The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

  The people who had been around the pair when Charlie came in had spirited themselves away to other parts of the public bar, probably not so much from tact or nervousness as seizing an opportunity.

  “So I’d like a talk with you both.”

  “Why don’t we grab a table, then?”

  “I need more privacy than that. Couldn’t we go back to your cottage and talk?”

  “Go back to the cottage? But I’m still on my second drink.” One look from Charlie made him crumble around the edges. “Oh, very well…. Fred, another double scotch please…. I’ll just have this, and then we’ll get back.”

  “Bacardi and Coke, Fred,” said the fragrant Lauren.

  “Look, there’s not much point in talking to Lauren,” said Rick. “She was onstage all evening in Loot, in Bradford.”

  “Onstage all evening doesn’t always mean what it seems to,” said Charlie. “Still, I did flick through a copy in Waterstone’s before I set out. Fay does seem to be on most of the time. If the lady wants to she can stay here, and we can talk alone.”

  He was fixed by hard, violet eyes.

  “No, I think I’ll come. It could be quite interesting.”

  Rick Radshaw too, now that he’d got used to the idea, seemed to quite fancy being interviewed. He had almost certainly entertained the idea that he might be, because he hadn’t asked in connection with what Charlie wanted to question him. He downed in his second gulp his third double whiskey, then pulled himself off the stool and up to his full height (about five foot ten, Charlie estimated).

  “Come on. I’m ready for the rack and the thumbscrews.”

  “You’ve done Yeomen once too often,” said Lauren dismissively.

  Charlie had the impression as they all three did the two minutes’ walk back to the cottage that the eyes of Abbotsdale were on them from behind closed windows. Clearly, if so, there must be something about him that marked him off as “copper.” What a humiliating thing to realize about himself! Rick and Lauren seemed impervious to the attention, either because they didn’t notice it, or because they accepted it as their due, they being Thespians. Rick threw open the cottage door, and they were greeted by an agreeable centrally heated fug. Rick went straight to the drinks cabinet, took out an opened bottle of red wine, and sloshed two glasses full.

  “I’m on duty,” said Charlie, knowing that neither glass was for him. Rick looked at him as if wondering at this conversational irrelevance.

  “Fire away,” he said at last, holding out a glass to Lauren, who was standing against the kitchen doorpost in a pose familiar in theater productions.

  “Obvious question first,” said Charlie. “What were you doing on Saturday evening?”

  Rick had sat down, and now began his spiel with copious use of his hands, either a bad stage habit or the result of alcohol.

  “Round about six, maybe a bit before, we left to take sweetie here to the theater in Bradford. Dropped her off about half past six, then drove on to Leeds. Parked the car near the Merrion Centre, then went down to the Grand. In the run-up to the start of the thing—Forza del Destino, I mean—I saw the dead man and my ex-wife, Caroline Fawley, and we had a few perfectly amicable words. Then I took my seat, which was on row S, several rows behind Caroline because I’m only the bloody father, aren’t I? And there I was for the rest of the evening until curtain fall—hooked! She was fabulous. I’ve got a very nice voice, but somehow I’ve managed to pass on one that’s not just that, but something miraculous. It makes me very humble, I can tell you, and—”

  “You yourself sing in musical comedies and operettas, I believe?” Charlie slipped in.

  “That’s right. I could have done opera, the voice is large enough, but I had this fabulous success early on with Freddy in My Fair Lady, and after that the offers kept rolling in, and they were all in the same line. I’ve done plenty of Gilbert and Sullivan, but I suppose the closest I’ve come to legit opera is Offenbach. Paris in La Belle Hélène, and Orpheus. That was a fabulous production, but a bit too risqué for some English critics. The producer made Eurydice into—”

  “You left your first wife not long after Olivia was born, didn’t you?”

  “Only wife. And she left me. Faults on both sides, I suppose. Don’t be taken in by Caroline’s romantic heroine airs. She can sleep around with the best of them.”

  “High-class whore, if you want my opinion,” said Lauren from the door.

