The Red Herring (5 page)

Rutter suppressed a grin. ‘Yes, I can quite see that,' he said.

‘On the whole, I've been very lucky with my guests. One of them was learning to be a bookkeeper. Another taught the violin – though never in this house, of course.'

‘Of course not.'

‘They led quiet lives. Occassionally, if I invited them, they'd come down to the lounge to watch television with me, but most of the time, when they were in the house, they kept to their own rooms. On the whole, I've been very pleased with my young ladies.'

‘But not with Miss Beale?'

‘I thought she was going to be
highly
satisfactory at first. She has a good job at the grammar school, and one of the first things she asked me was whether there was a Baptist church nearby. I'm Church of England myself – my husband was very upright, a pillar of St Steven's, and sadly missed – but I like to be tolerant in these matters, so I didn't hold her interest in the Baptists against her.'

‘Very understanding of you,' Rutter said.

Mrs Hoddleston sighed. ‘Yes, I thought she would be the perfect paying guest at first.'

‘And what happened to make you change your mind?'

‘Mainly, it was the hours she keeps. Mr Hoddleston, when he was alive, always said that early to bed, early to rise, makes a person healthy, wealthy and wise. Of course, he never became wealthy, and he died when he was only fifty-three, but even so, he had a point.'

‘Of course he did,' Rutter readily agreed.

‘I don't expect my guests to live by the same rules I was brought up with – this is the nineteen sixties, after all – but you do still have to have certain standards, don't you?'

‘She came . . . she comes in late?'

‘She does indeed. Well after midnight, sometimes.'

‘The buses stop running at just after eleven,' Rutter said. ‘Does she have a car?'

‘Yes. A black Mini. But she often leaves it here when she goes out in the evening.'

‘So how does she get back?'

‘She's brought,' Mrs Hoddleston said, lowering her voice.

‘Brought?'

‘I hear cars in the street, just before she opens the front door.'

‘Cars?' Rutter said, pouncing. ‘Plural?'

Mrs Hoddleston looked a little embarrassed. ‘I'm not one to spy on my guests,' she said. ‘To tell you the truth, I'm usually in my bed by the time Miss Beale gets home.'

‘But?'

‘But several times I
have
got up and looked out of the window, and let me tell you, I've rarely seen the same car twice.'

‘You didn't happen to take any of their numbers, did you?' Rutter asked hopefully.

‘No, I most certainly did not,' Mrs Hoddleston replied, sounding a little offended.

‘But perhaps you noticed the make and model of some of them?'

‘There was an Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire which dropped her off a couple of times.'

‘That's a bit of an unusual car,' Rutter said. ‘Are you sure that's what you saw?'

The woman nodded. ‘Oh yes. Definitely. My brother, who lives in Halifax, has one. He drove it all the way over here once – just to show it off. Mr Hoddleston, my late husband, wasn't at all impressed. He said a Morris Minor should be good enough for anybody. And I agreed with him,' she sighed again, wistfully this time, ‘though I do have to admit, there was
something
about that Sapphire.'

‘Is Miss Beale usually noisy when she comes in?' Rutter asked.

‘Not especially,' Mrs Hoddleston said, reluctantly. ‘I mean, when the house is silent, every noise carries, doesn't it? But no, I wouldn't say that she makes more noise than most people would. It's just that I don't like to think what she's been up to until that hour of the night.'

‘So she doesn't bang into the furniture, as people do when they've had too much to drink?'

‘Certainly not!' Mrs Hoddleston said. ‘That's one thing I would
not
tolerate. But I suspect that even if she hasn't been drinking herself, she's been in places where drinking takes place.'

‘What makes you think that?'

‘When she goes out to work in the morning, she's always sensibly – respectably – dressed, but she often takes a carrier bag with her, as well as her briefcase.'

‘So?' Rutter said.

‘I thought you were supposed to be a detective. She's taking a change of clothes with her. Dresses usually. I don't specially look, but I can't help noticing. One of them I saw was purple!'

