A Charitable Body

by Robert Barnard

  “You don’t sound as if you were heartbroken.”

  “Oh, I was fond of the old boy. But I was sickened by the Falklands affair and all the bogus flag-waving it involved. Before the Argentineans invaded, Thatcher begrudged the islanders a supply ship once a year. I tossed up and it came down that I’d leave the army and take over Walbrook. I don’t regret it, not at all, but still . . .”

  “But still what?”

  “It was never my sort of house. Like most military men I like a Spartan existence—the basic essentials, but not too much padding. But I was never made to be a gentleman, a landlord, a recipient of unearned income. It’s been a long, hard haul.”

  “And you had your cousin as an added burden on your income.”

  “Oh, Mary-Elizabeth. She’s been around pretty much all my life. Almost a sister to me. She’s been company for me, adviser, the real lord, or lady, of the manor, and then everything else as well. I don’t think of her as a burden at all.”

  “And yet finally you got rid of the place.”

  “Yes, and heartily glad I’ve been to rid myself of it. Mary-Elizabeth will be glad too, when she realizes how much easier and pleasanter life is. We’ve got the upstairs flat in what used to be the doctor’s house in the village. We have to go to Halifax for our doctoring. It’s not ideal, but most people in the village have a car. There’s still a bus service, which there wouldn’t be if this was in the South of England—yes, life is much sweeter.”

  “And Sir Stafford?”

  “What about Sir Stafford?”

  “Do you get on?”

  “To be sure we do. As much as is necessary.”

  “You think he’s straight?”

  Rupert Fiennes rubbed his chin. “Oh, dear—does the notion of straightness still survive? I don’t meet up with many straight people in my daily life. Even in the army it’s a dead concept. Look at the people in Iraq and Afghanistan. The service chiefs are always stabbing each other in the back. Then the three of them get together to do the politicians down. To listen to them speak, you’d think that all the wartime leaders before them had only to request men, machines, and equipment and it was bought and put at their disposal. Cloud cuckoo land, but people believe it, and so do newspaper editors—what a stupid lot they are! Sir Stafford, I’d say, is as straight as most people today.”

  “And you’ll go on working with him?”

  “I suppose so. If I get fed up with it, and him, I can easily get out from under.”

  “Is there anything upsetting you?”

  Rupert’s chin was fingered again. “I suspect Sir Stafford has set up a board that is broadly well-informed, impressive-looking. But I think he will dispense with the services of anyone who disagrees with him or looks likely to disagree with him. Like most people he prefers to act with puppets rather than with potential rivals.”

  “And how are you going to respond to a development like that—a takeover, I mean? Would you fight it?”

  “Not on your life! I’ve done more than enough fighting in my life, and rather incompetently. Like I say, I’d get out from under.”

  “Why? Because you don’t really like the house?”

  “I like the house all right. I just don’t want to live in it. And why should I oppose Sir Stafford making it a one-man show? He loves the house, he’s a museum expert, he gets on—moderately—well with people. He’s not going to live forever, and he’s not going to do anything monstrous or inappropriate to the house. I’d hand it to him on a plate.”

  “And the royalties and performance fees from From the Trenches or whatever the song cycle comes to be called—would you hand them to him?”

  “No, of course not. This is part of the contents of the house that were handed over to the Trust. Stafford can’t touch it. If I’m interpreting the messages right, the receipts won’t be enormous. What you’ve got are good English composers going through their paces. Not exactly on an off day, but not really at their best. A few performances, maybe a recording, and then consigned to the bottom drawer. I think even Matlock realized that.”

  “Tell me about Matlock.”

  “I think I saw him when I was a child, but I don’t remember anything about it. There are some photographs, so they are my substitutes for memory. He looks repellent.”

  “In what way? Smarmy?”

  “Yes. Or maybe oily describes it better. Periodically over the years he came to Walbrook, apparently to check a music manuscript, really to chart whether any unknown manuscripts had been found that were intended for the song cycle. He was almost entirely in charge of that project by then, but very little progress seemed to be made toward either publication or performance. One of my favorite pictures of him was taken at the end of one such visit. It just shows his back.”

  “And?” asked Charlie, curious.

  “He had just left the house and was going down the hill to his car. My father was watching him from the bedrooms. Matlock forgot that he could still be seen from the house, and after a time he broke into a dance—‘a sort of joyful polka,’ my father said—and you can see the dance from the photograph: his feet hardly seem to be touching the ground.”

  “What do you think he was celebrating? Did your father know?”

  “He didn’t, but he was determined to find out. He had been suspicious for a long time—hence the camera. He rang the local police super, who in turn rang his opposite number in Camden, where the oily Matlock lived. They were waiting for him when he got home and found it in his luggage.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was another song for the cycle. He said he must have made a mistake when he was putting his things away in his briefcase. They took that with a pinch of salt, but this was white-collar crime if it was a crime at all, and the bobbies in London didn’t feel at home with it. They let him off with a caution and returned the music to my father. He was not well—it was shortly before his death—and he didn’t want to be troubled by anything involving Matlock. So that was the end of it. As Dad said, wryly, it was a very short song.”

  “You must have taken over shortly afterward.”

