Fete Fatale Read online

  ‘There’s a clever boy, then . . . Now a little more . . . My precious has got to eat, hasn’t he? . . . Just one more bit of the nice chicken, and then we’ll go walkies . . . ’

  Jasper sniffed as I rang the doorbell. Poodles might like being talked to in this manner, he seemed to imply, but a rangy mongrel like himself would sooner die.

  ‘Helen!’

  As soon as she saw me, Gwen Nielson buried her head on my shoulder, drew me inside, and together we had a good, short weep. I knew she was a sensible woman. It was what I had been needing all day, though it was not something I would want to have done with many of the women in Hexton. She led me through into the living-room, where the Victorian contours of the room did not seem to conflict at all with the clean-lined Scandinavian furniture.

  ‘Such a lovely man,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you how I liked him. I just can’t take it in. It all seems so . . . so damned random.’

  The dogs were setting up a great racket, Gustave with his highspeed soprano barking, Jasper with a playful snapping at his haunches. ‘Out!’ said Gwen Nielson, and bundled them unceremoniously out into the garden.

  ‘He’s off-colour,’ she said, talking of Gustave. ‘Probably something from that damned sandwich stand yesterday. Now I shall never again have Marcus to take him to . . . Come along and sit down. I suppose that what you really want is a talk.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do . . . But I suppose what I really want is to find out who killed Marcus.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gwen. ‘But is there anything you can do that the police won’t do equally well, or better? Is it that you don’t trust the man in charge?’

  ‘No—it’s not that. I do trust him. He seems quiet and thorough. He doesn’t seem to suspect me any more than he’s bound to. Since I gather the majority of murders are domestic murders, then he’s probably only doing what statistics have laid down for his guidance . . . I know I’m sounding childish, but in fact I think I really want to do a bit of nosing around because I need something to do. Something to take me out of the emptiness of the house, the emptiness all around me.’

  ‘I know. That’s how all widows feel. It’s perfectly normal.’

  ‘By Hexton’s Victorian standards I ought to be prostrate. Overcome with the vapours and attended by some soft-footed medical practitioner who specializes in “women’s ailments”. Well, I’m damned well not going to be prostrate for them.’

  ‘Good for you. On the other hand, I still don’t see exactly what you can do.’

  ‘There is one advantage I have over the Superintendent: I know Hexton. I know it both as an outsider and an insider. I know the class divisions, I know the divide between church and chapel, I know the tensions between the locals and those of us who’ve moved here for one reason or another. And above all, I know the women . . . What did you call it? The town of the witches.’

  Mrs Nielson blushed.

  ‘Don’t remind me. What an appalling faux pas. But I think that’s an important point: a policeman would never really understand the women here, would never get to the bottom of the world they live in. To me, coming from outside, it seemed staggering—the pettiness of their lives and concerns. It’s from another century.’

  ‘It’s the women who rule in Hexton,’ I said, repeating what I had said so long ago to Marcus. ‘Petty they may be, but they have the whip hand, and they enjoy it. And it’s somewhere there that the key lies . . . The difficulty will be in getting started. At the moment everyone seems to dive down manholes, rather than meet me face to face.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re probably going right against Hexton etiquette in going out at all.’

  ‘Oh, I am. I’m quite aware of that.’

  ‘On the other hand, I seem to remember at the time when Mary Morse’s mother died . . . don’t they make calls?’ She spoke as if she were discussing the beings of another planet, dropping in on us in UFOs. ‘I didn’t, of course, on Mary, because I was too new then, and didn’t know her well. And anyway, I couldn’t quite believe that people still did such things. But they did! I remember a long procession of people went, one by one, calling on her—at tea-time, or morning coffee-time, or whatever.’

  ‘You’re right, of course. That’s what people do here.’

  ‘In that case, won’t they call on you? And won’t that give you your opportunity?’

