A Charitable Body

by Robert Barnard

  “You said winter of ’48,” said Charlie. “Does that mean the winter that started in late ’47?”

  “Yes, it does. If you want to pinpoint the date the manor was handed over, I’d say sometime in November or early December of 1947. Dad always talked about how the snow came to bring another misery to the third austerity Christmas of the postwar era.”

  “You say it with relish,” said Charlie. “Like a politician welcoming bad news.”

  “Not welcoming at all. All the earliest Christmases I have memories of were ghastly. It was only when I started getting my own friends, if you take my meaning, that I began to see the point of it.”

  “So if anyone came to the manor at that time, it was probably to see Montague Fiennes, or conceivably the last of the inmates, though I believe most had left already, or, still more likely, to retrieve something left there in 1939.”

  “Spot-on, I’d say—not having your training of course.”

  “Any ideas what they might have been after?”

  Pink Trousers thought. “There are one or two of the pictures worth a tidy sum now. What they’d have been worth in 1947 I’ve no idea, but I’d guess not very much. The old landed gentry couldn’t have been more out of fashion, according to my dad, and they only started making a comeback later, in the fifties—the Macmillan era.”

  Charlie rang off, then sat pondering. Then he rang one of his favorite places, and half an hour later he was seated in a secluded niche in the privately owned Leeds Library, poring over fragile copies of the Daily Telegram for the second half of 1947.

  He found what he wanted pretty soon—a tribute to the union man’s guesswork. Each issue of the daily was thin, now brown in color, but it did cover a remarkable amount of politics, sport, regional news, international developments, and sex. The last was inserted under all sorts of headings, and it found a place in the humorous column “Funny Old World.” There, Charlie came upon a photograph of a woman he felt resembled someone he had recently seen. The face was all that was shown, but it seemed to be cut from a large group, because either side of her, there were traces of curled hair, perhaps of female children, their heads reaching her shoulders. One resemblance that Charlie saw in a few seconds was to the lady he thought of as the queen mother—then the queen of the wartime king, George VI. He quickly decided the resemblance was mostly a matter of hairstyle, makeup, little hat to the front of her forehead: a fashionable look, he decided, in 1947.

  The image the lady presented was of a fashionable, wealthy, and distinctly hard personality. If children had been in the original of the same photograph, they must surely have been there to soften the image. The paragraph under the picture said that “social life” was picking up after the trauma and disorder of war, and salons were starting to form themselves not around the current Labour government, of course—they would scorn the institution—but around the old aristocracy and gentry, flexing their elegant muscles and hoping for a new general election. The so-called Lady Crécy was one of the foremost of these pioneers. That was all. But already Charlie felt he smelled a rat. If the children had been there as a softening feature, why had the Telegram cut them out?

  The story was almost immediately revealed as a negative one. Three days later, a headline read “Woman of Mystery” and the article pointed out that Lady Crécy was not an English title, that titles in France had no legal existence, and the French aristocracy were notably snooty and almost invariably married one of their own.

  Two days later the headline read “Ho-Ho Who’s Your Lady Friend?” The quote was from a music-hall ditty, hinted at sexual impropriety, and could as easily have come from the Daily Mirror as from one of the broadsheets. In the shady part of a picture of a door the shape of a man was huddled—with just part of his face lit up by an outside light. Charlie did not find the man recognizable, but his looks and his clothes did seem to proclaim the description of gentleman. Who was it? he wondered. A Tory MP? A Labour cabinet minister? Or it could be a well-known surgeon? Whoever it was, it was clear that the Telegram was playing games with him. And with her of course—the madam of the surely high-class brothel.

  The next reference that Charlie found proclaimed “The Wicked Lady”—the title of a scandalous Margaret Lockwood film. The same picture was used as in the first reference to her, though one could see more of the child on the lady’s left, who was revealed as about nine or ten years old, pretty in an upper-class sort of way, and pensive—almost, it seemed, melancholic. What was a child of that age, Charlie wondered, doing in a brothel, or at least in the company of a brothel’s madam? And why did the story come to an end in the last week of November 1947? For the last reference to the lady and her career choice was the bewildered: “Where Is the Wicked Lady?” The newsprint read, “What has happened to the so-called Lady Crécy? She has disappeared from her place of work, her ‘staff’ seem to have no knowledge of where she is. Where is she, and what sort of business did she run? We will report to you anything we hear about her, and the glittering circle of politicians and others who cluster around her.” But as far as Charlie could tell, they never did.

  As he walked back to Police Headquarters at Millgarth, Charlie thought over his conduct of the case, with some dissatisfaction. He remembered advice he had given Felicity as gradually she became involved in the affairs of Walbrook Manor, and he thought that he had not followed his own rules. He had assumed that Sir Stafford was an amiable old buffer whose innocence of real crime having to do with the bones in the car or anything else could be assumed. The same mutatis mutandis (he rolled the delectable phrase around on his tongue) had been applied to Lady Quarles. He had been influenced, of course, by the fact that, even as the wreckage of the car and the stock of bones accumulated, there was no “case,” and that they were only at the stage of deciding whether one could be put together. Charlie decided it was well past the time when he should have talked to Sir Stafford.

