The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

  Meanwhile there was the postponed interview with Olivia Fawley to be got through. When Oddie rang the people at Opera North they said they’d see what her plans were for the day, then rang back ten minutes later to say that she was coming into town anyway, and would talk with him in her dressing room. So at eleven o’clock she received him there—rather as a queen might receive someone she was about to award something rather special to, though in Olivia’s case it was nothing more than her time.

  “It’s the matter of your mother’s friend, Marius Fleetwood,” Oddie began.

  “Of course it is. Let’s say ‘lover,’ shall we?”

  “Her lover. As you know, I suppose, he came to the theater on Saturday but left after the first scene, about seven-forty.”

  “Marius never pretended to be musical,” said Olivia.

  “But you got on well with him?”

  “Perfectly well. Much better than with someone who did pretend to be musical. He ranked high on my mother’s list of husbands and lovers.”

  “Is it a long list?”

  “Is that relevant? Oh, well, I suppose it could be. It’s a quite moderate list for someone who is on the stage. But she’s not, as a rule, a good picker, as she would be the first to admit. Marius was generous, considerate, tolerant—all the things she’d never had, certainly not from my father, nor from her second husband.”

  “Your father was this Rick Radshaw, was he?”

  “That’s right. He was here on Saturday, probably to claim any credit for my success, and his current joined him for the party afterwards.”

  “So when Mr. Fleetwood met his death—let’s say the earliest would have been a bit before eight—what were you doing?”

  “Oh, second scene. Scene at the inn. In view of the baritone, mezzo, and the whole of the chorus, not to mention the audience.”

  “Yes—actually I know. I was there part of the time last night. Wonderful.”

  “Thank you,” she said, all queenly again after a sharpish spell.

  “But the latest time he could have been killed—say nine, half past. What would you be doing then?”

  “Well, if I wasn’t onstage I would be in my dressing room.”

  Oddie’s voice gained an access of silkiness.

  “But there’s no question of ‘if,’ is there, Miss Fawley? The soprano has no part in the second half of the opera until the last ten or fifteen minutes. You weren’t onstage from the moment the curtain came down for the interval until the very last, quite short scene.”

  Olivia looked daggers at him.

  “That’s right. She becomes a hermit and not part of the action. You will know this if you were there. So at that time I must have been here in the dressing room.”

  “For the whole—what? Hour and a half, is it, until you’re on again?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at what now seemed a hard, obstinate face. A fool, he thought. A talented, lovely-voiced fool. With a libido of stratospheric proportions.

  “Miss Fawley, do you own a fur coat?”

  She looked as if she was about to lie, but pulled herself back. Too many people at the theater had seen her in it.

  “Yes. I get a lot of flack about that, but I don’t give a fuck about that kind of thing. They should mind their own businesses. Anyway, it’s just the jealousy of the little people.”

  “It’s a long coat, isn’t it, down nearly to your ankles?”

  “Yes.”

  “That would nearly cover the hermit robe you wear in the last scene before the interval—make people think you had an evening dress on under it.”

  Olivia shrugged.

  “So?”

  “So I think you should tell me why you went to the Crescent Hotel in North Street at around eight forty-five on Saturday night, and stayed there until nearly ten.”

  “The Crescent Hotel? I’ve never heard of it. Why would I go to a dump like that?”

  “You know it’s a dump, then?”

  “If it’s not one of the well-known ones it must be a dump.”

  “And you are going to continue to deny that you went there on Saturday?”

  “Certainly I am. Will you go now, please? I’ve got to practice, and shopping to do after that, and all kinds of people to meet. Leave me alone.”

  “Certainly. But I shall be back. And you would be very unwise to refuse to see me, because you might find yourself under arrest. And arrest in connection with a high-profile murder would be no good at all for your burgeoning career, would it?”

  And Oddie went, rather eagerly, out of the presence.

