A Fall from Grace (21 page)

While Felicity, with help from Carola, made the evening meal he thought over the last hour, and what it meant. He had purposely not asked Alison any questions. It would have been so easy to say, “Where was he working as a consultant?” at various points in the conversation, but he had held back. With most other people (not just suspects) such questions would have been perfectly natural, but now he realized both Chris and Alison did not want to talk about their past, and the questions might have resulted in an embarrassing blackout curtain descending that would ruin their friendship. And that would have been disastrous at any time, but particularly now. During the whole conversation Alison had not given the tiniest indication of where she and Chris originated and where they had worked. Only the remark about the Midlands accent of the girl on the till, made when she was off her guard, had given any indication at all, and that could have referred to a move her family had made in her childhood. Such secretiveness in a couple who were much occupied with the doings of other people was surely unnatural.

And yet, for all that, he was inclined to accept Alison's assurances that Chris was what he had first seemed when they had met in the village square: warm, intensely alive, genuinely more interested in everybody else rather than himself. All the things about Chris that had begun to seem self-promotional were also explicable as a result of this strong care for others
and their happiness.

Many of his ideas and actions could be naive and mistaken. The mayoral ambitions would surely turn out to be a delusion: if he won the contest to be mayor of Halifax he would find himself impotent to bring in any changes. He would be no more than a figurehead, stymied at every turn by the party politics of the council members. When all was said and done, Chris was trying to bring about a change of heart—something miles away from the ambitions and mendacities of party politics in this or any other democratic society. What good could an individual do, even at a local level, to change people's psyches, elevate their hopes and ambitions? Charlie could not avoid a thought that echoed one of Alison's: that for Chris the physician there was a future of undoubted usefulness; but for Chris the agony uncle, only one of frustration and failure.

“She mentioned the Midlands,” he said as he wound up his account of the conversation with Alison to Felicity, over their pork chops. “The accent, and how horrible it sounds at first hearing. It didn't sound as if the experience she had of it was when she was a child. I'm going to tell Mike Oddie to concentrate his attention on the Midlands.”

It was nearly a week later—a week in which Charlie had been busy with yet another demanding case involving municipal corruption in Bradford—that he and Felicity sat in the house that was gradually becoming “their” house, and she watched as he crumbled toast and toyed uninterestedly with the scrambled egg.

“You're bored and frustrated, aren't you?” she asked.

“Yes. I won't ask how you know. There are probably fifty different indicators that give me away.”

“There are. And you're frustrated because you've been stymied in your urge to investigate Dad's death.”

“Of course.”

“Which police regulations, quite rightly, as you keep saying, stop you doing.”

“Yes, quite rightly. It would be ridiculous otherwise. But that doesn't stop me wanting to.”

“You sound rather like a spoilt child. But since neither you nor I was that, I'll treat it as an automatic reaction to a murder on your own doorstep. What you
want to do, I take it, is to go round and interview a few suspects, possible witnesses and so on?”

“If there'd been any possible witnesses in the quarry they'd surely have come forward by now. The quarry in late afternoon on a Sunday in December isn't likely to attract crowds.”

“A point worth considering. Why was Dad there?”

“Yes, true. Of course the person I would really like to have across the table in an interview room is my very self-confident acquaintance Anne Michaels.”

“I bet,” said Felicity. “I presume self-confidence is a quality almost always fatal in a witness.”

“Never say always, but usually. But there's no question of talking to her because if Ben Costello got on to it—and he quite likely would, because Anne Michaels would probably talk, even boast about it, to her little circle of admirers—he would make sure the powers that be in the West Yorkshire Police came down like a ton of bricks on my head. So there's a big ‘No Entry' sign up, as far as she's concerned.”

“And we have no one else who might be second-best to talk to. Anne seems to have acted on her own in her machinations with Dad.”

Charlie was spreading marmalade on cold toast when an idea seemed to strike both of them simultaneously.

“There is—”

They looked at each other.

“Did you transmit that idea to me, or me to you?” asked Felicity.

“Doesn't matter. ‘With all my worldly goods' and so
on. Is it the same idea?
Who
is there?”

“I don't know her name. The other leader of the children's gang.”

“Yes,”
agreed Charlie enthusiastically. “And talking to her would be a lot easier than talking to Anne Michaels. Ben Costello may very well not be on to her, may not even know that there were two leaders of the gang. Come to that, he may not be interested in the gang at all. The interest he must have—or
ought
to have—in Anne Michaels springs from her connection with your father.”

“How do we find out her name?”

Charlie pondered.

“Any of the children could tell us. Then talk immediately, so that wouldn't do. What about a parent? Would you trust Mrs. Postgate to keep quiet if you sounded her out?”

“The mother, yes. Not the daughter.”

“Could you get on the phone to her, try to see if she knows anything? If she's got a chatterbox of a child it's quite likely that she's been told something, or has overheard something, since you were there.”

“I'll talk to her today, or tomorrow if I'm too busy at work. I need to catch her alone at home, I think. Right. I'm off to Leeds and teaching—”

But they were interrupted by the thump of post falling down to the doormat.

“Another rejection!” said Felicity. Charlie went to fetch it, and came back with a miscellaneous jumble of stuff.