  When he had snatched a brief and horrible lunch in the police canteen, Charlie got in his car and drove out to Walbrook Manor. He had no advance knowledge of Sir Stafford’s whereabouts, but he was delighted to be told he was in his flat and meekly accepted directions there, which he did not need. When he knocked on the door, the welcome in Sir Stafford’s tone was distinctly underwhelming.

  “Ah, Mr., er . . . Inspector Peace. What can I do for you?”

  Not very much it seemed from the stance that he took up in the opening between the door and the wall. Sir Stafford could not himself be physically impressive, but he had had a lot of experience in putting people in their places, and it showed.

  “I wonder if I could come in and have a brief c—”

  “I am extremely busy.” End of conversation he apparently hoped.

  “And so, Sir Stafford, am I. I feel I should have talked to you before now. Let’s go inside and get it over with as quickly as possible. This is not the sort of interview I’d want to get a warrant for, but if—”

  “Oh, come in. Come in. Sit down. I’m sorry to be short with you, but I really do have immense amounts of work, of all imaginable kinds. But still, let’s get down to it.”

  Charlie sat down. He had had time by then to look around the flat and note that it did not justify Lady Quarles’s claim to poor housekeeping. With the exception of the occasional file on the table in front of Sir Stafford’s armchair, which was littered with reference and art books, the room was conspicuously neat, and with no attempt at grandeur. Contrary to some earlier suggestions, the couple apparently did not wish to assume the pretense of the lord and lady of the manor. Administrator of the most usual kind, the room seemed to announce.

  “Where exactly did you live, Sir Stafford, when you stayed here with your father and mother in 1939?” Charlie began.

  “The Dower House.” Still snappily.

  “And you were about three and stayed here some while?”

  “About four months I’ve been told.”

  “So it could be said Mr. Timothy Quarles was very good to y
ou.”

  “It could indeed,” said Sir Stafford, thawing just a little. “And I think I can say we were grateful. I know my father always spoke well of Timothy Quarles, who was a distant cousin and thought his kindness eased the business of my mother’s illness.”

  “I’ve never heard what she was suffering from.”

  “It was cancer. There were a lot of other words for it then, but that’s what it was, and the words didn’t hide it at all.”

  “It’s been represented to me that we should be concentrating our attention on two dates in the history of the house.”

  “The house? If you are investigating the car accident at Haroldswater, then I don’t see what the house has to do with it.”

  “Bear with me. The two dates are September 1939—”

  “The change of ownership,” said Stafford, ignoring the little matter of the war.

  “And the autumn—I think early November—in 1947.”

  “I don’t know any significance to the house of that date.”

  “The time when it was handed back to the family after being used as an asylum during the war.”

  “Oh, yes. It’s difficult to forgive the appalling Montague Fiennes for that act of vulgarity. Quite unnecessary.”

  “I think many much grander stately homes were commandeered by the politicians for use during the war.”

  “Commandeered. Not handed to them on a plate. But you must think me very petty. It comes from my love of the houses, and of the people in them.”

  “When did your mother die, Sir Stafford?”

  “When? Oh, I was very young then. I can’t put a date to it, but it must have been early in the war. It left me and my brother more or less alone with my father, who was not the best companion for a young child. He half realized this and sent my sister away to grow up in Canada, with relatives.”

  “Sister? Tell me about your sister.”

  “A year older than me. We’ve never got in touch. I have no memory of her, nor she of me, probably. There seemed no point in making contact.”

  This from a man who proclaimed his love of the houses and the inhabitants of gentrified England.

  “Sir Stafford, you say your mother died of her cancer early on in the war.”

  “That’s right. I remember my father calling me into his study and telling me. I remembered so little about her by then that I hardly shed a tear.”

  “You feel differently now? That it was a great loss?”

  “Of course. Surely everyone who loses their mother in early childhood must feel loss. Sending me and my brother away to boarding schools made things worse, not better.”

  Charlie shifted in his chair. He found he could not avoid clumsiness.

  “Would it surprise you, Sir Stafford, to hear that people who have told me about your mother have assured me that she was still alive after the war—at least until 1947?”

  Sir Stafford’s face assumed the fishlike look faces do assume when their surprise is genuine.

  “Alive? After the war? Of course that’s nonsense. I was told by my father. He couldn’t have been mistaken. Would never have told me a lie.”

  “Perhaps he felt that the lie was the kinder thing.”

  “The kinder thing? But how could that be? I don’t know . . . I don’t understand. . . . What could be worse than dying of cancer? You seem to . . . Are you implying—?”

  “I must be blunt. What my informant was implying—stating directly, in fact—was that your mother left the family circle about the time you and your father went home from Walbrook. I imagine the word was put out that the cancer was inoperable. In fact she had left her husband, left you, your brother, and your sister, for another man—perhaps more than one man. It was wartime—a time when normal sexual behavior is forgotten and the main object for many people is having a good time.”

  Charlie had been looking away from the pathetic figure in the chair opposite him. Now he looked back and was horrified to see the old man struggling to rise, and reaching shakily for a stick that apparently he kept beside his chair to be used at need. Sir Stafford seemed to think that need had come. His breath was noisy with outrage, and his glance was fiery and unforgiving.

