Death of a Perfect Mother Read online

  McHale sighed. That was better. That was coming cleaner. ‘That was what I suspected.’

  Gordon whirled round to face him and spoke with a low, controlled intensity: ‘The point is, can’t you do something about it?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Get him out of here. Deported or something. Away from her. Have you talked to him yet?’

  ‘Not yet—all in good time.’

  ‘You should. He and Mum had a row in the street, couple of hours before she died. He could easily have done her in, for revenge. But what I really want is to get the bugger deported. You could manage that. How long have they been sleeping together? We just don’t know. She could easily have been under the age of consent when they started. You could get him on that.’

  The idea appealed to McHale. In matters of race he had all the innate liberalism of his middle-middle-class, tax-inspecting background. He hated the bastards, and behaved to them with impeccable courtesy. Cutting short Achituko’s so-called study at this local so-called university was a notion of delicious appeal to him.

  ‘Bit early to speak of deportation,’ he said cautiously. ‘Though it’s something we could keep in mind. In fact, we could take him in for questioning and on this angle we could definitely give him the works. But I’m not sure what your interest in this is.’

  ‘What do you think? We’re going through a difficult time, but we’re a decent-enough family.’ Gordon turned his dark eyes broodingly out to sea again. ‘Now Lill’s gone most of the responsibility comes back on me. You’ve seen Fred. I’ve got to find some way to keep that little—Debbie in order. She’s not going round disgracing us by sleeping with blacks, or anyone else at her age. Christ, you must understand: don’t you have a sister?’

  ‘No—but I understand,’ said McHale. Gordon Hodsden was articulating attitudes which lay very close to his conformist heart. You didn’t hear them so much from the younger generation. In fact, he was beginning to feel a much greater respect for Gordon Hodsden, though he failed to realize this was because Gordon had changed his performance since the earlier interview. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m very grateful,’ said Gordon. And together they trudged up the wharf, watched by supplicating, terrified eyes from the windows of the shipyard offices. As they turned into the yard the eyes disappeared.

  When it became clear that McHale was not going away in his nice big car but was coming into the yard proper, Corby oozed out of his office to usher the Inspector in. He was a pathetic sight, but he tickled some little instinct in McHale which made him overlook the pathos: he never disliked the thought of an inquisition, but now he looked forward to this one with positive relish. It was the bonhomous cheeriness of Corby, trying to cover over the beginnings of a piglike sweatiness, that aroused the relish. McHale rationalized it by characterizing Corby in his mind as a savage husband and an adulterer, but he hardly believed the first, and didn’t greatly care about the second. It was Corby’s craven fear that tickled his inborn relish. He decided to play with him for a bit, catlike.

  ‘I’m sure you understand why it is I’m here,’ he said, sitting down opposite the boss’s desk.

  ‘Oh yes—perfectly.’ Corby puffed and glistened as he sat uneasily in his position of authority. ‘You have to follow everything up. I realized you’d want a bit more than just the time Mrs Hodsden left us that evening.’

  ‘Precisely. Now, you told me on the ’phone that she’d been visiting at your house.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Eagerly, with pathetic, transparent mendacity, he added. ‘Visiting the wife.’

  ‘Who is I believe an invalid.’

  ‘That’s it. Sees no one as a general rule. Not up to it. Any excitement and—whoof—she might go. That’s what the doctor says.’

  ‘Really? But Mrs Hodsden was a regular visitor, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Aye, that’s right.’ With that same fatal eagerness. ‘Devoted. Twice weekly. Regular as clockwork.’

  ‘No excitement from her, then.’

  Corby squirmed. ‘No. She was a marvellous sick visitor. Knew just the right tone to adopt. Soothing, like.’

  ‘Really? Odd. I haven’t had the impression of Mrs Hodsden as an exactly soothing figure.’

  ‘Adaptable. Surprisingly adaptable,’ said Corby, oozing another layer of sweat.

  McHale sat back in his chair, a dangerous half-smile lurking in the corners of his thin mouth. ‘Tell me, Mr Corby, is your wife’s illness a mental one?’

