A Fall from Grace (13 page)

Charlie was not inclined to give up on the inquisition.

“What exactly did you say?”

Chris sighed, and thought.

“I said, ‘That's wonderful for you, and for her too. But be careful people here don't get talking about it. It's always bad for children when they get talked about.' ”

“So what did he say?”

“He said, ‘Not her. She loves being talked about. And she's not a child.' ”

They looked at each other.

“Did he mean by that,” asked Charlie slowly, feeling his way, “that he was talking about a grown woman, not Anne Michaels? Or that Anne was very mature for her age?”

“I don't know. He walked off at that point—or stalked, I should say. But I took it to mean that Anne was in all important ways a grown-up woman. And that he didn't at all care for my interference.”

Charlie groaned.

* * *

Ben Costello grasped Felicity's arm and let her into the mortuary. They turned toward the far wall, and to a stone slab with a body on it. Felicity's heart thumped when she recognized the old green sports jacket. It had been bought long ago in an outfitter's in Exeter that catered to the gentry. It had been old-fashioned then, and now looked antiquated. She had still been spending university vacations at home when he bought it. Recently she'd seen him wearing it to do some desultory gardening—clearing up twigs and dead leaves. He'd hate being exposed on a mortuary slab in shabby old gardening clothes. Unless he'd caught on that the gentry rather specialized in dressing shabby.

They came closer to the body inside the clothes.

“Yes, that's him,” Felicity said.

She tried to take in the detail, the tear on the shoulder of the jacket, the dirt on the gray flannel trousers and the shoes, the sandy-colored smear across the left cheek. She must have a picture of him in her mind, to tell Charlie about later. She shuffled off Ben Costello's hand and went closer. The half of her mind that
believed in God was trying to frame a prayer. It came out as one that all his sins should be forgiven him. The skeptical side of her mind suggested this was a tall order.

She turned and walked back to the door, Costello following behind her. Outside she looked at him questioningly.

“Would you like me to get someone to drive you home?” he asked. “Or would you be willing to answer a few questions now?”

Felicity thought. She felt exhausted and yet excited. She felt ashamed of the latter emotion, but she could not deny it. She was now free, she was entirely her own person. Her own—and Charlie's, Carola's and Little Fetus's. She was her own world, unshadowed by the past. She need feel no guilt, no resentment. Charlie was at home looking after Carola. He wasn't going anywhere. She wanted to get it over.

“Questions, please,” she said.

“Good girl,” said Costello, approvingly if unfashionably. Felicity let herself be led to a room on the second floor. It was all very informal, with no suggestion that she was under suspicion. She thought with surprise that there had been no suggestion that there was anything to be suspicious about.

“Now,” said Ben Costello, “let's be clear from the outset—or maybe I should say unclear. Because we have no idea at the moment whether what we are talking about is an accident, suicide, manslaughter or murder. So all I am doing now is trying to make the situation and background clearer.” Felicity nodded. “Now,
did you see or talk to your father earlier today?”

“No. Neither.”

“When did you last see or talk to him?”

“Last night at the carol service.” She added, still embarrassed by the memories, “The encounter you saw.”

“When you interrupted your father and Anne Michaels?”

Felicity grimaced.

“I didn't mean to interrupt. I meant to join.” She heard the bitterness in her tone and said, “Sorry. I know you all saw, and drew your own conclusions. It would have been much better if I'd left them alone. You all probably thought there was something going on between my poor old father and this young chick. In point of fact I don't believe that for a moment. But I made sure everyone else did. Just what we didn't want.”

“Surely what you didn't want was for your father to get entangled in that way in the first place?”

“True. But just as bad is
not
to be entangled, but to be gossiped about as if you were.”

“And that had happened in the past to your father?”

Felicity took a deep breath, and decided to come clean. Why not? He was dead, and about to become part of her past.

“I think so. I mean I
know
there was gossip, but I think it was untrue. But that's why he suddenly plonked himself on us here in Yorkshire. It happened where he was living before, in Coombe Barton, in Devon. Pretty little cottage, hollyhocks in the garden,
roses climbing round the door.”

“Sounds idyllic,” said Ben Costello. “Why leave that to come to Yorkshire—except to be near you, of course.”

“That was the least of his reasons. There was a snake in the Eden, and he introduced it himself.”

And she told him, briefly, the gist of what had happened in Coombe Barton: his using Dora Catchpole when the other lady-slaves started melting away, and his attachment to himself of the woman's grandchild Kylie. Costello looked skeptical.

“Sounds innocent, if unwise.”

“That's about the limit of it, if I'm reading the rune right. But you can see why it would cause a fuss in a little community. First of all the women rallied round after my mother's death, but they soon found out that he was an exploiter—it's the sort of relationship he understands best. Under
stood.
And the thought must have occurred to them when he took up with this schoolgirl that the exploitative nature of the man could extend beyond what they'd offered him—work, services and so on—to a sexual exploitation, if he was interested in that way in young girls. And then the parents came into the picture, the whole family in fact, and the gossip mill started to turn speculation into fact. It's how the tabloid newspapers operate on a national level. Gossip does the same on the local level.”

Costello nodded, his dark eyes becoming calculating.

“And was the same thing happening in Slepton Edge?”

“I don't know. I don't think so—or rather, it was in
the earliest stages, with the women who had helped him settle in falling away as they saw they got no gratitude or genuine friendship. But the process had hardly started, and that's why I kicked myself over what happened last night. I practically announced my suspicions to the whole village by going to break up their conversation. Or so people must have thought.”

