history, but they used to say eighteenth century. She’d managed to make it comfortable without losing the atmosphere. I can tell you, if it hadn’t been for the woman herself it was the sort of pub I’d be happy to have a drink in, and I’m not a pub person. She had a very nice sort of customer, served this real ale people go on about. Oh, the Fox and Garter was in lots of guides as a very special pub. Pity she was such a horrible woman!”

  “She must have been cleverer than Carmen if she could hide it so well.”

  “Oh, she was. Carmen had been neglected as a child and just went after what she wanted when she grew up. Her mother had had to work to get what she wanted, so she’d learnt things the hard way. She was disciplined, had control of herself. But it all came out in private. And once the customers had been sent on their way, she drank like a fish.”

  “Was this how she . . . died? Was she drunk?”

  Auntie Connie nodded, confidently.

  “She was asleep, and she’d been drinking heavily. I thought it might be a cigarette butt, because she chain-smoked once she was in her own quarters—never let the customers see her. But the fire people thought it was probably faulty wiring. The public parts had been redone, but the private bit was still as it had been—oh, back in the twenties, I think, when the electric light was put in. That’s where they thought the fire started. So she’d have got her money out of the insurance people.”

  “Was it her insurance policy?”

  “Yes. Took it out when she was convinced she had cancer. Doctor told her she hadn’t, and she was medically inspected for the policy, but she was convinced. She always liked to do someone down if she could, and this was her way of doing the insurance company down. ‘You’ll be nicely set up when I go,’ she said to Carmen. ‘You’ll have the pub to sell and this as well. You can get yourself a real man, one who’s a credit to you.’ ”

  Again it struck Matthew that Auntie Connie ought to have considered the unlikelihood of her daughter-in-law’s taking off and making no contact with the insurance company to ensure that she got her money. How long did she have to be missing before that thought was to strike anyone?

  He said: “All that money . . .

  “Oh, she’s probably made contact with the insurance people by now,” said Auntie Connie. “They wouldn’t tell us, would they? Especially if she didn’t want them to.”

  So that’s the way they’re thinking, Matthew realised. It made sense, if you didn’t know Carmen was dead.

  Matthew brooded for some days on the new information he had got, in particular what it told him about his father and his involvement with Carmen. He was at a point now where he regarded his father quite dispassionately, as a fact. There was no love and there was no anger. Love was in the distant past, when Dermot had been a real person. Anger was more recent, but it was difficult to stay angry with a blob. Dermot was like an animal who was not loved but who was there and had to have his needs catered to. Matthew loved Annie, loved his small brothers, but he had no adult to love.

  But there was his father’s past, those mysterious last few months of sanity, and Matthew very much wanted to penetrate the secrets of those months and perhaps uncover the seeds of his present state. A possibility occurred to him, and a means of checking it. The next day he announced that a project in history class meant he had to go into the reference library in Leeds. Auntie Connie agreed without a murmur. She was beginning to allow him quite a lot of freedom.

  The lady behind the desk reacted quite impassively when Matthew asked for the Yorkshire Evening Post for the previous year. She asked which part of the year he was interested in and eventually brought him copies of the first three months’ issues which, collected in a stiff binder, came to a weighty and bulky mass which she helped him carry to a table. Matthew already had a date in his mind around which to work: His mother had died on the thirtieth of January. He turned straight to that date and immediately struck the gold he was looking for: On page 3 was the headline:

  POPULAR PUBLICAN DIES IN FIRE

  The story, which he read through carefully, did not add greatly to his knowledge.

  Fire brigade called by a neighbour at 2 am . . . fire had already got a hold . . . Mrs Rose Morley rushed to hospital, but it was clear she was already dead . . . had built up the Fox and Garter from a humble country pub to a well-thought-of hostelry with a discriminating and devoted clientele . . . a strong, no-nonsense personality very much respected by her customers . . . will be much missed in the Licenced Victuallers Association.