  *

  The rector went on his own on Wednesday morning to visit Caroline Fawley, to administer what comfort his presence and his religion could afford her. His wife had declined to accompany him. Sir Jack had volunteered, but the rector had tactfully turned down his suggestion. Jack’s presence, he felt, would be inhibiting.

  Mr. Watters had a collection of phrases for the consolation of the bereaved—different phrases for each sort of loss: husband, mother, daughter, and so on. He also had a number of vague phrases for when the nature of the loss was less clearly defined. He found these particularly useful when talking to parishioners whom he knew had lost someone or other but couldn’t quite remember who. This happened more often than might have been expected, since his parish now comprised three villages. It was these phrases he used with Caroline because, after all, nothing could be vaguer than the nature of her loss. In fact, legally speaking, she had not suffered any loss at all. So he used the sort of phrase that could have been called forth for a dead friend, or even a dead dog.

  “I hesitate to say that time heals,” he said in a calm, gentle voice he had perfected for such visits, “but it really does dull the pain, it really does enable us to turn our thoughts to the future. We must remember, surely, that the deceased would not want us to stop living life fully and fruitfully.”

  Caroline let him go on. She, who had spent her life mouthing the words of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Coward, and Agatha Christie, could not object to people who worked to a prepared script. The truth was, Mr. Watters’s words seemed to have no relevance at all to her loss of Marius. The hard, searing pain that seemed to stab her every time her thoughts were brought back to him was a world away from his threadbare comforts. Fortunately he apparently expected no response, as if he thought he were talking to a statue. It was only when his words became a little more specific that Caroline thought she should intervene.

  “…and it will certainly be a great loss to Marsham if you decide you don’t want to continue living here, with all those memories around you.”

  “Oh, but I do, Mr. Watters,” said Caroline. “They are wonderful memories, beautiful ones. I certainly don’t intend to run away from them.”

  If Mr. Watters was disappointed he was too experienced to let it show.

  “That is excellent news. And it’s a tribute to Mr. Fleetwood that you cherish his memory so warmly.”

  “It is. I shall never feel any other way.”

  “And will you actually be able to stay on at Alderley?”

  “I feel sure I will, yes.”

  “That is very good news for us all in the village. And I’m sure it will be pleasing too for Mr. Beck.”

  “Mr. Beck? Who? Oh, the former owner. Alf Beck, isn’t it? I don’t get the impression that he cares much what happens to Alderley.”

  “Oh, but I don’t think that’s true,” said the rector. “Alf cares a lot about Alderley and the village. He’d lived here for more than forty years when he moved to Hornsea. He’s a dear friend to many of us here—I phoned him only yesterday. But what I meant was he’ll be pleased still to have the income from the house coming in.”

  Caroline was unable to suppress the impact his words had on her showing in her face. She did manage to stop herself from asking questions, from showing still more unmistakably that she did not know the house was rented. What aroused not just shame but anger was the feeling that Mr. Watters had plan
ned this conversation, had designed it to reveal this fact to her. And that he was pleased with her discomfiture.

  But even as her desire to get rid of the rector became overwhelming, her natural good manners and charm saved the situation. Smiling, she stood up.

  “I really must be getting on. There’s always so much to do after a death, isn’t there? Distressing things, but ones you want to get done. I hope I shall see you in church on Sunday.”

  After he had gone she sat down and wept with pure rage. It was brief, but somehow purifying. When it was over she sat and thought out what she should do. She had a shrewd suspicion that if she were to ring Jack Mortyn-Crosse he would be able to confirm authoritatively what the rector had just made her aware of. Suddenly many of Jack’s odd or funny remarks seemed to make proper sense. But somehow she didn’t want to ring him. It would be to lay bare her shock and revulsion at Marius’s behavior to an unendurably kind scrutiny. In the end she rang Directory Inquiries and got the number of Alf Beck in Hornsea. Soon she was speaking to a man with a gentle Yorkshire accent.

  “I was so sorry to read about it,” he said. “A real gentleman, Mr. Fleetwood, in all his dealings with me. I only met him the once, but I could tell he was a very pleasant man as well.”

