A Fall from Grace (10 page)

Their eyes all went toward Rupert Coggenhoe. As the queue advanced on the steaming vessel the great author's eyes were indeed, though cautiously, going everywhere. From some signs of irritation among the group of women it was clear his attention was far from any of them, and from anything they said to him.

“He's looking for someone,” said Charlie, unafraid to state the obvious. At that moment Coggenhoe's peripatetic gaze began to steer in their direction, and they hastily looked away.

Felicity swung round to look at Charlie.

“I don't want to see,” she said. “I don't want to know who it is. I wish we'd never gone along with his plans to move near us. It was just a typical scheme of his to bribe us with his help with the mortgage so that he'd secure a prop for his declining years.”

“Say slave,” said Charlie. “That's what he wants and that's what he won't get. And don't pretend to be so
surprised. We talked over the probability of this as soon as we got the offer, and we said then there were going to be strict limits to our involvement with him.”

“You're both very hard,” said Chris. “After all, he may not have all that long to go—”

“Oh, don't give me that,” snarled Felicity. “Have you seen him having trouble walking, have you noticed his mind wandering, have you smelt any signs of incontinence?”

“Well, no, but—”

“He'll live to be a hundred,” said Charlie gloomily. He turned to Chris. “And talking about not having long to go, you were right about Archie Skelton.”

“I was.”

“I didn't notice you squeezing the tear ducts for sympathy when you first mentioned to us that Archie was a candidate for a heart attack.”

“I wasn't close to Archie, and nor were you. Like it or not, you are to Rupert.”

“We are
not,
” said Charlie and Felicity together. Chris shrugged.

“Sad.”

“Not sad at all,” said Felicity firmly. “Perfectly natural. As Swift said, children aren't obliged to feel gratitude to their parents, because when they were being made the parents were thinking of something else entirely.”

“In my mother's case I should think it was whether she had any oven chips in the fridge,” said Charlie. “She took so little interest in the whole business that she's never been able to remember the name of the
man whose efforts made me.”

“Anyway, we have a dead mayor,” said Felicity. “I suppose what everyone will want to know is whether you're thinking of standing again.”

Chris shrugged—a display of lack of interest that didn't quite convince.

“I don't know. I've only just heard . . . I did quite well last time, didn't I? I think the whole idea of an elected mayor is still in the experimental stage, so they could decide to revert to the old way of doing things: nominate an elderly party hack as a reward for always voting at his party's call and never thinking for himself at all. And that probably makes sense: making it elected only brought us the same result—a hack.”

“But it nearly brought us you,” said Felicity.

“I must say you seem to have done quite a lot of thinking in a very short time,” commented Charlie. Chris looked slightly embarrassed.

“Well, to be honest it was something I've been expecting. I more or less told you that when we first met.”

“So you should be able to come to a quick decision.”

“You think so?” Chris scratched his head in comic bewilderment. “There are so many imponderables. By the time they have made the decision to keep it as an elected post the baby could have arrived, but do babies and campaigning for a job go together? Is this the sort of worthwhile thing to do that I'm looking for? I'll really have to ponder it a lot, talk it over with Alison . . . Oh, there she is. Let's all go over and join the queue.”

The queue was down to five or six people. The ones who had been served were clustered in little knots around the main door and out into the graveyard, talking, sipping, laughing.

“Oh look, there's Ben Costello,” said Chris, as they all clutched mugs and biscuits. “I think you both ought to know him—I'm surprised you don't, Charlie. He's a policeman.”

“My main contact with the station here is a man called Harridance,” said Charlie. He and Felicity let themselves be dragged over to a dark man with slicked-back hair and piercing mauve eyes. There was a lot of gym-muscle about him, and a general air of no-nonsense copper. Alison Carlson raised her hand in greeting to an old friend.

“Ben,” she said, “this is Charlie Peace—Dexter Peace to his birth certificate—who's come to live in Slepton. And this is his wife, Felicity. Chris over there you know.”

Ben shook hands genially.

“Ah—I'd heard we had refugees from Headingley. Things are getting tough there, aren't they? Every square inch taken over by students. Good to meet you. Coppers either have the instinct to settle down and become part of the community they police, or else the instinct to get away from it so that they're not faced with local villains the whole time. I don't need to ask which category you're in.”

“Definitely. No job ought to be a twenty-four-hour one. I've come here to live to see what class of villain you breed up, and how it compares with the Leeds variety.”

“I think you'll find they're pretty similar. I'm not local, though. You can probably hear I'm closer to your old haunts than to Yorkshire. I'm Stratford East.”

“And I'm Brixton.”

“And why did you pull up stumps and move north?”

“The instinct you just talked about. Wanting to get away from the people I'd known since birth, from the job, and generally to have a normal off-duty life. And you?”

“Pretty much the same, I suppose.”

“Don't try talking about not wanting a twenty-four-hour job if you meet up with a doctor called out in the middle of the night,” said Chris.

“Don't talk crap,” said Ben Costello. “You all have agency cover these days, and fair enough too.”

“Did you hear about us from my father-in-law?” Charlie asked him.

“Father-in-law? No, I don't think I know him. It was one of our local men, Harridance, that mentioned you. Good man. Safe pair of hands. Oh, here's my wife. Belle, this is Charlie and Felicity, and Alison over there. Chris you know.”

