Death of a Perfect Mother Read online

  (It can’t do any harm, not telling him. No good Brian priming Debbie to hold her tongue and me blabbing it out. Stick to one plan. Then if it comes out, as it probably will, it will just look like the devoted family sticking together. It won’t look suspicious. Christ! The idea of Lill the Peacemaker, though!)

  ‘I’m wondering—’ said McHale cautiously—‘I’m trying to get an idea of what sort of a woman your mother was. Do you think you could try to sum her up for me?’

  (Careful: those cold blue eyes, watching me. Don’t make the mistake of overdoing it. None of the ham stuff. Only pull out some of the stops.)

  ‘I suppose everyone thinks their Mum is something special, don’t they?’ said Gordon slowly. ‘Anyway, all I can say is, ours was to us. She was a very warm person, very vital. She was so outgoing you always felt it when she was around. The rest of us don’t amount to much. But everybody in Todmarsh knew Mum. She’ll really be missed around here!’

  (A slut, a loud-mouthed, vulgar slut who ruined my life.)

  When Gordon had been thanked, and the wintry eyes had simulated understanding and sympathy, he was shown out. In the outer office he told the constable who had driven him down that he preferred to walk home. As he made his way along, very slow, hunched over (with grief, for all anybody knew), he went over in his mind the interview with McHale. On the whole he felt he had got things right. Fred had been established as feeble and foolish, he himself—and the rest of the children—as besottedly devoted. Any suspicion there might be about people in Lill’s personal life had been directed outwards: at Wilf Hamilton Corby. Even at his wife. And they were rich bastards who could look after themselves. Any road, he’d done his best. The only possible problem was Debbie. Well, if she wanted to muck things up, that was her affair. She wasn’t a girl to listen to reason, and she’d have to bear the consequences. In any case, nobody could seriously suspect a sixteen-year-old girl of killing her own mother. Could they?

  • • •

  Brian, heavy-handed, heavy-hearted, took Lill’s knick-knacks one by one from the back of the sideboard and began to restore them to their rightful, Lill-ordained places. The little brass windmill, the plaster duck with the cheeky expression, the model of Anne Hathaway’s cottage. And all the pots and plates from Tunisia, with their sharp, pressing associations—the sun, the leafy gardens around the hotel, with their orange and lemon trees, and the loose-bowelled birds overhead; the endless beach, with Lill in her two-piece holding court, surrounded by sellers of rugs and sun-hats, toy camels and earthenware pots, sitting at her feet, dark, doe-eyed and teasing, delighting in the polyglot sparring before bounding off to more profitable prey: the German couples, pumped full of heavy food and deutschmarks. And Lill, lying back on the beach, holding her nasty little vase or plate and announcing which of the vendors she fancied.

  Brian looked around the room. Now everything was back, down to the dreariest little pot, the price Lill willingly paid for five more minutes’ attention. The room had returned to normal, Lill had resumed her sway. Brian felt he had been appointed keeper of the Lill Hodsden Memorial Museum. To put the thought out of his mind he went up to talk to Debbie.

  Debbie had mostly kept to her room since Lill’s death—almost as if she were still locked in. As if to emphasize, in fact, that she had been locked in, and no one had lifted a finger to help her. Or perhaps she did not care to mingle with the family and join in their grief, real or pretended. At any rate, she was not going to be hypocritical: she was not grief-stricken and she was not ashamed. She kept insisting on this to herself. She lay on her bed, exaggeratedly casual, reading a Harold Robbins.

  ‘Hello, Debbie.’

  ‘Hello.’ Debbie went on leafing through her blockbuster from double-cross to rape, exaggeratedly calm, taking no notice of her brother. Her dark brown hair fell down untidily over her sharp, passionate face. One day Debbie would be a beauty; even now she was the sort of schoolgirl one noticed, wondered about. She turned another page, and cupped her chin in her hands. Brian knew perfectly well she was not reading.

  ‘About the police . . .’ he began.

  She looked up. ‘Dishy, wasn’t he?’ she said.

  ‘I thought he looked rather stupid,’ said Brian, allowing himself to be sidetracked.

