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1 Eric Gill (1882-1940) English carver, engraver, writer who founded an ideal community at Ditchling.
15
CRACKS IN THE SURFACE
As soon as he had revealed the identity of the corpse, Mike Oddie announced that a forensic team would be arriving shortly, and that he would like to question informally all three women separately. Melanie was still insistently playing, or overplaying, her role as the iron lady.
“I see no reason why forensic scientists or anyone else should pay any attention to this house,” she said, her voice acquiring the boom of the born tyrant. “The dead young man had no connection whatever with the place, or with anyone in it.”
“Then that is what they will find, isn’t it?” countered Oddie, unfailingly courteous and quiet. “They will be investigating all the Ashworth cottages, not just this farmhouse. We believe the first thing Patrick O’Hearn would have done when he came to Britain was make contact with his brother.”
“Why should he do that? Why shouldn’t he bum—that is the word, isn’t it?—his way round the country, as others do?”
“Because he and Declan were unusually close,” said Oddie, and then chanced his arm by turning a guess into a fact. “And because he’d been made uneasy by some of the things his brother had said about this place in letters.”
Melanie opened her mouth to continue the argument, then shut it again.
“If I might use your dining room, which I saw on the way in, to ask you all a few questions?” Oddie suggested, still quiet but now authoritative. Melanie nodded grimly. “And if you would stay here while we start with Mrs. Mates, and if you, Mrs. Max, would go about your business in the kitchen?”
Mrs. Max seemed relieved to escape; she was, Oddie guessed, a woman who had always preferred men’s company to women’s. Melanie appeared upset at being left on her own while her daughter was being questioned, but gave no clue as to why that should worry her. Charlie felt confirmed in his guess that Martha was the outsider of the family—the one who knew least, and was dangerous for that reason, since she had not been party to a coordination of stories.
Once in the dining room Oddie gestured Martha Mates to one side of the long table, while he himself sat opposite her. He told Charlie to leave the door open and to stand in the doorway, thus giving himself a good view of the hallway and of any movement in it, but also of Martha herself.
Martha was clearly nervous, and was making little or no effort to hide it. Perhaps she knew herself well enough to realize that she couldn’t. She was not wringing her hands, but her fingers were engaged in agonized couplings, and her face was the battleground for occasional spasms, which gave her an aspect both twisted and slightly wild.
“I wasn’t here, you know,” she began, before Oddie was properly seated. “Not on the weekend Declan left.”
“I know that,” said Oddie. “Let me ask the questions I want you to answer. Where exactly were you?”
“I . . . I went to see a private detective on the Saturday. He’s trying to trace my husband. I stayed with an old school friend: Hattie Wilmslow, Twenty-four Barton Street, Bellingham, SE6. We went to morning service in Saint Paul’s on the Sunday.” Her drab face lit up. “It was absolutely lovely. The services in Stanbury church are short these days, and of course they’re very simple, but one does like something more sometimes, doesn’t one? After that we did tourist things—went to Windsor in the afternoon, had a lovely meal at a good local Chinese in the evening.”
“You were together the whole time?”
“Practically. Except on the Saturday morning when I went to the detective’s office, of course.”
“You say you’re trying to trace your husband. Is this so you can obtain a divorce?”
“Oh, no!” Her eyes widened, adding to the wild expression. “That would hardly be worth the trouble, unless he wanted it. No, it seemed to me so unfair that my father is having to pay all Stephen’s college fees and living expenses. I suddenly realized that Morgan may very well be able to contribute his share if he’s still alive, and after all, why shouldn’t he? The days are past when fathers can just walk away from their responsibilities, which is exactly what Morgan did. I just feel he should be found and made to pay up!”
She stopped, breathless and excited. Oddie would have liked to stop the interview and talk over impressions of what they had just heard with Charlie. Oddie’s feeling was that the lady protested too much, that she was voluble not to explain but to hide—from herself as much as from them. But his instinct was to go on to other matters and to ambush her later on the subject of her husband.
“So when did you get back to Ashworth on—when was it?—Monday?” he asked.
“Yes, Monday.” She quieted down a little, and thought back. “Let me see: Hattie and I had a nice, chatty breakfast together, and then I went for the train. That left King’s Cross at about eleven, so it will have got to Leeds around half past one, but it was late, so I had a bit of a wait, twenty minutes or so, for a train to Keighley, then I got a taxi back here.”
“So you’d be back here by about three?”
“About then.”
“And when you arrived back you learned that Declan had left the previous Friday.”
“That’s right.”
“Nobody mentioned his brother Patrick having been here?”
“No, of course they didn’t,” she said, firing up, “because he hadn’t. Not all that much happens here, Superintendent, especially now Dad is bedridden, so any visitor is a subject of conversation. When I got back we just talked about Declan, and how naughty it was of him to leave in the night without giving us notice so we could make other arrangements.”
Oddie nodded gravely, suppressing any skepticism.
“Was your son still here then?”
