Stately Homicide (13 page)

‘What makes you think there's anything out of the ordinary about it?'

The voice came from behind the police officer. Jurnet swung round and found himself facing Charles Winter. The potter pushed past, leaving a smear of grey on the detective's shoulder; bent over the young man and lifted his chin with a clay-encrusted forefinger. ‘Is it the fourth or the fifth time this year, Mike darling?'

Botley jerked his head away, but made no other acknowledgement of the other's presence.

‘He's always a bit surly for a day or two after,' Winter confided. ‘He's not one of those who get a kick out of it, otherwise I'd have to think up some other way, wouldn't I, of getting it through his thick head that you can't go through life behaving like a cat out on the tiles without suffering the consequences.' Winter rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. He wore an apron of filthy canvas over the stained yellow sweater Jurnet remembered from the party, the sleeves now rolled up above the elbows, tiny beads of clay threading the hairs of his powerful forearms; clay in the crevices of the haggard, hung-over face. ‘Believe me, Inspector, it hurt me more than it hurt him.'

At that Mike Botley got up from his stool, picked up the bucket and flung the contents at the potter. A passer-by who got splashed reacted with an angry ‘What d' you think you're doing!' Charles Winter, soaked from chest to foot, rocked slightly on his feet and murmured softly: ‘Mike darling!'

Jurnet, his face tight with disapproval, turned to go.

‘Poor, unhappy peeler –' Charles Winter's voice was vibrant with mock-pity – ‘Never to have known the pangs of love.'

‘Not your kind, that's for sure.'

‘The same kind as yours, friend.' No mockery now. ‘The same kind as everybody's. The one unique thing.' A deep breath: ‘Except perhaps – and I say it without boasting – my kind's the purest. Not corrupted by the desire for children, nor by the fear of begetting them. No sheaths, loops, pills, none of that revolting paraphernalia which turns the act of love into a branch of your neighbourhood chemist's. No bloody menstruation –'

‘Bloody nose instead,' Jurnet interrupted. ‘Some improvement!'

Charles Winter faltered. He bent over the young man again, fingertips gently touching the bruised flesh as if in benediction.

‘Mike knows I was pissed – don't you, Mike darling? He doesn't hold it against me.'

‘Thank me lucky stars.' Botley inclined his head so as to bring the detective into the purview of the one functioning eye. ‘Gimme an alibi, don't it? Too busy being beaten up, weren't I, to go ringing Mr Shelden's bell. An' after Charlie got through I weren't exactly love's young dream any more.'

Jurnet said: ‘Could be you went and rang that bell after all, and caught that lot from your pal when you came back.'

The young man pondered.

‘It's a thought,' he agreed at last. ‘So what you think? I knocked off Mr Chad Shelden defending my virtue? Charlie, now –' Botley favoured the potter with a glance of pure venom – ‘if it's suspicious characters you're looking for, he's another kettle of eels. There's me for starters, an' the rent he's going to have to pay, an' turning Bullen into a fun fair – you heard him blasting off yourself, didn't you? Well – knocked me out cold, he did. So who knows what Charlie boy was up to while I was lying there on the floor, dead to the world?'

At the flat over the jewellery workshop there was no shortage of weak tea, as well as buns that – or so it seemed to Jurnet – would have been just the thing for making good the clapped-out masonry on the Bullen Hall roof. Sergeant Ellers, whose wife, Rosie, cooked like a fallen angel, so irresistible were the temptations she devised for the inner man, asked for the recipe, demanding shamelessly: ‘Why can't my wife turn out cakes like these?'

Anna March, kaftaned and dogmatic on the subject of stoneground flour, was, to Jurnet's relief – people should stay the way they were: otherwise how could you ever tell who you were yourself? – back to her old self.

He began: ‘We'll be sending a bloke up to London; but I thought you wouldn't mind having a word, seeing you're the only one at Bullen Hall knew Shelden before he came here.'

‘If you hadn't turned up I was going to phone you. Danny and I talked it over, and we decided you'd have to know sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner.'

‘Have to know what?'

