The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori

by Robert Barnard

  Did it make sense? Charlie would not have been able to put that sense into his own words, but after having seen the pictures in Byatt’s studio it did. That last picture in the stack, he felt sure, was the realistic picture from which all the later, more abstract versions sprang.

  What was worrying was that there was at least one other “phase” of remarkable pictures mentioned in the Briscott book, though he had fallen asleep before he had reached the details.

  The dreaming spires may have looked like the New Jerusalem from a distance, but in among them, in the dust, noise, and fumes of the Oxford traffic system, they were more like a medieval Detroit. Charlie made it, with five wrong turns, to police headquarters in the city and there left his car. He made a courtesy call on the duty sergeant, picked up a map, and set off for Brasenose on foot.

  The porter in the lodge at Brasenose was hunched over a computer, picking his nose. He was dismissive.

  “Is that the bloke who turned up out of the blue one evening last week?” He pressed some keys on his computer. “Yeah, that’s him. Said he’d come up early, and demanded a room cool as you like, as if we were a hotel. I said, ‘Look, mate, the college is full of toffee and sweetmeat manufacturers’—their annual convention, it was, and we were bursting at the seams. I said, ‘This college can’t afford to be empty during long vacation, or any other vacation, come to that.’ I sent him off with a flea in his ear, but I gave him a printout of landladies who are willing to take young gentlemen—so-called—in the vacs.”

  “Has he been back,” Charlie asked, as the man was turning away, “or told you he’s got rooms?”

  The man turned back reluctantly.

  “I’ve seen him go through on the way to the library. Looked a bit at a loose end.” He sat down and pressed some more keys on his computer. “Yeah, he must have told the night porter. He’s got a room at Thirty-one, Meadow Lane. Grotty, but close by. It’ll be three weeks before he can have his room here.”

  The porter sent him off on the first stage of his journey, and he consulted his map for the later ones. The lodgings were about ten minutes’ walk away, a peeling Victorian terrace house with all the charm of a detention center. The only good thing about the landlady Charlie could think of to say was that she probably made no difference in her manner on account of his color: it was clear she was horrible to everyone.

  “No, ’e’s not in,” she said, standing as if barring the way of an invading army. “I don’t encourage them to stay in. ‘You didn’t come up early in order to sit in your room reading,’ I says. ‘You get out and study in one of them liberies. ’Nuff of them around,’ I says. I’d never be able to call me ’ome me own if I let ’em stop in all day. Oh, Gawd, there ’e is.”

  Slouching along the road, scuffing his feet, was a tall, saturnine young man in a deep green shirt and light slacks, both of which looked expensive. The expression on his face showed he was neither confident nor happy. He stopped at the gate.

  “Mr. Mates?”

  “Yes?” The manner said “So what?” or “What’s it to you?” As with the landlady it was a manner that seemed habitual rather than racist. Charlie flashed his ID at him.

  “DC Peace, West Yorkshire Police. Could we talk somewhere?”

  Stephen swallowed. The landlady looked implacable.

  “Best not here,” he said. “You can see why. We could walk. Or go to a pub.”

  “Not a pub. Is there any park nearby, or place where we could sit down?”

  “Magdalen hasn’t got a conference on at the moment. I suppose we could go there.”

  As they walked toward the bridge Stephen said, “How did you find me?”

  “No great feat of detection. I asked the Brasenose porter. Why? You’re not in hiding, are you?”

  “No.” He swallowed again. “Though it’s sometimes seemed like I’m in exile. There’s no one up at all. Nothing but conferences and conventions. Not a soul worth talking to.”

  “Tough,” said Charlie, his word being accepted at face value. “I believe you’re getting your reading done early.”

  “Oh, yes, there’s that. But I had hoped to make a few contacts as well.” They turned into Magdalen, and Charlie found they had to pay for the privilege of entry. Stephen Mates gazed at the sky, and with a sigh Charlie felt in his pocket. “Now, this is a college!” breathed Stephen.

  “Brasenose not up to scratch?” inquired Charlie, keeping his voice neutral. This time Stephen shot him a glance.

  “Above my level,” he admitted. “Well above. I only got in because my father was there.”

  “Useful,” said Charlie.

  “Even then it was touch-and-go. I’ve been to introduce myself to the principal, who was up when Dad was up. He says his main interests were practical jokes and fast cars. He obviously wasn’t impressed at all. I think it was Grandfather who tipped the scales: his money, his picture, and his name.”

  The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable. By now they were in the largest quad, New Buildings lawn, which was almost deserted. Just what Charlie had hoped for. He nodded at a park bench, and they sat down, one at each end.

  “You’ve been in touch with Ashworth?” Charlie asked.

  “I spoke to Mother a couple of days ago. She was away when I left. She said you were investigating Declan’s disappearance—if he has disappeared.”

  Charlie let that ride.

  “You were in the house at the time. Did you hear him take off during the night?”

  “No.”