  “That’s right. Nineteen eighty-three. I was one of several young men discontented in the army. Mary-Elizabeth ran things briefly till I could get my release, and then we started on a regime of economizing, making do, retrenching. It was quite satisfying for a while, but eventually we had to face the fact that it wouldn’t work. In spite of Mary’s enthusiasm for cutting our coat according to our cloth, we faced an old age of living in a house that was becoming a ruin around us.”

  “A pretty grim prospect,” agreed Charlie.

  “I’m in love with our flat. Everything works, and everything is simple and efficient. I’m learning to cook—all the basics and some quite difficult recipes. I watch all the would-be chefs on daytime television. Heaven! So don’t tell me I could make trouble for Stafford. He’s got carte blanche as far as I’m concerned.”

  Charlie took a swig of his beer and thought.

  “But you did want to talk with me, didn’t you? Put your point of view.”

  “Yes. I face a future of standing round at wine-and-cheese parties in my old house and being pointed out as the last lord of the manor, the man who could never quite make ends meet. I just like to put my own angle on things now and then.”

  “I liked him,” said Charlie that night over dinner. “Believed him too. Not that I’m lowering my defenses. I’ve known people who fifty years ago would have been hanged and yet they were just as believable as Rupert Fiennes. But still . . .”

  “Is it possible for someone like that to be so lukewarm about families as he is?” asked Felicity.

  “Of course it is. Look at yourself.”

  “I’m not gentry. And I do think about family. I wonder how my mother could have married my awful father and then stayed loyal to him through the whole of that marriage. And then there’s my grandmother—I remember her as a sensible lady. Why didn’t she stop her daughter making that dreadful mistake?�
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  “You don’t stop children marrying these days.”

  “That wasn’t these days.”

  “I don’t care tuppence about family,” said Charlie. “My scatterbrained mother is mainly an embarrassment. My father I could pass in the street—in fact I could arrest him in the street—and not have the faintest idea he was my father. So could my mother.”

  “You never had childish fantasies about being the secret love child of a member of the royal family?”

  “Me? The color I am? I’ve never had any doubt about my father being as black as my mother.”

  “Not caring much about family background seems to go hand in hand with parents not caring about their offspring. Let ’em do what they like. Let them do what they like, because eventually that’s what they will do. So the parents don’t fight drugs, or knives, or very early sex. And if they don’t care, why should the children?”

  “That’s not my background, and my mother did try and had some success. Anyway, we’re getting off the subject, which is that we have no case.”

  “We never had a case or expected to find one,” Felicity pointed out. “I’ve just been intrigued by Walbrook and Sir Stafford and the family dynamics.”

  “Agreed. Sir Stafford, who was the starting point, turns out to be a typical committee member on an arts body—committed and knowledgeable, but with a strong vein of egotism underneath. He also has a personal interest in Walbrook. Beyond that, we’ve found that he probably would like to have a collection of yes-men and yes-women around him. Not necessarily a bad thing, and possibly a positive one: your own yes-men can make for a more united and effective board than one with many different egotisms pulling in different directions.”

  “Agreed. What it comes down to is, situation normal, nothing worse than occasional personal disagreements, things on the whole going well with visitor figures, local PR, the special exhibition, and so on.”

  “Everything in the garden is lovely,” said Charlie.

  But of course that was before the discovery of the body.

  CHAPTER 9

  Wet Bones

  The woman taking the path down to the pool known as Haroldswater (chivying her two young children and their dog along the path behind her and exclaiming at familiar natural phenomena) exuded moral authority, young as she was. At her place of work her attributed name was Trouble, as in “Here comes trouble,” though others more favorably disposed attached to her the more cumbersome “the done thing.” She was continually asking herself what the regulations said, and why they said it. When she had discovered that, she generally knew what the done thing was and followed her nose.

  Once beside the water, her family’s favorite place for an impromptu picnic, she opened the small basket, took from it a rather basic set of packages containing cheese sandwiches, biscuits, and fruitcake, and placated the children with a selection from each package. They all settled down, chattering happily, and occasionally feeding the dog, who was called Peggotty. Beside their picnicking place was a notice warning against swimming in Haroldswater, which in places had surprising depths. The woman did not need warning, and while she chattered and pointed out birds and even a fox on the other side of the water, she kept her eyes on her children with her ear taking in all the time the subjects of their chattering. When half the picnic was eaten, she packed the remainder away for later on, and they all went down to paddle in the shallowest and safest places, with Peggotty practicing her powers of self-advertisement. They paddled and splashed until the mother said it was time to eat up the food and start for home. She looked toward the shore and shook her head.

  “Oh, dear. What’s Peggotty got now?”

  The dog was barking a “Haven’t I been clever?” sort of bark, one she used often, and was standing over two white, solid objects that she had found somewhere or other and laid out neatly on the shore. The woman gained the earthy shore and was about to pick them up when she said, “Good heavens,” and held herself back.

  “What is it, Mummy?”

  “I don’t know. I think I have to get someone out here.”

  She pulled out her mobile phone and spoke into it, the children on either side of her in trained total silence.