Anna March looked across the table at the two police officers.

‘That Chad Shelden was Tommy's father.'

‘What!' Jurnet made no attempt to hide his surprise, even as, in a flash of recognition, he saw the dead man's face in the little boy's. ‘At the party you both acted as if – I mean, you could have been casual acquaintances.'

‘That's exactly what we were.' Anna's tone was one of wry detachment. ‘He was part of the student crowd I tagged along with, just like he said. What he didn't say was that he was at the heart of it, the centre of gravity round which everyone else revolved, and I was way out on the perimeter – a plain, gawky kid from the provinces who couldn't even understand their language, let alone summon up the courage to say something off her own bat. Every now and again somebody would take pity on me and fling a few words in my direction, like some scraps to a dog. Why I kept on, hanging on to the fringes, I'll never know – except that my mother had been dead against my coming up to London to Art School in the first place, and if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that I wasn't going to crawl back to Horncastle and a secretarial course, saying: “You were right all the time, Mum!”'

Jurnet protested, out of the goodness of his heart: ‘I'll not believe that bit about being plain. Shelden singled you out, after all.'

Anna March shook her head.

‘Not even that. We'd all been to a disco, and he was one of the few who had a car – oh, even in those days, it was obvious he was going to go far.' She stammered a little at that, taken unaware by the contrast between all that golden promise and the actuality, a moat writhing with eels. Tears came into her eyes: genuine, thought Jurnet, watching and listening, but not without a modicum of complacency. At last
she
could patronise
him
. ‘As usual, I spent the evening propping up the wall, numbed by the noise and the lights, and when we got outside at last, into the dark and the cold air, I nearly passed out. Next thing I knew, someone had pushed me into the back of Chad's car and told him to run me home. He wasn't best pleased, I can tell you. I had a room out in Neasden, light-years away from trendy Islington, where he hung out in those days. But he took me, I'll say that for him. And when we got to my place, he helped me out of the car, fished my key out of my bag for me, unlocked the front door, came up the stairs and went to bed with me.'

Anna March caught sight of the detective's face, and actually burst out laughing.

‘Oh, you mustn't think he was taking advantage of a poor half-conscious girl! I'd wound the window down on the drive, and the air on my face had brought me back practically to normal, for what that was worth.'

‘You mean, it was what you wanted? Were you in love with him?'

The woman pondered both questions as if she had never before given them consideration.

‘I don't think so, on both counts. I thought he was groovy, of course, the way we all did. But love? I know it'll tell you what an unbelievable ninny I was, but chiefly, I think, I let him come up to my room because, as usual, I felt tongue-tied. I simply couldn't get out the words to say no.'

‘Occupational hazard of being young.' Jurnet's voice was warm with understanding. ‘So that was the start of the affair?'

‘What affair? It was the beginning and the end. I'd never been to bed with a man before, and despite all the school biology classes I hadn't a clue what to do. And Chad, for all the airs of worldly sophistication he always put on, wasn't much better. But there you are. It was enough to make me pregnant.'

‘What did he say when you told him?'

‘I never did. Next time I saw him, among all the crowd, and every time after, we both acted as if it had never happened. Perhaps he wasn't proud of his own performance, or, for all I know, he really did forget – it was so completely unmemorable. I'd have forgotten myself, except that, a couple of months later, I found out it wasn't going to be as easy as all that.'

‘You could have got an abortion.'

‘I suppose I could, if I could have got over my shyness and gone to a doctor. But I kept putting it off until it was too late, and by then –' Anna broke off. When she spoke again, it was as much to herself as to the two police officers.

‘My father was killed in a car crash when I was six. Mum never cared for me. She was – is – a great one for the Mothers' Union; but I think now, every time my father wanted to go to bed with her, she thought it was assault and battery, if not actually rape. And I was the tangible evidence, the perpetual reminder, of all she had had to suffer, up there in their darkened bedroom. The chief thing I remember about my father dying was the day after the funeral, my mother getting rid of the big double bed. She couldn't wait to get it out of the house.' A brief silence, then: ‘You'd have thought, when I got my place at St Martin's, she couldn't have seen me off to London fast enough. But no. Somebody had to pay for all she'd gone through, and for that she needed to have me under her hand.'