“No, Stephen had just left for Oxford. The car had broken down again, but when the garage said it was something quite minor wrong, he packed a bag, walked to Haworth, then drove it to Keighley. If I’d known it was in a car park there I needn’t have taken a taxi—but I suppose I would, because I didn’t have the key. I had to go to Keighley to fetch it the next day.”
She was at her best, or most relaxed, when prattling on about trivialities. Oddie had a notion that all her life she had seized on the banal to avoid facing up to reality, and for this reason she was usually dismissed as a silly woman.
“What happened when your husband left you?” he asked. At once the fingers started knotting into each other again.
“What happened? Well, he just left.”
“Did you have a row, agree to separate after a long period of not getting on, or what? You’ve obviously lost touch.”
She swallowed, as if what was in her throat was an unpalatable fact she wanted to get rid of.
“He just left while I was away from home. That was typical of Morgan—he hated facing up to things. The marriage hadn’t been going too well, but he wasn’t even willing to talk about why. Stephen had been a difficult baby, and was by then a very noisy child. Morgan got very irritated about that, but I don’t know . . .”
“If that was the reason he left?”
“No. I’ve never understood that, really. Maybe it was everything building up. . . .”
“How did it happen?”
“I was away with Stephen in Manchester, seeing a specialist about his asthma, and having three days of tests. It worked too, because over the years he’s had less and less trouble with it, until now he never thinks about it. When I got back here Morgan had gone, told Dad and Mum that he was fed up and needed more space. That was typical of Morgan.”
“What did he do?”
“Do?”
“For a living.”
“Oh, well, that’s difficult to say, really,” she said with a perplexed frown, as if Morgan Mates was a man she had barely known. “He did a bit of journalism, a bit of cartooning—Punch took several of his drawings. He was an insurance salesman for a while. I had a bit of money: my grandmothe
r, Mother’s mother, had left money to both her granddaughters, and I got Catriona’s share as well when she died. We managed.”
It seemed to Oddie and Charlie that if one were to make a guess about what had happened to Morgan Mates after leaving Ashworth, it would be more likely that he would be on the streets than that he would be able to contribute to his son’s Oxford fees.
“Did you live here at Ashworth while you were married?” Oddie asked.
“Yes. At Stamford we lived with my parents, but here we had the cottage that Arnold Mellors is in now. Morgan was just starting to decorate it when he . . . left me.”
At the doorway, looking alternately down the hallway (where the only event had been Melanie opening the sitting room door, regarding him, then retreating back into the room) and at the questioning in progress at the table, Charlie had been bursting to ask a question. At this point he could hold it back no more.
“Mrs. Mates, do you suspect that your husband is dead?”
She jumped.
“No, of course not! Why?” She paused. “Well, of course it’s a possibility. It’s a long time since he left me.”
“How long?”
“Fourteen years. Nineteen eighty-three it was. Stephen was five at the time.”
“It occurred to me that your hiring a private detective might really be a way of finding out whether he is alive or dead.”
“I told you why I’m hiring him,” she said, an obstinate expression settling on her face, but her fingers telling another story. “If the detective found out he was dead, that would be the end of it, but it’s not the reason I’m using him. I expect Morgan has stumbled from one job to another, or is sponging off one person or another.”
Charlie wanted to ask one more question, and it came out before he had weighed the wisdom or folly of asking it.
“Are you quite sure your husband was alive when he left Ashworth? Isn’t what you’re really afraid of that he was dead by the time you and Stephen got back from Manchester?”
The chin shot up.
“No, of course that’s not what I think. I was told all about his leaving, and his things were gone.” The fingers suddenly stopped feverishly interlocking with each other and went up to her face. “Why are you asking me about Morgan? And such silly questions!”
Suddenly, as if making a decision, she went tense, then got up and without looking at either of them almost ran out of the room. They heard her stumbling up the stairs.
“I’m not sure that was wise,” admitted Charlie at once.
“It’s done now. Time will show. You notice how she jumped. She assumed that’s what you meant when you asked that first question, that he’d been murdered, and then realized she’d half fallen into a trap, and said in effect ‘of course he could have died in the meanwhile.’ Do you really think her husband was killed here?”
“I think she has that suspicion at the back of her mind,” said Charlie cautiously. “I wouldn’t go further than that. You weren’t happy with her explanation of why she was going to a private detective, were you?”
“No, of course not.”
“I thought it had to be a question of finding out whether he was alive or dead. And I instinctively felt she was desperate to discover that he is alive.”
“To still doubts?”
“Exactly. But whether it was wise to ask that now, with no evidence of any sort . . .”
“Anyway, I don’t think we’ll ask Mrs. Byatt about that. We’ve no reason, as you say, to think that Mates’s disappearance was anything other than a discontented husband taking off—though you’re probably right that she, at the back of her mind, was suspicious. It will be interesting, if we can find out, to know whether the daughter brings up our question with her mother, or whether she lets the suspicion fester, as it presumably has up to now.”
