A Charitable Body

by Robert Barnard

  “Fair enough point,” said Hargreaves magnanimously. “Someone we know of, then, or could have heard of. Someone who had associations with Walbrook, the house or the village.”

  Charlie was thoughtful when he trudged away to his car, and when he got back to Police Headquarters in Leeds, he sat at his desk for a long time making notes. When Hargreaves came in, at the end of his shift, Charlie hailed him, across the large room.

  “Hargreaves! Could I have a minute or two of your time?”

  “I suppose so,” he said, coming over. “There’s only rugby on the telly tonight.”

  “I thought you’d be there with your can of lager and your eager sons.”

  “Rugby doesn’t televise well, compared with soccer,” his sergeant said, sitting down. “It looks like a game for thugs.”

  “Hmm. No comment. I’ve been thinking of all the women we’ve heard about or met on this case. It’s possible that Rose Patchett had gone all upper-class with the proceeds of her pregnancy, but that seems unlikely in a girl of few talents. Who else do we know, bearing in mind that we don’t know why the car went into the pond, and it could have been in any of the last seventy-odd years.”

  “What about the car, sir?”

  “We don’t know much yet, but remember cars last a long time, particularly posh cars; protected over the years by their posh owners. It could have been a vintage car when it went into the water.”

  “Fair enough, sir. Now—these women . . .”

  “Well, there’s Mrs. Wes Gannett—died or disappeared, we should be able to find out which.”

  “Got you.”

  “There’s someone who I suppose we should call Mrs. Quarles.”

  “Sir Stafford’s lady mum.”

  “Exactly. Said to have been gravely ill, or alternately to be having it off with a local surgeon and any number of the participants in the seminars.”

  “Almost too fruity to be a suspect, sir.”

  “No one is ever too fruity. She could have been said to be gravely ill and then dead, all made up for the benefit of the children.”

  “Then there’s this Mary-Elizabeth,” said Hargreaves with a note of contempt in his voice. “Clumsy name.”

  “Names of the two queens before the present one, only they were queens by marriage, she’s queen in her own right. But I see your point. It doesn’t exactly slip off the tongue.”

  “Currying favor, sir?”

  “I don’t think the family was ever important enough to curry favor with royalty. They were too insignificant for Buck House to feel flattered.”

  “Are there any more?”

  “There’s an interesting fact I didn’t know,” said Charlie, leaning down toward his bottom drawer and pulling out a thick book. “Never despise Who’s Who. It is not just the snob’s delight, and it gives important crooks very nearly as much space as it gives important politicians, which is just as it should be.”

  “Get on with it, sir.”

  “And it is where I learned that Sir Stafford, in addition to being an expert on fifteenth-century Italian art and sculpture, a tireless pursuer of fakers and boosters of unjustified artistic reputations, had married—no year given—some coyness on Stafford’s part, do you think?—one Hazel Quarles.”

  Hargreaves had to think about that.

  “Meaning she was a Quarles when they married?”

  “Yes. Either by birth or by an earlier marriage.”

  “They do seem to keep things in the family, the Quarleses and the Fienneses. Did they marry when they were both a lot younger?”

  “I’ve phoned Mary-Elizabeth, and she says twenty years ago when they were both in their fifties.”

  “Mature that’s called, I believe,” said Hargreaves with a nasty chuckle.

  “They could have married conscious that they had a common interest in the family and the house. Sir Stafford probably had some museum or gallery post and planned to retire soon when he was in his middle or late sixties. Nice pension, no doubt, but probably both had expensive tastes. The token-rental flat in Walbrook Manor must have been a big attraction.”

  “With full-time employment in the house and the convenience of being close to all the records of the history of the family.”

  “Which the other side of the family, represented by Mary-Elizabeth, was sorting into a fully publishable shape.”

  “Are you suggesting some kind of war between the two wings, just as, apparently, in the past?”

  “I don’t think I’m suggesting anything,” said Charlie. “I don’t understand well enough people like the Walbrook lot. Now I find that even Sir Stafford’s wife is a family member. . . . Felicity thought that Lady Quarles was surprisingly open, and pretty much au fait with everything. But of course we have to treat her as suspicious.”

  “We have no case that involves Quarleses or Fienneses as yet,” said Hargreaves.

  “We have a swish car, dating back to the thirties in all probability, a time when Walbrook actually featured, in a very minor way, in national politics.”

  “I suppose so. No reason why Lady Quarles should be unable to discuss that, is there?” said Hargreaves. “You could talk to her if she was agreeable.”

  “I could,” said Charlie unenthusiastically.

  When Charlie arrived at Walbrook, he left his car in the lower car park, strolled up the grassy hill, not recognizing any of the dogs or their owners, and turned in at the Entrance Hall as a nice surprise for the ticket taker Felicity had introduced to him as Susan. When she saw him diving into an inside pocket, she protested.

  “Surely you shouldn’t pay—here on business.”

  “But I’m not. I’m here to see the First World War exhibition because it interests me. There’s no reason to connect the house with the body in Haroldswater, is there?”

  He looked at her with his policeman’s eyes, and she swiftly backed away from the subject.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Because if there is, we’d like to know.”