They all smiled at a plump, smiling but forceful-looking woman, exuding confidence, who shook hands with them.

“My father-in-law lives near you both,” said Charlie. “I thought you might have noticed him as a new arrival—passed him in the street or driven past him.”

“Oh my God,” said Felicity. “There he is over there.” The words seemed to have been forced out of her—
there was a note of drama and foreboding in her voice. All the other eyes in the group followed hers, surprised.

They had shifted position slightly when Belle Costello had joined the group, and they now had a view through the big oaken doors into the body of the church. Rupert Coggenhoe was standing, exuding satisfaction and self-love, talking to a girl in school uniform—which she seemed to transform into an ironic contrast with the body inside it, since her face, her carriage, her gestures seemed to proclaim that she was a stunning beauty about to bloom. It was Anne Michaels, Harvey Buckworth's Miranda, the leader of the little group of childish persecutors.

Felicity moved forward, as if in a dream. Her father was so taken up with his new interest that there was no chance of his noticing her. Soon she was in the church and within hearing distance.

“I must go. My mum and dad are down the front, and they'll wonder where I've gone to.”

“But I'll be seeing you again soon?”

“'Course you will. Maybe tomorrow. If not, Monday after school.”

And in a flash she reverted to the schoolkid and scuttled off down the center aisle. Felicity stopped in her tracks, bowled over by the sheer banality of the exchange. What had she expected? she asked herself. Breathless vows of eternal love? Had her approach prevented their being put into words? She swallowed hard and put herself where her father could not fail to see her.

“Hello, Dad. Are you enjoying the show?”

“Felicity!” He turned, awakening from a dream. “Very much so. Or as much as a practically tone-deaf person can.”

“Who was the girl? Daughter of one of your harem?”

His nose went into the air in irritation.

“I don't have a harem, as you well know. No—just a friend. You wouldn't want me to depend entirely on you and Charlie for company, would you? You've made that very clear.”

And he stalked off to the most prominent seat he could find, halfway down the church. Felicity looked back to the little knot of people she had left. Chris was looking at her sympathetically. Ben Costello and his wife were looking at Rupert Coggenhoe, clambering across people's legs to get to the vacant place.

Charlie's eyes were fixed on Ben Costello, one policeman observing another with the insight of an expert, knowing what was going through his mind. He felt kinship with him, even though he didn't feel he'd ever have him as a friend. They were both new in their jobs, both hungry for further promotion, both outsiders in their patches, both having the same policeman's instincts. Charlie saw Ben registering all the nuances of the encounter he had just witnessed, weighing up alternative hypotheses, cataloging the nuances in this obviously uneasy father-daughter relationship.

Charlie regretted what had happened in the last minute or two, thinking that
Felicity had given away a private matter to an outsider.

Felicity was regretting this herself.

Felicity and Charlie were able to have some words together on the way home from the carol service. Carola had spotted a nursery schoolmate with her parents just ahead of them, and she decided to string along with them and favor them with her critique of the reenactments, in particular the Christmas tree fairies, whom she was desperately jealous of. Her parents welcomed the chance to talk alone.

“I know I stuffed it up,” said Felicity despairingly. “You don't have to tell me.”

“I'm not sure I want to, or that you did,” said Charlie. “You made Ben Costello suspicious. I could almost see his policeman's nose twitching. But is that necessarily a bad thing? If your father got a hint of police interest in his little flirtation, if that's what it is, it could give him pause for thought.”

“More likely than anything
I
might do or say would do that,” agreed Felicity. “But, you know, I don't believe there's anything going on. I don't believe he's
bedding her, or that he did that with the girl back in Coombe Barton. I don't believe he even wants to. The danger lies in what other people think is going on.”

Charlie shrugged.

“You know him best. If it's not sex, what is it?”

“Vanity,” said Felicity firmly. “With him everything comes back to vanity. In the unlikely event of his writing a bestseller, he'd be absolutely unbearable.”

“He's well on the way to being that now,” said Charlie. “The question is: What do we do?”

They walked on for some time without anything occurring to either of them.

“There's the girl's parents,” said Felicity. Charlie thought about it.

“That would really put the seal on our success as newcomers to the village,” he said at last. “They no sooner get to know us, start to accept us, than we're warning parents to beware of your father, a man whom we brought with us to Slepton Edge.”

“Not a nice prospect,” agreed Felicity. “But we can't put our own reputation before what most parents would see as our duty.”

“Except that you don't know there's a sexual danger,” Charlie pointed out.

“No, I don't. And I don't
think
there is. Could I have grown up with a potential pedophile and not have had an inkling? Me with a novelist's eye already developing. But what a daughter doesn't
think
is happening is not evidence. And there's all sorts of other dangers than sexual ones that parents ought to be warned about.”

“Such as?”

“Making someone of an impressionable age into an acolyte—or is that a boy? Into the keeper of the flame, a besotted fan, a worshiper.”

Charlie raised his eyebrows with a sly grin.

“Somehow I don't recognize anything he could be charged with.”

“Oh, there isn't. Don't be such a typical policeman. There's a whole range of dangerous activities and attitudes that don't come within the criminal code and that parents ought to be warned against.”

“That depends on the parents,” said Charlie thoughtfully. “Didn't the ones in Devon recognize the dangers and put a stop to their daughter going up to the cottage?”

“Sort of,” said Felicity. “But I suspect only after a lot of prompting from the grandmother.”