  ‘That too,’ said Debbie.

  ‘But about when he talks to you: we thought—’

  ‘Oh yes? Have you been concerning yourselves with me down there? That’s nice. That’s heart-warming.’

  ‘—we thought it would be best if you didn’t mention that little trouble between you and Mum.’

  ‘Little trouble? You mean when she half knocked my block off?’

  ‘Well, all the more reason for not mentioning it.’

  ‘I don’t know what it’s got to do with you lot, but if the copper doesn’t bring it up, I won’t.’

  ‘But if he does—’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell him, of course. Why not? I’ve got nothing to lose.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that. The Inspector seems to think it was some kind of mugger, but if he hears there’d been trouble in the family it’ll direct his attention here. And after all, you wouldn’t want that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t I? Is he supposed to think we were all devoted to her? Well, I wasn’t.’

  ‘Now, Debbie—’

  ‘Were you, Brian? Were you?’

  Brian swallowed. ‘Of course I was. We all were. And all we want is to find out who did it. That’s why we don’t want to give a false impression.’

  ‘That’s what you do want to give. If you go round spreading the idea that Lill was loved by all who knew her, they’re never going to find out who did it. Perhaps that’s what you want, at heart. Well, I’m not going along. If he asks me, I’m going to tell him the truth.’

  ‘You’d be a fool to.’

  ‘Why? I was locked in this room all evening, with Fred on guard downstairs. I couldn’t have been more out of it if I’d been in Australia. I’m one person he’s not going to suspect.’

  Brian went to the window. ‘You could have climbed out.’

  ‘Through those bloody roses? I’d’ve been cut to bits. Look at my hands—see any scratches?’ She held out her hands, which were inky rather than bloody. ‘I thought of it, actually, and decided against it. If I’d managed to get down, I could never have got back up. Look out: there’d be lots of broken stems and crushed leaves if I’d climbed out and in.’

  Brian looked out. The climbing rose clearly hadn’t been disturbed. He turned back into the room, disappointed, but as his eye lighted on the door he was struck by a flash of inspiration:

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The key.’ He saw Debbie’s eyelids flicker briefly.

  ‘There was no key. Mum locked me in and took it, remember?’

  Brian went out on to the landing and grabbed the key to the next room, the double bedroom shared by Lill and Fred. ‘This house was jerry-built in the ’thirties. I bet any key turns the lock of any of the doors.’ He jiggled it about and then turned it triumphantly. ‘See! It does. This place is no Broadmoor.’

  ‘Well, so what? I was in here: I couldn’t dart out and get one of the other keys.’

  ‘You had one in here in readiness, I bet. None of us ever locks the bedroom door, so it wouldn’t be missed. The last time one of these was locked was—what? two years ago, and then it was you being locked in, just like last night. Mum locked you in because you’d been at her make-up. I bet you’ve had one of the other keys in here all that time, in case it happened again.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  ‘I bet the police could. By examining the locks and keys. Scratches and that.’

  ‘Are you going along to them to suggest it? You’re the one who’s promoting the idea of the idyllically happy Hodsden family, remember. Anyway, if the subject comes up in future, I’ll be able to say that if the key of Lill’s bedroom has been used in my lock, it’s because you just tried it out.’ Brian looked down at the
key in his hand in dismay. ‘You really are the lousiest detective. Now go away and leave me alone.’

  ‘Look, Debbie,’ said Brian, coming to sit down on the side of the bed, ‘all I’m trying to say is this: your alibi’s not foolproof by a long chalk. You’d be a fool to dub yourself in by broadcasting all the family dirt. If you do that you’ll do none of us any good. Nor Achituko either, for that matter.’

  Debbie blinked again. It was clear she had not thought of Achituko. She thought for a while. ‘Well, I suppose I won’t say anything. But you needn’t think I’m going through with all this disgusting pretence—’

  ‘What pretence?’

  ‘That we were all devoted to Lill. One big happy family, with her the light of all our lives. I bet Gordon’s plugging that line down at the Station now. I think it’s disgusting.’

