The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

  So twenty minutes later they were seated with a bemused but distinctly flattered Rani, with a flask of coffee, some sandwiches, and a whole case to survey.

  “If we begin at the beginning,” said Oddie, “then it has to be with the dead man. There’s still a possibility of a random slaying, but we’ve uncovered enough dirt, enough possible motives, to let us put that on the back burner, at least for the moment. Who was Marius Fleetwood?”

  “Bert Winterbottom, for the first twenty-odd years of his life,” Charlie pointed out. “And by your account a good son in a solid, working-class family.”

  “But one with upwardly mobile impulses,” said Oddie. “Mostly but not entirely centered on the mother. Dad apparently never had much trouble mixing with any class of person. Was it the upward-mobility impulse that made Bert itch to get on? That does come over strongly from my talk with the sister.”

  “I know how he felt,” said Rani.

  “Do you?”

  “And how. Families are stronger in Asia, as are Asian families here. You really have to fight if you want to get away from the life they’ve earmarked for you.”

  “And you wanted to come into the police force,” said Oddie with gentle irony.

  “I wanted to do something different, and I didn’t want to spend three or four years in higher education. I made it—I’m not standing behind the counter of a you-name-it-we’ve-got-it shop—but it was a struggle.”

  “Interesting. But with Bert Winterbottom it was rather different: they were behind him all the way. I have the impression they recognized that the family had produced a boy who was definitely exceptional. They were proud as Punch that people who knew him realized he was, even at a young age, someone who was obviously going to make a splash.”

  “So when he kicked the ladder from under him, it was a piece of real ingratitude,” said Charlie.

  “Yes. OK, his father was pestering him a bit. He could have been dealt with firmly. Instead his sister is convinced that the pestering was used, brutally, as an excuse to cut the bonds entirely.”

  “Right,” said Charlie. “So now we have Bert Winterbottom metamorphosed into Marius Fleetwood, successful and respected businessman. And deservedly so, by all accounts.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Oddie. “Straight, responsible, responsive—founder of a chain that in quite a short time developed a bond of trust with its customers, as the old Marks and Spencer did, though it took them much longer to do it. Fleetwood’s supermarkets got themselves an instant reputation: they gave value, they told the truth, they were responsive to environmental and ethnic concerns, they were model employers.”

  “But in private he was a lying two-timer, is that right?” asked Rani.

  “That’s about it. Seems like he had to let off his immoral steam somewhere, and he did it in his private life. We’re not talking here just about him having a wife and a mistress. He seems to have slipped into the convenient lie like a duck into water. He tells his mistress his marriage is effectively over, and when his wife gets pregnant he tells her it’s by some younger lover. And when a young look-alike enters the stage who was born and grew up in Armley, he tells her he’s never lived in Leeds, but he had had a younger brother who did, a tearaway, and he’d slept around like there was no tomorrow—the said brother being a spur-of-the-moment invention. I could go on. The charming liar personified.”

  “With a basic contempt for the women he was charming and making fools of,” said Rani.

  “That could be a much longer list than we know about,” said Charlie. “And we know about his wife, his current mistress, and a long-ago lover in Armley. Add to them his own children, who did or could have had grievances against him—Guy and Helena, and even perhaps the Fawley children and certainly Peter Bagshaw. That’s a pretty good list to start with.”

  “And you can add to those his own family back in Pontefract,” said Oddie. “I agree with you it’s a formidable list, but I don’t think we should include Sheila Fleetwood among the women he fooled. Once, maybe, but not for years. They perfectly understood each other, apparently, and she stayed with him on his terms. Comparisons with Hillary Clinton and Mary Archer spring to mind. She knew, I imagine, about all his sexual liaisons. She may well have a motive, but it surely has to be something other than his womanizing—something we haven’t uncovered yet.”

  “And did she have an opportunity?” said Rani. “Living in London?”

  “She was at a board meeting of the Gordon Craig Theatre trustees in Stevenage until about five o’clock,” said Oddie. “But let’s stick with motive for the moment. We haven’t discussed yet his new situation, of starting up a liaison with the daughter of his mistress. That was an entirely new factor.”