  “And how much contact did you have with your daughter after that?”

  Rick Radshaw spread out his hands.

  “Oh, you know how it is: a visit to the zoo, then months later it’s Madame Tussaud’s…. Well, not that much, actually. Of course I loved her—loved her to bits. Still do, actually. But somehow things get in the way, don’t they? Caroline’s in something at Bexhill-on-Sea and I’m in something in Harrogate. The logistics are almost unworkable. It seemed sensible to scale things down.”

  From what? Charlie asked himself. He thought of his daughter, Carola, now determinedly crawling and tottering to her feet. He decided in a flash that he was never going to get a divorce. He also put this particular rotten father on his blacklist.

  “So if Ms. Spender hadn’t been acting in this area, you probably wouldn’t have been at your daughter’s first night at all?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. No—I think that, granted I wasn’t in anything myself, I’d have been there. And particularly as word gets around about anything special, and that’s what I was hearing. From my agent, for a start, from all sorts of people in the musical theater, as you might call it. Oh, I think I’d have come up. Olivia is heading for something big, and I’d have wanted to get a sl—” He pulled himself up. “I’d have wanted to be there for the beginning of it all.”

  Charlie could have sworn he was going to say “a slice of the action.” He surely had had an idea that there might be something in it for him in his daughter’s approaching fame. Drink was leading him into a revelatory mood, though caution was still reining him in. He was glad when Radshaw got up and splashed more red wine into his glass.

  “Opera singers earn fantastic sums these days,” Charlie commented.

  “Absolutely bloody fantastic! Pop star earnings.”

  “That’s right at the very top, of course.”

  “That’s right. And that’s where she’s going to be. All the people at the very top at the moment are men. There’s plenty of space for a woman up there.”

  “Let’s hope she makes it…. You said you were in the theater for the rest of the performance, but you didn’t tell me about the interval,” said Charlie, looking at him closely.

  “Interval? Ah yes. Oh, I was in the bar, of course—accepting the congratulations of anyone who knew I was Olivia’s father. Caroline will tell you. She was nearby doing the same.”

  Charlie risked a lie.

  “She says you were close by for the first part of the interval.”

  “Oh well, I—er—” He ground to a halt.

  “Where did you go, sir? Was it backstage?”

  Collapse of lean party.

  “Well, of course I shouldn’t. But as you know Syd and I are good friends, so I tipped him a nod, and—”

  “And you went to your daughter’s dressing room, didn’t you, sir?”

  “Yes. Well, I knew the opera, and I knew it was a long time before she was on again.”

  “But you hadn’t heard that she likes to have sex at some point during the performance?”

  His eyes opened wide.

  “Does she, b’ God? Syd never told me that. Chip off the—Well, anyway, that does explain one or two things.”

  “Oh?”

  “The tenor was leaving as I came near the door. I recognized him by his costume—greatcoat over jeans, typical modern-production touch. He was looking put out—distressed, really. I suppose he’d been given the brush-off?”

  “Quite possibly. I have the impression that he’s used now and then, but only when something newer and more
exciting isn’t on offer.”

  “Well, probably it was. Because when I’d knocked and gone in, Olivia was in a long fur coat, and it was obvious she was on her way out. I started to make apologies, but she just said ‘I’ll talk to you at the party afterwards,’ and swept both of us out. I slipped back to the front of the house, and had a quick second drink.”

  Charlie pondered this.

  “When she said, ‘I’ll talk to you at the party afterwards,’ it sounds as if you had something definite to talk about—not just party talk.”

  Rick screwed up his face. The drink was removing the last of his inhibitions.

  “I did. I’d sent her a note a couple of days before, wishing her well, saying how proud I felt.”

  “And?”

  “And suggesting that what she needed was someone around her—like a combination of agent, protector, PR man, and general dogsbody, getting her to her hotel, to the airport, the opera house—that kind of thing.”

  “And the person you thought of for this role?”