  ‘I suppose they will call on me. Even though I try to be as little Hexton as possible. They’ll do it because of Marcus’s position—a vet is rather important in a town full of ageing people with horrible animals . . . Sorry, I wasn’t referring to you or Gustave . . . So I suppose they will, though it’s always possible that some special rule applies when murder is in question . . . I don’t think I’ll risk it. I always did like turning Hexton customs on their heads. I think I shall cause great scandal. I shall pay my mourning calls on them.’

  CHAPTER 9

  CASTLE WALLS

  I spent the first part of the next day in thought. So did Jasper. He moped. Marcus, he thought, was away, as he occasionally was, to conferences, or on a difficult case at some remote farm. Jasper, I feared, was going to mope still more before the week was out, and, with that blessed shortness of canine memory, he began to forget. I, meanwhile, had not the heart to attempt any of those tactics for cheering him up which I usually employed to keep his mind off Marcus’s absences.

  I was thinking. First of all I was wondering whether I dared to pay the first of my mourning calls that day. There were limits to my daring in defiance of Hexton custom—I was a Fabian rather than a revolutionary by temperament. Also, my embarrassed reception of the day before had made me wary. But, more than that, I was uncertain how I was to approach the crux of the matter on these visits. ‘Where were you when my husband was killed?’ spoken above the tinkle of teaspoons on bone china, seemed a preposterous intrusion, and one likely to get me nowhere at all. I could not even explain why I believed that the murderer of Marcus was to be found among the middle-class residents of Hexton whose quarrels he had spent his last days trying to dampen down. Hexton, I had no doubt, had by now fixed on one of the army boys, or perhaps all of them, as culprit. Rumour would swiftly have broadcast their inquisition by the Superintendent, and Hexton would have breathed a relieved (and self-congratulatory) sigh: it was the sort of thing they had more or less expected. ‘I always said that one day . . . ’ they would be saying to one another.

  But they were wrong, wilfully wrong. They were setting up a smoke-screen. It was they who had killed Marcus. One of them. The question was: how to manage the discussions that eventually might give me a lead as to which of them it was. I began to think that aggression, blatancy, was my only possible form of approach.

  After lunch—I was eating ravenously still—I made a concession to weakness and pain and had a lie-down. As the afternoon wore on, and I still had made no decision and lighted on no definite plan of campaign, it became imperative to take Jasper for his daily walk. Moping or not, he was a dog who kept his mind—and mine—on his few and simple needs. He perked up no end when he heard the jingle of his lead. Impelled by I-knew-not-what, we made once more in the direction of the castle.

  As I neared the place where Castle Walk began, and the little cluster of cottages around the entrance to the castle itself, I thought I had an inkling of why I had been drawn in this direction again. Castle Walk was largely shielded from the meadows, and from the lower paths along the river and past the weir, by its height and by the vegetation on its slopes. On the other hand, it went around the castle—that is, beneath its walls. How far, then, was the Walk visible from the grounds inside the castle walls? Hexton Castle was not a particularly popular tourist spot, but there are always castle buffs, and one or two of all the tourists who would be in Hexton on a Saturday in summer would be sure to feel that they had to see what there was to be seen. So tourists there would have been, around the castle somewhere, at the time when Marcus was stuck to the heart.

  I turned away from the Walk, a
nd made my way up the sloped, cobbled path leading to the castle gate.

  ‘You can’t take that dog in with you,’ said a bossy little functionary in blue. I knew that perfectly well, but in the stress of the moment had forgotten.

  ‘Why on earth not?’ I asked, preparing to argue the toss.

  ‘It’s a national monument. No dogs. Nor in the approaches. You’ll have to tie him up down there.’

  ‘Really, that’s quite nonsensical,’ I complained, approaching him. ‘What harm can dogs do? It’s human beings who damage national monuments.’

