A Charitable Body Read online

  Praise for

  Robert Barnard and His Mysteries

  “One of the deftest stylists in the field.”

  –THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “A master of the form.”

  –THE DENVER POST

  “Apart from the technical mastery, what makes a Barnard mystery a delight to read is the wry insight and asides tossed out by his characters. . . . Delicious moments of reflection . . . make a reader loath to reach the final pages.”

  –THE WASHINGTON POST

  “You can count on a Barnard mystery being witty, intelligent, and a joy to read.”

  –PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  Robert Barnard, the internationally acclaimed Diamond

  Dagger–winning crime writer, dissects family bonds at

  their best and worst in this stunning novel of suspense.

  What an honor—to become trustee of an English stately home museum. Yorkshire Detective Inspector Charlie Peace’s wife, Felicity, is initially thrilled when she’s asked to join the board that oversees Walbrook Manor, an eighteenth-century mansion that’s now part of a charitable trust. She’s in for some surprises.

  With its shabby salons and drafty hallways, Walbrook shows signs of the financial burden it caused its recent owners, members of the related Quarles and Fiennes families, known more for feuds than for affectionate familial ties. They are known also for shadowy intrigues, great and small, some of which may emerge now that Walbrook and its archives are open to the public. The revelations could be devastating . . . and dangerous.

  Rupert Fiennes and Sir Stafford Quarles represent two lines of Walbrook’s lords of the manor. Rupert seems relieved to have relinquished the estate to charitable hands, while Sir Stafford clings with perhaps unseemly pride to his position as chairman of the Walbrook Manor Trust Board. A tentative peace reigns, but when the wreck of a car and the remains of a body turn up in a nearby lake, it soon becomes clear that one of Walbrook’s grimmest secrets may date to the years between the two world wars and may involve something much worse than mere malice.

  With police resources focused on more timely cases, Charlie and Felicity are left to discover that old sins are never forgotten, that “family” means more than a slot on the ancestral tree, and that sometimes there can be a good reason for murder.

  Suspenseful, witty, and, as always, superbly insightful, A Charitable Body shows acclaimed master of mystery Robert Barnard at his clever best.

  ROBERT BARNARD is the winner of the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Nero Wolfe Award, as well as the Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards. An eight-time Edgar nominee, he is a member of Britain’s distinguished Detection Club. In May 2003, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for sustained excellence in crime writing. His most recent novel is A Stranger in the Family. A graduate of Oxford University’s Balliol College, Barnard was for many years a professor of English in Australia and Norway. He lives with his wife, Louise, and their animals, Durdles and Peggotty, in Leeds, England.

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  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  Also from Robert Barnard

  A Stranger in the Family

  The Killings on Jubilee Terrace

  Last Post

  A Fall from Grace

  Dying Flames

  The Graveyard Position

  A Cry from the Dark

  The Mistress of Alderley

  The Bones in the Attic

  Unholy Dying

  A Murder in Mayfair

  The Corpse at the

  Haworth Tandoori

  No Place of Safety

  The Habit of Widowhood

  The Bad Samaritan

  The Masters of the House

  A Hovering of Vultures

  A Fatal Attachment

  A Scandal in Belgravia

  A City of Strangers

  Death of a Salesperson

  Death and the Chaste Apprentice

  At Death’s Door

  The Skeleton in the Grass

  The Cherry Blossom Corpse

  Bodies

  Political Suicide

  Fête Fatale

  Out of the Blackout

  Corpse in a Gilded Cage

  School for Murder

  The Case of the Missing Brontë

  A Little Local Murder

  Death and the Princess

  Death by Sheer Torture

  Death in a Cold Climate

  Death of a Perfect Mother

  Death of a Literary Widow

  Death of a Mystery Writer

  Blood Brotherhood

  Death on the High C’s

  Death of an Old Goat

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Robert Barnard

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  ISBN 978-1-4391-7743-3

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7745-7 (ebook)

  A

  Charitable

  Body

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  Change of Life

  “Very nice,” said Rupert Fiennes, licking his tongue delicately around his lips. “Boiled is easily my favorite way of having an egg.”

  “The easiest, anyway,” said his cousin Mary-Elizabeth rather grimly, as was her wont whenever anything even remotely connected to their new and only comparative penury came up. “Mrs. Tower always said it was a very poor sort of breakfast.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Tower was devoted to bacon and sausages, to mushrooms and black pudding,” said Rupert. “We had to have them because she enjoyed them herself. I always hated piled-high breakfasts in the army, and I hoped for something simpler when I got out. Croissants, maybe, or cold meats and cheeses. As so often, Walbrook Manor defeated me.”