  ‘Mental? Good Lord no. Well, of course, it involves a lot of mental suffering . . .’

  ‘It’s just that your wife tells me that she never in her life set eyes on Mrs Hodsden.’

  Corby exploded into weak man’s rage, and shambled to his feet clutching his collar. ‘Tells you? When—? How—?’ He sank back in his chair, as if exhausted by all the tension. ‘The bitch. How did she—?’

  ‘Never mind that, Mr Corby. I think I’ll do all the asking of questions. Perhaps you’d better decide to answer them truthfully this time, eh?’

  Corby settled muttering in his chair, and looked at the inkwell, a picture on the wall, anywhere but into McHale’s face. ‘You’d no call to go behind my back and talk to her first,’ he muttered, as if there were some obscure cricketing rules attached to police investigations.

  ‘I’m very glad I did,’ said McHale, that half-smile now more openly decorating his handsome, heavy face. ‘Though frankly it doesn’t seem as if your relations with Lill Hodsden were any great secret. Half the town seems to have known.’

  ‘Oh, if you listen to the gossips—’

  ‘Are you denying there were sexual relations between you?’

  ‘Denying? ’Course I’m denying it. You’ve seen my wife: she’s no companion to a man. Lill Hodsden came round to see me to chat—give me a bit of womanly sympathy.’

  ‘Frankly, my impression is that womanly sympathy was no more Lill Hodsden’s line than soothing invalids. You’re not ringing true, Mr Corby.’ McHale leaned forward and started raising his voice. ‘You certainly paid well for this womanly sympathy, didn’t you?’

  ‘Paid? Who said anything about paying?’

  ‘I did. I don’t just mean money, either. That we might have difficulty tracing. But that colour TV—that’ll be child’s play to track back to you. And then there was talk of a car—’

  ‘I bought her no bloody car.’ Corby looked at his inquisitor with anguished indignation. ‘If you ask me, a second-hand colour TV wasn’t much to pay for all her kindness.’

  ‘And if you ask me I’d say that brooch you gave her was a good deal too much.’

  Corby jumped six inches out of his seat. ‘Brooch? Who said anything about a brooch?’

  McHale sighed, as if Corby were an antagonist unworthy of him. ‘Mr Corby, I know you gave Lill Hodsden a brooch from your wife’s jewel-case not an hour before she died.’

  Wilf Hamilton Corby’s pudgy, heavy face was brilliant with sweat by now, and he seemed on the verge of crying. He began twisting his shoulders in anguish as if trying to find a physical answer to the question of which way to turn. ‘Well—what if I did? It was just a trinket—nearly worthless. She’s never in a condition to wear them now.’

  ‘How do I know it was worthless? Since it’s disappeared we can’t check that.’

  ‘Disappeared?’ Wilf Corby seemed outraged. McHale kicked himself. He should have tested Corby to see if he knew it was not on the body. As always with lost opportunities in his investigations, he smoothed it over, hid it even from himself.

  ‘No doubt we can check that with your wife. She—I suspect—will know exactly what was in the jewel-box, and how much the missing piece was worth.’

  ‘You’d believe her? Any old cracked bit of china’s a family heirloom if you listen to her. And she’d say it was worth a fortune if she thought it’d land me further in the shit.’

  ‘She’s been very helpful so far, at any rate. It would save all of us a lot of trouble if you described
the brooch yourself.’

  ‘Hardly noticed, tell you the truth. Just grabbed something to calm her down. Sort of peacocky design—bird, silver I think, glass in the eyes and the tail. Dressy sort of stuff, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘And you gave her this to—to calm her down.’ McHale leaned forward with a nasty sneer on his face. ‘Had you been getting her unnaturally excited, then?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me.’ Corby went scarlet, and for once in the interview McHale believed him. ‘She arrived all het up. She’d had an argy-bargy with her daughter. Been sleeping with that black student or something. Makes your hair curl what girls will do these days, doesn’t it? Then she’d met the bloke himself in the street, and had a showdown. He’s the chap you ought to be grilling, you know. Anyway, she was really put out when she arrived. Started going on about this and that —’

  ‘Like getting you to marry her, for example?’

