A Charitable Body

by Robert Barnard

  “I’m told that the man I think must be Pink Trousers is a good person to ask about the village scandals of the last fifty or sixty years. Would you agree?”

  “Maybe. He’s—I would guess—only in his late middle-age.”

  “And you said he had a father—won’t go into that now—employed at Walbrook in a role conducive to gossip and rumors. The police used him often.”

  “That’ll suit you down to the ground. You’ve got a lot more on him than I did. I had the impression that the group of men—mostly older than Pink Trousers—was holding back on me, keeping quiet about any really juicy morsel. You could speak to all of them, but I would suspect you’d get more out of Pink Trousers, especially if you talk to him on his own.”

  So when he strolled over to the group of elderlies and no-longer-youngs the next morning, Charlie recognized some of them, which in the case of Pink Trousers did not take much brainwork.

  “Hi,” he said, “I’m the—”

  “The policeman,” said Paunch. “Your day is made, Will. He’s come to rummage in your great mind.”

  “He can rummage anywhere he pleases,” said Will. “Where shall we do this exciting catechism?”

  “Yours please, not mine,” suggested Charlie, and he was about to be led off, feeling like a prize pig, when Cockles put his spoke in.

  “You connected to that nice bint who talked to us last week?”

  “More than connected—married. We do things by the book in the police force.”

  “Not what I’ve heard,” said Paunch.

  “How did you know this?” Charlie asked Cockles.

  “Oh, come on. She comes and works in the Big House, she asks questions, most of the museum assistants are from the village. Put all that together and what do you get? Of course everyone knew she was married to a policeman. They could also see that he’s black, not white. Really sharp, aren’t we, us village folk?”

  “Well, if you think there’s something I ought to know that you have particular knowledge of, tell me. You can ring me at the Leeds police number.”

  “Right. ‘Can I speak to Charlie Peace, please?’ Is that the way to your ear?”

  “Dexter Peace to the receptionist, though she knows I answer to Charlie. Come on, Mr. Wheeler.”

  On the walk to Wheeler’s cottage they talked about dogs, and the impossibility of having one with a policeman’s work schedule and two young children. The longer they talked, the more Will Wheeler’s camp impersonations fell away, so that by the time he let them into a tiny but attractive cottage with clematis, not roses, around the door, they were talking quite normally.

  The ground floor was a model of what can be done with very little space. The area was open, with kitchen and eating and relaxing space all together and apparently functioning well. The wall made the strongest personal-political statement, being plastered with male pinups: a few of them hunks, including figures from the Australian soaps, but most of them willowy, pretty young men, all of them totally unclothed. Charlie definitely felt he had been presented with a surfeit of penises.

  “Not many blacks,” he said cheerfully.

  Will Wheeler grinned. “No offense, but they incline to the beefy. I find beefiness comic rather than stimulating. Now—what can I do for you? I mean that in the chastest sense.”

  “Good. Tell me about Walbrook, and tell me the most controversial, the most dangerous, of your father’s stories about the place. Pull no punches.”

  Will Wheeler thought before answering.

  “The house or the village?”

  “Both.”

  “As far as village gossip is concerned, it has always been ninety to ninety-five percent usual rural stuff: pregnant maidens, errant vicars, randy milkmen, even the odd camp character, like me, whom they had to take in their stride because they were afraid of my dad, a formidable figure. There was an interesting pregnancy, but maybe we could come back to that.”

  “Perfectly okay. You’re in the driving seat on this. What about the manor? I’ve heard a lot about the pacifist seminars that turned out to be less than pacific.”

  “Right.” Will sat massaging his knee, thinking about the time before he came into existence, as it had been rendered in his father’s account. “The seminars and their attendees were the main village talking point in the thirties, when my dad was one of the gardeners up at the house. That went on until the house was sold, and by then a lot of the occasional celebrity visitors to the seminars had packed their bags and taken themselves off to the United States. Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Christopher Isherwood, and so on.”

