The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori

by Robert Barnard

  “He had a hangover?”

  “Well, he looked very tired, anyway. He wasn’t back that late the night before, so I don’t know that it was the drink.”

  “You heard him come back on Sunday night?”

  “Oh, yes. It was about ten o’clock or so.”

  “What do you mean, you heard him? What sort of noise was he making?”

  “The car. I heard the car. I should know the noises it makes. I’d seen him drive out about half past seven, and I heard him drive back as I was going to bed about half past ten.”

  “I see. Could he have gone out again later?”

  “Easily. I hear nothing after I’ve dropped off, like my son told your young constable there. Someone must have, mustn’t they, if the car landed up in Haworth that night.”

  “Of course. When he drove out at seven-thirty, did he have anyone with him in the car?”

  “No one. He was alone. Unless someone was hiding.”

  “Or unless someone was a corpse in the boot,” said Charlie to Oddie when they were alone in the dining room. But neither of them was happy with that idea.

  “Then why didn’t he dispose of it?” asked Oddie. “It was dark long before ten-thirty, when he returned.”

  “The most likely reason,” said Charlie slowly, “is that when he went out there was no corpse to dispose of, and when he came back there was.”

  Oddie considered this.

  “Or there was soon after. Because either Stephen Mates did the garroting after he came back, or it was done while he was away. And if it was the latter, who on earth did it? Because looking at Mrs. Byatt, I can’t see her hands having enough strength. And from what you’ve told me about her husband, he needs help painting, let alone turning the screw on that horrible implement.”

  “That leaves us with one of the disciples,” said Charlie. “Or with all of them together.”

  16

  SEE NO EVIL

  They were interrupted by the sound of cars. Charlie registered with a start how much his ear had accustomed itself to a car-free environment. No wonder the ears of the Ashworth people took note of the comings and goings of their one vehicle. The arrival of Forensics meant four cars left higgledy-piggledy in the lanes around the farmhouse. Mike got up to let in the six- or seven-strong team, then came back into the dining room.

  “They know what they’re looking for,” he said. “What say we let them get on with it? I think it’s time we talked to the disciples.”

  “Shall we do them together, or divide them up?”

  “Together, I think. You know these people better than I do.”

  “I’ve only really talked to Colonel Chesney.”

  “By reputation, anyway. You may pick up things I would miss if I was on my own—discrepancies, contradictions. You can have a watching brief.”

  “‘Forgive me, Lord, I have sinned.’”

  “It’s nothing to do with what you asked Mrs. Mates. We’ve yet to learn that that was counterproductive. Don’t go all sensitive just because I ask you to button your lip.”

  “I’m all girlish uncertainty,” said Charlie. “You know that.”

  They emerged from the house, which was filled with the subdued bustle of the forensics people going about their finicky business, and in the weak, late-afternoon sun, they looked about them.

  “Where do we start, Boss?”

  “With the one who’s done time, I think,” said Oddie, after a thought. “It’s where we normally would. I don’t see why we should make a difference, even if he is middle class and artistic as hell.”

  • • •

  Ivor Aston had had ample time to adopt the manner that seemed to him the best form of counterattack. He greeted them in a friendly, courteous way, sat them down, and offered them tea or coffee, which they refused. All in all he seemed to be presenting a surface of normality for their inspection. Here I am, he seemed to be saying, your friendly neighborhood child pornographer.

  “Do you want to discuss my record first,” he said easily, “or recent events at the farmhouse?”

  “I think we’ll discuss recent matters first,” said Oddie, equally easy.

  “Right you are. I hear it was Declan’s brother who was the actual victim. I had no idea he had one.”

  “Can we stick to the question-and-answer approach?” said Oddie, smiling more kindly than he felt. “It usually works rather well. We’re working now on the assumption that Declan O’Hearn did indeed leave Ashworth voluntarily on the night of Friday-Saturday last week. Have you any idea why he left?”

  Aston shrugged.

  “None at all. Just the itchy feet of the young, I would imagine. My impression was that he’d rather enjoyed helping Ranulph paint, been rather proud of being part of a new creative surge. I had a fair bit of chitchat with him when Ranulph invited me to a special private viewing of his new canvas, and that was the feeling I got. But in the long run that’s not going to weigh against seeing the world, mixing with people of his own age, having a few girls, maybe experimenting with drugs.”

  “Doing what all young people do, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You say you didn’t know that Declan had a brother. Did you see any young man around Ashworth that weekend?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t suspect that the Byatt household might have found a replacement for Declan?”

  “No. And I very much doubt they did.”

  Oddie nodded neutrally.

  “What were you doing on that Saturday, sir?”

  “I went sketching over toward Hardcastle Crags. It’s a favorite spot of mine. I walked over the moors and spent the day there. I have my sketchbook to prove it.”

  “Someone who remembers you would be useful, sir.”

  Ivor Aston thought—or gave the appearance of thinking. Because surely he had got it all thought out before they came?

  “I stopped on the way for a pint and a sandwich at the Horse and Whippet. They’ll remember me there. I’m well known—and well shunned—in this area.”

  Oddie nodded, still neutral.

