The Case of the Missing Bronte Read online

  ‘Well, now, when Miss Carbury died, in the fullness of time, she left us a great many family things. Heirlooms, I think we might call them. Because we have been in the past a Prominent Yorkshire Family, Inspector. Looked Up To. Actually, these heirlooms should have been ours many years ago, we being the Senior Branch. Unfortunately, the Dad having gone to America when I was hardly more than a boy, we had dropped out of sight, not to mention the Dad having been less close to Cousin Rose than I would have liked. Kith is kith, I always say. So it was only when Mother and I came back to Yorkshire that we became in any way intimately associated.’

  ‘Oh? And when was that?’

  ‘Nine years ago, come August. I was Planting the Seed in Winnipeg when the Lord called me to Leeds.’

  ‘The Lord seems to call you to some rotten places. Have you been a clergyman all your adult life?’

  ‘Pretty much. Pretty much. The Dad received the Call in California, back in 1951. I was fortunate enough to be similarly Called in 1960. The Dad was most affected. He’s still alive, you know, still Shepherding the Faithful in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. And I’m pleased to say we have found fertile soil here in Yorkshire. Yes, indeed. Oh, dear, yes.’

  ‘And have you remained close to Miss Wing since Rose Carbury’s death?’

  ‘Ah well, yes — and no. In spirit, certainly. Affliction brings people together in spirit, as I’m sure you know, Officer. But seeing as how she is distantly Kin, it seems a pity we have not seen more of each other. Consolidated our closeness, as you might say. I said as much to Mother, when I read of the attack. Mother, I said, we must see what we can do for poor Miss Wing. This is just the sort of Sad Eventuation that the Lord sends in order to bring people closer together.’

  I have known people who disliked clergymen as a race because they saw them as preying on people in times of distress and bereavement. It certainly did seem to be going it a bit to believe that the Lord had had Edith Wing bashed on the head in order to bring her closer to Amos Macklehose.

  ‘Well, Mr Macklehose,’ I said, ‘I can doubtless find you any time I want to, and I shall certainly want to. For the moment the best thing is probably to send you on your way. I need hardly say there is no question of anything being removed from this house — beyond what has already been removed. I suppose you would have no notion of what that might be?’

  ‘None in the world, Inspector.’

  ‘Or of anyone who might have had any special motive for doing Miss Wing harm?’

  ‘No, indeed. Indeed, no. A harmless spinster lady, and a true friend and kind nurse in times of distress. Who could find a motive for violence in the blameless life of such a one? You must look to the violence of the age, Superintendent. The inborn seed of wrath. Only last night on the television — our Tabernacle congregation has after much heart-searching and prayer come to the conclusion that there is no intrinsic reason why television should not be regarded as one of the Gifts of God — ’

  ‘Really? I can think of any number.’

  ‘ — last night on television we saw gangs of Youth, Charioteers of Beelzebub, pelting the Prime Minister, one of the Frailer Vessels, with stones, and with eggs, nay even tomatoes. An ugly sight, Inspector. As I said to Mother at the time, I am far from unsure that we are not entering the Sixth Night foreseen in the Revelation of St John.’

  ‘Well, Mr Macklehose,’ I sighed, repressing the desire to ask for a precise citation of the relevant passage in Revelation, ‘if you will just take yourself off — ’

  ‘You must,’ Amos Macklehose pronounced, as if he were awarding the star prize at Bingo, ‘you must come and meet Mother. Mother is waiting in the car like the patient Griselda (Second Book of Kings). I insist you meet her, Superintendent. You are a man to appreciate her Quality.’

  Unwilling to let this chance go by, I allowed him to hurry me out of the cottage. Not so fast, though, that I didn’t lock both the window and the doors behind me. One never knew what other Macklehoses might be lurking around in the undergrowth.

  Amos of that ilk enthused about his topic all the way down to the gate.

  ‘My Judith, Superintendent, is a woman in a thousand. A jewel beyond price, a pearl in a sow’s ear. She is, I can tell you. I don’t know what I would have done without her!’

  I was a bit uncertain as to what he had done with her. I could well imagine that the Reverend Macklehose was on to any number of unsavoury lurks, but if so the resulting income was not lavished on his person: the frayed cuffs of his suit, no less than its shiny seat, did not bespeak prosperity. We went through the gate, and he pointed to the car, fifty yards down the lane.

