Death of a Perfect Mother Read online

  Gordon let out the beginnings of a raucous laugh, then arched his body forward and choked it in his lap.

  ‘Our Fred! He couldn’t chop a worm in half with his spade without botching the job.’

  ‘Debbie, then. She hated Lill’s guts. More than us.’

  ‘If she did it, she’s acting in a damnfool way this morning. Asking about the funeral, and all that!’

  ‘Debbie’s like that. She can’t hide anything.’

  ‘Well, she’d better start learning, if she’s going to go around knocking people off. She’ll find herself in some bloody reformatory with a matron the spit image of Lill.’

  ‘Look, face up to it, Gord. What are we going to say? Are we going to put on the grief-stricken act, or are we going to be honest about her?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, of course we’re not going to be honest about her. Do you think people ever are when there’s been a murder? Do they all troop along to the Station and say “I hated her guts, I admit, but I didn’t do it”? We’re the devoted sons. Everybody thinks so. Lill thought so. We’re broken-hearted, like old Fred: all we want is for them to catch the bastard who did it.’

  ‘OK. All I’m saying is there’s some pretence.’

  ‘The same pretence we’ve been going on with for years.’

  ‘Debbie knows we hated her.’

  ‘Telepathy, that’s all. She couldn’t swear to it. Why would she want to? If she knew who’d done it, she’d be all over him like a rash in pure gratitude.’

  ‘If she didn’t do it herself.’

  ‘Well, if she did she’ll have to look after herself. We’ve got enough to do worrying about us.’

  ‘You see? It’s not that simple. You’re starting to act guilty yourself.’

  Gordon glowered at him, and banged out of the room. As he ran down the stairs a policeman in the hall looked up at him, curious, speculating.

  • • •

  Down at the Todmarsh Station, Chief Inspector McHale—sleek and complacent in his recent promotion, a new honour which, like most other things that had ever happened to him, had gone straight to his head—unbent sufficiently to talk over the case with the local man. Haggart was older, wiser, but unused to cases of murder and inclined for that reason to defer without cause. McHale had wandered distantly among the local men drinking their coffee and stuffing thick sandwiches, but now he had come to rest by the window, gazing contemptuously at the little patch of garden worked by the Todmarsh force in their spare time, with its neatly marshalled beds and paths, lawful and orderly. He pursed his lips at the dirty window, and paid little attention to the lower ranks.

  ‘How did the family impress you?’ Haggart asked.

  ‘Pretty ordinary collection,’ returned McHale, without pausing for thought. ‘Cut up, as you’d expect, and saying some silly things, just like everybody does at this sort of time. Perfectly run-of-the-mill lot. Nothing out of the way there.’

  ‘The second boy’s at Grammar School, going on to the University, they say,’ said Haggart. McHale merely raised his eyebrows and continued staring out of the window. ‘You’re not inclined to suspect one of them, then?’

  ‘Not unless I get any evidence that points in that direction,’ said McHale confidently. ‘You told me this morning they were thought of as a pretty devoted little family. Why should I suspect them?’

  Haggart shook his head. ‘No obvious reason. Still, I had the impression there was something. The mother—the dead woman—had a bit of a reputation.’

  ‘Really? Well, no doubt I’ll be learning plenty about that in the next few days. What sort of reputation?’

  ‘She was rough. The loud, vulgar type—irritated most people . . .’

  ‘Shouldn’t have thought the family were sensitive plants,’ said McHale with a superior smile.

  ‘I think she’d slept around a bit in her time—without the husband being aware.’

  ‘I suppose that sort of thing makes a bit of a stir in a small town,’ said McHale, still oozing city complacency. ‘Well, I’ll keep it in mind. No doubt this could be a straightforward family killing. On the other hand, it could be a simple robbery with the killing thrown in for kicks. You’ve no idea how much of that there is these days—and the devil’s own job it is to pin it on anyone. Then again, as you yourself said, she wasn’t liked.’

  ‘Most folk around here couldn’t stand her guts. She touched a nerve, you might say.’

  ‘I know the type, believe me. I expect the family will be able to help us there—who particularly disliked her, and so on.’