  “Kath? I need help. I need someone who knows what’s what out here. It’s Haroldswater—you know where it is, don’t you? . . . I mean ‘what’s what’ medically and criminally. I’m here with the children, and I won’t go away till I’ve handed over to someone who is a detective policeman, not a boffin like me. . . . Hurry, Kath. The children are inclined to be boisterous, and I’d like to get them out of the crime scene, if there is one.”

  She slipped the phone into her jeans pocket.

  “Mummy, Mummy—what is it? What did Peggotty find? Is this really a crime scene? Tell us.”

  “I think, darlings, that Peggotty discovered a human bone, and a separate finger bone. They’re wet, and I guess they have been in the water a long time.”

  That human remains had been found by a member of the West Yorkshire forensics team, and a female one at that, was the cause of jokes and sexist badinage for the whole team at the Halifax station. Charlie did not participate. He had collected any detectives not obviously working on a case and taken them to Haroldswater. He had heard a lot about Dr. Julie Maddison, seen her once or twice, and thought she was someone with whom he could work, though he thought her Olympic-gymnast body was a little bit off-putting. When he found that, because of her part in the discovery, she was not professionally to have anything to do with her findings, he was part regretful, part delighted.

  “I don’t know this Haroldswater place,” he said to her at Police Headquarters. “Is it near a churchyard? Could the bones have been separated from the rest of the body during flooding? We’ve had enough of floods in the last few years.”

  “The nearest graveyard is three miles away, and the pool is too high to have been hit by flooding,” said Dr. Julie.

  “Do you have a hunch about how long it has been dead?”

  “Yes. And my hunch would be no better than your hunch.”

  “I doubt it. I only caught a glimpse of it out there. Go on—guess.”

  “My hunch is that it’s been dead a long, long time.”

  “Anglo-Saxon? The age of Shakespeare? The body of Catherine Earnshaw?”

  “No, no. Later than those.”

  “Well, go on: about when?”

  She shook her head. “Charlie, shut up. You asked for a hunch, and now you’re turning it into a professional scientific verdict. I’m not having any.”

  “Right. Look—I promise not to quote your guess to anyone. It’s a bet between you and me with no money on it because you’re guessing with say twenty years on either side, while I have all the rest of recorded time. Just a lovely private bet between the two of us—a secret à deux.”

  “You think you can charm the birds down from their branches. People told me that, and they were dead right. Well, here goes. Somewhere around the middle of the last century. Give it your twenty on either side and that makes it somewhere between 1930 and 1970. Got that? If it’s wrong, I never said it, right? Now let me get on with my work.”

  Charlie wandered away, his brain ticking over but not making him shout Eureka at any point. The only breakthrough was when he saw PC Murray Weston snatching a quick lunch at his desk, the chutney oozing down his chin.

  “Murray, you’re from Walbrook, aren’t you? What’s the name of the gaffer there who knows everyone that’s ever lived there, and everything that’s ever happened in the village since he was in toweling nappies back in the twenties?”

  “Oh, you mean Jeb Wheeler. A human encyclopedia within a very narrow field.”

  “Is he still reasonably compos mentis?”

  “Wrong tense. Was till he died? Yes, he was, but it didn’t stop him dying.”

  That stopped Charlie. “Really? I felt sure . . . How long ago was this? Last week?”

  “Last year, if not the year before. We miss him.”
/>   “Who does? Us here at the station?”

  “Yes. We miss him, and we’d miss him even more if Walbrook was a hotbed of crime.”

  Charlie was frowning. “I just can’t get over . . . Still, there must be someone else who may do—someone who really knows the village through and through. Who might that be?”

  “I’d go after his son. You’ll get it all at one remove, but he’ll have all the stories pat. He’ll have heard them oftener than anyone would like. And by the way, I wouldn’t mind betting he’ll have some that were not for general consumption. Interesting character, Will.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s been a gay proselytizer all his life. He’s currently secretary of the Association of Rural Gays. In the past he’s been something or other in the Society of Gay Athletes.”

  “A man of various lifestyles,” said Charlie. “I have a feeling my wife has met him. I’ll give her a ring later on.”

  As is the usual thing with cases involving bodies and bones, things piled up on Charlie’s desk, as well as things involving him in travel and questioning, so it was after five when he actually rang Felicity on his mobile. She was home, coping with two demanding (in different ways) children.

  “Hi, Charlie. I’m busy, but they’re asking to talk to you.”

  “Later. You first. You told me about a guy in pink trousers, one of the dog walkers of Walbrook. Was his name Will?”

  “No idea. They none of them told me their names. I just called them in my own mind Cockles, Paunch, Pink Trousers, and so on.”

  “So the name means nothing to you?”

  “Nothing at all. His father had been head gardener at Walbrook.”

  “Yes, you told me that. What time was it you met this little group?”

  “Late morning—say eleven or so.”

  “And did you get the impression that this was a regular occurrence in their day—the dog walking I mean? Did they meet up then to talk over last night’s telly, discuss who should win Britain’s Got Talent and so on?”

  “Regular—yes. Topics of conversation—something less asinine, I’d guess. Might even be politics on a good day. Village life is real, and earnest, however they may cover that with a joking surface act.”