  “If it wasn’t just a one-night stand,” said Rani.

  “There was the matter of the newly decorated fantasy room at the Crescent, which he was to have the use of for three weeks—which is about the length of the rest of the current opera season at the Grand.”

  “Walter Fairlie tells me he’d done one or two similar jobs—part of the process of wooing women who later became long-term mistresses. On the other hand, it could have been a one-night stand on Olivia Fawley’s part,” said Rani.

  “That’s quite true. And in that connection we have to remember that Olivia brings with her into this case a long list of lovers from her recent past and present.”

  “And also a father who was ambitious to cling to her skirt-tails if her career takes off as people expect,” said Charlie.

  “That’s right. A decidedly unsavory character, Rick Radshaw. We only have his word for it that she gave him the brush-off at the post-performance party. It could have been earlier.”

  “What about Caroline Fawley?” asked Rani. “She could have one of the best motives of all. She’s woken up to Marius now, she says, but can we be sure she didn’t suss him out much earlier?”

  Oddie and Charlie thought.

  “No, we can’t be sure,” said Charlie. “By all accounts they were pretty careless, Fleetwood and Olivia. There could have been mounting anger on Caroline’s part as she realized they were panting for each other, and that it was going to climax, in every sense of the word, on the first night of Forza.”

  “But then opportunity really does present a problem,” said Oddie. “But before we get on to opportunity, just one observation: as his sister said—and she’s one herself—he really went for strong, independent women. He deceived them, he played with them, he brought them down, and he wouldn’t have had half so much fun if they’d been gorgeous birdbrains. I’d say that applied to Caroline Fawley just as much as to the others—though we’ve thought all along that she was a bit of a fool to be taken in. So, at one time or another, had Sheila Fleetwood, Mrs. Bagshaw, and a whole lot more.”

  “Maybe the only one who wasn’t was Olivia Fawley,” said Charlie.

  “Fair point. But she wasn’t in the market for a long-term relationship. She’s only interested in ships that pass in the night. A totally different agenda. His agenda, apparently, was long term, hers short.”

  “Maybe that was the problem,” said Rani. “Maybe that was the undoing of him.”

  “No, no,” said Caroline into the phone. “I couldn’t think of dragging you out here. In any case it’s rather tricky to find. I’ll come to the theater. I very much want to see it again, and I haven’t been backstage at all…. Oh, I agree about the potential, provided we can find the sort of repertoire that suits the size of the theater and suits the patrons too. We’ll have to see what’s available from outside, as well as initiating productions ourselves, of course…. Yes, I’m glad Mrs. Fleetwood recommended me, and please: you don’t have to be embarrassed about it. We’re not embarrassed, why should you be? When shall we say, then?…No, Monday isn’t too early. Ten o’clock. That’s fine. Oh, and by the way, if you do find that I suit, and if we can come to an agreement, I shall need to find a house near Doncaster itself—something quite modest, because I shan’t have the
children with me that much longer. Do please keep your eyes open…. You are terribly kind!”

  She put the phone down, confident that they would find that she suited them. Philip Massery, the chairman of the trustees of the Little Theatre, had been trying to suppress his drools at the prospect all through the call. Caroline wished she could remember what it was that she and Marius had seen there. It had made little impression at the time. Luckily she kept a diary, and could well have noted the title of the play. If the performance was undistinguished, all the more chance for the new broom to improve things.

  She had not wanted Massery to come to Alderley. She was very conscious of the sort of spectacle she now made, posed against the backdrop of the house: the mistress, set up in a solid, impressive establishment, suddenly finding herself about to be turned out into the cold. It was not quite like the Lady of the Camellias coughing herself to death in a denuded apartment, but it was along the same lines. She had been deserted by Marius in his hour of death, just as any of her predecessors would have been if his death had coincided with their period of tenure as his accepted mistress. The special place she had imagined for herself in this line had been a figment of her own imagination. She would have hated it if Philip Massery had come to see her amid the ruins of her hopes and aspirations. He might have appointed her to lead the Little Theatre of Doncaster out of pity. She wanted to go there in hope, make the place the center of her life, and succeed there, both as actress and as administrator.