  “Don’t be disrespectful of Walbrook. You know it pains me to the heart that we
have lost it.”

  “It doesn’t pain me to the heart, but I’ll try to be silent in my rejoicings in future.”

  They were just finishing the washing-up when Mary-Elizabeth looked at her watch.

  “Oh goody! There’s time to read the papers. I haven’t got to be at the vicarage until eleven o’clock.”

  “Now you see what a wonderful thing running hot water is,” said Rupert. “You’d still be waiting for the kettle to boil if we were living at Walbrook Manor.”

  Mary-Elizabeth said nothing. That was always the way to get the best of Rupert. She settled down to the bits and pieces in the Times’ Arts supplement and was well advanced with the sudoku when she checked her watch again and then hurried into the hall and put on her outdoor coat.

  “Ah, Mary. Just a word before you go,” said her cousin, coming out from his study. He didn’t speak to her as a cousin, much more like a brother, which is how she regarded him. “Got all your papers for your meeting read and digested?” he temporized.

  “We don’t have much paperwork in the Women’s Institute committee. Now what is it, Rupert?”

  “I’ve been thinking—it troubled me—about your sorrow at losing Walbrook.”

  “Well, don’t. Really, Rupert—”

  “I think sometimes you throw a pretty pink halo around the place, forgetting how horribly inconvenient it was.”

  “I am quite aware of that. I have reason to be.”

  “Of course you do. But I was wondering, would you like a position—well, a job, to be frank—in Walbrook when the place is really open to the public on a full-time basis?”

  A smile burst onto Mary-Elizabeth’s usually rather glum face.

  “I can think of nothing I’d like better. But be careful, Rupert. The other members of the Walbrook Trust Board might condemn you as wanting to keep control even when you’ve handed the house over to them. No—there’s no might about it: some of them certainly would.”

  “I’m aware of that. I will go very carefully. And you must go carefully and not try to glamorize the place’s past. There were very ugly sides to the days when our family ran the manor and almost everything around it. The Trust, quite rightly, would expect a degree of balance in how the house’s history is presented to the public.”

  “And they’d get it from me. I do appreciate how much easier life is in this flat. Everything works, everything is convenient and saves us no end of trouble. We can concentrate on what interests us, not on the grind of everyday living. So in many ways we’re both better off than we were.”

  “Of course we are. I knew you must see that,” said Rupert, his relief showing in his voice.

  “Still, this place is a bit lacking in style, history, people’s loves and struggles and dilemmas, isn’t it?”

  With that Mary-Elizabeth made her way out of the front door, being careful not to bang it.

  A few minutes later Rupert passed his cousin as she was gazing into the window of Mrs. Borden’s secondhand-book shop (OPEN THURSDAYS AND SATURDAY MORNINGS the sign said), and he stopped and broached to her what he had been thinking on his walk.

  “You know, I wonder whether instead of a job it wouldn’t be easier to get you into one of the vacant places on the Trust Board. No payment involved—but we can’t pretend we are in need of money.”

  “No . . . a place on the board sounds glorious, Rupert. We’d make a great team.”

  “Ah . . .” Rupert gave every appearance of having been caught out. “I was thinking instead of me, not in addition to,” he said, and resumed his walk to the manor.

  That was typical of Rupert, his cousin thought. He floated ideas, then shut down any discussion of them, assuming that he, and his interlocutor, needed time to sort things out in their own minds. It was a surprisingly effective way of proceeding. But this time he momentarily turned back.

  “The meeting today is going to discuss the matter of the rolling exhibitions on the first floor. At the moment the plan is for a new exhibition each year, with a wide range of topics.”

  “I’d support that,” said Mary-Elizabeth. “Something is needed to get the crowds in.”

  “The choice for the first exhibition is between one on the First World War and its poets and one on our great queen consorts.”

  Mary-Elizabeth thought for a few seconds.

  “Well, you know me: I’m a glutton for royal. But not for the first exhibition. Not serious enough. How can you be a great queen consort? And people won’t lend their royal pictures to an untried organization. I’d back the war poets. Pathos and tragedy, and the odd story of heroism. And you’d get lots of school parties. It would get Walbrook’s education department off to a good start when it is finally put together.”