  ‘Just so long as you keep quiet about the fight. And about how you didn’t get on with her.’

  ‘Didn’t get on! What a lovely expression! She made me puke. I loathed the sight of her. And so did you and Gordon. Didn’t you, Brian?’

  Brian jumped off the bed and headed for the door. But even as he escaped through it she threw out the query to him yet once more: ‘Didn’t you, Brian?’

  And she burst out laughing at his pale, anxious face. Then she put aside her book and lay back to think things through.

  CHAPTER 11

  BRIAN AND DEBBIE

  The two younger Hodsdens, McHale thought to himself later in the day, exhausted by his excursion into the proletariat, were clearly a cut or two above Fred and Gordon in the mental-agility stakes, but he would hardly call them intelligent.

  McHale set great store by intelligence in his thinking about the murderer. On the one hand, this killing might be a totally random piece of brutality, in which case the culprit would be difficult to spot because the field was impossibly wide. On the other, it might be a personal thing, a premeditated crime in which Lill Hodsden and Lill alone was the intended victim, and in that case he was convinced that the murderer was a deep one indeed. These two solutions had one thing in common: they demanded great intelligence and insight on the part of the investigating officer. McHale was convinced that he had them; therefore he was convinced this was a crime that demanded them. He was not a man to be content with apprehending common or garden criminals, not he.

  So, without the thought consciously surfacing, he was on the look-out for a suitable partner in a duel of brains, and he did not feel he found him in the Hodsden family.

  Brian, no doubt, was bright enough as schoolboys went, but he was hardly Oxford material, McHale decided. In addition, there was the undoubted fact that, by any standard of everyday life, Brian was ‘wet’. The word belonged to McHale’s generation and his attitude of mind, and he stuck it on Brian like a price-tag. The boy looked years younger than he was, had a confident manner which highlighted rather than concealed the fact that he was a bundle of nerves, and seemed to know no more of the world than a day-old chick. Add to that a slight frame and an air of frailness (he somehow did not seem to fit into his jeans and check shirt, and what kind of clothes were they, anyway, for someone who’d just lost their mother?) and McHale felt quite safe in marking him down in his mind as ‘feeble’, and ruling a line through him on his list of suspects.

  Brian’s account of the evening before largely confirmed that of his brother.

  ‘Well, it was pretty drunken,’ he said, pushing back a lank lock of hair with a gesture that McHale found irritating and pathetic. ‘I’m not all that used to these do’s, and I was just thinking we ought to be making it home when . . . when . . .’ He swallowed. ‘Gordon’s more the type for that sort of thing: he was the life and soul of the party—had a joke with everyone there.’

  ‘He was in the Rose and Crown the whole evening?’

  ‘Oh yes. I was watching him, because of course I felt a bit strange. They were his friends: he knew everybody and I didn’t. He probably had the odd quick trip to the loo, but that was all. Ask anyone.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Well, the same, really. I suppose I went to the loo—yes, I did, once. Otherwise I was there in the Saloon Bar, either talking to someone, or just watching. I expect some of the people there will remember—the more sober ones.’

  Like his brother, Brian was sure there had been no ructions in the Hodsden family in the days before the murder. They were not that sort of family. Like his brother, he was willing to admit (not surprisingly, since they had had a hushed, hurried consultation before he was called down to the Station) that his mother might have had the occasional flirtation with one or other of the men on the fringes of her life, though he justified this in different terms.

  ‘People’s life-styles have changed,’ he said, with that horribly unconvincing man-of-the-world air. ‘Nobody thinks twice about that sort of thing these days.’

  Not in Todmarsh? said McHale to himself sceptically. He knew his small-town England and its inhabitants. Permissiveness had not reached them, and if it did they would not know what to do with it. He also noticed Brian’s use of the phrase ‘life-styles’ and thought: pretentious little prig!

  Brian’s estimate of his mother was less breathlessly admiring than Gordon’s (they had agreed that too much of that sort of thing might arouse rather than avert suspicion), but it was equally wholehearted.