“It wasn't quite that—”

“But I could see speculation in all of your eyes, you who were watching. And the truth is, I didn't have any suspicions of my dad—not on the sexual level. But I was afraid that he'd use his little fame to tie the girl to him, get a willing disciple, and I saw that that could have consequences nearly as disastrous as a May-December sexual relationship would have.”

“She looked to me a very self-possessed and modern young lady.”

“She is—at fifteen! And she's a budding actress in the drama stream at Westowram High. Quite brilliant, Charlie says. And she has a little gang of younger children who go round targeting newcomers to the village—or that seems to be what they're doing.”

“Yes—Harridance, your husband's contact, has told me about that. But what are you saying about the girl's motives?”

Felicity thought hard before replying.

“That she could have been entering into this relationship—
luring
Dad into it—with destructive intentions: blackmail, or perhaps just making his reputation in the village so bad that he was forced out. Or maybe just destroying him as a person for the fun of it. That
little gang of children suggests she likes power, rejoices in it, just any manifestation of it.”

Costello shifted uneasily in his chair, but he conceded, “I could imagine she's pretty hot to handle. Difficult for the parents.”

“I was thanked by them this morning because—they said—Dad was making a change for the better in their daughter by encouraging her literary ambitions. The wilder side, they thought, was encouraged by the drama interest, presumably bringing out the exhibitionist streak in her. Nancy Stoppard said she thought parents understood their children best. In this case I rather doubt it.”

“Though to be fair, they could be right about the drama.” Ben Costello sat back in his chair and thought. “All this is very interesting, but only if there's more to your dad's death than meets the eye.”

Felicity nodded.

“And what meets the eye, do you think?” she asked.

“An accidental fall during a walk on his own when his mind was occupied—with his latest book, perhaps, or with his lovely young disciple.”

“It's possible. So is a heart attack.”

Costello leaned forward, now all energy.

“But you assumed, as soon as you heard of your father's body in the quarry, that it was—well, at least that there was something suspicious about it.”

“How do you know that?”

“The whole direction of this conversation.”

Felicity thought for a while without answering.

“I suppose I did,” she said at last. “Yes, I definitely did. And now I come to think of it, it
is
rather absurd, to assume that about a man in his early seventies. I think it must be the combination of learning about the events back in Coombe Barton, seeing something similar perhaps starting here, and then the sudden shock of the death. And there was also the fact that my father was a very dislikeable man. Not spectacularly awful, like Evelyn Waugh, but still deeply unpleasant because he was so self-obsessed, manipulative, unfeeling.”

“You really disliked your father?”

“Yes.”

“Did Charlie dislike him too?”

“Charlie can speak for himself.”

“Of course. But I'd like to hear your opinion.”

“In a different way I suppose you could say he disliked him, though it's much less personal with him. He disliked him for what he did to me. I was a very mixed-up kid when Charlie first knew me. But until recently Charlie barely knew him. Intense exposure to him on three or four family occasions—that had been the limit of it.”

“You're being very honest with me.”

“Charlie is a policeman. He really believes that being honest with the police saves a lot of time and trouble.”

“Good for him. Pity he can't have anything to do with this investigation, if there turns out to be anything to investigate, which frankly I doubt.”

“Of course if that does turn out to be the case, he'll be completely honest with you. And anyway, we've nothing to hide.”

“Oh, everyone has something to hide,” said Costello cheerfully.

* * *

“Anyway,” said Charlie to Chris, still sitting in the living room chair, “you did as much as you could be expected to do to warn poor old Rupert in your first real talk to him. I doubt if you'd have got through to him even if you'd talked to him a lot. Quite apart from anything else, I think he'd have run a mile from being classed with Desmond Pinkhurst and all the others who come to you for advice.”

“If he even noticed that they did,” said Chris.

“Oh, I think he would have. The thing about egotistical people is not that they don't notice things, it's that everything they notice is transformed in their own minds into how it affects
them,
or contrasts with them or is of use to them. Rupert would not have wanted to be thought in need of advice. If he had any problems, he was the one who could solve them. And he was, in his own mind, the great novelist who saw and understood everything.”

“Anyway, I'm glad you don't think anything I said could have affected what happened.”

“How could it have? Do you imagine Rupert was so worried by the possibilities that you had spelled out that he wandered off the path and over the edge?”

Chris looked sheepish again.

“Put it like that it does sound daft.”

“Set your mind at rest. It's not something that even needs mentioning. There won't be any record of disastrous advice given by you should you decide to run for mayor.”

Chris stood up at once and looked hard at Charlie.

“Why do you mention that? I told you, I haven't decided yet.”

“Not consciously. But I think you will.”

“And you disapprove.”

It wasn't a question, but Charlie answered it as one.

“No, I don't. But I just can't see why you should want to do a nonjob like that. Not if you weigh it against going back into medicine in some shape or form.”

“But it doesn't have to be a nonjob,” protested Chris. “It can be made into something really useful, and close to ordinary people. They could be encouraged to come direct to the mayor's office with their difficulties, and know they'd speak to me or to someone who really understood whatever it was that they were het-up about.”

Charlie raised his eyebrows.

“Chris, if you got in, you'd have the apparatus of all the three main political parties against you. You'd be even more of a cipher than if you were a political nominee.”

“I don't agree. You're being much too negative.”

“I want to see you being
really
useful. You're in danger of deceiving yourself. The problem is that you are coming to regard yourself as indispensable, whereas what you really are is an optional extra.”

Chris laughed, but there was unease in the laughter. When he took his leave a few minutes later Charlie regretted having hurt him. Really he liked and admired
Chris more than almost anyone he'd met. He was so fresh, and open and unafraid. On the man-to-man level he was warm, humorous, sympathetic and useful. Was the human level, Charlie wondered, what Chris had not found in his work as a consultant?