  The sound of an elderly motor car aroused her from her reverie. She knew it was Jack—his first visit since the murder, though they had talked more than once on the phone. As she opened the front door Alex came out of his little computer room and started up the stairs to the lavatory. Caroline had intended to kiss Jack, in thanks for his visit and his tender care of her while she was Marius’s mistress, but now she gave him no more than a formal peck, and still got suspicious looks from her son.

  “Jack, thank you so much for having come,” she said, drawing him into the kitchen. “You’ve been wonderful to me, and I’m so grateful. Tea or coffee? And what would you like with it? I’ve got chocolate cake, or some little biscuits I made for Marius last weekend which are still nice and crisp.”

  “Oh, tea. And the biscuits, if the memory is not too painful.”

  “Not painful at all.”

  “I usually avoid coming up at weekends,” said Jack, “but now—”

  “Now you’re doing me a service. Taking my mind off things. And by things I mean anger rather than grief.”

  She was aware, as she fetched the tin of biscuits and brewed the tea, of a suppressed excitement in Jack. She tried to dampen it down when they went into the sitting room and waited for the tea to brew.

  “I’ve just been talking to the chairman of the Little Theatre in Doncaster,” she said. “There’s a chance of a job there, as big panjandrum—a sort of actor-manager.”

  “Oh Caroline, I am pleased! You know I always—”

  “Yes, Jack, I know—now. And now I know why. You were trying to warn me about Marius, not trying to preserve my dramatic gifts for the English stage.”

  “Both, my dear—both.”

  “At least you didn’t know about him and Olivia. I suppose you’ve heard by now?”

  “Rumors, my dear. Mrs. Naylor’s son is very in with Opera North.”

  “People love that kind of thing. It makes me feel dirty. It’s a terrible thing when your own daughter disgusts you. I never want to see Olivia again.”

  “Don’t say that. Some day she may have need of you.”

  “I certainly hope she does!” said Caroline grimly.

  “Anyway,” said Jack, trying to turn the conversation, “it will be wonderful to see you onstage.”

  “Oh, I’ll only do old-woman parts, and there aren’t enough of those to go round.”

  “If you only give yourself old-woman parts I shall write letters of protest to the Doncaster Evening News.”

  “You’re so sweet, Jack. I’m afraid I shall have to move to a smaller house, and one closer to Doncaster. I’m really sorry about playing host to the fete, but it looks as though you and Meta will have to shoulder it again.”

  Jack bounced up and down in his chair and sprayed biscuit crumbs all over his ancient suit.

  “You haven’t heard, then?”

  “Heard, Jack?”

  “It’s all round the village, but probably no one has told you because you’re more or less in mourning.”

  “Mrs. Hogbin is the only one who brings me village gossip, and her day is Tuesday. Tell me, Jack: I’m on tenterhooks.”

  “I’ve turned Meta out of the house!”

  Caroline’s jaw fell open.

  “Jack! You haven’t!…What do you mean, ‘turned out.’?”

  “I mean I packed her bags, put them outside the front door, and locked her out.”

  “But why? You’ve lived together so long—all your lives, in fact. What had she done?”

  Jack looked down and became cagey.

  “Oh, it had been building up for a long time.”

  She’d been sounding off about me, thought Caroline.

  “But where will she go? She’s got no money, or so she always says.”

  “She’s gone to Aunt Sarah in Northampton. I had a bitter phone call of complaint from Auntie yesterday evening. But she’s eighty-seven, and needs someone there. They’ll shake down.”

  “But what if she’s turned out again?”

  “She can’t be. Sarah hasn’t got the strength.”

