Death of a Perfect Mother Read online

  ‘And it took you all the evening? You didn’t go down for a snack? Or to watch something on the telly—there was a Francis Durbridge on.’

  ‘The television?’ Debbie queried, as though she were rebuking him. ‘No. I don’t watch much television. That’s mostly for old people.’

  ‘Ah! That puts me in my place, doesn’t it? So you stayed in your bedroom all evening. And then your dad came up, didn’t he, and told you about your mum. He didn’t call you down. That seems a little odd, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Well, naturally, he wouldn’t want me to hear in front of all those coppers, would he? What’s odd about that? Did you think my dad wouldn’t have that much delicacy?’

  She had neatly checkmated him. There was no possible follow-up to that put-down. In spite of which, clenching his teeth, McHale told himself that Debbie was not a girl of any great intelligence.

  • • •

  McHale had made a home-life for himself that was hygienic and orderly. His house —’sixties neo-Queen Anne—on the outskirts of Cumbledon was rather more pretentious than his income at the time of acquiring it had warranted: it had been bought in the expectation of that promotion which, in its unduly laggardly way, had eventually arrived. By now its garden was stocked with evenly trimmed box hedges, like plump guardsmen; its paths were as if drawn with a schoolboy’s geometry set; its flowers flourished and faded in the appropriate seasons—or else.

  His wife was an admirable helpmate. She admired him very much. She entertained the right people when he suggested it, and served better wine than they were used to with conventional dishes she knew they liked. The children were well disciplined, and taught to be demonstrably affectionate to their father when he came home. If they said cute things during the day, Sheila McHale taught them to say them again in the evening to their father, so that he felt he was the first to hear them, and could repeat them next day on duty. As a housewife she fulfilled all the expectations he had had when, after due consideration, he had asked her to marry him. The house was always spotlessly clean and seemed to run itself, and she had a wonderful repertory of meals suitable for a man who came in at all hours and needed to feel cherished.

  When he arrived home that night he went upstairs to kiss the kids goodnight (they woke up specially), and then he settled down to a good casserole which somehow was not overdone. Afterwards he expanded on the sofa, a brandy on the table by his right hand, his wife snuggled temperately up beside him.

  ‘How’s this new case?’

  ‘Oh—’ he paused for due consideration—‘not over-exciting, perhaps. But interesting in its way. Ordinary housewife, cheap as dirt; middle-aged, but still something of a looker. Lively—something of a hot-pants too.’ He smiled apologetically to emphasize that he was using the language of her world, not of theirs. ‘The question is: was it someone who knew her, or was it just plain murder in the course of robbery?’

  ‘Did she have much on her?’

  ‘Don’t know yet. That’s one of the interesting points. In any case, if it was a sort of mugging, it’s not likely the murderer would know. She made a bit of a show, in a cheap and nasty kind of way. He may have been taken in by appearances and expected more than he actually got.’

  ‘Not enough for murder, though, you’d have thought?’

  ‘You just can’t say these days. They’re kinky, these young people: they start in on someone, then they go the whole hog. Not like the old days, when they had the fear of the rope in front of them.’

  McHale always talked of ‘the fear of the rope’ rather than ‘hanging’. It had a poetic ring.

  ‘Is that what you think happened?’

  ‘Well, on the whole, yes. And if that’s the case, there’s not much we can do but wait till he tries it again—apart from chasing up all the possibles on our books and keeping an eye on them.’ His good-looking face crinkled in thought, and he took a sip of brandy. ‘But it would be fatal to rule out the other possibilities. You’ve only got to look at the body—’ his hands sketched vulgar curves, and his wife smiled sympathetically. ‘There’s no mistaking the type. Something of a handful: dyed scarlet hair, bags of make-up, slapped on, dirt under the nail varnish.’ Sheila McHale shivered dutifully. ‘Exactly. I wouldn’t employ her as a char. But she’d be attractive to some. And she’d know how to work on them, get what she wanted. I’m on to one of them already—though the poor bloody fish of a husband seems not to have caught on, and it’s been going on for years. There may have been others.’

  ‘Sounds a nice type.’