  “You are trying to tell me that all I’ve ever been told about my mother was untrue. It is outrageous. You seem to be telling me that my mother did not merely have an affair, but that she was a woman of easy virtue.” Only with difficulty did Charlie repress a smile at the wonderfully dated phrase. Sir Stafford took a step forward to try to seize the stick. “How dare you, sir? How dare you?”

  With relief, Charlie heard a key in the door of the flat. Sir Stafford looked in that direction, and the relief that Charlie felt was mirrored in Sir Stafford’s face at the sight of his wife.

  “Whatever is happening? Inspector Peace, what do you think you’re at? My husband is an old man—how can you think of upsetting a man of his age and distinction. There, Stafford, there. Come and lie down.”

  The two figures, brave yet pathetic, disappeared through a door into a bedroom. Charlie sat down again. He felt he had not distinguished himself. Only the fact that he was dealing with a possible crime, perhaps murder, could excuse the brutality of his approach. Or had he just been fooled? Had Sir Stafford known about his mother all along, or perhaps from his adolescent years or early manhood?

  If so, he had put up a good semblance of shock. The door to the bedroom opened. Lady Quarles sailed majestically in, her face expressing, or feigning, outrage at seeing Charlie still there, invading their domestic territory.

  “I think you should go, Inspector. I think you should already have gone.”

  “I understand your feeling. I couldn’t quite believe that your husband could live a long life without somebody enlightening him about the nature of his mother’s reputation. You are aware of it, I assume?”

  “I’m aware of many things that are better not discussed, Inspector. Stafford’s mother was a marginal figure on the fringes of the country gentry. For a few years after she left the family home, she lived in London—a rackety life that anyone, not just family, would rather forget about. The family said she was dead, and people shrugged and forgot about her.”

  “But I am investigating a death, perhaps a murder. I can’t just accept convenient lies.”

  “Do you have to be so cruel, Inspector?”

  “I’m afraid I do. I’d guess that when you married Sir Stafford, you were still in the accepting-convenient-lies stage.”

  “I was. I’d only known him two or three months. As I got to know him better—and love him too—it became clear that his loss of his mother was part of a treasured memory, with Walbrook Manor at the center. His time here as a little boy, combined with glimpses of the house later in childhood and adolescence, was the great experience of his life, the ruling passion. That’s when I say again, you are cruel, quite unnecessarily cruel.”

  “How could I possibly put in the witness-box someone who thought his mother died of cancer in 1939 when in fact she lived on in London under a false name, or several, ran an upper-class brothel, and may well have died in a car accident some years after leaving home—an event that could well be something more than an accident.”

  “Do you really think your investigation is going to lead to a criminal case? After all these years?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Perhaps not, but I have to act as if it will. Sir Stafford’s father must have connived at the deception about his wife’s disappearance, so he was certainly involved in a way your husband is not. You have not told me how you came to see through all your husband’s talk about his mother.”

  “I haven’t told you, and I don’t intend to tell you. It would be a gross piece of treachery to do so. It involved the grandson of the man—a fine surgeon—who was let’s say associated with her. I intend to let my husband cling to his illusions, if that is what they are, and I shall proceed as normal in the hope that nothing comes of the car in Haroldswater. I would say I was pretty safe that nothing ever will.” />
  Charlie turned and looked at the determined old face, strong, good-looking. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Something other than your desire to preserve your husband’s illusions.”

  “Nothing that I’m sure you haven’t guessed. My husband grew up clinging to the illusions about Walbrook, and they were illusions in which he played a part. He was second cousin once removed of Tim Quarles. He formulated a fantasy which he soon came to regard as a fact that he was the rightful heir to Walbrook. He clung to this even though solicitors and legal men of all shapes and sizes tried to convince him there was nothing in it. It wasn’t like a monarchy, with ‘next in line to the throne.’ So when he accepted the job as chairman of the Trust, he insisted the flat—this flat—be carved out for us, a perfectly sensible suggestion, but it would have been even more sense for it to be the home for the director. Since we moved in, Stafford has identified himself more and more as the representative of the old family rather than as the museums expert with a long line of prestigious appointments to his name. I aim to continue to support him in this, Inspector Peace.”

  “That is what I would have expected, Lady Quarles.”

  “And you and your grubby little investigation can go hang. That is all the help from me you will get.”

  “I’m very grateful for it. You know, I think you should try to remember that if my investigation is grubby, the grubbiness springs not from the police, going about our normal business, but from members of your husband’s family. And of course, of yours, Lady Quarles.”

  She looked daggers at him for a moment, then pretended to have heard a noise from the bedroom. At the door she turned and looked significantly at the exit door. Then she went to her husband and Charlie had nothing to do but leave.

  On his way down to the stables car park Charlie began thinking. First he wondered what place Lady Quarles actually had in the checkerboard of the Quarles and Fiennes family. Sixtieth cousin forty times removed? Still, it did seem fitting that Sir Stafford should choose to take to wife (first wife? he wondered) one of his own family. To hell with inbreeding fears—like should cling to like.