  “No, I’m sure there’s nothing. I’d have heard.”

  But she had assumed he was there on police business, Charlie noted. He nodded and headed for the staircase.

  Once on the first floor Charlie satisfied pretty quickly his desire to learn about the Great War. He lingered a little to take in the war’s aftermath and stored in his mind the names of “arty people” (poets, composers, painters) who were affected by the terrible conditions and the horrific mortality rates of the four-year conflict. He registered that there were more paying customers than on the day that Felicity had come here, and he put it down to the inevitable surge of interest when a skeleton has been found nearby. When he heard the clatter of high heels, he went to the door: the exhibition had attracted primarily men, and the women who were there were mostly dressed in slacks and low-slung shoes. He saw the back of a woman of a certain age, straight-backed, and he thought he recognized Lady Quarles. She moved toward the little, roped-off staircase and put the rope aside gracefully and quickly. Then she replaced it and proceeded confidently upward. These were the actions of someone who knows what she is doing and has done it often. Not a shred of guilt at any unauthorized access.

  Charlie waited five minutes or so, then walked softly to the stairway, put the rope aside in imitation of Lady Quarles’s grace and confidence, and went up to the attic floor. He looked around at the improvised offices and storerooms. All the doors were shut to, but from behind one there were sounds—scuffling sounds of papers being roughly sorted through, files being shut. Charlie waited. Eventually he heard sounds of files being returned to shelves, and the door opened.

  “Oh.” Lady Quarles’s slightly horsey face showed that she was taken aback.

  “I took the liberty of coming up,” said Charlie.

  “Liberty as a visitor to the house, or as a policeman?”

  “Initially as a visitor, then, when I happened to see you coming up here, as a policeman.”

  “There is no connection between the ho
use and the bones everyone is talking about.”

  This jumping of hurdles from the house to the bones was done confidently, as if nobody was going to gainsay such an obvious proposition.

  “That’s what I said to the lady at the ticket office downstairs. But as I went round, I realized that it is not true. ‘No known connection’ would be more accurate. We have some remains, believed to be a woman’s, apparently drowned while driving what, sixty or seventy years ago, was a very expensive car.”

  “Haroldswater is a mile and a half away.”

  “It is. But this is a rural area of modest houses. Even the National Trust has notably few houses in Yorkshire. Therefore it is something worth investigating: was there any connection between the dead woman in the expensive car and Walbrook? It seems possible because there are very few comparable houses within, say, a twenty-mile radius.”

  Hazel Quarles shrugged. “I don’t want to quarrel with you. It’s not a matter of any importance to me. Please look anywhere you want. With your permission I’ll wait here till you’ve finished and then I can lock up.”

  Charlie nodded. But then he went off at a tangent.

  “Did you know this house when you were younger, or was Sir Stafford’s involvement in the Trust’s formation the first time you saw it?”

  Something close to a romantic glow could be seen in Lady Quarles’s eyes. “Oh, I knew it! It was a fairy-tale place to me in my childhood.” Suddenly Charlie had a sense of her pulling herself together. “Mostly from photographs. I was very young.”

  Lady Quarles’s attitude seemed to shift with a prevailing wind. “Of course. You must be. That terrible crime—though long ago, we heard, so hardly soluble today.” When she got no response from Charlie she hurried on, “I’ll just leave these papers. I came to restore them to their right files. Stafford sometimes takes things to read, or to finish reading. A bit naughty I’m afraid.” This last was in response to Charlie’s raised eyebrows. “He does rather think he is head of the house now and can do what he likes. Perhaps you could have a word with him.”

  “I think that is Wes Gannett’s job.”

  “Oh, dear. They don’t always—well, you know—see eye to eye. And Wes does have a colonial—no, I must keep quiet.”

  “I get your meaning. Could I see the papers—the ones you have in your hands?”

  “Oh, I don’t . . . Yes, of course. I was just bringing them back.”

  She abruptly handed the papers over and Charlie leafed through them. Many of them were of a financial nature and probably mirrored the family’s difficulties in the twenties and thirties. Certainly the later papers suggested that the family’s involvement in the peace movements of the time involved increased financial stability. Those papers, the ones concerning the new sort of expenses incurred, were often dealing with concerts, with fees paid to artists, of the need to make the concerts coincide with the seminars, which must have made many in the audience uneasily conscious that by mingling with the younger artists performing at the manor they were letting themselves be used as propaganda fodder.

  “I’m sure these are quite harmless,” Charlie said, handing them back to Lady Quarles. “But still I think they should be back in place. The last director got into trouble because of the archives and the records of family possessions, didn’t she?”

  “Something of the kind, I believe.” It was stiffly said.

  “It would be unfortunate if your husband was criticized for the same sort of thing, especially as his position, as a family member, makes him particularly vulnerable. People are very open to criticism if they can be seen as using their own special position for their own ends. It’s largely unfair and springs from the MPs’ expense scandals, but people are now very aware of possible conflicts of interest.”