  ‘Mmm. By the look of her she’d be something of a troublemaker, to boot: I’d be very surprised if she wasn’t cordially loathed by the neighbours.’

  ‘What about the family? What you’d expect?’

  ‘Pretty much. Hubby works in the parks, eldest son works at the shipyard. Not a good class of murder at all.’ He smiled as if he had made a joke. ‘And they were all well and truly under her thumb.’

  ‘You don’t see them as suspects?’ She was very good at knowing the track of his thoughts and following them; she was accessory after the fact to all his wrongful arrests, and there had been one or two. McHale screwed up his mouth.

  ‘Hardly. Dim as hell, frankly, and spineless into the bargain. And mostly they’ve got alibis of a sort—not watertight ones, but the sort of natural, normal ones that are better in a way.’ He suddenly had a thought. He should have asked Fred details of the television programmes he said he had watched between eight-thirty and ten. Before he had a chance to talk to anyone else. He put the thought from him.

  ‘Well,’ said his wife. ‘It sounds rather a sordid little murder.’

  ‘Oh, it is,’ said McHale. ‘Still, it is my first, apart from the odd manslaughter where there was no reasonable doubt. I should be able to get some mileage out of it. I’m looking forward to getting in with the neighbourhood. I bet there were some suppressed hatreds at work there. Lill Hodsden would have put some backs up, that I’m sure of.’

  He smiled in anticipation. His wife, looking at him, thought how handsome he looked. She did not see that touch of heaviness in the face that had made Brian Hodsden pronounce McHale a stupid man. She would never see it.

  ‘Yes,’ her husband repeated. ‘I think I’ll enjoy talking to the neighbours.’

  CHAPTER 12

  FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS

  A murder in one’s immediate vicinity is a sort of test: a test of the dead person; a test of the family of the corpse; a test of the neighbourhood. Suddenly, dormant characteristics are highlighted, rugs are snatched away to reveal the dust that has been shovelled beneath them over the years.

  In Windsor Avenue and the surrounding streets, in the houses of plywood tudor and the bungalows of super-beachhut design, first reactions were to whisper about it over back-garden fences: ‘Isn’t it terrible?’ or ‘I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard.’ The last of these was true enough: no one expects murder in the vicinity, unless they live in the hinterlands of savagery, in Kampala or New York. But ‘terrible’ was to be interpreted loosely: ‘shocking’, or ‘stunning’—not anything implying grief, or that Lill’s end was undeserved.

  That was the immediate reaction. It was quite soon superseded by the question of what one said about the family, or—more vitally—how one behaved to them. At first people said: ‘It must be awful for them,’ rather as if it hadn’t been awful for Lill. But when they thought about things, weighed up all the circumstances, they rather wondered about the Hodsdens. It wasn’t a nice thing to have a murder in the family—‘nice’ to be interpreted as respectable, or socially acceptable. And then—of course Lill must have been killed by one of these muggers you’re always reading about, and why wasn’t something done about them? . . . On the other hand, if she hadn’t . . .

  After the first couple of days, people who met one or other of the Hodsdens in the street tended to gabble quick condolences, and hurry on.

  This tendency was increased when Chief Inspector McHale and hi
s subordinates came among them, probing, prying, asking about Lill, about the Hodsdens, and about their own relationships with the afflicted family. It was exciting, everyone would have been affronted to be left out, but there again, it wasn’t really respectable. You had to pretend you’d found it unpleasant. After a while opinion on the point definitely hardened: they remembered that the Hodsdens, after all, were foreigners. And one and all they had always said that they were a funny family . . .

  • • •

  Gordon Hodsden met Ann Watson in Todmarsh High Street on Saturday morning, before the first wash of generalized sympathy had totally receded. Not that Ann Watson was affected by tides of sentiment in Windsor Avenue: aloof, remote, she wandered through her daily round never letting herself become part of any community, neither at home nor at the school where she taught. But even she was not quite sure how to behave to Gordon Hodsden. There is nothing for it on these occasions but to take refuge in cliché.

  ‘I was awfully sorry to hear—’ she said, not feeling it necessary to specify. ‘It must have been a terrible shock to you all.’

