A Fatal Attachment (24 page)

Oddie decided it was time to bring him back to the present.

“You say your visit on Saturday wasn't a happy one, sir.”

Maurice was glad he had decided on honesty on that point. If Lydia hadn't said anything about it to the boys, she was pretty sure to have said something to that cleaning lady of hers. He nodded vigorously.

“Not particularly happy. Let's say it was tense. You have to remember she ruined my relationship with my parents, and that it's never quite been repaired. There always is this awkwardness between us, the shadow of my . . . treachery. Actually, having Kelly and Matthew with me made things easier.”

“Lightened the atmosphere?”

“More a case of them being a part of my life that has no connection or association with Lydia. Anyway, being with my parents, seeing them afresh as such likeable people, so innocent of wishing harm, meant that I wasn't disposed to be easy on Aunt Lydia. Meeting her in London or Birmingham was usually less tense.”

“Did your wife's view of her add to your feeling that you needn't be easy on her?”

“Maybe. Kelly's very alive to pretensions and small snobberies—of the sort that Lydia mistook for standards.”

“Perhaps you could tell us what you actually did on the evening of the murder, sir,” said Oddie.

There was a perceptible relaxation in Maurice.

“Oh, that's easy. Of course I've thought about it. We were all together, talking and watching television till something after nine. Then Kelly decided to turn in early—we were to be up at six and away by seven thirty the next morning, and she gets tired with the baby. Mum was getting ready for bed, but I thought I'd go and have a drink in The Wheatsheaf, see if any old friends from the village were there.”

“Did you ask your father to go with you?”

“Yes, but he preferred a whisky at home, because he had some teaching to look over.”

“And did you find any of your old friends in The Wheatsheaf?”

“Nobody of my own age—no old school-friends. Most of them would have left the village, I suppose. But I knew practically everyone there. The Wheatsheaf is where I had my first pint of bitter—with my dad, who was wishing he was having it with Gavin.” He smiled a lopsided smile. “Life has been a bastard to him. Anyway, I was chatting away to Syd Horrocks, who used to be the village butcher, and he was making lubricious allusions to my wife—because Kelly's visit has been a minor sensation in the village—no, a major one: they'll be talking about it till the turn of the century. Anyway, after we'd been talking a bit I realised there was this berk down the other end of the bar talking about Lydia.”

“What
time
was this?” Charlie asked.

“Well, say I went to The Wheatsheaf around half past nine—”

“You didn't meet Mrs Perceval and the boys on the way there?”

“No, I didn't. Of course I'd have stopped for a chat if I had. Well, I suppose I became conscious of this Mr—I've forgotten his name.”

“Bellingham.”

“Right. I became conscious of him say towards ten. After a second or two I remembered who he was.”

“You'd met him?”

“Not exactly met. He'd lurched over to our table when we were in the Maple Tree the previous Friday. He didn't remember me, but I remembered him. And of course I listened pretty intently as soon as I did, because the boys had come in while I was at Lydia's, and it was—well, quite an experience.”

“Yourself when young?” Oddie suggested.

“Exactly—like an old film re-run. Just the situation with me and Gavin in the seventies. Only this time, I gathered, it was the younger one who was the favourite.”

“Yes—and he seems the one who was most out for what he could get,” said Charlie.

“Really? But then Lydia was never very good at fathoming people—not people in the flesh. She never understood Gavin—as I tried to explain to her last weekend, to her great offence. Anyway, eventually I went over to this—Bellingham did you say?—and tried to warn him that small doses of Lydia might be good for his boys, but that quite soon she would try to prise them away from their parents, especially as I gathered that his wife was sick and likely to be so for a long while.”

“We hear you didn't get through to him.”

“Ah—you've talked to people about it, have you? No—not one millimetre
into his thick skull. Room for one idea in his head and that's all. Eventually I got angry, went back to the other end of the bar, finished my beer and left.”

“What time did you leave, sir?” Oddie asked.

