Death of a Perfect Mother (11 page)

It seemed as if Fred couldn't keep himself quiet. He said greedily: ‘What did the bugger strangle her with?'

‘Probably wire,' said McHale with reluctance and some distaste. ‘A length of wire. There may have been some sort of makeshift handle on the ends, so he could grip it better.'

Brian felt sick. In fact, all but Debbie looked green. Lill had been garrotted. They shifted uneasily in their
chairs and gazed at the floor.

‘Well,' said McHale, putting on an expression of deep sympathy and beginning to collect his things together. ‘There's nothing much I can say, is there? You have my deepest sympathy, but the best service I can do for you is to get the chap who did it, as you say. I'm afraid I'll have to talk to you all later, at the Station. I don't think at the moment there's anything more I can do here.'

‘Will we be able to get the funeral over soon?' said Debbie suddenly.

McHale shot a quick, surprised look at her, then smoothed over his features into their habitual officially bland expression. ‘I'm afraid that won't be possible until after the inquest. I hope that won't be too long hence.'

‘Awful to think of her lying there—like that—in that morgue,' said Fred mournfully, wiping away a feeble tear. ‘That's what's worrying our Debbie—isn't it, Debbie?'

After a pause Debbie nodded. It was half the truth. Until Lill was buried, burned, disposed of away from mortal sight, she still had a horrible marginal existence. She was still
here.
Debbie wanted her underground. Then her liberation would be complete, and she could begin the business of life, unshackled . . .

‘I'll call you in, then, when I want you,' said McHale, ‘and I hope you'll all be thinking about this, trying to put your finger on something that might be of use to us.' He once more indulged in his sweeping look around the assembled Hodsdens and their ineradicably lower-middle-class front room, then took himself self-importantly out. Left on their own, they looked at each other, feeling somehow truncated, and found they had nothing to say. Finally Fred cleared his throat and said: ‘Well, we'd better all lend a hand with the breakfast, and then I'll be off to work.'

‘Oh, for God's sake, Fred,' exploded Gordon. ‘You
don't go to
work
on the day your wife dies!'

Fred looked bewildered. It was Friday. A working day. What was one to do if one didn't go to work? ‘I suppose I could prick out those petunias out the back,' he said.

• • •

Where were they to talk? Over breakfast—interrupted by policemen coming in and out of the back door and marching all over the house on odd errands—the problem exerted both Brian and Gordon, and they threw significant glances in each other's direction over Debbie's scrambled eggs. A strange fear gripped the two of them: they felt watched, spied on, overheard; they felt like Embassy officials in Moscow, walking in the parks to escape ubiquitous bugs in their offices. Where could they go? In the house the police were everywhere. They could hardly go for a walk without attracting comment. If they went into the garden, even, what would people think—that slimy bastard Fawcett from next door, for example—at the sight of the two of them strolling up and down the path in low, urgent conversation?

In the end it was eleven o'clock, when the police infestation of the house had somewhat abated, before the pair of them, obeying a silent signal from Gordon, could disappear to the bedroom and begin to thrash the matter out.

‘If you could talk French,' said Brian, ‘we wouldn't have this difficulty.'

‘Cut it out. If I could talk French so could your common-or-garden policeman. And what the hell would he think if we started jabbering away in Frog? Come to that, I didn't notice you were so bloody fluent when we were in Tunisia. You never wanted to translate, I remember.'

Tunisia.

‘Anyway,' continued Gordon, ‘there's no problem now. Any copper comes up those stairs and they'll creak to high
heaven. This house was jerry-built before we were born and it's housed Lill for twenty-five years or more. That would wreck the Tower of London. You can hear every goddam thing everybody does.'

‘We don't want it to look as if we were conspiring, getting our stories right,' said Brian obstinately.

Gordon sat forward in the little bedroom chair, shoulders hunched, intense, blazing: ‘For God's sake, what is this? We're not guilty, remember? Why the hell should we get our stories right? All we have to do is to say to the police what we were going to say . . . tell the truth.'