  Rupert nodded and went on his way. He was impressed by his cousin’s grasp of practicalities. She would make a much better representative of the family on the board than he did. And it would give him, finally, freedom from the burden of Walbrook. It was something “devoutly to be wished”—had been for more than twenty years.

  The lawn sloped gently down to the river, with, dotted around, a shrub pretending it had grown there quite casually. Felicity would have liked to play games with Thomas—let go of the pram and then chase it, then repeat the joke. But Thomas was a serious baby and could carry for life the conviction that his mother was a potential infanticide. Quite enough crime in the Peace household, thank you. Felicity turned back into the weed-covered rose garden, enjoying a rather tentative second flowering, and then round toward the front of the house and the main entrance.

  From here the old manor house looked its best, with its plethora of windows regularly reflecting the Yorkshire sun, and Felicity was longing to go inside to see whether the interior was similarly welcoming and well planned. The early-eighteenth-century builder who had designed and delivered this house to its first owner must have had a modicum of sheer genius in his makeup.

  The notice said HOUSE OPEN TUESDAY AND SATURDAY MORNINGS. Today was Saturday, the time was eleven o’clock, but when she tried to enter, she was politely told that she could not take Thomas.

  “But I thought there was some kind of crèche for young children,” she said.

  “Oh, there is,” said the woman with an all-purpose smile, “but only for the Tuesday openings and bank holidays. That’s not very convenient for families we know, but the fact is we can’t get volunteers to staff the crèche on Saturdays.”

  “I see. I guess you’re really just testing the waters at the moment, aren’t you?”

  “We are. The house is run by a charitable trust, and the people on the governing body all donate their time. Do come back some Tuesday. Or bring your husband.”

  Felicity had to fight the suspicion that the woman saw that her husband was black (not difficult by looking at Thomas), and she assumed that he would therefore not be interested in the treasures of Walbrook Manor and could be left to mind the baby. No point in rummaging round for possible prejudices though. And at least the woman had presumed a father was in the picture. Felicity smiled and said she was sure there was plenty to see in the garden.

  She continued walking, just to familiarize herself with the setup. She knew an herb garden had once been here, and a wildflower meadow, but from that point between the manor and the car park most of what she could see was still lawn and hedgerow, and the drive leading to the main road. Some way from the main gates was a substantial block that her little guide to the estate identified as the stables—no longer used for horses obviously, and with a long, windowed extension. Certainly it was now used for something else, because cars were arriving and turning into a small, special parking area.

  Felicity watched, idly, as people walked toward the main entrance to the stables. Some smart, country people, some more scruffy ones; men in open-necked shirts, broad-beamed women in slacks. One young woman got off a bus outside the gates with a buggy and pushed her baby toward the meeting or social get-together that was obviously scheduled to go on. Felicity watched her, an
d a man who came out from a side door to the manor and started in the direction of the stables—a slim, elderly figure, impeccably dressed in dark-gray suiting, with a good head of hair, and a way of walking that gave Felicity the idea of someone walking on water. She wondered if he could be the person in charge of the museum-to-be—director, curator, or whatever. Perhaps chairman of the Trust.

  Felicity had all the time in the world before Carola, her elder child, would be finished for the day at her riding school. She decided she would wander toward the stables later and then go and find the wildflower meadow if it still existed. More to the point at the moment, which her watch showed to be close to eleven thirty, was to go to the little cafeteria that she had seen on the other side of the manor and get herself a cup of coffee and maybe a cream bun. Felicity was one of those people, almost unnatural people it was often thought, who never had to watch their weight. She had settled Thomas with a rattle in an otherwise empty café (one offering good coffee and basic cakes and biscuits obviously supplied by a local bakery chain) and was enjoying a leisurely snack when the door opened again and another woman came in—one in a similar position to herself: child in a baby buggy and a need for coffee, which she fetched from the counter before settling into a nearby table with an outlook on the sloping grass. It was the woman who had got off the bus and whom Felicity had last seen going toward the meeting. She was crying.

  Tears were rolling down her cheeks, her light makeup was smudged, and when she had had a couple of sips from her cup, she put her head on the table and Felicity heard gulps of anger or frustration.

  “Can I help?” Felicity asked, getting up and going over to her. For a moment there was no reply. “I think I saw you arriving at the stables a little while ago. Is there something wrong?”

  The woman looked up.