“Oh, about twenty past ten. I was back in time for the end of the ITV ten o'clock news—they had a ‘funny' on as usual: you know, talking goldfish, that kind of thing.”

“And was your father still up?”

“Oh yes. We had a bit of a chat, quite cosy together, and we both went up to bed about eleven.”

“And did you meet anyone in the street on the way home, sir?” Charlie asked.

“Nobody that I remember. Nobody at all, I think. One or two cars went by. . . .”

“You don't remember the makes of any of them?” Charlie asked.

Maurice laughed at him.

“Give me a break! Remember the makes of cars that pass you in the night? Of course I d—”

“Arrest my 'usband, Inspector, for 'e is ze guilty man,” said a voice from the door, in execrable
'Allo 'Allo
French English. Charlie turned and his stomach churned over, along with other physical effects that made him glad he was sitting in a chair with a notebook on his lap. No wonder the advent of Kelly Marsh had been a milestone in the social life of Bly!

“My wife, Kelly Marsh,” said Maurice, getting up and going over to her. “She's here auditioning for
William and Annette
, our next year's prestige mini-series.”

“Ah, that would be William Wordsworth and the French Revolution, wouldn't it?” Oddie said, shaking the hand that Kelly had free of her baby. “ ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive'?”

“Yes. Wordsworth omitted to mention that by mid-morning you were
lucky
to be alive,” said Maurice. “God, don't I sound like Lydia? She was never a friend to revolutions. Yes, Kelly's auditioning for the part of Annette.”

“I thought eet would be good to breeng my bébé,” said Kelly, smiling guilelessly up at the policeman. “Ze innocent fruit of our illeeecit passion. . . . Who
was
this prat Wordsworth anyway?”

She was wearing a modest, calf-length woollen dress with lace around the neck, an outfit far from her usual style. However she bundled the baby into Maurice's arms and perched herself on his desk, raising her skirts to above her knees and aiming them directly at Charlie. His face may have remained
impassive but his heart started doing the one hundred metres. He noticed that Maurice was looking at his wife with an expression that could only be described as excited.

“Don't take any notice of Kelly,” he said happily. “She knows perfectly well who Wordsworth was. She's got Ordinary Level English—”

“Graham Greene and Chinua Achebe was what we did.”

“—she's even got an A level—”

“Domestic bloody Science, if you'll believe it.”

“—but she'd die rather than tell anybody because she's such a frightful inverted snob.”

“Being a slut suits me,” explained Kelly to Charlie. “Because it's closest to what I really am.”

“Did you play the slut or the A level student when you met Lydia Perceval?” Charlie asked.

“The slut, of course,” said Kelly with relish, laughing aloud and hitching her skirt an inch or two further up her thigh. “You don't think Old Mother Starch-in-her-Drawers would be impressed by an A level in Domestic Science, do you?”

“Did you meet in Bly?”

Kelly Marsh smiled, and licked her lips in reminiscence.

“No. Last weekend was my first visit. She came down to Birmingham to do a chat spot on a daytime programme. BBC, of course. Even that was rather beneath her, so she tried to convey, and we felt that she really came down to confirm that Maurice's choice of wife showed he'd gone irretrievably to the bad.”

“Which you proceeded to demonstrate,” said Maurice amiably.

“Well, the moment the old cow saw me she drew herself up, like a Victorian bishop's wife who's found out her son's married a fallen woman. Anyone would add a few ‘fuckings' to the conversation, faced with that.”

“And Lydia became glacial,” Maurice remembered. “She had no social devices she could use against that sort of thing. If it had been a child she would have known what to do, but against an adult she was powerless. She just clammed up. She was supposed to go out with us for a meal that night, but she rang later and said she was too tired.”

“Luckily I'd got something in for us,” said Kelly wickedly.

“And was that the only contact you had with her before last weekend?” Oddie asked.

“It was the only contact I had with her full stop,” said Kelly emphatically.
“You don't think I'd go up there to let Lady Sneer look down her long bony nose at me again, do you?” She smiled, with a hint of relish in her smile. “Mind you, I'd have quite liked meeting her in the street, so I could give her the full treatment again in the hearing of the locals. And the locals would have enjoyed it too. But I wasn't going to climb Mount Olympus to let her condescend to me in her own house. Maurice went on his own.”

