A Fatal Attachment (22 page)

Charlie nodded.

“It sounds awful. But are you sure he's not just saying that to justify your seeing so much of her? Some of his mates at school may have been suggesting it was a bit funny for two teenage boys to go calling on a mature lady like Mrs Perceval, and he decided to give that as his reason.”

Ted looked at him as if begging to believe him.

“Do you think that's why he's saying it?”

“I don't know. You know your brother better than I do.”

Ted's eyes dropped to the floor, but he muttered: “Yes, I expect that's why he's saying it.”

“Your parents were quite pleased at your going up there, weren't they?” Charlie asked casually.

“Yes. It meant Dad didn't have to cook for us at night.”

“And your mother?”

Ted shook his head, clearly very upset.

“Well, you couldn't say she was pleased. . . . You couldn't even say that she registered. Mum's sick. It's been confirmed she's got M.E. We go and see her, but mostly she just lies there. Seems like even making conversation is too much effort.”

“This must have been upsetting for you both.”

“Yes. Specially as Dad didn't understand at all. . . . Lydia thought our dad was a big thickie.”

And not only Lydia, Charlie thought.

“Surely she didn't say so?” he said.

“Oh no—she'd never have done that. She was too much of a lady. But somehow you knew—just a second's silence, or a change of subject . . . somehow you knew.”

“Did she understand about your mum?”

“When we'd been to the doctor's she did. But I don't think she had much sympathy with illness. I heard her describe a librarian friend of hers as ‘a poor creature.' I think she'd decided Mum was ‘a poor creature' before she knew that she was ill, and I don't suppose she changed her opinion.”

“She seems to have got her opinion across.”

“Oh yes, she did. I suppose that's because she always knew what she thought. She'd decided Colin was the brightest of us two, and she didn't hide it.”

“Didn't that hurt you?”

Ted thought for a moment.

“No, it's what I've always thought. I did once or twice mind about Mum—thought she should have been more concerned, should have backed her up, somehow—but I never minded about Colin.”

“You minded about your mum, but not your dad?”

“Well, not much. He's not helpless like my mum. And she was quite right: he's not very bright.”

“When your dad was in The Wheatsheaf on the night of the murder, you and Colin watched television for a bit, didn't you, and then you went upstairs?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have separate bedrooms?”

“Yes, we do. And we went to them. But after about five minutes I remember Colin turned on his transistor.” Ted looked straight at Charlie. “Look, I'm not saying Colin went up and murdered her. If you think that I wish I'd never talked to you.”

“I don't think that,” said Charlie, shaking his head. “I don't think a boy of that age would have had the strength, for a start.” This was something Ted had obviously not thought about, but he nodded quickly, relieved. “You're upset because you feel Mrs Perceval was kind to you, and the way Colin is talking makes it sound as if you took advantage of her.”

“Yes. And it wasn't like that, not for me. She took an interest, and I appreciated it.”

“She deserves better than Colin's reaction. But have you thought maybe she doesn't deserve your reaction either?”

Ted frowned.

“What do you mean?”

“That it's too kind, too favourable to her. It's really a pretty unpleasant business, prising children away from their parents, setting them against them
or teaching them to despise them. Whether you understood it or not, that was what was happening. Those silences and changes of subject were calculated by her. She made sure she got her opinions across without stepping over any borderline that would have shown you without question what she was trying to do. But I think you had some unconscious sense of what she was up to. And you knew it had happened in the past with her nephews. I agree she deserved better than to be treated by Colin as a milch cow for a legacy. But I wouldn't give her too much devotion either.”

Ted looked at him thoughtfully, then nodded.

“No . . . I suppose what she did for us she did for herself . . . It's funny: when we first talked to her and told her our names, she said ‘My fate!' And when we asked her later what she had meant she talked about an ancestor who was prime minister being killed by someone called Bellingham. But we weren't her fate, were we? We had nothing to do with her being killed.”