  ‘Have trouble finding a parking place?’ I asked nastily. He began kneading bread again, frenetically.

  ‘Ah, Mother,’ said Amos Macklehose, as we finally drew up beside the car. ‘I’ve got a treat for you. I want you to meet Inspector — ’

  ‘I said you didn’t ought to have,’ said a sepulchral voice. ‘I said you didn’t ought to have, and I was right.’

  The Reverend Macklehose’s jewel beyond price was a hard-featured, doom-ridden sort of woman, predestination breathing from her nostrils. She barely acknowledged my presence, but remained staring ahead at the landscape through the car windscreen. She had a thin line of lip, set permanently to disapproval, and a marvellous brown felt hat of the sort everybody’s North Country auntie wore thirty years ago. I thought they made a lovely couple.

  ‘You’re quite right, Mrs Macklehose, that your husband didn’t ough — that he shouldn’t have broken into Miss Wing’s cottage,’ I said. ‘You’re obviously a woman of principle.’

  ‘I know what’s Right,’ she said. ‘I know what’s Right and I say so.’ She sniffed and kept looking ahead, but I thought she was thawing towards me a bit.

  ‘Mother saw a good deal of Cousin Edith,’ said Amos Macklehose, still uneasy with the conversation and rubbing his hands as if he were a garage mechanic. He looked at me ingratiatingly the while, his head cocked like one of our less appealing feathered friends. ‘Saw her most days in dear Cousin Rose’s last illness. United they tended her, you might say.’

  ‘She did her duty, I’ll say that for her,’ pronounced Judith Macklehose. She added, as if as an afterthought, though it was not that: ‘Though I’ve no doubt she had her reasons.’

  ‘Mother!’ said Amos Macklehose.

  ‘Really?’ I probed. ‘You thought she had her reasons?’

  ‘I’m not saying there was anything Wrong, mind you,’ said the charming Judith. ‘But Cousin Rose leaving all her personal things away from her nearest Kin is something I’ll never understand. I just think it was Funny.’

  Judith Macklehose was clearly one of those people for whom funny is never funny-peculiar, let alone funny ha-ha, but always funny-suspicious.

  ‘I’d gathered they were very old friends,’ I ventured.

  ‘Oh, friends,’ said Judith Macklehose, disposing of friendship with a mighty sniff. ‘Still, if Edith Wing collected her pile, she worked for it, I’ll say that. I’d be the last to begrudge it to her. Particularly,’ she intoned, with great emphasis, ‘particularly in view of what has befallen her.’

  She didn’t actually use the word retribution, but the word was definitely hanging in the air.

  ‘You’ve no idea who might have done such a thing — attacked her in this brutal way?’

  ‘Oh no. We’d had no contact with her, not since the funeral, had we, Amos? We weren’t privy to her private life, dear me no. Mind you — we did hear . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, one of our New Israelites — a member of our Tabernacle — comes from here, from Hutton. Three buses there, three buses back, every Sunday without fail. You won’t find that sort of faith in the Anglicans! Anyway, Fred Hebblethwaite, he told us that since she’d come here, she’d got very fond of a boy — ’

  ‘Black!’ intoned Amos Macklehose.

  ‘A black boy,’ agreed Judith Macklehose, her eyes clearly seeing the brand of
Cain. ‘He comes to do the garden for her, so they say. Fourteen! Not, of course, that there’s anything in it. But I do say it’s funny . . .’

  ‘We know about blacks, from Los Angeles,’ Mr Macklehose assured me, rubbing his greasy hands in an agony of sincerity and insultingly including me in on his remarks with an implicit assumption that as a policeman I would agree. ‘Can’t walk the streets these days without getting attacked. Brutal thugs. We’ve had to be strict in our Tabernacle. Not admitted. Of course they’ll go to anything with a bit of Enthusiasm.’

  ‘So if you’re looking for a likely suspect,’ his lovely wife assured me, ‘it’s my belief you need look no further. Making no judgments, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Naturally not. So you both have lived in Los Angeles, have you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes indeed!’ enthused Amos. ‘Met there, did we not, Judith? So in spite of the Sin and the Shame — and there is Sin, there is Shame — Los Angeles will always be a very special place for us. As you might say, The Promised Land. And the Dad did very nicely there too!’