  “Well, the voice isn’t going to last forever, though it’s still in pretty good nick, I can tell you. And you’d need someone absolutely devoted to your interests, and who would be more likely to be that than her father?”

  “And did you get to talk to her at the party?”

  “Yes…bitch!”

  His face was dark with remembered fury.

  “What she actually said to him,” said Lauren from the kitchen door, “was ‘Get lost, you creep. You’ve never given a fuck about me till now, and I’m not having you anywhere near me in the future.’”

  “I see.”

  “Charming, wasn’t it? Tells you something about the way that bitch Caroline Fawley brought her up.”

  Charlie’s reaction was that it was the only thing he’d heard said by Olivia Fawley that gave him the slightest respect for her. He got out of the cottage without even mentioning Rick’s interest in the Crescent Hotel. Why jeopardize the relationship of Rick and Lauren? It had the supreme virtue of preventing them from making anyone else unhappy.

  Chapter 17

  The Ones

  He Left Behind

  Oddie had rarely had professional reasons to go to Pontefract, and he had a good knowledge only of the center of the town. On the way there he pondered idly on the sort of suburb the Winterbottoms would have lived in, in Marius’s childhood as Bert. Back-to-backs or terraced, late-Victorian houses with their own backyard, he would have guessed.

  Where they lived now might be another matter. There had been no problem tracing them. The dead man’s sister had rung the Leeds police on Monday, saying she was getting pestered by the local press, and she thought she ought to talk to the police—if they had any reason to look at her brother’s background—before she gave way to the reporters’ thirst for details of the dead man’s early life. Oddie wished he could have made the journey earlier, but at least he had given the sister, Hester Brierley by name, notice of his visit the day before. She would take the day off work, she said. Her father was in a nursing home two streets away, and she would take the policeman to call on him, though if it was one of his bad days there wasn’t a lot of point, she added.

  When Oddie had been through the center and started out toward Cranbourne Road, it became clear that he was penetrating into one of the “nice” areas of the town. Good-quality semis and detached houses with well-kept gardens, paintwork and guttering all in good nick. Number twenty-six was like all the others, with plentiful lead lighting of floral and geometrical design in the windows and front door. As he was getting out of his car, the front door opened, and a woman came out.

  “I’ve been keeping a watch out for you,” she said, coming through the gate. “Shall we walk to the nursing home now? It’s no way, and they say it’s one of Dad’s fairly good days, so best to do it as soon as possible, because you never know if it’s going to last. I’m Hester Brierley, of course.”

  “And I’m Detective Superintendent Oddie, if you want the full mouthful,” said Mike. “It’s very good of you to take all this trouble. Does your father know his son is dead?”

  “He’s been told, but he hasn’t taken it in, and I don’t want to tell him again. I shouldn’t be trying to teach you your own business, but I think if you start talking to him about Bert he’ll just chat away and won’t ask you why you want to talk about him.”

  “That sounds like a good idea. Were your father and…Bert close?”

  “Yes. Maybe close in a superficial way—men’s things: cricket and football matches together. Pontefract Town were our team, of course, until Bert decided they were born losers, and he started to support Newcastle United. And they’d go to test matches in Leeds over the summer sometimes, and Dad took him to the Railwaymen’s Club for his first pint.”

  “So he was a father’s boy?”

  “Yes, but, like I say, in superficial ways mostly. It was Mum who was the mover in our household. She was the one with the ambition. Dad was pleased when I got into teachers’ college, but it was Mum who pushed me to make the effort, she who made it possible. It’s from her that Bert got his drive. And she could be ruthless too, but in a small way—in a domestic context, you might say.”

  “Are you a teacher still?”

  “Yes, I am. It’s been my life. And I’m still loving it, in spite of everything…. Here we are.”

  The street they were in had a suburban similarity to the one Hester lived in. They pushed open the gate of the Wayside Nursing Home, which was the largest house in it, with an annex visible to the rear, and the front door opened to admit them. They were expected, and were welcomed.