  There was nothing about the cause of the fire. That would come later. But in a way, that was irrelevant. There had been no question about the cause of the fire—or, if there had, the investigators had eventually satisfied themselves that it was accidental. They had been wrong. Between her and her various lovers, Carmen had found a way of incinerating her mother that fooled the experts and left her collecting the insurance money and the price of the burnt-out pub. Or would have done if she had not met her comeuppance.

  Matthew sat there in the dim, high-ceilinged Victorian library, trying to think the matter through. Carmen’s mother had died the night before his own mother—probably, in fact, on the same day. When Carmen had appeared at Ellen Heenan’s funeral, she must have recently been to, or been about to go to, another funeral. The day his—Matthew’s—mother had died, the news of Rose Morley’s death had appeared in the evening newspaper.

  Matthew tried to remember that day. They had just finished breakfast when his mother had said, “It’s starting,” and had herself rung for the ambulance. She had been terrified that the industrial troubles of the Winter of Discontent would mean that no ambulance would arrive, and she had an arrangement with Mrs Claydon up the road that she would drive her to hospital if necessary. However, she was assured an ambulance was on its way; and she sent Annie up the road to tell Mrs Claydon that she would not be needed. The ambulance had arrived in under a quarter of an hour, and the children had been left to watch and wait.

  Where had Dermot been? Not in the house, but he’d been in the house overnight. That didn’t tell one anything, of course. The fire could have been started by some sort of device. Or Carmen could have got into her mother’s quarters at the pub and started it without Dermot’s help. His father had had an early breakfast, as was his wont when he was in work, which he had not broken himself of when out of work. Then he had gone off, as he so often did, going round building sites looking for work and calling in at the Job Centre. That was it. Before the ambulance came, his mother had rung the Bramley Job Centre and asked that a message be given her husband if he called in that she had been taken to the hospital.

  It was late afternoon by the time Dermot was driven home. Plenty of time for him to have seen the Yorkshire Evening Post at the hospital and to have been struck by the double blow. The more he thought about it, the less Matthew could see his father as any sort of prime mover in Rose Morley’s death. Weak, yes, stupid, yes, wicked, no. He would not—surely he would not—have actively participated in the taking of his lover’s mother’s life.

  And, in fact, there was a sort of living proof that he had not. He had seen the Post, seen the report of Mrs Morley’s death, and realised that—unwittingly but foolishly—he had been one of the agents of her death. It was that, combined with the death of his wife and baby, that had driven him mad with grief and guilt. To his simple mind it seem
ed like an instant judgment.

  Matthew’s mind strayed to the earlier stages of Dermot’s affair with Carmen. With the other men there had been a stage at which sex began to be mixed up with questions that caused them unease and eventually led them to hotfoot it out of the relationship. Those questions must have involved how to cause death without arousing the suspicions of fire officers and accident investigators. Either the other three men were brighter than Dermot Heenan, or Carmen had seen that she had to get subtler in her approach. What was certain was that Dermot had provided her with the sort of information or know-how she needed. Perhaps having provided it, he was immediately uneasy, fearful that it might be misused. When he read of Rose’s death in a fire, he was devastated. And the other news came immediately on top of it.

  Some days later, in Peter’s back garden, Matthew told his friend about Carmen’s mother’s death and about his father’s possible involvement in it.

  “I don’t think he did it, or even helped her to do it. That doesn’t seem like my dad—even if he was madly passionate about her. But I think he provided her with the method of getting rid of her, the way to start a fire without rousing suspicion that it was started deliberately. She must have got it out of him because he was too stupid to realise what she was doing. But he must have wondered afterwards, and when he read of the fire while he was in the hospital and then heard of Mum’s death and the baby’s, it drove him over the top.”

  Peter considered this.

  “If it did happen like that, he could have hated the thought of Carmen and what she used him for.”

  “Maybe he does if he can think at all. That’s what we told Carmen when she came round.”

  “He could have killed her.” Peter held up his hand as Matthew began to protest. “He may seem like a total mess, but he has the strength, and there could be some sane corner of his mind where he blames her for how he is.”

  “How would he know she was there? He’s shut away in that little room the whole time.”

  “Before your Auntie Connie came, he was alone in the house all the hours you were at school. He could have set it up himself—arranged an assignation with her.”