  ‘It was,’ said Gordon. Hypocrite! he said to himself. Liar! ‘Somehow Mum was the last person you’d expect that to happen to.’

  ‘Yes, she was,’ said Ann Watson. Hypocrite! she said to herself. Liar!

  ‘Of course I know you had your disagreements with her—’

  ‘Oh—nothing. A silly little thing. Best forgotten.’

  ‘—but what I really meant was not that everyone loved her, because I know they didn’t, but that she was so bursting with life and energy. And suddenly, just like that, it’s all gone.’

  Gordon, in his cautious way, was trying to soften down the picture of himself as a fatuous admirer of his mother’s talents and charms. Ann Watson did not help him very much.

  ‘It’s particularly bad for you, because you were such a close sort of family,’ she said.

  Gordon felt he had to take another tentative step towards self-liberation. Oh, I don’t know about that. Pretty much like most, I suppose. We had our ups and downs. Still, give Mum her due: she didn’t interfere much. Let us go our own ways.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Ann Watson, with just a trace of upward intonation.

  ‘I mean in our personal lives and that . . . We went our own ways, got our own girl-friends . . .’ Ann Watson blinked twice at that, and confirmed Gordon’s suspicions of what the row with Lill had been about. Christ, he thought, if I ever make it with her, it’ll be against all the odds. ‘At any rate,’ he said, ‘one way or another the neighbourhood’s going to miss her.’

  ‘She certainly made an impression,’ agreed Ann. Gordon grinned cryptically, to tell her they really shared the same opinion on his late departed mother.

  ‘She didn’t give the place tone,’ he said, ‘but she did give it a bit of life. And Todmarsh could do with all the life it can get.’

  ‘What will you do now?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Now she’s gone. Will you leave the place?’

  With a sudden shock of panic Gordon realized that he had not begun to think in those terms. He had to face it: Lill’s death was a beginning, not an end. He felt bewildered, adrift. But he squared his shoulders and made an instant decision.

  ‘No, I don’t plan to move on, not yet awhile,’ he said. ‘My roots are here. I expect for a bit we’ll go on as we always have. Only we’ll have to get used to Mum not being around. It’ll take time.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Ann. ‘It’ll take all the time in the world.’

  Somehow that was not the way Gordon had hoped the interview would end. He did not want Ann Watson to compare in her mind his loss of a mother with her loss of a husband.

  • • •

  Along Windsor Avenue Miss Gaitskell—she whose arse had been so rudely assaulted in words by Lill Hodsden on her last trip down to the shops of Todmarsh—had a satisfying posthumous revenge by inviting Inspector McHale in to have ‘just a small glass of sherry’ and telling him just about everything she knew about the Hodsdens. The sherry was South African, but the gossip was the real McCoy.

  She fussed over him, massive in shape but birdlike in manner, sometimes putting her head on one side as the insidious suggestions flowed out, sometimes bending forward over their glasses and letting fly with the brutal truth.

  ‘Of course, everyone was always sorry for Old Fred—it’s funny, he’s always called that, even by his own children I believe—but when it comes down to it, he’s a poor fish. I like a man to be a man, I must say. Underneath I think everyone does, don’t you agree?’ McHale assented confidently. ‘And of course, that’s what’s intriguing everyone.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The difference.’

  ‘Difference?’

  ‘In Old Fred. He’s a new man since she died. Well, half a man. He’s like an extra who’s suddenly been given a line to speak. Why? Do you think that underneath he’s relieved?’

  ‘I’ve known it like that before with devoted husbands,’ said McHale. ‘Though it doesn’t usually last.’

  ‘No. Very wisely put. He’ll be as dim and lost as ever within six weeks. Or married again to the same type. Still—intriguing. Then there’s the Other Man in her life.’

  ‘Ah yes-’

  ‘You know already, I see. How, I wonder? The family told you, perhaps? Who? The boys? Gordon knew it couldn’t be kept under cover, I suppose. Well, Corby’s been looking like death warmed up since Thursday. He’s talking of closing the yard and retiring to a cottage. A cottage not too far from a pub, I imagine. You’ve talked to him already, I expect?’