  An awful conviction came over Caroline: Meta had been turned out to make room in the Dower House for herself and the children. She’d realized he was besotted, but she shuddered at such cruel consequences of something that was an illusion, a chimera, something that absolutely never could be. It had to be nipped in the bud.

  “Jack, I can see how excited and pleased you are about this—”

  “I am!” he said, his mouth stretched in a broad, triumphant grin. “It’s like a liberation, Caroline. I haven’t been so excited since VE Day!”

  Caroline’s face assumed an expression of warm but sad sympathy.

  “But you do realize, don’t you, that though I’m enormously fond of you as a friend, it never can be more than that. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that Marius was absolutely the last man in my life, and—”

  “Caroline!” He almost shouted. She raised her head and looked at him, and saw that his face was red with a sort of horror. “You misunderstand. I’ve never for a moment imagined—I’ve worshiped you, but absolutely not in that way. I wouldn’t have dared! And you know, since Lydia died, and the little baby, there’s never been any question, not the slightest in the world, of—”

  Caroline had to dash in to retrieve the situation.

  “Oh Jack—I am so sorry. You must think me an awful fool. Please put it down to all the traumas and horrors of the last few days. I just thought your turning out Meta, after all these years, and your always having been so good and considerate to me—”

  “Enough said! Dear Caroline, enough said! I turned out Meta because I’ve been wanting to for years without really realizing it, and I finally plucked up courage to do it. Already I feel as if my life has been transformed. I can spend my last years alone and in peace. You can’t think how happy that makes me.”

  Probably Aunt Sarah would have liked to do the same, Caroline thought. Then she felt she was being mean.

  Rather sooner than he might otherwise have done, Jack decided that he had better be off. Ushering him through the hall and out into the September sunshine, Caroline was conscious of the eyes of Alex and Stella on them from the stairs. She suddenly had a thought that almost made her laugh: Jack had gone through the whole visit without farts or tummy rumbles. His distaste for his awful sister must have been the thing that upset his stomach, and he had effected his own cure for it. How odd! To cover her amusement she said, “Jack, I do hope you can forget my stupid, stupid mistake,
and we can go back to being as we were.”

  “Of course, Caroline, my dear.” He paused, then looked at her with a twinkling eye. “And, you know, thinking it over, it’s really rather flattering. In fact, truth to tell, I’m chuffed to bits that you could even think of it!”

  And, looking at him, Caroline could believe it.

  She waved him good-bye, and went back into the house, which suddenly seemed overlarge, undistinguished in its architecture and furnishings, and even slightly ridiculous as a home for herself and two children. The two children were still standing on the stairs, looking at her in that adolescent weighing-up, judgmental way.

  “You don’t have to worry,” she called up. “I haven’t made a fool of myself.”

  But that, she thought, was exactly what she had done.

  “So what say we go on to opportunity?” asked Oddie. “Can we rule out his two current women on those grounds alone?”

  “I’d have thought we had to rule out Caroline Fawley, at least as doing it herself,” said Charlie. “There’s no doubt she remained in the theater when he slipped out, no doubt she was around throughout the interval, and was in the theater for the second half. Rani and the other uniformed people have checked that very thoroughly, and it’s dent-proof. Aside from hiring a knife-man—and a gunman would be much more likely and efficient—she’s in the clear.”

  “But not the wife,” said Rani. “Meeting ends at Stevenage at five o’clock. M1 then A1—you could do it easily by seven forty-five.”

  “I’ve been in a car with you, Rani,” said Mike Oddie. “You’re a maniac.”

  “I’m a fast, safe driver,” protested Rani.

  “In the passenger seat it felt maniacal. I’d put Sheila Fleetwood down as a careful, efficient driver. We’ll class her as possible but unlikely.”

  “All three children have to be classed as possible and not at all unlikely, as far as opportunity is concerned,” said Charlie.

  “I agree. I can’t see Guy as having the guts, and the other two are awfully young to murder a capable, well-setup man who’s also a sort of father figure to them. But we’re not into character—a quagmire area anyway. We’re into opportunity. And you’re forgetting, Charlie, that there are four children.”