A Fatal Attachment (11 page)

T
HE
news was brought down to Bly by a farmer's wife who had been hailed down by a distraught Molly Kegan at Lydia's gate.

“She's been murdered!” she kept saying. “I can't go back in there. And they say you mustn't touch anything.”

Molly had stayed at the cottage gate and the farmer's wife, on her way into Halifax, had stopped at the post office to Bly and rung the police from there. The news had caused a great sensation among the two old people who were collecting their pensions and the postmistress, who saw her function as keeping the community alive by spreading any piece of information or misinformation that came her way. Within half an hour most people in the village had heard.

The news stunned them, though there was no sorrow. There was a time when Thea and Lydia had both been popular in Bly—when Thea was a young mother, Lydia a divorcée, and the sisters always in and out of each other's homes. Thea was still regarded with respect and affection, though there was also a sort of reserve on account of her great grief. Lydia, on the other hand, had become merely an occasional sight in Bly, and her dealings with the Hoddle boys in the past was a matter of general censure. The feeling towards her was little more than a vague feeling of pride that she was local and had made a name for herself in the world. She had been the most notable person in the area, and now she was a notable corpse.

• • •

“So, who is she—was she?” asked Charlie Peace of his superior as the police car from the West Yorkshire police headquarter to Leeds sped towards Bly.

Mike Oddie frowned.

“I ought to know more than I do, because I know the name. I wish I'd had
time to ask my wife. Some kind of popular historian—biographer I think. People like Nelson, Lawrence of Arabia. There's always a good solid market for biographies of the right sort, as I understand it. But she was very scholarly—not the gush and grovel kind. I know Margaret has read one or two of her books—they sell well in paperback.”

“So fairly prosperous?”

Mike shrugged.

“Depends what sort of a spender she was, I suppose.”

“And she was strangled?”

“So I understand from the Halifax people.”

“Someone with a fair degree of strength, then.”

“Depending on whether she was awake or asleep, whether it was the culmination of a quarrel or she was caught by surprise. You're jumping the gun, Charlie. You could be making all sorts of assumptions that will have to be revised when you get to the scene of the crime. That way trouble lies, especially if you're the sort of person who doesn't easily revise your ideas. Much better to get to the scene with your mind a blank sheet.”

“OK—mind a perfect blank.”

Charlie grinned at the Superintendent equably. Oddie had noticed him soon after he had arrived in Leeds. He was chatting with a group in the police canteen, apparently relaxed, but Oddie could see from his eyes that he was registering everything said, noting who was the thickie and who was the bright boy, who the rebel and who the greaser. Now he was sitting sprawled in the car as if his limbs were dough, but Mike knew he was registering everything, and keeping it filed.

“How is Yorkshire treating you so far?” he asked.

“Pretty well. I'm really liking it. Only problem is understanding the natives.”

“They probably have the same problem with you.”

“No they don't. They all watch
EastEnders.

Charlie—Dexter to the registrar of his birth—Peace had transferred to the detective squad of the West Yorkshire Police only two months before. He still spoke, and probably always would, broad cockney.

“Why did you decide to transfer up here?”

“Girlfriend. Got a girlfriend lives in Wakefield.”

“Going to be married?”

“Oh, I don't know that we'll go
that
far.”

They both laughed.

“No problems with her parents?”

Charlie grimaced.

“No. They're so liberal it's almost depressing.”

“Nothing to get your teeth into?”

“That's about it. I rather enjoy a bit of a barney.” Charlie gave one of his ferocious grins, but then he shifted in his seat. “When I said I applied for a transfer because of my girlfriend that wasn't quite true. We're fairly steady, but not
that
steady.”

“Why did you then?”

“I was born in London, brought up there. I've been on the windy side of the law once or twice myself, and I know a lot of people who are well on that side. I just know too much, know what I mean? Coming North was like coming to a foreign country.”

“The blank sheet of paper again.”

“That's right.”

“And is it? A foreign country, I mean.”

“Yes,” said Charlie emphatically. “And people down South think of it like that. You know, I once had a girlfriend whose parents
really
cut up rough on the race thing, and she said: ‘You shouldn't let it worry you. When I had a boyfriend from Bolton, all they could say was: “But he's from the
North
!” ' I never could work out whether that should make me feel better or worse.”

They laughed, and drove on in companionable silence for the rest of the way.

When they came to Bly, Mike Oddie said; “It's through the village and up the hill, so the Halifax people tell me.” They went past a few houses and the odd depressed-looking shop, past The Wheatsheaf, and then saw a hilly road to their left. There was a little knot of police and other cars at the top. Charlie turned up the hill, then left the car with the others. The two men got out and stood looking at the cottage, shimmering in the sun.

“Nice,” said Charlie appreciatively.

“Exactly—that answers your question about whether she had money,” said Oddie.

“I meant nice aesthetically,” said Charlie, from the height of his six O levels and one A.

“Nice aesthetically costs money. You need brass to live in a place like this. Come on.”

In the cottage the hive of activity that always succeeds a murder was beginning to scale down. He police surgeon, whom Oddie knew well, was snapping the clasps of his bag shut and getting to his feet.

“Morning, Mike,” he said, raising his hand in greeting. “I'll get the initial
report to you as soon as I can. No great surprises beyond what you can see for yourself, so far as I can say at this time. Time of death—somewhere between eight thirty and midnight. Unofficially I'd say you could lop off an hour either side of that, just as a working hypothesis, but that's unofficial.”

He edged his way out of the working melee, gave another wave of the hand, and was off, leaving Mike and Charlie with an unobstructed view of the body.

“Oh,” said Charlie.

“Take it slowly,” advised Oddie. “Look away, keep calm, and then look back again.”