  ‘I don’t detect any American in your accent,’ I said to Judith.

  ‘I went,’ she intoned, ‘on an Exchange Visit.’

  ‘That’s it!’ enthused Amos, as if she had just produced a spiritual revelation. ‘Mother was a British Israelite then, weren’t you, Mother? And you exchanged with a family of British Israelites in California. Nineteen fifty-five it was. After we met you switched — or rather your earlier Call became subsumed as you might say in your new Call. Since then we’ve never looked back. Twelve years serving the Lord and his prophet Moses in Winnipeg, and now nine years in similar joyful service in Leeds. It makes you humble, indeed it does. A high calling, Officer, a joyful burden. Once the Word is known, it spreads like wildfire. You should come to one of our meetings, you know. Your life could be Transformed.’

  ‘I’m afraid I have no time to be Transformed in the immediate future,’ I said. ‘Though I certainly might be paying you a visit. For the moment I’ve got a job of work to do. I’ll say good-night to both of you.’

  ‘The peace of the Lord God and the benediction of the Prophet Moses be upon you, Constable,’ chirped out Amos Macklehose blithely. He jumped into the driving seat, slammed her into reverse, and drove erratically backwards towards the main street of Hutton-le-Dales. As he did so, he came within an ace of running over my toe, I swear deliberately. There was a manic smile on his face as he receded into the distance.

  I stood there watching as the car jerkily made it to the main road, and drove off in the direction of Leeds. I swore as I stood there to have the Reverend Amos Macklehose, preferably with his Pearl of Great Price beside him, up in the dock on some charge before this case was over. Already I could probably have him under the Race Relations Act, but that was much too namby-pamby in its penalties for my purposes. I wanted Amos to fry.

  Pending which culinary treat, I fetched my bag from the Dalesman and spent the night in Edith Wing’s cottage. I didn’t want evidence destroyed or valuables stolen by any other marauding clergymen that night.

  CHAPTER 5

  MATTERS ACADEMICAL

  The next morning first thing, after a rather uneasy night spent in Miss Wing’s spare bedroom, I rang to the Milltown police and arranged for a police guard to be resumed on the cottage. The Prime Minister was about to depart, to spread economic theory o’er the unemployed of Liverpool, so things in the area were returning more to normal. I also suggested that they do something to strengthen the locks on the cottage windows.

  Me, my next stop was Milltown, but before I went I got on the telephone to the secretary of the English Department at the University there.

  ‘I wonder if you could help me?’ I said, not identifying myself as police. ‘Could you tell me who it would be best to see in the Department with a question about the Victorian novel?’

  ‘Oh, you’re the second this week to ask that,’ she replied.

  ‘Really? Who was the other?’

  ‘I don’t remember the name. A lady, it was. Anyway, it’s a rather difficult question.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, by rights, by etiquette if you like, I ought to say Professor Gumbold. He is the senior man, and head of department, in name anyway . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The trouble is, he’s — ’ she lowered her voice — ‘quite gaga. I mean, absolutely. There’s some here who seem gaga but aren’t, there’s some who don’t seem gaga but are. He’s gaga and it shows. Even the students have noticed. So there’s really no point in sending you along to him with a question. You’ll get a lecture on Carlyle’s ethical philosophy. It was writing a book on Carlyle sent him round the twist. I can only suggest to you what I suggested to the other lady — that you go along to Timothy Scott-Windlesham.’

  ‘He’s not gaga?’

  ‘No-o,’ she said. ‘He’s not gaga . . .’

  The tone of her voice was not calculated to make the salivary glands run in anticipation. I could see I was in for a difficult morning. But then, I hadn’t been looking forward to it anyway. I must go a bit carefully here. There’s nothing irritates me more than people who condemn whole professions: the police are pigs, all soldiers are fascists — that kind of thing. I call it jobism, and it’s quite as bad as racism. Still, I have to say that I have not greatly liked the academics I have come in contact with in the course of my life. Of course, you could say I don’t as a rule see them at their best: mostly when I’ve met them it has been in connection with some kind of offence or other — thieving from bookshops, mostly, or sexual offences of a slightly ludicrous nature. But I have to admit that they have seemed the most snivelling, self-important scraps of humanity you can imagine, and as windy and whiney a bunch as ever demanded special privileges without doing anything to deserve them. Of course they might be quite charming in their natural environment. Anyway, it was with this sort of foreboding that I set off for Milltown.