  The boy veered between confidentiality and truculence. He had had a week to decide on his attitude, but he hadn’t picked one. It didn’t seem to Charlie that he was a fast learner. He also seemed strangely unformed, as a fifteen-or sixteen-year-old will often be, but as a nineteen-year-old should not be. Charlie guessed it sprang from growing up in a household with two dominant personalities in it. He hoped it meant that the young man might still choose a fruitful rather than a self-destructive path for his life.

  “What about the other arrivals at the farmhouse that weekend?”

  “Other arrivals? There weren’t any other arrivals.”

  “There was one, at any rate. The boy whose body you disposed of in the car park behind the Haworth Tandoori.”

  “I didn’t! You can’t prove anything like that!”

  The voice was raised, but a note of panic could not be disguised.

  “Oh, but we can,” said Charlie, hoping he was right. “Our forensic team is probably going over the car and the stable at this moment. If the body was in the boot, traces will be in the boot. And with your mother away, you were the only one who drove.”

  “That’s not true. Plenty of people at Ashworth can drive. They just don’t because Granddad disapproves of cars. Isn’t that a joke, when he’s the only one who’s got one?”

  “You were heard coming home, then going out again.” Charlie decided to come clean with what he suspected to have been the order of events. “I don’t think you had anything to do with the murder, Stephen. But I do think you agreed to dispose of the body.” He waited, and a flicker appeared in the boy’s eyes. “If you’re going to keep out of jail, which I don’t promise, and if you’re ever going to make anything of yourself at Oxford, you’re going to need all the goodwill from the police you can muster. Do you want time to think about it? I can take a turn around the quad if it would help you make up your mind.”

  After a second Stephen shook his head.

  “No. I don’t need time.”

  “Right, then. Let’s get back to my earlier question. When did Declan’s brother arrive at Ashworth?”

  Stephen’s dark eyes were set into reminiscence.

  “It was the Saturday afternoon. We’d had lunch, and Mrs. Max had gone. I was upstairs in my little darkroom, doing some developing. I heard the doorbell, laid down the print I was working on to dry, then went out onto the landing. By then, though, Melanie had got to the front door, so I didn’t bother to go down.”

  “S
o you didn’t meet or see him then?”

  “No, it was later, a lot later. I went out, walked to Stanbury to get some cigarettes at the pub. On the way out I heard Melanie and a man laughing and talking in the drawing room. By the time I got back they were upstairs with Ranulph, still laughing and talking. The voice sounded like Declan’s—same brogue, same quality—and I thought he was back, so I went into Granddad’s bedroom.”

  He paused.

  “You weren’t welcome?”

  “The talking and the laughter stopped. Then Melanie introduced me, explained who I was and who the visitor was. I made some small talk to him for a minute or two, said I was sorry he’d missed his brother, that sort of thing. Then I sensed they wanted me to be off. I went along to my bedroom, opened and shut the door, but I stayed on the landing, listening.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. . . . I felt they were up to something.”

  “And did you hear anything that told you what it was?”

  “No. Not really.” Stephen screwed up his face. “But they were being so nice to him. Even Granddad. They were making up to him. Do you understand?”

  Charlie nodded encouragingly.

  “I think so. Were they being so nice it seemed they were trying to entrap him, hold him there?”

  “Something like that. But nothing you could pin down. The only thing I really remember was Granddad saying, ‘Declan was a nice boy, a lovely lad. A bit straitlaced, though. You’re a young man who’s seen a bit more of the world.’ Granddad never soft-soaps people as a rule. But it was mainly their friendliness, their welcoming him. Granddad’s not like that, nor Melanie, by nature.”

  “How much more of Patrick did you see?”

  Stephen shook his head.

  “Hardly anything. I saw him taking a tray up to Granddad’s room, saw him and Melanie talking in the kitchen.”

  “You didn’t talk to him again?”

  “No. I was out, mostly.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well, I was going to pubs. I drove to Hebden Bridge—”

  “You’re not telling me why you were out so much,” Charlie pressed him. “Did you not want to be at home?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Stephen nodded.

  “I suppose not. It felt all wrong, somehow.”

  “Did you ever have suspicions about your father’s disappearance?”

  “What? My father’s?” He had almost jumped when the surprise question was sprung on him. There was shock in his voice and eyes, but there was something else too: was it surprise at its being brought out into the open for the first time? Was the mere question a revelation of things in his mind he had never acknowledged. “I never had suspicions. I just wondered—wondered what happened to him. I thought it odd, his going out of our lives so entirely.”

  “Do you think your mother has suspicions? Is that why she’s using a private detective?”

  “I never thought of that!” He seemed dumbstruck. Charlie felt sorry for him. He was really not very bright, even about his own situation. “I suppose you could be right. Do you mean she wants confirmation that he left her, but she really fears he was . . . murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor woman. My poor, bloody mother. And everybody there looks down on her, thinks her next thing to an idiot.” He shook his head. “God, what a household! I’ve always said it. That, at any rate, isn’t something I’ve just woken up to.”

  It was like a silly boast. It was pathetic. Again he seemed to Charlie more boy than man.

  “What happened on the Sunday night?”