  ‘They bark, and the people around complain.’ That figured. They would. Hexton divided itself up very neatly into the doggy and the anti-dog people. I sometimes thought we should have some sort of Group Areas Act, to divide us from each other, and laws against intermarriage. The bossy little man was by now looking at me closely. ‘It’s Mrs Kitterege, isn’t it? Oh dear, oh dear,’ he fussed. ‘Well, I suppose we might make an exception . . . in the circumstances. But keep him on his lead!’

  I shot him a look that was not composed mainly of gratitude, paid my money, and walked through the gateway, set in the wall by the keep. As I walked on I knew he would have popped into the ticket-office to nudge, stare and comment. He was that sort of little man.

  My first task was to ascend to the parts of the keep open to visitors, and ascertain what could be seen from there. That was easily done. Magnificent views, but nothing of Castle Walk, which clutched to the base of the high castle walls. Almost certainly, then, if anything were seen, it would have to have been from the trimmed, grassy expanses of the Great Court, for the various ruined rooms and chapels around the Court had only slit windows, through which it was impossible to put one’s head. The lawns of the Great Court, on the other hand, stretched to the top of the castle’s walls, and visitors often sunbaked, picnicked or larked about on them.

  I walked somewhat gingerly to the far end of the Court. I am not afraid of heights, but Jasper is inclined to give sudden jerks on his lead if he sees anything that interests him. From here one got an excellent view of Castle Walk, on its first stretch from the town, but lost it as the path curved round towards the precipitous slope down to the weir, down which Marcus had fallen or been pushed. I walked carefully round the walls, as close to the edge as I could manage: at the crucial stage, the view of the path was blocked by the ruined wall of a battery. I was not surprised, or too disappointed: people who witnessed murders were inclined to report what they had seen to the police. If anyone had seen anything from the castle walls which they had not yet gone to the police with, it would have to be something they had seen before the murder—something that they had not yet realized the significance of . . . Marcus walking, Marcus meeting up with someone . . . I returned to the point on the walls from which one got a good view of Castle Walk, and sat down with Jasper, thinking and observing.

  Castle Walk was an excellent place for a stroll, for it was seldom crowded: Hexton was a small town, and the tourists tended to cling to the centre. Thus, what one saw was occasional people walking past. And thus, even on a Saturday, Marcus could be murdered, his body fall fifty feet, and nothing be observed. As I sat there, in the late afternoon sun, watching, I saw people that I knew, going past one by one: Mrs Hussein from the delicatessen, wheeling her youngest child in a push-chair; one of the Blatchley children; a woman who cleaned for Thyrza Primp; Timothy and Fiona . . .

  There was something odd about Timothy and Fiona. Well, there always was, in my opinion, but particularly today. Timothy, I knew, was on holiday from the firm of accountants where he worked; Fiona was pretty much perpetually on holiday. They came from town, holding hands, and gazing dewily into each other’s eyes. Timothy looked ahead, and coming round the curve was a teacher from Mr Horsforth’s school, one of my occasional colleagues. Timothy and Fiona sauntered on, exuding young love like an aerosol spray. As the teacher passed them, they greeted him sweetly and respectfully, then went on gazing at each other, raptly. As his footsteps receded into the distance, however, and with no one else visible along the walk, they dropped their clasped hands, moved a pace away from one another, and seemed to retreat into separate worlds, Timothy gazing intently over at the distant landscape, Fiona brooding darkly as she kicked stones into the undergrowth at the side of the path. They were not hostile, merely separate. Only as they approached the curve did a glance pass between them—much like dancers, well-versed in their routine—whereupon Timothy’s hand came out for Fiona’s, they moved closer, and then walked towards the bend in the path for all the world like two amateur actors in the wings, about to make an entrance before all their friends and neighbours in the village hall.

  ‘What a performance!’ said a dark, slightly sardonic voice a few feet from me. I turned and saw Father Battersby.