‘Which?' said Brian, still with a mulish expression on his face. He stood by the little fireplace in the bedroom, boarded up, and with a pathetic little electric fire set in the boards, a useless crusader against the mists and damps of winter. He looked down at it, the long straight lock of hair coming forward as usual over his eyes and making him look even younger and more defenceless than he was.

‘Look,' he said: ‘we plotted. We intended to do it. We wouldn't want that known. Right?'

‘Of course we wouldn't want that known. Why the hell should it be? There's only you and me know.'

‘All I'm saying is, we've something to hide. For example, you must have been in the bog in that pub timing yourself for hours, I'd imagine.'

‘Didn't you notice I'd gone, then?'

‘No. To tell you the truth I forgot all about it.'

‘My God, what a partner you make,' groaned Gordon in disgust. ‘Well, I was there thirteen minutes. You don't say anything about that, natch.'

‘All right, then. But you see what I mean. I
feel
guilty. It doesn't matter that we didn't do it. Morally it's the same.'

‘You've got too much bloody imagination. And what's all this about morality? If I plan a murder again I'll get a
partner who's all solid muscle and a head six inches thick. You do bugger all, and then you get eaten up with guilt. Forget it, for Chrissake. For all we've done to the contrary, Lill would still be alive now.'

‘Just,' said Brian.

‘Well, don't you forget it. That policeman's going to be giving you the once-over. I don't want you blubbering and saying “we planned it, Mr Grouser, sir; we're morally guilty.” Remember: we've done
nothing,
boyo.'

‘OK. But somebody did. Somebody got in first. Don't you even want to know who it was?'

‘Some day I might. As of now I just want to get through the next few days. Devoted son mourning his much-loved Mum. After that, I might like to find out. If it was some mugger I'd like to bash his face in. Doing me out of my fun.'

Brian flinched, then left the mantelpiece and came over to him. ‘Some mugger—OK, that will be all very convenient. But what if it was our Debbie? Or old Fred?'

Gordon let out the beginnings of a raucous laugh, then arched his body forward and choked it in his lap.

‘Our Fred! He couldn't chop a worm in half with his spade without botching the job.'

‘Debbie, then. She hated Lill's guts. More than us.'

‘If she did it, she's acting in a damnfool way this morning. Asking about the funeral, and all that!'

‘Debbie's like that. She can't hide anything.'

‘Well, she'd better start learning, if she's going to go around knocking people off. She'll find herself in some bloody reformatory with a matron the spit image of Lill.'

‘Look, face up to it, Gord. What are we going to say? Are we going to put on the grief-stricken act, or are we going to be honest about her?'

‘Oh, for God's sake, of course we're not going to be honest about her. Do you think people ever are when there's been a murder? Do they all troop along to the
Station and say “I hated her guts, I admit, but I didn't do it”? We're the devoted sons. Everybody thinks so. Lill thought so. We're broken-hearted, like old Fred: all we want is for them to catch the bastard who did it.'

‘OK. All I'm saying is there's some pretence.'

‘The
same
pretence we've been going on with for years.'

‘Debbie knows we hated her.'

‘Telepathy, that's all. She couldn't swear to it. Why would she want to? If she knew who'd done it, she'd be all over him like a rash in pure gratitude.'

‘If she didn't do it herself.'

‘Well, if she did she'll have to look after herself. We've got enough to do worrying about us.'

‘You see? It's not that simple. You're starting to act guilty yourself.'

Gordon glowered at him, and banged out of the room. As he ran down the stairs a policeman in the hall looked up at him, curious, speculating.

• • •

Down at the Todmarsh Station, Chief Inspector McHale—sleek and complacent in his recent promotion, a new honour which, like most other things that had ever happened to him, had gone straight to his head—unbent sufficiently to talk over the case with the local man. Haggart was older, wiser, but unused to cases of murder and inclined for that reason to defer without cause. McHale had wandered distantly among the local men drinking their coffee and stuffing thick sandwiches, but now he had come to rest by the window, gazing contemptuously at the little patch of garden worked by the Todmarsh force in their spare time, with its neatly marshalled beds and paths, lawful and orderly. He pursed his lips at the dirty window, and paid little attention to the lower ranks.