  “This is Mrs. Mackie, who runs the home,” said Hester, and he shook hands with a bright-as-a-pin Scottish lady who clearly regarded the home as the next thing to a stately one. “And this is Detective Superintendent Oddie, who’s in charge of the investigation. I expect he’s the one you’ve seen on television, isn’t he, Mary?”

  “He is that. I’m very pleased to see you. Will you come through to the annex? I’ll just show you into Mr. Winterbottom’s room, then I’ll leave the three of you together.”

  They walked through the communal area, past what seemed at first like a forest of dull eyes, registering and then instantly forgetting their presence. In the midst of them, though, Oddie noticed sharp, glinting eyes observing, knowing who he was, what errand he was on, and relishing such an unusual event, something that gave savor to their day. The little party entered the annex, better lit and painted a bright white, with pictures of seasides and mountains on the walls. Mrs. Mackie opened a door.

  “Hello, Mr. Winterbottom,” she said, in a voice without false brightness. “Here’s your daughter and the friend of hers I mentioned who’s come to talk to you.”

  “Oh yes…. Come to talk.”

  There was a sort of residual sparkle in his eye, perhaps a product of this “good day,” but it was fighting a losing battle with the prevailing dullness and life fatigue. Oddie sat down on a chair on one side of the bed, and Hester Brierley on the other.

  “That’s right, Mr. Winterbottom,” said Oddie, trying to keep the talking-to-children tone out of his voice as successfully as Mrs. Mackie managed to. “I’d like to have a good chat, if you feel well enough. About your son Bert.”

  “Oh yes. I think they told me that. About Bert…What was it you…”

  The voice faded.

  “There’s a lot of people interested in Bert, you know, Mr. Winterbottom. He’s a bit of a personality in the world.”

  That brightened him up.

  “He is that! People have stopped me in the street wanting to talk about him for years. I don’t know what I did, to have a son like that. Always going to do something, be something, was our Bert. And he did. Not many can say that. And a good son he’s been to me. Bought me this house.” He looked around and actually registered that something was not quite right. “My house,” he amended. “Where I’ll go home to, soon as they’ve found out what’s wrong w
i’ me. Oh yes, he’s a good son, is Bert.”

  “I hear that you and he were keen on sport, back when he was a youngster.”

  “We were that. Went to all the home games, and a lot of the away ones too. Didn’t cost the earth like it does now, so they tell me, and they were real footballers on the pitch then, not bloody stars. Bert knew them all, read the sports pages soon as he’d got through the business ones…. Oh, he were a champion lad.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  “I’d’ve been proud of him if he’d gone to university, but I was even prouder when he decided not to, and went into business. His mam was a bit disappointed, but I weren’t. He had his head screwed on right. Business is where the money is, not in teaching and all that…for all that teachers are necessary,” he added, directing his words to his daughter. “But you makes your pile in business—and people are always going to need food, aren’t they?—and when you’ve made it, you can do whatever the fancy tells you to do. He could buy that house for me without blinking, could Bert. He could have lived like a Lord, bought football teams, had a string of racehorses—just whatever he pleased! Eh, it makes me proud! I blink my eyes just to think of it!”

  “I heard that he’s thinking of expanding his business into the North,” said Oddie.

  “He is! Told me so hisself! He comes back often, you know, back to his home. Came to see me the other day. Stood there in the doorway and said, ‘By ’eck, you’ve got a few more years left in you yet, Dad. You look as fresh as a daisy!’ It did me good to see him, and his good-humored face. And he said to me, he said: ‘I’m thinking of opening stores up north, Dad.’ He were sitting there where you are now when he said it. ‘I’ve held off long enough, not wanting to compete with Morrisons’s, where I trained. But they’re strong enough to stand a bit o’ competition. I’ll start wi’ a big one in the center o’ Leeds, then I’ll have one in Middlesborough, then one in Newcastle.’ Oh, he’s going to be big up here! Getting back to his roots, is our Bert….” His eyelids began to blink, and he looked around him uncertainly. “Hester, love?”