  Corby let out a mystified yelp of anguish. ‘Are you joking? With both of us married already?’

  ‘It’s easy enough these days. If you wanted to, it could have been arranged.’

  ‘Who wanted to? I certainly didn’t.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have been blackmailing you to make you more keen, would she?’

  ‘Blackmail? What the hell would she have on me?’

  ‘That,’ said McHale, ‘is something I shall be trying to find out.’ He got up. ‘Well, Mr Corby, I’m sorry to have to leave you dangling like this—’

  ‘Wha’d’ye mean—dangling?’

  ‘Uncertain, so to speak. Of course, if you were to act sensibly and come completely clean—’

  ‘Wha’d’ye mean—completely clean? You’ve screwed my whole private life out of me—’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Mr Corby. I really don’t. I’m afraid we’re going to have to follow this up very completely indeed if you don’t come over with the complete story. You were, after all, the last man to see Mrs Hodsden alive. Your wife says your affair with her had lasted two years or more—’

  ‘My wife! My God! What have I done to deserve a woman like that? What did I do, marrying a treacherous cow like her?’

  McHale paused at the door and waved a hand at the shipbuilding yard beyond. ‘She brought you—all this, didn’t she, sir?’

  He left Corby staring after him vindictively, with a sense of having said something rather neat.

  CHAPTER 15

  TROUBLE AT THE HODSDENS’

  McHale acted swiftly in the matter of Achituko, but in the event matters did not sort themselves out as quickly as he had hoped. Fetched from his lodgings at Mrs Carstairs’s on Monday night by a peremptory pair of police constables (McHale chose the largest and thickest in Todmarsh), Achituko displayed admirable self-restraint and forbearance during the inquisition about his row with Lill Hodsden and his activities thereafter (by ten o’clock on the night of the murder he was sharing a chaste cup of Maltino with Eve Carstairs, but before that his doings were difficult to check). It was when the talk turned to his relationship with Debbie Hodsden, and in particular when the word ‘deportation’ was airily slotted into the conversation by McHale, that Achituko showed his metaphorical teeth and made it clear that he was no illiterate wog picked up on the streets without an entry permit and easy to bully into damaging admissions. He knew his rights, and stood on them; he knew English law, and he invoked it; he knew the techniques of opposition, and he used them. The thing developed into a duel between two obstinate personalities, and of the two Achituko was much the more subtle.

  By Wednesday morning a stalemate had been reached. Achituko had mobilized on his side the Comparative Religions Department of the University of South Wessex, and McHale was having to face the prospect of figuring in a national civil rights scandal, with articles in the New Statesman and questions to the Home Secretary in Parliament. This was not how he had imagined achieving prominence in the larger national context. With a sigh he released Achituko into the custody of one of the defrocked clergymen on the staff of the Comparative Religions Department, on the understanding that he would not return to Todmarsh or attempt to make contact with Debbie Hodsden. Achituko enjoyed the duel and felt flattered by the friendly interest of his teachers at South Wessex. By the end of the week, though, he was finding the interest of the defrocked clergyman a good deal friendlier than he liked.

  This was the news that McHale was able to give Gordon Hodsden when by chance he drove past him early on Tuesday evening, McHale on his way to talk to Guy Fawcett, Gordon out on his training run. Gordon bent over attentively at the window of the car, and when he got the details his saturnine face lit up with pleasure.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘I appreciate what you’ve done.’ And then he continued on his run.

  As he jogged efficiently along the drab sea-front of Todmarsh he felt a warm, satisfying feeling in his bowels at a difficult job well done. Now Mum was gone, thank God, someone had to keep the family together. Fred’s attempts to step into her shoes were ludicrous, as they all could see; and if it wasn’t to be Fred, then who else could it be but he himself? There wouldn’t be any problem about that, aside from Debbie. Fred had always done as he was told, and would do so again, when he got used to the new regime. Brian was pretty docile, and might be expected to get a place at South Wessex in autumn, and do well. It was Debbie who was the green, useless sucker shooting from the Hodsden bush. She had gained an unruly independence during her years of fighting with Lill which was going to have to be knocked out of her. She complained she’d had to fight her own battles. Didn’t everyone? Life didn’t present you with your victories on a plate. Now that Achituko was gone, there could be a new start for Debbie: firm discipline, hard work, and something worthwhile and respectable when she left school. Something in an office, with good prospects. It would all work out all right if she was treated with a firm hand.