‘How did the family impress you?' Haggart asked.

‘Pretty ordinary collection,' returned McHale, without
pausing for thought. ‘Cut up, as you'd expect, and saying some silly things, just like everybody does at this sort of time. Perfectly run-of-the-mill lot. Nothing out of the way there.'

‘The second boy's at Grammar School, going on to the University, they say,' said Haggart. McHale merely raised his eyebrows and continued staring out of the window. ‘You're not inclined to suspect one of them, then?'

‘Not unless I get any evidence that points in that direction,' said McHale confidently. ‘You told me this morning they were thought of as a pretty devoted little family. Why should I suspect them?'

Haggart shook his head. ‘No obvious reason. Still, I had the impression there was
something.
The mother—the dead woman—had a bit of a reputation.'

‘Really? Well, no doubt I'll be learning plenty about
that
in the next few days. What sort of reputation?'

‘She was rough. The loud, vulgar type—irritated most people . . .'

‘Shouldn't have thought the family were sensitive plants,' said McHale with a superior smile.

‘I think she'd slept around a bit in her time—without the husband being aware.'

‘I suppose that sort of thing makes a bit of a stir in a small town,' said McHale, still oozing city complacency. ‘Well, I'll keep it in mind. No doubt this
could
be a straightforward family killing. On the other hand, it could be a simple robbery with the killing thrown in for kicks. You've no idea how much of that there is these days—and the devil's own job it is to pin it on anyone. Then again, as you yourself said, she wasn't liked.'

‘Most folk around here couldn't stand her guts. She touched a nerve, you might say.'

‘I know the type, believe me. I expect the family will be able to help us there—who particularly disliked her, and so on.'

‘If they know. In a way they'd be the last to hear. I don't suppose Lill—Mrs Hodsden—realized herself. She sort of sailed through life, if you know what I mean. Full of herself, she was, and never gave a damn about what anyone else said or thought. If anyone gave her a piece of their mind, it would be like water off a duck's back.'

‘It would get through to the family, though,' said McHale, with his usual congenital confidence. ‘Children at school, and all that. I've no doubt they know just who had reason to loathe the mother. I expect when I come to talk to them I'll get a great deal out of that family.'

A sergeant spoke up from the back of the room, undaunted by McHale's air of remote authority, like royalty visiting the other ranks' canteen:

‘Those two boys were up to something, up in their bedroom. Chattering away like magpies. One of them started to laugh, and then choked it down. I heard them from the hall.'

Chief Inspector McHale turned and looked at him for a moment, and then said: ‘When you're a little older, Sergeant, you'll know that people behave in a funny way when there's a death. They don't tiptoe round and talk in hushed whispers as they're supposed to. And a murder's no different—worse, in fact. There's a lot of tension there, waiting to be released.'

The sergeant's mouth had set firm at the snub. Haggart rushed in to cover over: ‘So you don't think of the Hodsdens as murderers, then?'

‘In my experience,' said McHale, ‘the first things a murderer needs are brains and guts. I wouldn't have said any of the Hodsdens had either in sufficient quantities.'

And nodding in a positively lordly manner, he left the recreation room to take up the threads of the investigation. No one in the room was to know that this was his first proper murder investigation, and indeed he himself had managed to put that fact totally out of his mind.

When all is said and done, thought Fred, painstakingly buttoning the cuffs of his shirt, being interviewed by the police was a bit of excitement. The whole thing was terribly upsetting, quite horrible, and yet—a sensation of heat in his bowels made him aware that he was thrilled at being at the centre of a real-life sensation. He put on his shabby old grey suit and looked out at the police car by the side of the road outside. It was there to take him to the Station. He caught sight of himself in the bedroom mirror and was shocked to see something like a smile on his lips. He composed his face into an expression of extreme depression. Grief was beyond him, outside his emotional range. He thought: Poor old Lill; she'd have enjoyed all the fuss. She always liked a bit of life.