Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman (3 page)

It was one subject at least on which he could be eloquent, doubly so because it was Kitty’s car. They talked knowledgeably about sports models all the way to Comerford, and when she pulled up at his own door in the village the return to his ordinary world and the shadow of his familiar routine startled him like a sudden blow. Those few minutes of utter freedom and ease with her were the end of it as well as the beginning. He had to be thankful for a small miracle that wouldn’t drop in his lap a second time. He climbed out slowly, chilled by the fall back into time and place, and stood awkwardly by the door on her side of the car, struggling for something to say that shouldn’t shame him by letting down the whole experience into the trivial and commonplace.

“Thanks awfully for the lift home.”

“Pleasure!” said Kitty, smiling at him. “Thanks for the lift you gave me, too. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather shed my blood with.”

“Are you sure you feel all right?” was all he found to say.

An end of muslin was protruding from Kitty’s sleeve; she pulled it experimentally, and it came away in a twisted string, shedding a scrap of lint on the seat beside her. They both laughed immoderately.

“I feel fine,” said Kitty. “Maybe I had blood pressure before, and now I’m cured.”

An instant’s silence. The soft light from the net-curtained front window lay tenderly on the firm, full curves of her mouth, while her forehead and eyes were in shadow. How soft that mouth was, and yet how decided, with its closely folded lips and deep, resolute corners, how ribald and vulnerable and sad. The core of molten joy in Dominic’s heart burned into exquisite anguish, just watching the slow deepening of her valedictory smile.

“Well, thanks—and good-bye!”

“See you at the next blood-letting,” said Kitty cheerfully, and drove away with a flutter of her fingers to her brow, something between a wave and a salute, leaving him standing gazing after her and holding his breath until the blood pounded thunderously in his ears, and the pain in his middle was as sharp and radical as toothache.

But she saw him again earlier than she had foretold, and in very different circumstances; and the blood in question on that occasion, which was neither his blood nor hers, had already been let in considerable quantities.

THE LATEST OF Alfred Armiger’s long chain of super-pubs, The Jolly Barmaid, opened its doors for business at the end of that September. It stood on a “B” road, half a mile from Comerford and perhaps a mile and a quarter from Comerbourne; not an advantageous position at first sight, but old Armiger knew what he was doing where making money was concerned, and few people seriously doubted that he would make the place pay. Those who knew the beer baron best were already wondering if he had any inside information about the long-discussed by-pass, and whether it wouldn’t, when it eventually materialised, turn out to be unrolling its profitable asphalt just outside the walls of the new hotel. It was seven months now since he’d bought the place and turned loose on it all the resources of his army of builders, designers and decorators, and everyone came along on the night of the gala opening to have a look at the results.

Detective-Sergeant George Felse of the County C.I.D. wandered in off-duty out of pure curiosity. He had often admired the decrepit stone-mullioned house and regretted its steady mouldering into a picturesque and uneconomic slum. Two old ladies had been living in it then, and like so many ancient sisters they had died within days of each other, leaving the place unoccupied for almost a year before their distant heir decided to sell and cut his losses. There was nothing else to be done with a place of such a size and in such a state; the only question had been whether he would ever find a buyer. But he had; he’d found Alfred Armiger, the smartest man on a bargain in three or four counties.

It still made no sense to George, even when he pushed open the new and resplendent Tudor door and walked into a hall all elaborate panelling and black oak beams, carved settles and copper-coloured glass witchballs. He estimated that ten thousand at least must have been sunk in the restoration, and he couldn’t see how Armiger was ever going to get it back, short of shifting the place bodily on to the main road, which was liable to tax even his formidable powers. Even if he could continue to fill it as he’d apparently filled it to-night, which was very doubtful, it would still cost him more to run, with the staff he’d need here, than he’d make out of it.

It was certainly lively enough to-night. In the crowded public bar on the left, lantern-lit and period down to the fire-dogs in the hearth, George recognised most of the Bohemian population of Comerbourne, more especially the young ones. Ragged beards and mohair sweaters gave the place the texture of goats and something of their pungent smell. In the two small lounge-bars on the right the eighteenth century had been allowed a toe-hold, and there were some nice brocade chairs and some comfortable couches, and a fair number of the more sober county posteriors were occupying them. The dining-room seemed to be doing a considerable trade, too, to judge by the numbers of white-coated waiters who were running backwards and forwards for drinks to the saloon bar. Most of them seemed to be strangers to the district, probably newly recruited for this house. He saw only one whom he knew, old Bennie from the White Horse in Comerbourne, no doubt transplanted here for his local knowledge. It would pay to have someone about the place who knew all the celebrities, and all the nuisances, too.