“I'm sure you didn't,” said Charlie. Not directly, anyway, he added to himself.

• • •

It was barely two when Charlie left the Bellingham semi—a couple of hours or more before Andy Hoddle could be expected home from school. He began the house-to-house enquiry he had contemplated earlier, feeling he could justify giving it two hours of his time. In some houses he was received with suspicion, at others with metaphorical open arms. When they found that the conversation led round to fancy men, via mysterious strangers, most people were anxious to contribute their item of bile about one or other of their neighbours' habits. By the end of the afternoon Charlie had identified four women in the village who were generally thought (“It's well known” was the phrase most people used) to have male friends whom they had reason to want to keep apart from their husbands. In each case the man was known, in three of the four they were men from Bly. None of them had a beard.

Charlie's only stroke of luck—which, like most luck, sprang from good judgment—came in the last house he visited. He was just into a nice piece of character assassination with Mrs Holmroyd when her daughter Julie came home from school. It was then that Charlie decided he could do with that cup of tea Mrs Holmroyd had offered him earlier on.

“So,” he said to Julie when they were alone. “I've been hearing about you from your boyfriend.”

“I don't know about boyfriend,” said Julie Holmroyd, a pretty, rather forward girl. “Anyway, he won't be for much longer. I'm looking for someone with a bit more savoir faire. All he thinks of doing is groping. I hate gropers.”

Charlie thought it was a bit unreasonable to go into the woods with an adolescent boy and then complain about being groped. But he hastened to agree with her.

“The spots are a bad sign,” he said. “You didn't get a better view of the man than Jason did, I suppose?”

“No—it was just side on. I'd never recognise him again. But I remember a bit more about the car registration.”

“You've talked about it with him?”

“ 'Course we have. No one talks about anything else. The car was an F registration, like Jason said, and there was a G and an S in the number. Something like F four six something, then AGS.”

Charlie hastened to put this down in his book.

“That's very helpful. You went down the path past the back of Mrs Perceval's cottage, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“What time would that have been?”

“Don't know. Maybe about twenty to ten . . . I stopped there for a bit.”

“Oh? Why was that?”

She looked down, with a sly but not unpleasant grin on her face.

“I thought Colin Bellingham might be there. I think he's dishy.”

“But he wasn't there, was he? He'd gone back home.”

“Yes. I saw him in their kitchen when I got to the bottom of the path . . . But I think there was someone there.”

She shivered. She knew perfectly well who this was likely to be.

“What did you see?”

“I didn't
see
anything, not clearly. The only room that was lit up was the lounge, and there was nobody there. But if you go a bit further down the path you can see the side window of the study. I've often seen Mrs Perceval working there. And when I looked back that night . . . you couldn't see much because there was no light on . . . but somebody
moved
in there. I couldn't see who it was, or whether it was man or woman, but it moved away from the window to where I couldn't see it anymore.”

Charlie heard the clink of cups being brought down the hall, and merely
whispered: “I hope you find someone with a bit more savoir faire before too long.”

After ten more minutes of tea and scandal Charlie escaped to his car and found Mike Oddie there, sitting on the radiator and smoking a rare cigarette in the sun.

“Interesting talk with Oliver Marwick,” he said when Charlie came up. “With the cottage the estate will come to between a quarter and a half million—nearer the half, he thinks. She sold well, knew her market, and had no expensive habits. Even her holidays she generally took in connection with the book she was writing, so they were tax-deductible. She felt strongly about income tax, apparently, and thought most of it was spent on people who ought to be standing on their own two feet.”

“That's a sum worth killing for.”

“Certainly. And the people we're about to visit could reasonably have hoped to inherit.”

“If the Hoddles killed her it wasn't for money,” said Charlie, and Mike Oddie nodded agreement.

“They hated her. I wonder if they're going to admit it.”

“Oh,” said Thea Hoddle when she opened the door to Mike Oddie's knock. “We were half expecting you. Come through . . . I suppose it's about Maurice?”