‘Shocking!' Rutter said, then, noticing the hard stare he was getting, he quickly added, ‘Do you have any other complaints about her?'

‘We share the bathroom, more through necessity than choice. I've never had any trouble with the other young ladies, but sometimes, after
she's
used the bathroom, the smell is dreadful.'

‘Perhaps she has stomach problems,' Rutter suggested.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘If she leaves the bathroom smelly––'

Mrs Hoddleston blushed. ‘Not that kind of smell,' she said. ‘If it had have been, I'd never have mentioned it. What I'm talking about is
scent
.'

‘Scent?'

‘I use a little lavender water myself. Lavender water and violet are thoroughly respectable scents for a lady to use. But what Miss Beale sprays on herself . . . well, it wouldn't be out of place in a . . . in a . . .'

‘In a house of ill-repute?' Rutter suggested.

‘Yes! Exactly! And we're not used to that kind of thing in Whitebridge, you know.'

‘Anything else?' Rutter asked.

Mrs Hoddleston hesitated for a second. ‘She changed the lock on her bedroom door,' she said. ‘None of my other young ladies have thought it necessary to do that.'

‘How do you know she'd changed the lock?' Rutter asked.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Presumably, to have made such a discovery, you must have tried to get into her room.'

‘I . . . er . . . yes.'

‘And why would that have been?'

‘I . . . er . . . noticed a spot of damp on my bedroom wall. I wondered if there was a similar problem in Miss Beale's room. She was out at school, so I thought I'd just pop in and check. My key didn't work.'

‘And did you mention it to her?'

‘I didn't see how I could, really.'

No, you couldn't, not without revealing you'd been snooping around, Rutter thought. ‘I'm afraid I have some bad news for you,' he said aloud.

‘She's not been arrested, has she?' Mrs Hoddleston asked, clearly alarmed. ‘It won't be in all the papers that she's been living under my roof?'

‘I'm afraid it might be, but not for the reasons you seem to fear,' Rutter told her. ‘You see, though we can't be absolutely certain yet, we think she may have been murdered.'

‘Oh, the poor girl!' Mrs Hoddleston said. ‘I'd never have wished that on her – but as my late husband often said, those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword.'

T
he staff room in King Edward's Grammar School was on the second floor of the original Victorian building, just about as far from the playground as was possible within the school complex. But even so, the sound of eight hundred boys expelling their surplus energy while they had the chance was enough to produce a persistent background hum like the engine of a cruise liner.

As was usual at break time, the room was full of teachers, standing in small groups and sipping cups of strong, warm tea. Unlike most mornings, however, the conversation that day did not centre on complaints about the administration or anecdotes relayed by teachers hoping to demonstrate their own prowess in the classroom. Instead, they were concerned with the man in the hairy sports jacket who had been seen leaving the headmaster's office but, as far as anyone knew, had still not left the school.

‘His name's Woodend,' said Lew Etheridge, the head of craft. ‘Local man originally, but until recently he's been based down in London. Not one of our old boys, is he, Dennis?'

‘Certainly not,' replied Dennis Padlow, the head of languages. ‘If he had have been, he'd have been a pupil here at the same time as I was, and I'd have remembered him. Besides, the headmaster in my day was Killer Culshaw, and he'd never have stood for one of his boys considering the
police
as a career.'

‘The question isn't where he was educated, but why he's here
now
,' said Martin Dove, with an edge to his voice which could have been either irritation or tension.

‘Maybe he's got a son he wants to enrol,' Lew Etheridge suggested.

‘Too late in the year for that,' Dennis Padlow said dismissively. ‘I think he's here in a professional capacity.'

‘Professional capacity!' Etheridge repeated. ‘What kind of professional capacity? As far as I know, there hasn't been a burglary.'

‘Perhaps that air-force girl has been caught shoplifting, again,' Padlow suggested.

‘The man's a
chief inspector
, for God's sake,' Martin Dove said. ‘I know neither of you have a high regard for the intelligence of the local constabulary, but even Whitebridge Police wouldn't waste a chief inspector's time investigating a case of petty larceny.'