They were a mixed bag in the saloon bar, neither big shots nor Bohemians. The big room had been virtually rebuilt, and Tudorised with a monstrously heavy hand. The ceiling beams were too low and too obtrusive, and hung with far too motley an array of polished copper, much of it shamelessly new. Armiger always knew exactly what he wanted, and if he couldn’t get it in period he’d have it manufactured specially, even if it involved some surprising anachronisms. But at least the customers were genuine enough here, farmers, tradesmen, travellers, local cottagers and workmen, and scattered among them the occasional county elder who still preferred this kind of company.

George inched his way patiently to the bar and ordered a pint of mild, and a blonde with a topknot like the Prince of Wales’s feathers and long pink finger-nails set the pot in front of him and informed him with a condescending smile that tonight everything was on the house, with Mr. Armiger’s compliments. Hence the crowd, he thought, though the evening was yet youngish, and no doubt hundreds more would get wind of the party before closing-time. When drinks were free George stopped at one, indeed if he’d known he would probably have deferred satisfying his curiosity until another night, but he was here now. And the spectacle was undoubtedly interesting. More than half the members of the Borough Council were somewhere in the house, and a good sprinkling of the more widely scattered County Council, too. Armiger crooked his finger and people came running, but how many of them out of any love for him? You wouldn’t need the fingers of both hands to count ’em, thought George, one would be enough.

He was carrying his pint pot to the most retired corner he could see when a heavy hand thumped him on the shoulder and a voice resonant and confident as brass, but tuned as truly as brass, too, bellowed in his ear: “Well, well, my boy, is this an honour or a warning?”

Speak of the devil, and his bat-wings rustle behind you.

“Don’t worry,” said George, turning to grin over his shoulder at the man who had bought him the beer. “I’m off duty. Thirst brought me in on you. Thanks for this, I wasn’t expecting it. Cheers!”

Armiger had a whiskey in his other hand; he hoisted it to George and downed it in one quick swig. Not a tall man, hardly medium height, but built like a bull, shoulder-heavy, neckless, with a large head perpetually lowered for the charge. He ran head-down at business, at life, at his enthusiasms, at his rivalries, at everyone who got in his way and everything that acquired a temporary or permanent significance for his pocket or his self-esteem. He was dark, with thinning hair brushed across his sun-tanned scalp, and the short black moustache that bristled from his upper lip quivered with charged energy like antennae. His bluish chin and brick-red cheeks gave him a gaudy brilliance no matter how conservatively he dressed. Maybe he’d consumed a fair quantity of his own wares, or maybe he was merely high on his pride and delight in his new toy, and his ebullient hopes for it. Come to think of it, it was very improbable that he ever got tight on liquor, he’d been in command of it and manipulated his fellow-men by means of it too long to be susceptible to it himself at this late stage. He glittered with excitement and self-satisfaction; the bright, shrewd eyes were dancing.

“Well, how do you like my little place? Have I made a good job of it?”

“Terrific,” said George reverently. “Do you think it’s really going to pay for transferring the licence out of the town? Looks to me a costly house to run.”

“You know me, boy, I never throw money away without being sure it’ll come back and bring its relations along. Don’t you worry, I’ll make it pay.”

He slapped George on the back again with a knowing grin, and was off through the crowd head-down, big shoulders swinging, distributing a word here and a handshake there, and radiating waves of energy that washed outward through the assembly and vibrated up the panelled walls to clang against the copper overhead. Self-made and made in a big way, Alfred Armiger; many a lesser mortal had been bowled over in that head-down charge to success. Some of the casualties were here to-night; more than one of the looks that followed his triumphal progress through his Tudor halls would have killed if it could.

“He’s in high fettle,” said a voice in George’s ear. “Always is when he’s been walking on other people’s faces.” Barney Wilson of the architect’s department slid into the settle beside him, and spread lean elbows on the table; a long, saturnine young man with a disillusioned eye. “Don’t take too much notice of me,” he said with a wry smile, catching George’s curious glance, “I’m prejudiced. I once had hopes of taking this place over myself, pulling down the rubbishy part of it and making the rest over into a house for my family. I still grudge it to him. What does he need with another hotel? He has more than he can keep count of already.”

“Biggish job for a private man, restoring this place, the state it was in,” suggested George, eyeing him thoughtfully.