  He was standing a little behind me on the lawn, his black soutane billowing around his ankles in the light breeze, his lean, long, serious face looking concerned. His aspect was impressive, but slightly less ‘other’ than he had hitherto seemed to me. He had come to talk to me about Marcus, that I was sure, and I didn’t yet know whether I wanted to or not. I looked back to the path, where Timothy and Fiona were disappearing around the bend, taking their dewy freshness towards the murder spot.

  ‘Do you think so?’ I asked.

  ‘It must be. Young people may feel the same way about each other as they felt fifty, a hundred years ago, but they don’t express it in the same way. Neither of those two has the strength of mind or originality to start a new trend, though there’s something distinctly rum about that young man.’

  ‘He certainly does seem too Leslie Howard for words.’

  ‘I certainly won’t be asking him to run the Lads’ Brigade, anyway. But it wasn’t those two I came to talk to you about, Helen.’

  ‘I rather hoped you were just doing a tour of inspection of your new parish.’

  ‘I was, until I saw you here. As a matter of fact, I was escaping from the Blatchley children. Everyone in that house is very kind, but of course they don’t realize how exhausting children can be to an ageing bachelor.’ He sat down on the grass, patted Jasper, who was beginning to give signs that this was not what he came out for, and looked at me concernedly. ‘From what you say, I gather that you don’t want to talk about your husband?’

  I considered for a while.

  ‘I shall eventually want to talk about him—and about it, to make sense of it in some way. Oh, don’t worry: I’m not one of the sort of nutter who sees the fire in York Minster as God’s divine thunderbolt punishing heresy, and I don’t see any divine intervention in Marcus’s death. I’m not going to lose my faith, such as it is, because I don’t understand God’s purpose in this. He doesn’t have one, and this is a normal, messy, human affair. That’s the trouble. Until I’ve reduced it to some kind of order in my mind, I can’t focus on Marcus—on himself—as I want to. His end, and the randomness of it, keep getting in the way. So until the police find out who did it—’

  ‘Or until you do—’

  I looked up at him sharply.

  ‘You’ve been talking to somebody.’

  ‘Mrs Nielson did mention that you hoped to go around talking to people, perhaps getting to hear things that a Superintendent from Leeds is unlikely to be told.’

  I sighed.

  ‘However you put it, it sounds horribly Enid Blyton, doesn’t it? I ought to be ashamed—’

  ‘Not at all. My experience suggests that any activity is beneficial after a sudden loss—and yours was more horribly sudden than most. And of course you do know things about Hexton—the web of customs and conventions, the alliances and animosities—that the police could take months to get any real grasp of. I don’t think there is anything childish as such in what you propose to do. Only, be careful—’

  ‘Because she may strike again? I’ve thought of that. I’ll be on my guard.’

  ‘How can you be on your guard when you’ve already assumed it’s a woman?’


  He sounded quite exasperated by my silliness, and he did have a point. It was hardly prudent to have wiped fifty per cent of the population clean of suspicion. Father Battersby sat thinking for a moment, and then said:

  ‘Tell me, have you come to the conclusion that this was a planned murder?’

  This I had thought out.

  ‘I think it’s possible. It would be easy enough to persuade Marcus to go round Castle Walk. It was one of his favourite spots. He told me that he was finishing his stint on the Test Your Strength machine at three-thirty, so he could have told anyone, or anyone could have overheard. Easy enough to intercept him on his way home.’

  ‘Quite. And yet . . . You know, I incline to think this was a quite off-the-cuff affair.’

  ‘Do people murder off the cuff?’

  ‘I put it badly. I mean the result of a sudden impulse. After all, if it was planned, then it was a terribly dangerous and chancy murder, wasn’t it? Let us grant that the murderer had gone over this castle thoroughly, to make sure that stretch of the path was not visible from any part of it. But that committed him to that part, and only that part. Then there are the fields on the other side of the river: that part of Castle Walk is not thickly vegetated, so someone with good eyesight might easily have seen something from the fields. How could he or she be sure no one would be in view on the path? What would he have done if someone had been? Planned, it seems so unlikely. On an impulse, it seems credible.’