  “Thank you so much,” said Caroline, uneasy that the sentiments coincided rather embarrassingly with her own until this day. “Of course, I’m having to think forward now. I was wondering how far ahead—”

  “—the rent is paid. Of course you were. It’s to the end of next month. But you’re not to worry, my dear. A week or two beyond then is neither here nor there, and I wouldn’t expect you to pay, not good tenants as you’ve been, and not after the awful shock you’ve had with this murder. I’ve been delighted to have you in the house, someone I almost feel I know from the television. And it’s been a relief knowing that the furniture has been in responsible hands.”

  Caroline said weakly that she was very grateful, and that everyone was being so kind she didn’t know what to say.

  Her voice belied her mood. When she had put the phone down she again felt a great rage swelling within her. But this was a rage such as she had not known since she had been married to Rick. Her second husband had been too much of a nonentity to merit it, and none of her occasional lovers had measured up to it. This, she registered in the back of her mind, was not a theatrical rage, half assumed for effect and for self-satisfaction: it was the real thing. She looked around her, at the sofa with its memories of lovemaking, at the dinner table with its memories of intimate meals, at the garden in which he had appeared to share her pride and joy.

  Sham! Everything that had happened between them was soiled. Suddenly, beautiful moments could only be seen as vile deceptions. She took up the decanter from which she had always poured him his favorite Amontillado and threw it against the wall. Frustratingly, the heavy glass failed to smash. A red rage possessed her, seemed to paint everything she could see with the color of blood. She ran into the kitchen and seized the sharpest carving knife. Upstairs she found that Marius’s wardrobe had been denuded of most of its contents by the police, but she took out a pair of casual trousers and slit down the legs, then cut crisscross patterns through all the area of the crotch. Then she found his favorite shirt, which had somehow got hung in her wardrobe. She seized it, and had just begun to slash it when, holding it as she was by the front, she realized that there was paper inside the pocket. Taking it out she found it was a letter.

  At the same time, nearing the end of his walk back to the rectory, the Reverend Vernon Watters prepared to tell his wife the details of his visit to Mrs. Fawley, aware of how eagerly she would be awaiting them, and conscious that he had achieved all he had set out to achieve. He was less conscious, perhaps, of the fact that this was the first of all his visits of condolence to the bereaved that had actually made a difference—had indeed changed a whole way of thinking and thus, potentially, a life.

  Chapter 13

  Sons and

  Daughters

  Guy Fleetwood was one worried boy. That was how Charlie thought of him, though he gathered he was twenty. His age manifested itself in swagger rather than maturity, and Charlie remembered that he had had the disadvantage of a successful and forceful father (something he, Charlie, had certainly not been encumbered with in his own distinctly more confident early twenties). And Fleetwood had been rich to boot. Perhaps that had been most inimical of all to a successful growing-up process for his son.

  But at least the self-made wealth of Marius Fleetwood had bought his son a good solicitor: Martin Adcock—the best money could hire in the Leeds area. And honest with it. Even humorous, though not with the usual lawyer’s humor.

  “Let’s start,” Charlie began when the interviewing formalities were entered on tape, “with the packet of heroin found in the garden shed at Alderley.”

  “Excuse me, Sergeant, but is there any reason to connect my client, a mere visitor to the house who only arrived the day before, with the package?”

  “I think the connection can be made immediately,” said Charlie. He turned to Guy. “You went to Leeds on Saturday night, and one of the pubs you went to was the Shorn Lamb. Is this true?”

  “I didn’t notice the names of the pubs I went to. Should I have?”

  “This one’s in a little snicket off Briggate.”

  “If I understand the word ‘snicket’ correctly, that description could apply to a lot of the pubs off Briggate.”

  “You’ve done your research, and in a remarkably short time. You did go to one such pub, then, in the part of Briggate between the Headrow and Boar Lane?”

  “Yes.” It came after a second’s silence.

  “We have in fact established that someone resembling you did, that you attached yourself to a group of students, and that finally you had a private conversation with a man—a man well known to us.”