  “I see. Talk to anyone while you were sketching, sir?”

  “No. The odd walker was around, but I didn’t talk to any of them. I began back about half-four, so as to be home by nightfall. I had another pint at the Grange—the same applies as at the Horse and Whippet: at the Grange they serve me through clenched teeth, if you can imagine that, thanks to my sister.”

  “And when you got back to Ashworth itself, you didn’t notice anything unusual?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Nor saw anybody you wouldn’t normally see?”

  “No.”

  “Well, the fact that you were walking may make it easier to check your alibi than if you had driven. What about Sunday?”

  “I went to church in Haworth. They have a new rector—very good, he is. Then I came back here, cooked a simple meal, then read and relaxed for the rest of the day.”

  “And you noticed nothing unusual around the place?”

  “Nothing. I was in rather than out, working up one of my sketches to a watercolor.”

  “I see.” Oddie decided to go off on a new tack. “You mentioned your sister. I gather there seems to be some idea around the place that she enjoys telling everybody about your record and what you were inside for. Is that what you think, sir?”

  “It’s certainly one of her very small tally of conversational topics.”

  “Why should that be, sir?”

  “You’d have to ask her that.”

  “You don’t seem averse to mentioning the topic yourself.”

  Ivor Aston grimaced.

  “I don’t have much choice, do I? If she hadn’t wormed her way into Ashworth I don’t suppose I’d ever bring the question up, unless someone here became a good friend, which no one has. As it is, the best way is to talk about it openly.”

  “You are ashamed of your past, then, sir?”

  “No,” he said with sudden forc
e. “I am certainly not ashamed. I wouldn’t have talked about it because I know what the popular attitude is—and the people here are nothing if not commonplace in their reactions. But don’t imagine it’s an attitude I share. I have certain tastes, and they were born in me. How can I be ashamed of things I had no choice about?”

  “You weren’t imprisoned for having tastes,” countered Oddie quietly.

  “In effect I was. I get my kicks from looking at a certain sort of picture, and I shared them with other like-minded men.”

  “The pictures and printed material you circulated,” Oddie pressed on, having done his homework before he left police headquarters, “covered a range of . . . interests, tastes, involving children; some of them were quite revolting, some of them extremely sadistic.”

  “They were acted, Superintendent, posed. They fed the fantasies of people with those tastes. Pornography like that saves them, us, from acting out our fantasies in reality.”

  “Oh? And do they never stimulate people to act them out in reality?”

  Ivor Aston sighed.

  “This is an old and well-trodden argument, as I’m sure you know. All right, I won’t generalize, I’ll speak for myself: as far as I was concerned, this was fantasy stuff I was circulating. In any case, what happened as a consequence was not my responsibility.”

  “Nor how the photographs were obtained, nor the effects on the children who ‘acted’ them out?”

  “No. Children are remarkably resilient.”

  “Hmmm. What made you decide to come here, sir, on your release?”

  Ivor Aston sat back in his chair, relaxing his tense pose.

  “I’d always admired Ranulph Byatt. I am a modest but a real artist myself—the only artist here, in fact, apart from Byatt, and the only one he can communicate with.”

  “And you told him about your prison sentence and what it was for?”

  “Of course.”

  “And his reaction?”

  “In his letter of reply he never mentioned it, and he never has since. Don’t confuse Byatt with the mediocrities who have gathered around him.”

  “You say you’ve ‘always’ admired him, sir. How long would that be?”

  “Well”—he smiled—“not my whole lifetime, I must admit. I went to an exhibition, a traveling one, at the Leeds City Art Gallery, oh, around 1985.”

  “And what was it you admired about these paintings?”

  “Oh, their power, the imaginative sweep, the completeness of the artistic vision.”

  “I see. Would you say that was what attracted most of the disciples here?”

  “You’d have to ask them. They wouldn’t choose me as their spokesman, would they?” His face twisted into a sneer. “I’m the loner, the one out on a limb. And that suits me fine, just fine.”

  • • •

  “Fire away,” said Charmayne Churton. She was sitting in the one downstairs room of her bijou cottage, filling an old armchair, with her legs just too far apart for anyone’s comfort but her own. For some reason, whether social, sexual, or personal, she had dabbed an unusual amount of makeup on her face, but she reminded Charlie of nothing so much as a battleship decked out for a fleet inspection.

  “Could you tell us about your movements last weekend?” Oddie asked her.

  “Saturday I was in Manchester practically all day: shopping in the afternoon, Cliff Richard in Heathcliff in the evening. Wonderful show. Got the train back to Halifax, then took a taxi back here.”

  “When did you hear about Declan O’Hearn leaving?”

  She had her pat answer.

  “Someone told me on Sunday morning, when I was pottering around the place. Surprised me. I’d rather liked the lad, and I’d’ve thought he’d have had more staying power.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual about the place on Sunday—anything or anyone?”

  “Nothing at all. Should I have?”

  Oddie’s face was impassive. If she had heard about Patrick O’Hearn, this was something she was not letting on.

  “How did you come to settle in this place?”