  Gordon smiled. He was a young man who lived for the moment. Everything was beginning to look rosy for the future. His whole body felt suddenly relaxed from tension. He broke his training rules and turned, track-suited and sweating, into the Rose and Crown for a drink. His luck was in. Ann Watson was in there, for a casual hour’s drink with a friend. Clutching his pint in his big carpenter’s hands, he went over and sat down with them. They both welcomed him with smiles. Yes, the future was beginning to look brighter.

  • • •

  ‘OK, so I went into her house,’ said Guy Fawcett, walking around his own front room, red-faced and blustering. ‘So what? We were neighbours. Neighbours do drop in on each other. I know who told you about it, and you can take it from me, she’s an evil-minded old woman.’

  ‘She struck me, in fact, as an exceptionally truthful and observant person,’ said McHale coolly.

  ‘She’ll be sorry she squealed to you, I can tell you that,’ burst out Guy Fawcett, unwise in his agitation, and letting the bully show through.

  ‘Are you threatening a witness?’ asked McHale, raising his voice to an authoritative roar. ‘I can assure you if you do that, it’s you that will be sorry.’

  ‘Just a joke,’ muttered Fawcett, cringing. ‘I can’t stand these nosey-parkers.’

  ‘The fact is, the pair of you were leading each other on, and then you went off into the house, with your arms round each other, and you doing God knows what with your hands. I suppose you’ll say you were going to borrow a gardening book.’

  Which put Guy Fawcett into a quandry, because that was precisely what he had been going to say, and he couldn’t for the life of him think of anything better.

  • • •

  When Ann Watson’s friend had gone, Gordon began to feel for the first time that they were really getting on well together. No mystery about why. Now there was no reason why the subject of Lill should embarrass them. There was no reason why it should come up at all. Instead they sat at their little table, companionably, talking about the army, about being an army wife, about Northern Ireland.

  ‘It’s the women I’m sorry
for,’ said Gordon. ‘Always was. I’d never have got married if I’d stayed in the army. No sort of life for them at all.’

  ‘Oh, I quite liked it,’ said Ann Watson, talking freely with him because with his background he was one of the few people she knew who might understand. ‘Of course there was the loneliness, and the separations, and you saw some of the wives going off the rails—but at least there wasn’t any question of getting stale.’

  ‘Most women would hate it,’ said Gordon.

  ‘Well, the army was his life, so it had to be part of mine. Some of my friends seemed to think I ought to be mildly ashamed of that, but I never was. The army’s a job like any other . . . Of course, when he had a tour of duty in Northern Ireland, that was different . . . terrible.’

  ‘Aye, it was that,’ said Gordon, remembering. ‘Still, it wasn’t so bad for us on duty. It made a man of you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You’ve no idea how quickly you grow up when you know the boy down the end of the alley may have a gun in his pocket. It makes you think—about yourself, about life. In the end, you’re on your own in Northern Ireland: your mates can’t help you much and you can’t help them—all you can do is get a bit of your own back after wards. When you’ve seen your mates blown up, you don’t give a f—, you don’t give a damn about the rules and the bloody procedures anymore. It’s you against the rest, and you’ve just got your fists and your rifle.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ann sadly. ‘I suppose that’s how it gets you.’

  Later, when he walked her home, Gordon tried to slip his arm around her, but she put it aside quite coolly: ‘Don’t.’ But she talked away quite naturally, and listened when he told her about himself, about how rootless he felt, how uncertain about the future, lonely. Wasn’t she lonely too?

  ‘Yes, sometimes. But it’s not really an unhappy feeling. Sometimes I almost like it.’

  ‘But it must be difficult for you—just yourself and the child. And having a job too.’

  ‘In a way. I wish I could care more about Beth. I wish I could give more of myself to her. She needs it, but I can’t.’