A tall, almost gaunt, man with piercing eyes drifted up to the group, and stood uncertainly on the edge of it. ‘Have any of you chaps seen Verity this morning?' he asked.

‘No, but that's hardly surprising, is it?' Lew Etheridge asked sourly. ‘She's had more days off sick than she's had working. That's the trouble with these highly educated women. They think they're far too good to roll up their sleeves and get down to an honest day's graft.'

The gaunt man gave him a reproaching look. ‘That's hardly fair, Lew,' he said. ‘The damp climate around here doesn't suit everybody.'

‘I know it doesn't, Simon,' the head of crafts countered. ‘But I'd like to bet all her little illnesses don't stop her drawing a full pay packet at the end of every month.'

The gaunt man looked as if he was about to say more, then turned and walked away.

‘That was a bit harsh, wasn't it, Lew?' Dennis Padlow asked.

‘Well, I'm sick of her not pulling her weight,' the head of craft said. ‘And I'm sick of Simon Barnes jumping to her defence every time anybody says anything about her. If he wasn't so busy acting like a love-sick puppy whenever she walks into the room, he might start to see what I mean.'

‘Still, there was no need to be rude,' Padlow commented.

But in a way, he was glad that Etheridge had spoken as he did – because that had served to drive Simon Barnes away. And it was a view which the other members of the group secretly shared, too. There was something odd about Barnes. Not that there was anything wrong with a man having religion – they all, more or less, believed in God – but there was no need to be as intense about it as Simon Barnes seemed to be. True, he didn't ever try to force his beliefs down their throats, but whenever he was in their company they always felt as if he were judging their conversation and somehow finding it trivial and unworthy.

‘Did any of you happen to see that play on television last night?' Lew Etheridge said.

‘The one with the busty blonde in the low-cut dress in it?' Dennis Padlow asked.

‘That's the one. It was
so
low-cut that it's a wonder they didn't spill out when she bent over.'

‘If you ask me, it won't be long now before they're showing everything they've got on the telly,' Padlow said, with considerable relish.

Bob Rutter stood in a public phone box at the end of Elm Avenue.

‘How did you get on with the landlady?' Woodend asked him from the other end of the line. ‘Was she a bit tight-lipped?'

‘No, far from it,' Rutter replied. ‘In fact, I think I might have preferred it if she'd been a trifle more reticent.'

‘Reticent!' Woodend repeated, and Rutter could almost see him rolling the word around his mouth. ‘That's one of them big words – like marmalade – isn't it? So she came on a bit strong, did she?'

‘To hear her talk, you'd think Verity Beale was the original scarlet woman,' Rutter said.

‘Well, maybe she was.'

‘I don't think so,' Rutter countered. ‘Mrs Hoddleston's the kind of woman who thinks that playing marbles is a sign that you're in league with the devil and all his works.'

‘Still, she must have based her ill-founded opinion on
somethin'
,' Woodend pointed out.

‘Miss Beale seems to have had a fairly active social life,' Rutter said cautiously. ‘According to Mrs Hoddleston, she was out till all hours of the night, and it wasn't always the same man who brought her home. One of them even brought her home in an Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire.'

‘Shockin',' Woodend said, in mock horror. ‘I don't know what the world's comin' to. I really don't.'

‘You want me to pursue that line of inquiry further?'

‘You can chase up the Sapphire driver if you like – there can't be too many of them in Central Lancashire – but since I'm in the school at the moment, I'm best placed to do most of the checkin' on her recent activities.'

‘So what do you want me to do?'

‘You get yourself back to the station, an' see what you can dig up on Miss Beale
before
she decided to grace Whitebridge with her presence.'

‘No sooner said than done,' Rutter told him.

Helen Dunn had been buoyed up by the news that Miss Beale wasn't in school that morning. It wasn't that she didn't like the history teacher – she did, and sometimes she found herself desperately wishing that, despite what had happened, they could be
real
friends – but the fact that Miss Beale was away meant there would be no test, which in turn meant that she had temporarily avoided the possibility of failing to live up to her father's expectations again.