  ‘Just on the ’phone—about when she left the house that night. I’ll be going back to him, inevitably, when I’ve pinned down exactly what sort of relationship there was between him and Mrs Hodsden.’

  ‘You could ask him about the colour TV the Hodsdens have—and probably lots of other things she’d screwed out of him that we haven’t heard about. She told someone she was thinking of getting a car, and you can be sure it wasn’t Hodsden money was going to buy it. There is no Hodsden money, I know that for a fact. They blew what little they had buying that lump of a son out of the army.’

  ‘Were there any other boy-friends, would you say?’

  ‘Hmmm. Probably. But I’ve no evidence. If a guess is any use to you I’d say try Achituko and that Guy Fawcett.’

  ‘Akki-?’

  ‘Achituko. From the Coponawi Islands—Pacific, you know.’ Her big body softened, as if she became sentimental at the thought of Todmarsh’s token black. ‘He’s a nice boy; exceptionally polite. Still, you wouldn’t expect good taste from someone like that, not our taste, would you? And I’m sure there’s something with him and the Hodsdens. Fawcett’s only moved into the road in the last year. The sort of man who makes respectable women itch to have a good wash. Put that type next door to a Lill Hodsden and the result is as predictable as strikes next winter.’

  ‘I’ll certainly keep them in mind,’ said McHale, fixing her with his gaze of professional appreciation. ‘Is there anyone who had cause to hate Lill Hodsden, would you say, around here?’

  ‘Well, we none of us liked her. None of us had cause to.’ Miss Gaitskell blushed slightly as the insult to her posterior came back to her mind. ‘When she was in a good mood she was tolerable for five minutes. When she wasn’t—we scattered! I know for sure she had a row with Mrs Carstairs.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Because she was muttering to me about it next day. We were comparing notes. She’d had Lill Hodsden up to the ears. But she wouldn’t make it clear what the row was about.’

  ‘Anyone else who hated her?’

  Miss Gaitskell’s eyes sharpened, as she hazarded a guess that had nagged at her mind all day: ‘You could try the family,’ she said.

  But McHale did not bite. ‘I’ve seen the family,’ he said. ‘At the moment I’m more interested in the neighbours.’

  So Miss Gaitskell filled his glass, and resuming her birdlike s
tance told him more and more about the neighbours, though she would dearly have liked to wonder aloud about the Hodsdens. But at the end McHale was well satisfied with his morning’s work. He could not have picked his informant better. Obviously an ex-postmistress had ways peculiar to herself of finding things out.

  • • •

  Guy Fawcett, home at midday and looking for all his burly frame oddly gaunt, turned out of his front gate and walked along Windsor Avenue to the brown painted house two doors down. Uncertainly, for him, he trailed down the stone-dashed side path and knocked tentatively on the back door. He wasn’t looking forward to this. Mrs Casey, square, black and off-putting, opened the door and eyed him sourly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, er, Mrs Casey, we haven’t actually met, but I’m Guy Fawcett from number eight.’

  ‘I know,’ muttered Mrs Casey sepulchrally, as if the lack of formal introduction had not stopped her marking him down for damnation in her little black book.

  ‘I wondered if we could just have a little talk about a certain matter . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Could we go inside, do you think?’

  ‘I’ve nothing to say that can’t be said on my own doorstep.’

  ‘Yes, well, I have. Please . . .’ She gazed at him with the flames of hell lividly present behind the arctic grey of her eyes. Then she stood silently aside. Guy scuttled past her into the kitchen, and wedged himself gracelessly into a kitchen chair. Mrs Casey stood by her back door and waited.

  ‘It’s this business of what went on . . . what you saw the other day . . . Tuesday . . . in the garden,’ said Guy Fawcett, stumbling over his words and becoming even sweatier and nastier than usual. He hadn’t behaved or felt like this since his headmaster had been more than usually insistent on hearing precisely what he had been doing with little Sally Foster in the boys’ lavatories after school-time. Mrs Casey, like his headmaster, had an impressive line in silence, and gave him not an inch of leeway.

  ‘Of course it didn’t mean anything . . . what you saw. Just a bit of silly fun. Meant nothing at all. But I’d be glad if you didn’t mention it to the police.’