Charlie looked at the ceiling, holding his heaving stomach. He took another peek, looked away, then contemplated the awful thing full on. Lydia was indeed a horrible sight, the elegant legs and cream-frocked body ending in the livid horror of her face, and the hideous, thin, discoloured line around her neck.

“She's by the phone,” said the inspector from Halifax, coming up behind them and shaking hands with Oddie. He seemed to be relieved at handing the case over. “We think that may have been how she was surprised. She seems perfectly fit, but there was no great evidence of struggle—just some strands of rope under her fingernails, which luckily were fairly long. The phone was put back—he even seems to have turned off a saucepan of milk in the kitchen.”

“Tidy muderer.”

“There's a pane missing in one of the sitting-room windows, and some dirt on the sill. Doesn't look awfully convincing to me.”

“You think he came through the door?”

“That would be my bet. Either it wasn't locked, or he had a key—probably the latter, since he tried to fake a break-in. But you'll make up your own minds about that. We'll be finished in twenty minutes or so, then we'll do some routine things that we can do in the village or from HQ: see if we can chase up any relatives, see if anyone was seen around last night. Ah—they're coming for the body now.”

When the men with the stretcher had removed the livid remains of the elegant body that had been Lydia Perceval, and when the technical men from Halifax had packed up their little boxes and their cameras, Mike Oddie looked at Charlie.

“Blank sheet,” he said. “Let's go round and see what impressions we get. Ask if there's anything that puzzles you.”

So they went their separate ways around the study, then into the living room, the kitchen, and upstairs to the unrevealing bedrooms. It was, perhaps not surprisingly, the room where they had started, the study, that told them most.

“Charles the tenth,” said Charlie, bending over a pile of typescript on a table
beside tie desk. “Our Charles will be the third when his time comes. Who's Charles the tenth?”

Mike came over and looked at the early pages.

“ ‘The last king of France,' ” he read out.

“I thought that was Louis the sixteenth,” said Charlie, with a vivid downward chop of the hand.

“No, there was a restoration after Napoleon,” said Mike. He read on. “Then another revolution in 1830, fallowed by Louis Philippe, who called himself King of the French, not of France.”

“So now I know,” said Charlie.

He went over to the bookcase set on its own under the window, full of volumes in pristine condition.

“Her books,” he said.
“Horatio and Emma—
that's Nelson and Lady Whatsit, isn't it?
Richelieu, Richard II, Lawrence of Arabia—
wouldn't you need Arabic to write that?”

“I think an awful lot of people have managed without” said Oddie.

“Byron, Frederick the Great—
talented lady.”

“Yes they're a varied bunch. And look at all those paperback editions—American ones too. And translations. Looks like she must have made a packet.”

Charlie turned away from the stuffed-full bookcase and peered at a framed photograph on the wall.

“Who are Tweedledum and Tweedledee?” he asked.

“Oh, I've seen that photograph before,” said Oddle, coming up behind him. “It's very well known. It's George V and the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas the whatever.”

The two gazed gravely at the camera, the modest and successful constitutional monarch, the disastrous autocrat. The lower part of both their faces was covered by thick but neat beards. It was impossible to tell them apart.

“Like as two peas,” said Charlie.

“There was a book of hers you missed out on,” said Oddie.
“The Girlhood of the Last Tsarina.
A slim volume—looked older than the rest. Maybe her first go.”

“Russian too? She must have been a marvellous linguist.”

“No, the last Tsarina was a German princess, that I do know. She became more Russians than the Russians, but it counted against her in the First World War. Lydia Perceval probably had French and German, like most people of her generation. She'd have had to manage medieval French, though, to write some of those books.”

“Later on she went for men, didn't she? I mean to write books on. Particularly strong, magnetic men.”

“Ye-e-es. That does roughly seem to be the pattern, though I suspect also subjects whom she thought people might get interested in, who had had no biography of themselves written in English. Well, what general impressions have you got?”

“General?” Charlie sat himself down, sprawling, in a chair and thought. “A dominating sort of person, though perhaps subtle about it. She commands her space rather than just lives in it. It's a
distinguished
house, but it has no cosy, lived-in feel to it: everything has its place, everything in its place.”

“Except perhaps here,” Oddie pointed out.

“Yes—the study seems the centre of the house, and here the research has token over, making a bit of a mess, though no more than you might expect—it's ordered mess, really.”

“Anything else?”

“Conservative with a small c. Probably with a large C too, with her admiration of strong men. Writes in longhand, beautifully clear, then types it up. All the china was traditional in design, all the ornaments in good, old-fashioned taste. Curtains and furnishings good quality but far from modern. A spinster's home, wouldn't you say? A very self-sufficient person.”

“Yes—and some of the guest bedrooms didn't feel as if they'd been used in years. But there was that picture of two boys.”

“That was ages old,” Charlie pointed out. “Boys don't dress like that these days.”

“One of them is this naval chap.” Oddie pointed to the photograph on the bookcase. Charlie got out of his seat and strolled over to look at it again.

“Doesn't he think he's the cat's whiskers!” he said derisively.

“Hmmm. Doesn't look entirely comfortable to me. There's an element of play-acting or perhaps bravado there. You haven't mentioned the three sets of plates and cutlery in the dishwasher.”

Charlie hadn't mentioned them because they hadn't struck him as having any significance.

“Breakfast, lunch and dinner?” he hazarded. “Sorry, I didn't look all that closely.”

“Nobody eats full meals three times a day these days,” said Mike.

“You should talk to some of the body-builders I know.”

“I think you can be quite sure, Charlie, that Lydia Perceval didn't go in for weight-training. Actually one of the plates had traces of scrambled egg on it.
The other two were big meals, and there were three dessert plates—ice-cream, I think.”

“Right,” said Charlie equably. “I missed that. She had someone in for a meal, either at mid-day or in the evening.”