  The University of Milltown, it is said and widely believed, came into being as a result of a hold-up on British Rail. One day back in the ’sixties or early ’seventies the train containing the then Prime Minister, Mr Wilson or Mr Heath (folk memory is uncertain which, and in retrospect they do seem increasingly indistinguishable), came to a full stop just outside Milltown, and the Great Man — whichever — on the way from a party conference here to a bye-election rally there sat for twenty minutes looking out at the long rows of grime-encrusted houses, built in long monotonous terraces, and at the gimcrack office blocks and the tightly-packed skyscrapers containing council flats (built, we now learn, due to some failure of socio-architectural theory). And the Great Man, forcibly becalmed into contemplation, turned to his wife, or the underling who was with him, and he said: ‘This is a town with absolutely nothing.’ And after another ten minutes of hold-up and painfully enforced thought the Great Man had pronounced: ‘What it needs is a university.’ And so that is what it got.

  Like so many ideas of our modern Great Men, this one could have done with a bit of thinking through. For the University of Milltown had not exactly prospered. Student enrolment was precarious. Even as a staging-post on the road from school to unemployment it was not popular. Why, after all, fritter away three years in such an environment as Milltown when gayer, livelier, more beautiful surroundings are equally available to you for frittering in? The North Country young called it the University of Last Resort. Other new universities had made their mark: you went to one because you were bright, to another because you were revolutionary, to a third because you were over-sexed. You went to Milltown because it was there. There were whispers of closure, but the fact is that it’s confoundedly difficult to make academics unemployed. Even the architects had shown signs of faint-heart and lack of conviction. At least the other new universities have a certain bold awfulness — a brave Scandinavian fist thrust in the face of comfort, convenience and pleasurable living. The University of Milltown looked like the rest of Milltown. Two or three block
s that could be council offices, or the business premises of some shaky concern or other; several large hangar-like constructions that could be chain-store cash-and-carry warehouses; some builder’s sheds that no one had bothered to demolish. It hadn’t led to a lively environment. Even in the early ’seventies the students hadn’t been militant. They explained at NUS conferences that they were too depressed. Everybody understood.

  I had been enjoying the drive up to then, through marvellous countryside, and I’d been singing bits of Verdi. I stopped when I got to the campus.

  At any rate you could say it was well signposted. Fingerposts everywhere telling me where to go, as if it were some much-visited stately home. I left my car in the car park, which was miles from anywhere, and I walked past rugby fields, football pitches and finally tennis courts. A couple of chaps were hitting a ball around dispiritedly. A placard on the gate announced ‘North of England Championships, Leeds, June 15th-20th.’ It didn’t look as if they’d make the grade. I finally found ‘English Department’ on one of those signposts (like those on the South Bank in London) that tell you where absolutely everything is, but somehow leave you more confused than ever about how to get there. I went wrong twice, but finally located the English Department on the third and fourth floors of one of the blocks that looked like local council offices. There was no lift, and as I started up the stairs I was nearly crushed into the ground by a sudden rush of students from a lecture-room, all of them apparently desperate for air. I tell you, I didn’t like this place long before I got to the English Department.

  Which, when I did get there, proved to be a large central square, windowless, lit with neon tubes one of which was flickering aggravatingly. Off it were corridors leading to offices. There was one notice-board for official notices, another for student activities. There were no student activities. The official one had a list of names and rooms of staff members, little bits of paper advertising cancelled lectures, and various broadsheets suggesting to students a variety of activities and attractions. Some of them were relevant to their studies: contemporary literature courses here, there and everywhere, all of them addressed by Malcolm Bradbury and Ian McEwan. Some of them were rather odd, such as another advertisement for the tennis championships, and another suggesting an overland safari to Australia as a suitable way of spending the summer vacation. Could the staff be wanting to get rid of them?