  “I got back from a pub in Cullingworth. I wasn’t drunk. I’d just been spinning out the time, hoping they’d be in bed when I got back. But they weren’t. They were waiting for me.”

  “In what way? Who was?”

  “Ranulph and Melanie. In Ranulph’s bedroom.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “No.”

  “And no body?”

  “No. All that came out of the blue.”

  “How did they break it to you?”

  “Oh, indirectly. There was something they wanted me to do. I might find it shocking. But there’d been an accident. Nobody would understand.”

  Charlie’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Not a very original story. How did you react?”

  “I thought if they wanted me to do something nasty, perhaps illegal, they were going to pay for it.” He looked at Charlie. “I didn’t know what it was then!”

  His tone was anguished. He was trying to convey that he did have a conscience, hidden somewhere. Perhaps it was true.

  “When did they tell you it was a body?”

  “As . . . negotiations went on. Eventually, if we were going to agree on a price, I had to know what it was. I was appalled.”

  “Why did you agree?”

  He looked down like a guilty dog.

  “Melanie appealed to me. Said Granddad’s life couldn’t end like that, shut up in jail. . . . All right, I admit it: I suppose I thought if that was what they wanted me to do, I could screw a lot of money out of them.”

  “Did they tell you what happened?”

  “No! I didn’t want to know. Was it very nasty?”

  “You don’t want to know. Keep it like that. Where was the body, then?”

  “It was already in the boot of the car. I didn’t see it till the car broke down in Haworth.”

  “Really? So someone had taken it to the stable, then. They must have been waiting to put it in when you got home.”

  “Someone must have. Melanie just said, ‘You’ll find it in the boot.’ They had Mother’s keys, of course.”

  “This was when you agreed on a price?”

  “All fees paid, and five thousand pounds down.” He said it almost with self-loathing. Perhaps he was redeemable. Charlie was lost in thought.

  “So someone killed him, then humped him down to the paddock, then into the car. Who could manage that?”

  “A lot of people. He wasn’t a big chap. Wiry, thin, quite short.”

  “I suppose you speak with experience.”

  Stephen shuddered.

  “It was horrible beyond belief. The car broke down on the straight between Bridge House and Haworth station. I got it into the little station forecourt and sat there, out of my mind with worry what to do. I’d been aiming to drive over to Bingley Moor and dump him there—as far away from Stanbury as I thought the car would go.”

  “You say ‘him.’ Did you know who it was?”

  “Somehow I did. I suppose it was the buildup, all the niceness to him. ‘Come into my parlor’—that sort of feeling. But they’d not said and I’d not asked. Anyway, there I was, stuck in Haworth. I got out of the car and started looking around. I knew the area well, but having a body to dispose of gives any place a whole new perspective. There are steps up to the car park from almost opposite the station. I got to the top and was just wondering whether this was a good place to leave him when the lights went off in the Tandoori and two of the waiters came out. They went toward a car together and they were talking in English. One asked the other whether he’d got to a garage yet, and the other said, ‘No, I don’t know whether it’s worthwhile. I think it’s a write-off.’ They drove off, and that left one old car in the car park. I went over and checked and the lock on the boot was broken. It seemed as good a place as any.”

  “It was, in a way: it wasn’t discovered for days.”

  “I thought it might stay there till it began stinking. I went back to my car and waited till the traffic had dwindled to virtually nothing. Then I opened the boot and got the body out. . . . I don’t want to talk about that. I tried not to look. Anyway, I got it up the steps and into the boot, then I banged the lid down and ran. I thought it would draw attention to the car, and us, if I left it in the forecourt, so I managed to turn it round and push it with the driver’s door open back along the straight to the garage.”

  “You did well, in the circumstances.
It was the circumstances that you did badly in.”

  “I know.”

  “Then you walked home, I suppose. What sort of reception did you get?”

  “The house was in darkness. But as I walked along the landing Melanie’s door opened—gave me a hell of a fright, though I should have expected it. She just asked me if I’d got rid of the body, and I said yes and went on to my room. It was the truth too!” he added, as if what he was being accused of was untruthfulness.

  “And the next day you left for here.”

  “Can you imagine how much I wanted to get away? If the car hadn’t been fixed I would have walked. I had a bit of money myself, and I got out of Melanie any cash there was in the house, with the promise that the balance would be sent by check when I had opened a bank account here. Melanie has always handled the household’s money, at any rate since Granddad became so feeble. Then I got the hell out of there. For some reason I didn’t want to face Mother.”

  “Why not?”

  His brow furrowed.

  “I don’t know. I had some feeling that she’s always been somehow out of it, kept apart from all that, whatever it was. Innocent, if you like. And I didn’t want to see her, knowing what I knew . . . having done what I had done. God, what a mess I’ve made of my life. What’s going to happen to me?”

  “I don’t know,” said Charlie, with a real sense of pity. “You’ve helped yourself a lot, telling me all this without too much pressure and before Forensics comes up with physical evidence. But you’re going to need all the brownie points you can muster with the college authorities, I would guess.”

  “God, yes. Is it worth it? I came here to get away from Ashworth and my life there, and all I get is the same kind of loneliness.”