  “How controversial were the seminars in Walbrook?”

  “Oh, enormously,” said Will, spreading his hands to underline their enormity. “They were unpopular on two fronts, two reasons: first there were the pacifist aims that dominated all the publicity about the weekends. Even the mass slaughter in the First World War didn’t affect the village statement of faith that if your country called you, you packed your kit bag and obeyed the summons to fight. But then there was the behavior of some of the attendees, not least the celebrities. Shocking, ducky! You wouldn’t believe! Only everyone did, of course. The stories kept happy a population that television had not yet reached.”

  “Did the scandal involve Timothy Quarles?”

  Will’s face dropped. “Ah, you clearly know all about it already. My big moment is aborted.”

  “You mentioned an interesting pregnancy and I’ve heard that someone has mentioned an illegitimate child.”

  “Well, at least I can fill you in. It was a girl from the village, which made it worse, not better. She was a kitchen maid at Walbrook: that meant scrubbing and scraping and the rough laundry. Rose Patchett was about twenty, very stupid, but with an eye for the main chance, which she thought would be the making of her, though as far as we knew, it was the breaking.”

  “Did she try to get money out of Timothy?”

  “Of course she did. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe. But it was a dangerous course to take.”

  “Oh, yes. When I think how many weapons Timothy must have had, and how very few Rose had, then I wonder whether I’d have risked it. But I’ve a lot of the coward in me. Maybe I’d have said some village thickie I’d slept with was the father and gratefully accepted a five-pound note from the lord of the manor.”

  “I see your point. So what happened to her?”

  “Rumor had it she went to London.”

  “Nobody heard from her? Not her parents?”

  “Not her parents, who were staunch Methodists. But Walbrook saw her once again. The village saw her when she drove through—yes, drove—with a baby in the passenger seat. The manor saw her ten minutes later. She went to the kitchen, the part of the house she knew best. One of the seminars was on, so everyone was up to their eyes in work, but they took time off for a cup of tea. Her driving a car was the principal cause of comment. They couldn’t believe she could get a driving license, recently brought in. They were right. Rose said she ‘wasn’t bothered’ by such things. When asked why she was there, she said ‘to make arrangements’ about the baby—no one asked his or her sex. Seeing herself losing her audience, she snatched the baby and ran from ‘belowstairs’ up to the main rooms of the house. And that was the last time she was seen in Walbrook. No one saw her drive off. Mourned by no one, and only useful as the subject of gossip.”

  “Such as?”

  “Someone said he’d seen her in the Mall on VE Day, but he later admitted it could have been anyone. Just a vague resemblance that could have been the dress she and a million other girls had bought with their clothing coupons. If she set up as a whore, none of the squaddies from the village would have admitted using her. End of Rose. She was no great loss to village life.”

  “No. And the loss included the baby, presumably.” Charlie was very hot on neglected babies.

  “Never seen again. Disposed of some way or other.”

  “In both cases disposal could have invol
ved murder.”

  “Sure. I don’t see murder as a very Walbrook thing, but I’m a strong union man, and I believe the gentry and the aristocracy are capable of anything.”

  “You think that Timothy could have killed her, or had her killed?”

  Will spread out his hands, a familiar gesture of having nothing to offer. “To tell you the truth, I don’t ‘think’ anything. It’s a long time ago and I can’t see any point in reviving the matter.” The moment the words were out of his mouth, he put his hand over it. “Oh! The bones in Haroldswater!”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows theatrically. “So you know about the bones. . . . When exactly was this scandal?”

  “Exactly I don’t know. Before my time. Say midthirties. Maybe when the old king died, 1936 or so—you wouldn’t be far wrong.”

  “And the car was never found?”

  “Nobody so far as we knew claimed it, so we assumed nobody found it. The assumption was—assumption by those like my dad who lived through the whole affair—that she had been to see Timothy and afterward she drove away into obscurity. If she’d had a car accident, and the car had been found, the police would have contacted her parents. They remained untroubled by their un-Methodistical daughter.”