“Partly about Maurice,” said Oddie.

Andy Hoddle was sitting in an armchair in the living room with a pile of exercise books on a coffee-table beside him. There was about him, as there was about Thea, an air of shame-facedness and uncertainty—as if this second visit from the police was something they had expected, but had yet been unable to prepare themselves for.

“We knew we should have mentioned his being here,” said Andy, when the policemen were settled down on the sofa.

“Why didn't you?”

Andy and Thea looked at each other.

“It just happened that way . . . It would have complicated things, and it wasn't really relevant.”

Oddie decided it was time for plain speaking.

“You mean it would have brought out into the open the real relationship between the two of you, Lydia Perceval, and the boys?”

“Maybe . . . Yes. I suppose you know all about that by now.”

“We know something. Let's stick to the facts for the moment. Who was here, how long were they here, why were they here?”

“Maurice and his wife Kelly and their baby were here,” said Thea. “They came on Friday, and they were due to leave on Monday. Maurice had an interview lined up in Leeds on Monday. He'd had a tentative offer of a very good job—head of drama with Yorkshire Television. Then on Monday morning he had a phone call asking if he could postpone it till early Tuesday. He squared it with Midlands TV—said the baby had colic—and that's how they came to be here on Monday night.”

“I see. Apart from the interview it was purely a family visit, then?”

“Yes. A chance for us to get to know Kelly, whom we've only met two or three times.”

“And did you?”

“Get to know her? Yes,” said Andy, meditatively. “Interesting girl. Lots of sides to her. Not at all . . . not what Lydia took her to be.”

“Oh? And what did Lydia take her to be?”

“In a word, a slut. She'd used four-letter words the only time they'd met. I think she felt condescended to.”

“I see . . . Well, I suppose a family visit would include a trip up to see Aunt Lydia, wouldn't it?”

“Maurice went,” said Thea. “Kelly refused to. He didn't take the baby. Lydia wasn't interested in babies.”

“No, she preferred them when they got older, didn't she? Well, I can ask your son himself what happened when he went up there, but can you tell me who was where when Lydia was—possibly—killed? Say around ten on Monday night.”

“I was down here with a whisky,” said Andy. “Thea was in bed with a book. Maurice went for a drink in The Wheatsheaf. And Kelly was upstairs getting what she calls her beauty sleep—they were due off very early on Tuesday morning.”

“I see. All of you unvouched for except Maurice.”

“Yes. We made the mistake of not realizing a relation was going to get murdered.”

Mike Oddie nodded amiably.

“While your son was in The Wheatsheaf,” put in Charlie, “he was heard to say to Nick Bellingham ‘She killed my brother.' ”

“Did
he?” said Thea, obviously interested.

“Yes. Was that the view you all took?”

“It sounds a bit melodramatic, doesn't it?” said Thea carefully. “She encouraged Gavin with all sorts of glamorous visions of service life. She was a romantic at heart. She loved seeing him in uniform. Used to say he was Rupert Brooke without the fair hair. We did often feel that Gavin would have gone in for something quite different if it hadn't been for Lydia.”

“That all sounds very cool and reasonable,” pursued Charlie. “What about a gut reaction? How do you feel
here
?”

Thea's eyes went down to her lap.

“I suppose I feel she killed him,” she said.

“Right,” said Mike Oddie. “That clears the air, doesn't it? Can we talk about your relationship with your sister?”

Thea was clearly upset, and it was Andy who replied.

“It was very civilised. Thea and Lydia rang each other up periodically. If we were going past the cottage at some time when she wouldn't be working we'd drop in for coffee or a sherry.”

“How often would that be?”

“Perhaps once a year . . . There isn't much reason to go up the hill. Sometimes if she was working flat out she'd ask me to get something for her in Halifax. Then I'd normally take it up to her. Until recently I had nothing better to do, and she hated coming to this house.”