  “Well, of course I’d always admired Ranulph Byatt. I’m speaking as an amateur, a dauber and a dabbler,” she simpered, “but I’d been struck by the imaginative nature of his work, its tremendous variety, its sheer punch. So when I heard that Ivor was planning to come here when he got out—of Strangeways, that is—I thought: That’s for me. I’ve got a bit of money from our parents: they left everything to me after . . . you know. So I came over to see if there was a vacant cottage, and, bingo!”

  “You’re fond of your brother?”

  She paused before she replied, wondering, Charlie thought, whether to lie or to sugarcoat the truth.

  “Not really. We’ve never had much in common. But I thought I should do what I can.”

  “In what way? You don’t live together or anything.”

  She snorted.

  “God forbid. I mean rehabilitation, getting back into the community, that kind of thing.”

  “But you’ve never made any secret, I believe, of his prison sentence?”

  “No. Should I? If you’re going to rehabilitate yourself, you shouldn’t do it on the basis of a lie.”

  It should have sounded good, but it didn’t, coming from her.

  “It’s a point of view,” said Oddie noncommittally.

  She leaned her prow forward and pushed her stern back.

  “If you had young kiddies, would you want a man like that living near you? People are waking up to the dangers these days. They’ve a right to know. People like that never change.”

  So much for rehabilitation and getting back into the community.

  “Does your brother have any convictions for offenses against children?” asked Oddie, very conscious of having changed his position too.

  “He peddled child pornography. Isn’t that an offense against children? As far as I’m concerned, that tells you where his tastes lie, and tells you what a danger he will always be.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. As long as there’s breath in my body I’ll make sure people know what kind of a man he is.” She groped into the recesses of her mind and produced an old-fashioned phrase to cloak her motivation: “I’d be failing in my duty if I didn’t.”

  Both men watching her had the strongest sense not just of pleasure and satisfaction—that, they had expected from what Colonel Chesney had told Charlie—but of a life that had been adrift, rudderless, but which had suddenly found a purpose: the persecution of her brother and an unfailing, never-ending means of accomplishing it. To Charlie they seemed locked in a perverse bond, and he wondered whether there was any great moral difference between the persecutor and the pornographer. He also wondered whether there was anything in their childhood, their background, that would account for it. He was willing to bet that Ivor Aston’s first sexual experiments had been with his younger sister. That, surely, must have been the origin of the perverse bond. He felt sad that he could summon up no sympathy for the victim.

  • • •

  “Now, then, what is it you want to know?” asked Arnold Mellors, rubbing his hands.

  They had already run through his activities of the past weekend, established that he was at home virtually all of the time, but had seen no strangers in the area and noticed nothing out of the ordinary at the house. Kipling’s monkeys, Oddie decided, had nothing on the Ashworth community.

  “You say you spent a lot of time on the phone, sir.”

  “That and consulting the Directory of Art. I was looking for an agent for Ranulph’s new pictures. Of course I could only ring those who looked as if they were working from home, it being a Saturday.”

  “Byatt is thinking of changing his agent?”

  Mellors’s face fell a fraction.

  “Well, acquiring one again. I’ve been doing the donkey work for him these past few years. Frankly his . . . his genius has been in remission. Mostly rather tame, ordinary pictures,
and prices had to be modest accordingly. There was nothing much an agent could do for him. I was announcing that he was starting a new and remarkable phase, and sizing up possible agents to act for him. Just trying to be useful.”

  “What personal qualities were you looking for?”

  “A willingness to subdue their own personality to Ranulph’s. An ability to take orders, to take abuse.”

  “To be subservient, at least apparently?”

  “Yes, I think that would be fair.”

  “You have no illusions about him?”

  “I have no illusions about his greatness,” corrected Mellors. “So I take all the rest as part of the package.”

  “This new phase, how long has it lasted?”

  Mellors shuffled his feet a little.

  “Oh, only a few weeks so far. You think it ridiculous to talk of a new phase on that basis, but, you see, we know Ranulph. When he is gripped by his de—when inspiration strikes, it lasts: picture after picture tumbles out. Of course, in his condition we don’t expect the feverish production of his red period, but a series of remarkable pictures is very much in the cards. In fact, I would say it’s a certainty.”

  “And Byatt is concerned that they fetch the best possible price?”

  “Of course. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  “No, no.”

  Mellors rubbed his hands, gripped by the enticing prospects.

  “What would be ideal would be a much-talked-about exhibition, as much publicity as Ranulph could stand in his current state of health, and then the pictures released on to the market, probably gradually. But, of course, that will be up to his agent.”

  Wistfulness came into his voice with the last sentence. Oddie decided to press him.

  “You found an agent for him?”

  “Oh, that will be Ranulph’s choice. I talked to several, and selected three or four possibilities. I’m just trying to be useful.”

  “You seem to have enjoyed acting as Byatt’s agent.”

  “Oh, I did, I did. Even if I never handled first-rate stuff.”

  “I find this community here rather puzzling,” said Oddie, in confessional mode. “I expected to find a community of artists, kindred creative spirits to Byatt, and that’s apparently its local reputation. But it’s not, is it?”