  “It’s all very interesting,” said Charlie truthfully. “Its relevance to what I’m investigating I’m not sure about.” He remembered Felicity’s conviction that the dog-walking men were keeping something from her. “Unless Rose’s story figured in the negotiations between Mr. Quarles and Mr. Fiennes. Something on the personal level to run parallel with something on the political level.”

  “If it didn’t figure in the haggling, it should have done,” said Will, the union man.

  “What exactly do you mean?”

  “The haggling took place up to September 1939. The last days of peace, the first of war. Old Man Fiennes should have realized that the days of the landed gentry were numbered. He had money, infinitely more than the Quarles, but he should have asked himself, did he have enough?”

  “To take on the burden of Walbrook?”

  “Yes. To take on the burden of a decaying house two and a half centuries old. Old Fiennes found it was like funding the drugs bills of a hypochondriac. Every month there was something crumbling, something failing to function. He really took it on not in 1939 but in 1947, when the local council closed it as an asylum. They couldn’t get out fast enough, and that should have wised him up. Hotel chains hadn’t exactly made money in the war and its aftermath, and they would have needed to make mints of it. He found himself lumbered with this gentry residence with no money coming in to run it, a government hostile to landowners, and constant calls on his time, patience, money—you name it, he had too little of it. He relied on his young son to take over after him, and he never realized it would be the last thing Rupert wanted. I called him Old Man Fiennes a moment ago. He wasn’t an old man when he bought Walbrook, but he was long before he died.”

  “Was Rupert married?”

  “Had been. They’d been separated. She’s still alive, I believe, but there’s no communication between the two.”

  “Mark her off the list,” said Charlie cheerfully.

  “Oh, do you have a list?” said Will, obviously delighted. “Cherchez la femme disparue?”

  “No, but I will have one before very long.”

  And his list, headed by Rose Patchett, received a new entry more quickly than he had bargained for. He was tracing his way along the paths he had taken with Will Wheeler earlier that morning when he was conscious, as soon as he entered the manor’s grounds, of somebody targeting him. The dog scampering round his heels was a boarder terrier, and this, as well as the man’s square shape and brisk, no-nonsense swagger, identified him as the one Felicity had called in her mind Cockles.

  “I’ve a message for you,” the man shouted. “From Will.”

  Charlie frowned, then twigged that Will had had an idea since Charlie had left his idyllic cottage. “Oh, yes, mobile phones. I shouldn’t assume that Yorkshire villages haven’t yet caught up with the infernal things.”

  “Practically every household has one,” agreed Cockles. “Invaluable for ordering takeaway suppers. Will says will you put on your list, if you haven’t already done so, the director’s wife, Delia Gannett.”

  “I know whose wife she is. But she’s dead, and everybody knows that.”

  Cockles shook his balding head. “Will says, ‘She’s no longer with us, and everyone’s been told she’s dead.’ Quite a big difference there. Come on, Vini.”

  Cockles strode off toward the stable block, leaving Charlie with the idea that he was going to land up with a surfeit of missing ladies. Curiouser and curiouser.

  CHAPTER 10

  Onlookers

  The next day was a Tuesday. For reasons that Felicity was unable to fathom, attendance at Walbrook Manor on a Tuesday was always meager, and there was talk about making Tuesday a closed day, when cleaning and minor repairs could take place. Ideal, Felicity thought. When she had taken Carola to school and parked Thomas in his nursery, she took the road to Walbrook, waved her hand cheerily at the dog walkers, and marched into the house “as if she owned it,” she told herself. She wondered whether she was getting the disease that too often afflicted trustees of large and beautiful properties.

  “Hello, Susan,” she said, slowing her pace and lingering around the ticket office, the usual inhabitant of which little box was by now something of a friend. “You’re a bit lonely, aren’t you? Tuesday blues is it?”