  ‘If they know. In a way they’d be the last to hear. I don’t suppose Lill—Mrs Hodsden—realized herself. She sort of sailed through life, if you know what I mean. Full of herself, she was, and never gave a damn about what anyone else said or thought. If anyone gave her a piece of their mind, it would be like water off a duck’s back.’

  ‘It would get through to the family, though,’ said McHale, with his usual congenital confidence. ‘Children at school, and all that. I’ve no doubt they know just who had reason to loathe the mother. I expect when I come to talk to them I’ll get a great deal out of that family.’

  A sergeant spoke up from the back of the room, undaunted by McHale’s air of remote authority, like royalty visiting the other ranks’ canteen:

  ‘Those two boys were up to something, up in their bedroom. Chattering away like magpies. One of them started to laugh, and then choked it down. I heard them from the hall.’

  Chief Inspector McHale turned and looked at him for a moment, and then said: ‘When you’re a little older, Sergeant, you’ll know that people behave in a funny way when there’s a death. They don’t tiptoe round and talk in hushed whispers as they’re supposed to. And a murder’s no different—worse, in fact. There’s a lot of tension there, waiting to be released.’

  The sergeant’s mouth had set firm at the snub. Haggart rushed in to cover over: ‘So you don’t think of the Hodsdens as murderers, then?’

  ‘In my experience,’ said McHale, ‘the first things a murderer needs are brains and guts. I wouldn’t have said any of the Hodsdens had either in sufficient quantities.’

  And nodding in a positively lordly manner, he left the recreation room to take up the threads of the investigation. No one in the room was to know that this was his first proper murder investigation, and indeed he himself had managed to put that fact totally out of his mind.

  CHAPTER 9

  OLD FRED

  When all is said and done, thought Fred, painstakingly buttoning the cuffs of his shirt, being interviewed by the police was a bit of excitement. The whole thing was terribly upsetting, quite horrible, and yet—a sensation of heat in his bowels made him aware that he was thrilled at being at the centre of a real-life sensation. He put on his shabby old grey suit and looked out at the police car by the side of the road outside. It was there to take him to the Station. He caught sight of himself in the bedroom mirror and was shocked to see something like a smile on his lips. He composed his face into an expression of extreme depression. Grief was beyond him, outside his emotional range. He thought: Poor old Lill; she’d have enjoyed all the fuss. She always liked a bit of life.

  Thought is perhaps too definite a word for what went on in Fred’s head: impressions, feelings, vague impulses and desires floated through his brain like skeletal autumn leaves, driven by the vaguest breeze, slow, wanton, uncatchable. Fred could never have verbalized one of these thoughts, still less could he have argued for any of his opinions. Still, there was this low heat in his belly, this smouldering excitement, that made him, today, more than usually self-conscious, awake to everything going on around him. In the road outside a police constable got out of the car and leaned heavily over the top of it, looking towards the house. They’re waiting for me, thought Fred. He straightened his tie, dusted a speck of dirt from a sleeve, then walked round the double bed and left the front bedroom he had shared for nearly thirty years with Lill.

  In the car Fred
was silent. What was appropriate conversation for a man whose wife has just been garrotted in a public thoroughfare to make with the policeman who is driving him to the police station for questioning? Fred’s was not an inventive mind. As he got into the car he hazarded a ‘Looks like rain, don’t it?’ but thenceforth he held his peace; blew, in fact, on those little coals of excitement in his guts. He was head of the household, going—the first to go—to talk to the man investigating the murder of his wife. Made you think.

  Awkwardness made him shuffle when he was led into the presence of McHale, but then he told himself that that was stupid, and took his eyes from the brown lino on the floor. The sight of McHale, poised elegantly and impressively over an unnaturally tidy desk, confirmed Fred’s impressions of earlier in the day. Good-looking chap. Good class of chap, too. Well spoken, clean, a natural leader. Ambitious, capable. Fred respected that kind of chap. Voted for them—the Conservatives—in local elections. You could trust a chap like that to get things done.

  He said: ‘You’ve got to get him, that bastard. Must have been some kind of crazy mugger, eh? Christ, you wonder what the country’s coming to in this day and age, don’t you? Bombs, assassinations, and now this.’