“And at the time she was murdered you were in bed, we understand,” Oddie said.

“In bed alone, sleeping prettily like the heroine of a Barbara Cartland.”

“With nobody to vouch for you, unfortunately.”

“Only young Piss-my-nappy here,” she said, ruffling the sparse hair on Matthew's head, as he lay in his father's arms. “He was in a cot by our bed.”

“Much too young to testify, I'm afraid,” said Oddie, smiling.

“He'd have testified to my absence if he'd woken and cried—which he does all the time—and I hadn't been there to take him up,” Kelly pointed out. “No, I don't think I'd risk it, just to kill the woman who had a terrible influence on my husband fifteen or twenty years ago. That's a
terrible
motive, by the way: you wouldn't get away with that even on
Murder, She Wrote.
Or have you dreamed up something better?”

Mike Oddie had to admit that he hadn't, and got up to leave.

“I hope the audition went well,” he said politely.

“Pretty well, I think.” She jumped off the desk and clasped her hands together. “I sink I play ze pretty French bourgeoise vairy preetily. Poor leetle muzzer of William's child, abandonated by ze oh-so-respectable English poet.” She put off the accent with a wave of the hand. “At any rate I think I'll be through to the next stage, which is the best three or four. And if I get it—goodbye to Sharon the barmaid forever.”

But Charlie thought there was always going to be a bit of Sharon the barmaid about Kelly Marsh.

L
YDIA'S
funeral was a compromise, of the kind she herself had despised in life. Thea had ruled out a church funeral, knowing that Lydia had had no faith since her late teens. She had arranged to have the—not
service,
but what did you call it?—ceremony at a crematorium near Halifax. When Lydia's editor at Magister Books rang to offer condolences and enquire about the state of her final manuscript Thea conscripted him to come up and give an address by assuring him, with Robert's agreement, that he could take the manuscript away with him. Knowing Lydia had had no taste in music, and having little herself, she contacted Lydia's library friend at Boston Spa and asked her to suggest something, because she felt a funeral without music would seem odd. But the question of who was to lead the ceremony was the real problem. She didn't even consider herself or Andy, since their feelings about Lydia were so generally known. Robert was the obvious candidate, but he decisively negatived the proposal. It was as much as he would do to get along to the service, he said: funerals gave him the creeps. In the end Thea accepted the undertakers' suggestion of using the tame cleric on the books of the crematorium to officiate, so Lydia went to her rest blessed by non-denominational prayers and with bland promises of some kind of after-life that she would have scorned.

Looking around the crematorium's chapel Thea wished she had gone the whole hog and had a church service. It would at least have had a dignity appropriate to Lydia in life. And perhaps if she had arranged something in the little church at Bly more of the village would have come. As it was the chapel was sparsely filled, and the impression of an occasion unworthy of Lydia was reinforced by the chapel itself: a gimcrack affair built in the sixties with cheap wood and half-hearted suggestions of gothic about the windows.

The music was very grand, though. The “Gloria” from Cherubini's Coronation
Mass for Charles X. Grave, stately, unshowy music, with moments of radiant joy. Dorothy Eccles had been very good and had procured the record herself. Wasn't it rather long, though? Thea saw the all-purpose clergyman sneak a look at his watch, and the man from Magister Books shuffle his notes. On and on the music went, unwinding in graceful lines, speaking the unhurried certainties of another age, so that one saw the king and his attendants processing up the endless aisle of some limitlessly extended cathedral.

“At this rate we're going to keep the next corpse waiting,” whispered Andy beside her.

• • •

Charlie Peace was talking vigorously in the police canteen in Halifax when Mike Oddie touched his hand and jerked his head towards a table near the window.

“See that WPC over there?”

“WPC Bilton. What about her?”

“Her nickname for you is ‘Heavenly Peace'.”