  “Oh, you know by now we use Tuesdays for dusting and scrubbing, hurrying away if there are any visitors coming through. We may soon have it as a closed day, and that will make a lot of sense.”

  “I should think so,” said Felicity, nodding. “People expect a house like this to be sparkling clean—no dust, no dirt, no marks on the linen—that’s how people like to see the house—women anyway. If Charlie’s anything to go by, men just don’t notice.”

  “That’s right,” said Susan. “We need a woman’s hand here. Lady Quarles isn’t involved at that level, and no disrespect to Mr. Gannett, but there are things he wouldn’t notice in a thousand years.”

  “I’m sure he does his best,” said Felicity, thinking she had become a walking platitude in her new position. She added, “He misses his wife, I expect.”

  “He must do, and not just in the obvious ways. A woman’s touch is unmistakable, and it’s missing now.”

  “What was she like, his wife?”

  “Oh, lovely!” The subject was obviously one for enthusiasm, even rapture. “A lady, and not to seem snobbish, that’s what she was. She was delicate, refined, exquisite. You know if she did something, if she pronounced on something, she would get it absolutely right. I’m sure Wes noticed, if he didn’t register, what a difference she made.”

  “How did they meet? Here, or in Australia?”

  “Oh, in Australia. Delia had gone out to see one or two family members who had settled there. She loved the country, and she might well have remained there, at least for a while, if she hadn’t met Wes.”

  “That seems the wrong way round.”

  “Ah, but you see Wes had never done the Australian thing of going back ‘home,’ looking up roots, tracing a family tree. So when they got together, they thought, good, long trip to England should be the first thing they would do, then they should make the decision of which country they should try to settle in. You know Wes had been curator of a museum of sport.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “In Brisbane, I think. People have commented of course: wrong sort of background for this job. But he is so careful and painstaking that the snide remarks have tailed off.”

  “Good,” said Felicity. “I’m a great believer in learning on the job.”

  “That’s right. Wes always says, ‘The principles are the same.’ Anyway, they married in Australia, blued their savings on airfares and holidays, and before long he was back doing museum work and doin
g it well.”

  “How did he get jobs? Competition must be fierce these days in museums as well as everywhere else.”

  “He jokes and says, ‘The Australian Mafia.’ But I think it was probably her family. She was a Bowes-Cartwright.”

  Felicity blinked. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Nor to me,” confessed Susan. “But it always impresses people who do know about families, and it sounds good—almost royal!” She heard the door open and whispered, “When she became pregnant, we treated it like she was producing an heir to the throne!”

  Two middle-aged people silently proffered the right money, then without a smile took their tickets and their one-page house guide into the large Drawing Room.

  “She was pregnant, was she?” whispered Felicity.

  “Yes. Wes told head museum assistant Marge Beckwith—he made a bad mistake there. He told her it should go no further, and that made sure it would go right through the museum’s staff. Not like Wes to be indiscreet, but I suppose he was so full of the news and so pleased and proud.”

  “Did she die in childbirth?”

  “No, she didn’t. She went to see one of the Leeds specialists because of some unusual pains, and he slapped her straight into hospital and, after a few days, sent her down to another specialist in London. Wes came back looking really shattered. ‘It’s not for the baby now,’ he told Marge. ‘It’s Delia we’ve got to think of now.’ Two months later she was dead.”

  “What of?”

  “Lung cancer.”

  “Was she a heavy smoker?”

  “Didn’t smoke at all. Nonsmokers can get it, you know.”

  “I know. . . . Whenever he talks about her, you get the impression that he’s broken—haunted still. Like having been dealt a hefty blow.”

  “You should have seen him just after it happened. He was inconsolable. ‘I feel like killing myself,’ he said over and over. Or, ‘There’s no point in it anymore.’ He meant life, you see. He’s quite a lot better now, though not the old Wes he was when he came. It was as much as Sir Stafford could do to get him to go to the funeral.”