  McHale, though he was not inclined to see Lill’s murder in a national context, did in general terms agree with Fred: the murderer was probably some stray maniac. Last year there had been, in the Cumbledon area, that nasty business of the gay ripper. He had not, as it happened, got very far—being so unlucky as to choose for his second rip a fair-haired, angelic-looking judo black belt. But the case had impressed McHale (who had not been on it) with a sense of meaningless, perverse horror. It had confirmed, for no very obvious reasons, some odd feelings he had about the moral health of the nation. The garrotting of Lill Hodsden seemed to him to bear the same hallmarks. But of course, as he told himself, his mind was very much open.

  He said: ‘You may well be right. And believe me, I’ve got a whole troop of people working on those lines—’ As if to confirm what he said the telephone now rang. He snapped a couple of ‘yes’s and a ‘no’ into the mouthpiece and then slammed it down. ‘But of course,’ he went on, ‘until we can be sure we’ve got to fill in the picture as far as your wife is concerned—just as a matter of routine. I’m sure you understand that.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said Fred.

  I hope you do, thought McHale. He took hold of a handbag that was lying on his desk, a plastic affair that made only the most half-hearted attempt to imagine itself leather. Its red-brown colour was clearly designed to tone in with Lill’s hair. At the sight of it in McHale’s hands, two little tears squeezed themselves out of the corners of Fred’s eyes, and ambled down his cheeks. He wiped them off with an earthy handkerchief.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said: ‘brought her back to me, like.’

  ‘Quite natural,’ said McHale briskly.

  Fred—hesitantly, as if expecting to hear the upbraiding voice of Lill asking him what he thought he was doing—took the bag in his work-rasped hands and began to rummage inexpertly around in it.

  ‘Can you spot anything missing?’ asked McHale unhopefully.

  ‘There’s nowt as far as I can see,’ said Fred. ‘But then I wouldn’t really know. I’ve never been one to go poking around in my wife’s things.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said McHale. ‘But you would know if she’d been accustomed to carry anything valuable around with her?’

  ‘Can’t say she had anything valuable,’ said Fred. ‘We’re plain folks, like I said. ’Course, there was the engagement ring . . .’ Thirty-five bob, he remembered, back in Festival of Britain year, bought with a modest treble-chance win that had also run to a plaice and chips lunch at the Odeon cafeteria. He’d been happy that day. He did not see the sneer on the face of McHale. McHale had seen the ring too.

  ‘No—the ring was still on the—she was still wearing it,’ he said. ‘And your son said she wouldn’t have been carrying much money . . .’

  ‘Don’t know what he’d know about it,’ grumbled Fred, as if loath to share the limelight. ‘We wouldn’t know, would we? She might have had money from anywhere.’

  ‘Really?’ McHale jumped in, leaned imposingly forward and looked Fred in the eyes. ‘You think she could have had money you know nothing about?’

  Fred jumped. That was coming it rather fast.

  ‘I didn’t question her about money,’ he said, his mouth set in an obstinate line. ‘Just gave her the housekeeping and let her get on with it.’ (The housekeeping, be it said, was all but a quid or so of Fred’s weekly wage.)

  ‘But you think she could have got money from somewhere else?’

  ‘Could have,’ said Fred, still mulish.

  ‘Where, for example?’

  ‘How would I know? I tell you, I didn’t ask questions.’

  ‘But it was you who made the suggestion, Mr Hodsden.’

  ‘I didn’t make any suggestions at all. All I’m saying is, with Lill you never knew. She was a smart one, was Lill.’

  McHale was bewildered. He was not sure how carefully he needed to tread. How besottedly stupid was Fred Hodsden? Or was he a complaisant husband? He dipped a toe in the water.

  ‘Your wife had been out visiting, hadn’t she? At a Mr . . . Hamilton Corby’s.’

  Fred, it seemed, regarded this as a change of subject, and shifted in his chair so he did not have to see the red-brown handbag. ‘That’s right. Well, Mrs Corby really, of course. She’s an invalid. She’d been very good to her, my Lill had. Visited her twice a week, regular as clockwork. She’ll miss Lill will Mrs Corby, poor soul.’