“Crap mail, crap mail, crap mail,” he said, throwing
one after another—appeals to change their insurance coverage, their gas suppliers, and their sartorial tastes—into the wastepaper basket. “This is yours, and this and this. The package is for me, so it's not a rejection. Hebden Bridge—and it looks like Oddie's handwriting. Well, he's been quick. I'll keep this for tonight, and we—”

But he was interrupted by a great shout from the table.

“It's an acceptance! The novel's accepted! That Dorothea Matlock of Parson and Whitaker—the one who was so nice about
The Pleasures of Luton.
She's accepted it!”

They danced around the table, to the wonderment of Carola, who came in dressed for nursery school. Charlie said Felicity would be a danger to every other road user if she drove herself to Headingley, and they piled into his car, dropped Carola off at school, then drove toward Leeds talking about nothing but the new book,
Old Sores,
the wisdom and perception of Dorothea Matlock, the quiet excellence of the Parson and Whitaker fiction list and much else. They hadn't been so uncomplicatedly happy since before Rupert Coggenhoe had first proposed coming to live in the North.

“So it's the one I haven't read,” said Charlie. “The one you
refused
to let me read.”

“I didn't let you read it because if I don't adopt your suggestions you're hurt, and if I do I agonize over whether I should have done.”

“Now I
am
hurt. I've made some very good suggestions. You've said so yourself.”

“About two per novel. Actually I'm lying to you. The reason I didn't let you read this one is that you'd identify three of the characters with my father, my mother and myself, and you'd make suggestions to make them more like my father, mother and myself. Whereas to me they are just fictional characters, and I've tried to tear them away from real life.”

“Hmmm. I had a suspicion it was autobiographical. That probably means that when it's published you'll straightaway become favorite candidate for your dad's murder.”

“If he's not caught by then. And if it is murder.”

“You don't really doubt it was a murder, do you?”

Felicity thought about that.

“Strangely enough, I don't. I'm usually a very logical person, though, and I can't find any logical reason for believing that.”

“Your dad was a murder waiting to happen,” said Charlie. Then he realized with a start that Felicity, when he had first met her, was the obvious choice to do the deed.

It was a hard day for both of them. Felicity wanted to celebrate, then phone her new editor, plan a trip to London to talk over with her publishers (as she already thought of them) her next book. Instead she taught. Charlie wanted to read what Mike Oddie had found out. Instead he plowed through piles of paper evidencing municipal corruption. Felicity came home by train and bus, which enabled her to indulge in further bouts of delighted speculation. What speculation Charlie was able to indulge in as he drove was not at all delightful.
He still felt something of a traitor, a worm, over calling in a friend to investigate a friend. As soon as the whole family was home he settled down in his chair to chew over the information that Oddie and several hired helpers had accumulated.

Chris Carlson had been born in 1970 to a Swedish-born industrial manager and his English wife. He was an only child. The family lived at that time in Peterborough, and Chris was sent to a well-thought-of local private school. From there he went to medical school in London, and it was while he was there that his parents were killed in a road accident—his father dying instantly, his mother of her injuries five weeks later. A man was imprisoned for two years for dangerous driving. Chris sold his parents' home for ninety-five thousand pounds, and the estate as a whole amounted to a hundred and thirty thousand pounds. A nice sum for a young man, but not enough to live off (commented Oddie in the margin).

Chris was already engaged to and living at the home of Alison Hedley. For the last two years of his medical course they moved out to a flat in Pimlico, no doubt rejoicing in their new financial independence. Their marriage was a church one, in Chelsea, and on graduation he worked first in a hospital in Newark, then in a general practice in Witham. In 1996 he became consultant in the ear, nose and throat department of the Belchester Royal Hospital in Warwickshire.

Here information became a little more rounded and specific. The hospital had a staff newsletter and its own radio show. Once Chris's career progression had
been established by various determined ringers-round and specialists in local newspapers, hired by Oddie, one of the investigators was put on to a man who ran the radio station. He had been happy to talk into a tape recorder, and was very enthusiastic about Chris.

“He was a dream—just the sort of person a hospital radio station needs. He could talk about his own area of specialization, of course, but he had to be careful—and he always was—about using real-life cases. He could make the generalities interesting, though. Best of all was the nonmedical stuff. If there was something in the papers, or something on breakfast television that people were getting enthusiastic or steamed up about, he could comment in a sentence or two, and the sentence would be vivid and commonsensical. Politics he took in his stride, and he could now and then be cynical, but he remembered that politicians were human too, so there could be warmth and sympathy in his comments, as well as brickbats.”

Charlie saw very clearly at that point the birth of Chris Carlson, everybody's favorite kind of politician.

“Music? Mostly light classics and modern favorites. Anything from ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water' to Gilbert and Sullivan and the Hallelujah Chorus. I even remember him choosing Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘What Is Life?'—a real old favorite, that, from the days of
Housewives' Choice
. You could say he was a house-wife's choice himself—and I bet he asked for that because some old biddy in one of the wards had asked him to. All the elderly ladies loved him, and asked for him to be put on more often. As it was I
tried to get him on once a week, but that didn't satisfy the demand.”

Oddie's interviewer then asked him about Chris's leaving the hospital, and the man was quite unclear about that.

“That was a real black day for me, when I heard he was going. And it was just days after hearing it that he was gone. He told someone he needed a break from medicine, that the system had him all tensed up, and he needed to do something entirely different . . .”