It mattered very little, in fact, what they brought up with Melanie Byatt. On almost every subject she stonewalled the question completely. In her manner, somewhere between the Roman matriarch Volumnia and Lady Bracknell, she sat straight, rarely deigned to look either of them in the eye, and answered where possible in monosyllables. By and large she treated them like the under-gardeners which, her manner suggested, would naturally have been part of her establishment in an earlier age.
Since she denied ever having seen Declan’s brother Patrick, denied he had come to Ashworth, said she could not even remember whether she had ever heard him mentioned and had to be reminded that Mrs. Max had mentioned him on Charlie’s first visit, it was not long before Oddie, from the drying up of possible questions, was forced on to another subject.
“Your grandson Stephen left Ashworth on Monday?”
“Yes.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He decided to go up to Oxford early.”
“That was a sudden decision, wasn’t it?” She shrugged. “Was there anything that triggered it?”
For once she looked in Charlie’s direction.
“Mr. Peace,” she said, her voice oozing condescension, “tell your superior that young people do unpredictable things.”
“Yes, they do,” agreed Charlie easily. “But often they seem unpredictable to older people, but seem logical and well thought out to the young person himself. Monday was—what—September the twenty-first.”
“Something like that.”
“The Oxford term doesn’t start till well into October. Could you make an effort to get into Stephen’s mind, guess at what reason he could have had for going up so early?”
There was a long silence. Was she meditating on whether to reply, or what to reply, or trying to think up a convincing reason that would satisfy them? Eventually she said, still as if offering a few pence to a beggar, “Stephen is not a very intelligent young man. Sad but true, and something he tries to hide from himself. He went to a very good private school near York, but he never prospered there. He finally got into Brasenose because his father had had an undistinguished career there back in the sixties, and because Ranulph offered the college a very good picture for their hall. I suspect Stephen realized that if he was to make anything of his chance he either had to get into a good set, or he had to work hard to get a reasonable degree. He has never yet shone socially, so the second alternative was the only one open to him. He’s gone up to get a lot of reading done so he can steal a march on the other freshmen.”
So if you’re so confident of his reasons, Oddie felt like asking, why didn’t you tell us that from the start? Instead he said, “So that’s what he told you on Monday before he set off?”
“Not in so many words,” Melanie said carefully. “We were making practical arrangements about where he’d leave the car in Keighley, and who would pick it up.”
“And financial arrangements too?”
“Oh, Stephen had enough money for the fares and the first few days. He was going to set up a bank account in Oxford, and then we would forward the necessary funds.”
“We? His grandfather, you mean?”
“Of course.”
“Mr. Byatt is presumably very fond of his only grandchild.”
“Naturally.”
It was the only thing she could say, granted the line she was taking, but it was said after a brief pause, and with firmly set lips.
Mrs. Max, when they talked to her, was much more accommodating, but the real disappointment was that weekends were her time off.
“Saturdays I always come in for the mornings,” she said, “and I serve them a light lunch and leave them the wherewithal for their evening meal—either a cold one or something in the oven they can just switch on. Sundays Martha usually cooks a roast or a pie or something—she can cook if she wants to.”
“Martha was away last weekend,” said Oddie.
“Oh, they’ll have managed. It’s not part of my job to worry about what they do when I’m not here. They’ll probably have rung one of the Chinese or Indian places in Haworth that deliver.”
“Melanie can’t cook?”
“Won’t, if she can help it.”
“So after midday on Saturday you were free until Monday morning?”
“That’s right.”
“What did you do?”
“In the afternoon I pottered around in my little bit of garden, clearing up dead stuff, and in the evening I read my magazine and then watched Casualty on television.”
“And Sunday?”
“Sundays I like to cook for myself—things I wouldn’t serve at the house because someone would turn up their nose: tripe, liver, kidneys, that sort of thing. In the afternoon last weekend I went to my sister’s—she lives between Oakworth and Keighley, and I walked there.”
“Did you see anything unusual, or hear anything from the house on your way there or back?”
“No, I didn’t. I was driven back to Stanbury about seven, and just walked down the lane. Frankly, it’s not likely I would, is it? If anything was done, it wouldn’t be done by a window, would it? I don’t think anything was done at all.”
“You said, I believe, that on Saturday you saw Mrs. Byatt throw Declan’s note in the fire. What about Monday? Was anything more said about his leaving Ashworth then?”
“Nothing beyond how inconvenient it was.”
“His brother Patrick wasn’t mentioned?”
“He was not,” she said without hesitation. “And surely he would have been if he’d called there.”
“What about Stephen, and his decision to go up to Oxford early: what did you hear about that?”
“Not a great deal. Quite early on, while I was washing up breakfast things, I’d heard him phoning the garage from the hall. He phoned again about an hour later, and I heard him tell Melanie it was ‘no big deal’ what was wrong with the car. Then there were several huddles around the place, and the next I knew he was striding out with a big knapsack on his back, and Melanie told me he’d gone to Oxford for a bit to get down to work. Another of his fancies, I thought. Your constable will have told you he’s not a favorite here. He’s changeable, goes hell for leather in one direction, then changes tack—particularly when he has a hangover.”
The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori Page 16