  McHale raised, fractionally, a silver-blond eyebrow at the cretinous obtuseness of mankind. From a glance at Lill’s dead body he could have told that she was no devoted sick-room visitor. ‘Would there be any reason,’ he asked, treading warily over Fred’s stupidity like a super-power edging its way into a Third World country, ‘why Mr Corby should have paid her a sum of money last night?’

  Fred looked at him blankly: ‘No, not as I know of . . . Mind you, he was a generous man: found a place for our Gordon when he came out of the army, even though work’s scarce in the yards. But what would he give her money for?’

  ‘Or jewellery, perhaps? A present of jewellery?’

  At last the idea got through to Fred. He struggled forward in his chair, spluttering and coughing. ‘Here, what do you mean? What are you trying to say? Ruddy cheek! There’s no one can say my Lill was one of that sort!’

  ‘You misunderstand me,’ said McHale with a patient smile. ‘I merely meant he might have given her something, some token, as a thank-you . . . for her care of his wife . . . Perhaps some trinket of his wife’s that she had no more use for—after all, I gather that she’s bedridden.’

  Fred sank back into his chair, apparently somewhat mollified. ‘Oh well, if that was all you were implying, that’s all right. I suppose he might have. But it hadn’t happened before, not to my knowledge.’

  ‘You took me up very sharp there, Mr Hodsden,’ said McHale, super-smooth, in a way that made Fred sweat. ‘Is there something you’re keeping back? About your wife’s relationships with other men, for example? Did she have—friendships?’

  Fred, having once exploded, seemed now to be working on a longer fuse. ‘She was a real character, my Lill. Everybody knew her in this town. She was everyone’s friend. Brightened up the place as soon as she came here. Ask anyone. Ask ’em at the Rose and Crown. ’Course she had friendships.’

  ‘With men?’

  ‘Men and women. And I expect there’s dirty-minded people round the town who might have talked about it. I don’t mean you—you’re paid to snoop. But people do talk. Any road, they’d’ve been wrong. Lill wasn’t like that. She was just—outgoing. But at heart she was a family person . . . She was a wonderful mother.’

  A memory of the Hodsden daughter, her eye bruised, wafted through McHale’s mind. He lowered his head and made a little note on his writing-pad.

  ‘
Of course, I’ll be talking to your family,’ he said. ‘And then there are the friends you mention. Who would you say were your wife’s greatest friends?’

  Fred drew a finger round the collar that loosely spanned his scraggy, contracting neck. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s Mrs Fawcett next door, but I wouldn’t say she was a particular . . . And then there’s Mrs Corby, of course; they were devoted . . . But I’m out all day, so I . . .’

  ‘I see,’ said McHale. ‘Well, I’ll ask your daughter. I expect she’s more likely to know.’

  He preened himself on his sharpness when he saw Fred’s reaction. His concrete-grey face went rose-pink, and again he bent forward, choking: ‘Well, Debbie’s away all day too, you know, at school,’ he said, and then it seemed to strike him that anything he said might make things worse, and he trailed off into silence.

  ‘Still, women talk to their daughters, don’t they?’ said McHale, in his most molasses voice. ‘Or is it more your sons your wife was close to? I seem to have heard . . .’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said Fred, leaning back in his chair with relief and now seeming to have no jealousy of sharing the spotlight with his sons: ‘Gordon and Brian worshipped the ground she walked on. Couldn’t do enough for her. Yes, you talk to Gordon and Brian.’

  ‘Mr Hodsden,’ said McHale, again leaning forward and looking impressive, ‘there is one thing I have to ask you: where were you and the rest of the family last night?’

  ‘ ’Course you have to ask it: I understand. It’s easy, anyway. Debbie and I were both home, and Brian and Gordon were down the Rose and Crown.’

  ‘I see. So you and—Debbie, is it?—can vouch for each other, can you?’

  ‘Oh aye. She was in her room and I was watching telly.’

  ‘Well, that’s not quite vouching for each other, as we understand it. Did you see much of each other during the evening—she came down now and then, I suppose?’

  ‘No, no—she didn’t come down.’

  ‘Not once?’

  ‘No—but I know she was up there . . .’ Fred pulled himself together, backing away from the brink of telling how he knew Debbie was up in her room, and finished lamely: ‘I’d’ve heard if she’d come down or gone out.’