  “But there’s nothing of that sort about Stafford’s looking into the manor’s past. He’s a sentimental old soul, and he loves his memories of the place from his childhood. He’s just filling in the background of those memories. This taking of archives home—just one floor in fact!—springs from that, and when the item is finished with, and perhaps photocopied if it is really important, then it is meticulously put back either by Stafford or by me. Look—I’ll put these back now.”

  She carried the papers that Charlie had offered to her into the little office. She took down two files and inserted the papers in the appropriate places, then marched out again, padlocking the door as if it were a garden shed. She turned to Charlie, then started down the wooden, uncarpeted staircase, but she stopped almost at once.

  “You see, there was nothing very terrible, was there? Just a little piece of naughtiness from an old man. You will try and see that it goes no further, won’t you?”

  “If it doesn’t have any reference to the case, it certainly won’t go any further as far as the police are concerned,” said Charlie.

  “Thank you. You are very considerate. Please give my regards to your charming wife.”

  Charlie nodded briefly. Sir Stafford wasn’t the only one who nourished delusions about being head of the family, he thought. His wife could be positively queenly. He hoped that his reply to her request had been sufficiently ambiguous to acquit him if he had to tell his superiors of any charge of lèse-majesté.

  He raised his hand to Lady Quarles, then went down to the entrance lobby. “Could you supply me with paper and an envelope?” he asked Susan, in her place at the entrance. She smiled as she handed it over, and Charlie wondered whether she or another of the attendants could somehow have overheard the conversation in the attic and passed it on. If so, the subject matter would get around without him.

  He wrote:

  Dear Dr. Gannett,

  I wonder if enough care is being taken of the house’s archive. It is quite possible we shall want to consult it on matters financial, artistic, or social. A little strengthening of the ramshackle structure in the attic might send out strong signals and would show that the archive should be taken seriously.

  Yours,

  C. Peace (Inspector)

  CHAPTER 12

  Medical History

  The next morning Charlie decided it was time to put in order the events of 1939—not how they affected the nation, but how they affected the Quarles and the Fiennes families. One source of information on Leeds and its checkered history was the private Leeds Library—“founded 1768, decades before the London Library,” as it never failed to point out. Though Charlie suspected the only people who understood the catalog system were the librarians (and not always them), and though Felicity usually returned from working on the Victorian fiction there in a dusty state and foul mood, he had found its store of old newspapers and periodicals invaluable in the past. He rang them and asked the woman at the desk if there was such a thing as a history of Leeds General Infirmary.

  “Not as such, no,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There is a manuscript, several chapters long, written by one of the surgeons there which we can sometimes get permission for one of our readers to consult.”

  “You don’t have a copy yourselves?”

  “No, they’re very cagey. Or the author is. We asked if we could take a photocopy several years ago, but he said he wanted to keep control of who had access to the manuscript.”

  “Does he keep it himself?”

  “Oh, no. It’s in the infirmary’s own library. A very flimsy typescript, and they’ve had to photocopy it themselves to make sure it doesn’t decay beyond retrieval. We’d like them to have taken a copy for us, but”—she sounded as if she was shrugging—“no permission from Dr. Winstanley.”

  “Dr. Winstanley. Surely that’s not the one who worked there during the war and after?”

  “No. It’s his grandson. With one or two sections written by the grandson’s father. There has been a real family tree of Winstanleys working there over the years.”

  “I see. So I could try the library there?”

  “You could try. They’re not wildly helpful, bu
t, to be fair, there are special medical reasons—for example the right to confidentiality—which make difficulties for them.”

  Charlie put the phone down and pondered. He could not decide on the best approach to take. What was the reason for the fence around the history of an old, respectable institution such as the LGI? In the end he got on to the librarian at the hospital, explained that he was in charge of the investigation into the remains found in Haroldswater, and said he wanted to trace various connections with the Quarles family at Walbrook Manor. He was not interested in old scandals and would certainly not want to propagate them any further. She rang him back half an hour later. Mr. Winstanley had had a cancellation and a death before projected treatment and could see Charlie the same day from 2:00 till 2:45. Charlie thanked her gratefully—and noted what he had to do and where he had to go to see the Great Man—the present representative of the Winstanley family.

  Mr. Colin of that name was sitting in his office with his feet up, speedily eating from one or other of three plastic-packed sandwich packets. He was a boyish fifty-odd, welcoming, well-spoken, and Charlie thought if he did ever contract cancer, he would choose to be treated by this man, or somebody like him.

  “Sit you down,” he said, waving. “Operating is a very hungry occupation, and starving yourself can lead to ghastly errors. That’s what I find, anyway. You’re investigating that Haroldswater skeleton, eh? Any news on the car?” When Charlie visibly hesitated, Winstanley put his big, capable hand up. “Don’t tell me anything you shouldn’t. I won’t, so you shouldn’t. I’d better tell you I promised when I started writing, just out of medical school and between jobs, that I’d say as little as possible about my grandfather, how he came to be chucked out—in the nicest possible way—and his various amorous entanglements. I’ve held to that ever since, and I’ll try to today. But most inquirers are social historians, medical historians, and so on. Police investigating a possible murder are another matter entirely. Now—tell me about that car.”