  ‘Of course, she wasn’t an educated woman at all,’ he said. ‘Probably you would have called her common.’ (It was a shrewd shot. McHale would certainly have called her common, and preened himself on that impeccable, inland revenue background that allowed him to do so. He hardly even bothered to gesture a dissent.) ‘But she had more life than a hundred more intelligent people, and she had a wonderful human understanding. Nobody could ever be dull when she was around.’ (Thank God, he thought, now I have the right to be dull.) Then he pulled himself up for a suitable summing up of Lill’s life and works. ‘She was the sort of mother who influences your whole life. She’ll always be with me.’

  He never spoke a truer word.

  • • •

  Debbie Hodsden was another kettle of fish entirely. In some ways even less mature than Brian, still she seemed to nurse some kind of inner confidence which nourished and protected her. At any rate, it was only rarely that the Chief Inspector dented her breezy front. Unlike Brian, who seemed to have shrunk into his jeans and gone too far, Debbie bloomed out of her school uniform, not so much physically, like a younger version of overblown Lill, but emotionally, as if proclaiming that it represented a stage in her life that in reality was past for ever.

  She made no elaborate show of grief for Lill. She appeared serious, sober even, but there was no question (as there had been with Gordon) of her being about to burst into tears. Her notion of the proper behaviour was to be sensible and calm, and leave it at that.

  ‘Mum? What kind of a person? Well, she was very extroverted—big voice, big personality, you know the type. I expect you can guess just by looking at her. I suppose you’d call her common.’ (McHale blinked at the repetition. On reflection he decided to feel flattered at being the type of man who inevitably would call Lill Hodsden common.) ‘Well—that’s what she was, all right. But a lot of people like that.’

  ‘You got on with her all right?’

  ‘Oh yes, we jogged along. Of course, most girls have problems with their mothers —’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Well, they get jealous of their growing up. It sort of dates them, you know. Makes people think they’re past it. So we had a few argie-bargies about my wearing make-up, modern clothes, and that sort of thing.’

  ‘I see. Nothing worse than that?’

  ‘Oh no. Just the normal.’

  ‘You say she resented your growing up. Do you mean she liked to think she was still attractive to men?’

  ‘Well, of course. Naturally. Everyone wants to think they’re still attractive to the other sex. I expect you like women to notice you, don’t you?’ She launched a provocati
ve smile at him.

  ‘We weren’t talking—’

  ‘I was. Obviously you wouldn’t like women to think you were past it.’ McHale choked with annoyance. He had no wish to be compared with Lill, either in age or in inclinations. ‘Anyway, the answer is yes. She liked men. She could attract them too—a certain type. No harm in that, so long as Dad was happy.’

  ‘And was he?’

  ‘So far as I know. I don’t think he even noticed . . .’

  ‘Was there much to notice?’

  ‘Well, I’m not saying she was Cleopatra or anything. Still, he could have asked questions about all those visits to the Corbys. And I’d have kept my eye on that Guy Fawcett next door. He’s been pinching my bottom since they moved here, and making some pretty direct propositions. Still, what the eye doesn’t see . . .’

  ‘You’re quite sure he suspected nothing?’

  Debbie shrugged. She felt no inclination to fight for any member of her family. None of them had fought for her. ‘Never gave any sign, that’s all I’m saying. Not a great one at registering emotions, my dad.’

  McHale decided on the direct approach.

  ‘You seem to have a sort of mark . . . a little bruise, by your left eye.’

  Debbie rubbed it unconcernedly. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It wasn’t the result of some . . . quarrel?’

  ‘Good Lord no. What makes you think that? I was bending down in the bathroom to pick up the toothpaste, and when I straightened up I caught my head on the edge of the bathroom cabinet. It hurt like hell.’ She laughed. ‘I told them at school I’d been fighting with Mum. It made a good story.’

  McHale felt a spasm of frustration pass through him. The cunning little minx! Covering herself in advance in every direction! But he’d pin her down soon enough.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ he said easily. ‘You were upstairs, weren’t you, when the news of your mother’s death was brought to your dad. Had you been there all evening?’

  ‘That’s right. I was doing my homework. I had a French essay to write.’