  “The police know so many charming characters,” said Guy, his upper lip curling, though shakily. Charlie noticed a nudge of reproof from Martin Adcock.

  “We do—you’re quite right,” he said. “And it seems that you have been pretty keen to make their acquaintance too. We’ve also established that you approached this man after being advised he was a source of drugs.”

  “I would like a break in this questioning so that I can consult with my client,” said Adcock.

  “Willingly,” said Charlie, seeing a change of policy toward one of coming clean and pleading youth and a spotless record. Twenty minutes later he was reading the usual formula into the tape again.

  “My client would like to make a full statement about the events of Saturday night in the Shorn Lamb in Briggate,” said Martin Adcock.

  “Very well,” said Charlie. “Let’s start with his going in there.”

  Guy cleared his throat.

  “Well, I went in, and I got talking to this chap who was on his own, and I asked him about getting hold of drugs, and he told me to go over to a group near the window, and talk to a man with a scarlet shirt on. So that’s what I did. I muttered ‘Can we talk?’ and soon he separated off from the rest, and I went with him and we made a deal.”

  “This was a deal for a substantial amount of heroin, not a mere fix or two for personal use?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why were you suddenly setting yourself up as a dealer?” asked Charlie, who knew a greenhorn drug dealer when he saw one.

  “Sergeant, I think you’re jumping ahead—” Martin Adcock began.

  “Well, I was going to Scotland,” said Guy, some of his jauntiness returning. “St. Andrew’s—the sticks! I reckoned there was a wide-open market there, and I could muscle in and corner a good share of it.”

  His solicitor put his head in his hands.

  “I was going to say that you were jumping ahead of the evidence,” he muttered in Charlie’s direction.

  “If you think St. Andrew’s, which is fifty miles from Edinburgh, is going to know even less about drugs and the supply of them than
you seem to, you really should stick to your father’s retail trading,” said Charlie. “Edinburgh is a drugs capital, Glasgow is the same, and St. Andrew’s is close to both and draws its students from both. You were sold a packet of rubbish, and if you had tried to get rid of it you’d have been out of pocket, probably beaten up, and out on your ear from the university. You should be damned glad you’re going to be arrested. It will be safekeeping for you, and a lesson not to wade in way, way out of your depth.”

  Guy looked at him. By now the fires of swagger and aggression were all but burned out. It was time for him to put his head in his hands.

  “Thank God my father’s dead,” he said.

  There was only one supermarket in Armley that really deserved the title. When Charlie rang them on Wednesday afternoon to see if they employed a Mrs. or Miss Bagshaw they came up with the information straight away: yes, they did. She was a woman in her midforties, they told him. Her address they had to go to their computer for, but eventually they told him: 15 Diamond Street. She was on duty until three.

  Leeds Metropolitan University, Charlie suspected, might be rather more chary about giving out information, so he drove out there, flashed his credentials at someone really high up in Administration, enlarged on the progress of the Fleetwood murder inquiry, emphasized that what he was doing was merely eliminating suspects (which was what, following eminent example, he called being economical with the truth), and got from them Pete Bagshaw’s details: he was twenty-one, beginning his third year of studying computer science, having done well in his first two years in this and the related subjects of higher mathematics and information technology. He was not in one of the halls of residence, but lived at home. His address they gave him as 15 Diamond Street, Armley. Bingo!

  Charlie timed his visit for three-thirty, by which time Mrs. Bagshaw (if “Mrs.” was what she called herself now) should be home from work. Diamond Street turned out to be a road of small, four-roomed terrace houses, no doubt built in the year of the Diamond Jubilee. They were probably several times better built than most houses going up today, but they had a mean look, and were clearly not regarded as desirable. The front door of number fifteen was a modern import, with a bell beside it. When the door was opened Charlie was disappointed to see a young man. He’d wanted to save the son till he’d spoken to the mother. He’d intended to get the background clear in his mind first, then delve into the past.