Anna March got up, her draperies billowing: went to the window and looked out.

‘I thought I heard Tommy. Mary's taken him down to the village shop. I said he could have some Smarties for being such a good boy.' She turned, and if her face was wet with tears, her voice remained steady.

‘After I'd gone three months without a period, it suddenly came to me that, at last, I could have somebody of my very own to love; somebody who, if I played my cards right, might even love me back. That day, two things happened. I went to see the doctor, and I stopped being shy. I even –' with a strangely girlish giggle – ‘began to be quite good-looking. I stopped going round with the crowd, though funnily enough, once my belly began to get big, they went out of their way to seek
me
out. But by then I couldn't be bothered.'

‘Shelden must have put two and two together when he saw your condition.'

‘He never did. He wasn't actually at St Martin's. He just hung out with that crowd.'

‘Someone must have been bound to mention it to him.'

‘I doubt if he'd have thought twice about it. You've got to get it into your head that our going to bed was a complete non-event. And that was the way I wanted it. I didn't want to share my baby with anybody. That is, not till I met Danny.'

Anna said: ‘That's the reason you found me in such a state when you came about the earrings. It isn't easy, lying to someone like Danny. He's so straight himself, it makes you feel even more guilty. Without actually saying it in so many words, I'd given the impression that Tommy was the result of a passionate affair which had burnt itself out of its own heat. I was just too ashamed to let him know the stupid, unthinking way he'd been conceived. It wasn't so much that I was afraid he'd think worse of me for it – I'd have deserved that, and couldn't complain – but that it might somehow make him think worse of Tommy.'

‘You know Danny better than that.'

‘Of course I do, really; but on that one subject, I suppose, I couldn't think straight. Then, on top of everything, Chad came down to Bullen for a preliminary look round. I pretended I had to go into Angleby, but actually I hid myself up here, peeping out from behind the curtains as he went round the Coachyard. And I was appalled. I'd put him out of my life so completely I hadn't realised that Tommy was the spitting image of his Dad –' the final word pronounced with a pained twist of the mouth which had Jurnet wishing, for his friend's sake, that he liked the woman better.

‘So what?' he demanded, with what he hoped was a salutary getting back to basics. ‘You didn't expect Danny to think it was a virgin birth, did you? It had to be someone.'

‘But not someone we were going to have to rub shoulders with, every day of the week! Never mind Danny: what if – no, not if: when – Chad noticed the resemblance, what then? He was bound to see Tommy sooner or later. And then again, didn't Tommy have the right to know who his real father was? Didn't Chad, even, have the moral right to know he'd fathered a son?'

Jurnet, who had lived long enough to know that people seldom got their moral rights, and, when they did, were seldom grateful for the gift, commented: ‘You're too high-minded, that's your trouble. All you had to do was talk things over with Danny. He'd have put you right.'

‘That's exactly what he did.' The woman smiled, an inward-regarding smile that sent the detective's thoughts winging painfully to Miriam, offering herself to the sun and God knew who else on a Greek beach. ‘When he came in for his tea and saw the state of my face, I couldn't keep the truth from him any longer. All he said, in that simple way of his that isn't simple at all, once you know him, was: “Tommy's your boy and mine – get that into your thick head.” And then we went to bed.' She spoke without embarrassment. ‘He kissed every inch of my body – every inch of it – and he made me beautiful. He told me to dress myself up so that everyone could see how beautiful his wife, Tommy's mother, was. And he told me to treat Chad Shelden for what he was – a casual acquaintance from the old days. Nobody who mattered.'

Jealousy made Jurnet heartless.

‘From which I'm to gather that you didn't go back to Shelden's flat after the party was over, and spill the beans about Tommy?'

Anna March gathered the folds of her kaftan about her and regarded the detective with chill disapproval. It came to the latter, with no notable regret, that she cared for him no more than he cared for her.