“Biggish, yes, but I could have done the necessary minimum and moved Nell and the kids in, and taken my own time over the rest. And the way sales trends are running these days, a place this size and in that sort of state was the only kind of place I had a chance of getting. Everybody wants a modern, easy-to-run semi or bungalow, they fetch fantastic prices everywhere, but these bigger properties are going for next to nothing. You can’t run ’em without servants, or so everyone supposes, and they cost the earth to maintain. But the maintenance would have just been my job to me, and Nell was raised on a Welsh farm, she knows all about managing a lot of house-room with a minimum of effort. Oh, we thought we were in. I’d even started drawing plans for my conversion, believe it or not, I was that confident. What a hope! The minute I clapped eyes on his man at the auction I knew we’d had it. If it hadn’t been for him we could have got the place for the reserve, nobody else wanted it.” He gazed glumly into his beer and sighed. “But no, he had to snatch it from under our noses and turn it into this monstrosity. You can expect anything of a man who’d turn The Joyful Woman into The Jolly Barmaid!”

“Is that what it used to be called?” asked George, surprised and impressed. “I never heard that.”

“I’m well up in the history of this house, believe me. I read it up from the archives when I thought we were going to live in it. It was a pub, for centuries before it was used as a private house, and that was the sign—The Joyful Woman. Lovely, isn’t it? Goes right back to about 1600. And before that it was a private house again, and before that, until the Dissolution, it was a grange of Charnock Priory. But now it’s The Jolly Barmaid, and that’s that.”

“Business is business, I suppose,” said George sententiously.

“Business be damned! He’s willing to run this place at a loss rather than let his son have any part of it, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

“Was his son going to have some part of it?”

“He was coming in with me. We put together all we could raise between us to bid for it. We were going to convert the barn into a studio for him and Jean, and Nell and I and the kids were going to have the house. You know the barn? It’s right across the yard there, beyond where he’s laid out the carpark. It’s stone, built to last for ever. It would have made an ideal studio flat. But somehow his loving father got to know about it, and he thought a few thousands well spent to spite his son.”

The Armiger family quarrel was no news to George, or indeed to any native of the Comerbourne district. It was natural enough that Armiger, self-made, ambitious and bursting with energy as he was, should intend his only son to follow him in the business, and marry another beer heiress who would nearly double his empire. Natural enough also, perhaps, that the boy should react strongly against his father’s plans and his father’s personality, and decline to be a beer baron. The story was that Leslie wanted to paint, and most probably the rift would have been inevitable, even if he hadn’t clinched his fate by getting engaged to a humble clerk from the brewery offices instead of falling in with his father’s arrangements for him. Variations on the theme were many and fantastic from this point on; what was certain was that Leslie had been pitched out of the house without a penny, and the girl had either left or been sacked, and they had married at a registry office as soon as they could. Once married they had dropped out of sight, their news-value exhausted. What was news was that Armiger should still be pursuing them so malevolently that he grudged them even a home.

“There must have been a limit to what he was prepared to throw away in a cause like that,” suggested George mildly. “He likes his money, does Armiger.”

Wilson shook his head decidedly. “We went to our limit, and he was still as fresh as a daisy. Maybe he does love his money, but he’s got plenty of it, and he loves his own way even more.”

“Still, Leslie shouldn’t have any difficulty in getting credit, with his expectations—”

“He hasn’t any expectations. He hasn’t got a father. This is final. And believe me, the news went round fast. They know their Armiger. Nobody’s going to be willing to lend money to Leslie, don’t think it. He has the thousand or so he got from his mother, and what he can earn, that’s all. And can you think of anyone round these parts who’s going to ally himself willingly with somebody on whom Armiger’s declared total war?”

George couldn’t. It wasn’t just the money and power that would frighten them off, it was the sheer force of that ruthless personality. There are people only heroes would tackle, and heroes are few and far between. “What’s young Leslie doing?” asked George. Come to think of it, that made young Leslie a hero; and starting heavily handicapped, too.

“Working as packer and porter and general dog’s-body at Malden’s, for about eight pounds a week,” said Wilson bitterly. “He’s never been trained to earn his living, poor devil, and painting isn’t going to pay the milkman. And a baby on the way, too, so Jean will have to give up her job soon.”

Armiger had erupted into the saloon bar again, sweeping newcomers towards the free drinks, dispensing hospitality in the grand manner. They followed the compulsive passage of the cannon-ball head through the crowd, their eyes guardedly thoughtful. He seemed to have a party with him now, he was busy seating them in a far corner of the big room.

“Parents usually come round in the end, however awkward they may be,” said George without too much conviction.

“Parents, yes. Monoliths, no. Leslie never had but one parent, and she died nearly three years ago, or she might have ventured to stick up for him when the crash came. Not that she ever had much influence, of course, poor soul.”

Wilson was craning to see past undulating shoulders to the group in the far corner, and the passage of a waiter with a loaded tray had just opened a clear corridor to the spot. Others were equally interested in the spectacle. A woman’s voice said dispassionately: “Vulgar little monster!” and a man’s voice, less dispassionate, murmured: “So that
was
Kitty’s red bus I saw in the car-park. I thought there couldn’t be two like it round here.”