A Mansion and its Murder (19 page)

‘Didn’t anybody wonder? Anybody who knew her well? Your sister was an unlikely sick nurse.’

‘Everybody thought she was ashamed. The failure of a marriage was a cause for shame then. And in addition, the wreck of all her hopes … Mary had made no secret of them, to those close to her. It was thought she couldn’t face people.’

‘In fact, she was buried in the little copse on the far edge of the Blakemere estate.’

‘I don’t know the details. That was taken care of by your papa. All my family knew was that she had been buried, in secret, and that the helpers had been sworn to secrecy and paid handsomely. My father said the how and where of the disposal were immaterial to him. He and my mother had to cope with the appalling shock of a beloved daughter’s sudden death, in terrible circumstances, and before their very eyes. I think they behaved very well.’

Admirably in character, anyway: they’d pocketed a large lump sum and a subsidy for life and beyond.

‘When did you learn all this?’ I asked.

‘My father told me in the last weeks of his life. The First War had begun, so Peter’s life was uncertain. In any case, he had never married. My father had begun to treat me as the future head of the family. In fact it will die out with me. I suppose the same will be true of yours.’

‘There are more distant Fearings,’ I said, getting up because I did not want to enlarge on the subject to her. ‘I really am most grateful to you. It’s been an odd conversation, hasn’t it?’

‘Very odd,’ she said, licking her painted lips with relish. ‘I find it strange that no one had confided the matter to you before.’

‘The answer may partly be that as long as my uncle Frank was alive he was liable for prosecution for murder, and my father for a lesser offense. My father died first, so he never broached the matter to me. Also,’ I added, with an attempt at dignity, ‘I was an unloved child, as you have hinted. My father and I became quite close by the end of his life, but there was always between us a certain reserve, a sense of areas of the past that we did not care to go into. In business matters we were close, but in personal matters we were … reticent.

‘Well, I think I’ve taken up enough of your time with my family affairs.’ That seemed
ungracious, so I added, truthfully: ‘It’s been a revelation. Thank you.’

She shook my hand, mischief and satisfaction mingling in her eyes. She was very pleased to have rearranged my mental landscape for me. Then she walked out of the room, straight-backed, not quite certain on her feet, but looking for all the world as she must have looked when putting an end to a King’s Birthday Party in a foreign embassy, after mixing with dubious émigrés caught in a part of the world they despised.

Leaving me to my thoughts. Except that I had little time to indulge them. I was due to collect Ed from Fearing’s at half past four, when we would both head back to Blakemere. One of the flunkies summoned me a taxi, and I walked down the grand staircase I had wanted to show off to Ed, and out into the street. Ernie Bevin was being manoeuvred into one of the Foreign Office’s official cars.

‘Have a hinteresting talk with the old biddies?’ he called.

‘Very interesting with one of them,’ I said, bending down to talk through the open window. ‘I’ll tell you about it one day when you’ve got a couple of hours to spare. But I won’t be recommending any extra loot for them.’

‘That’s as well, because we’d hignore it if you did,’ he said, chuckling with pleasure at putting a top banker in her place. ‘We’re not throwing money around on superannuated figure ’eads.’

As he drove off, I settled myself into my taxi. There was an unexploded bomb alert in the Strand, the driver explained, and we’d have to go to the City via Victoria. It suited me. I had some shifting of psychological furniture to undertake.

The first thing I had to face was the change in my mental picture of my beloved, charming, ever-fascinating uncle Frank. He was not as I had always seen him to be. He had entered into a really sordid marriage arrangement, and he’d then climaxed that by becoming a wife-killer. The marriage arrangement I could cope with: I had already taken on board the essential nature of the reluctant union. It had diminished my uncle in my eyes, but I had also regarded it with indignation, as something forced on him by his family. The murder was something else. I told myself to think of it as manslaughter, an act of generous rage at the ridicule of his son. I rearranged my ideas of him around that explanation, to try to see if they fitted.

They
nearly
did, but the more I thought about it the more the explanation seemed like
special pleading. In fact, it would make more sense to see my uncle as a charming figure but a totally self-indulgent one: someone whose whole life consisted of doing what he wanted, and expecting other people to pick up the bills. Had anything of any geographical or scientific value ever been discovered during those expeditions of his that had cost so dear? Another thought suddenly occurred to me: had he, indeed, ever been on them at all? Were they, perhaps, a cover for months spent around the fleshpots of Shanghai, Cairo, or wherever?

And when Uncle Frank had been forced into actually doing something against his will to get his bills paid (there was, to my banker’s brain, something pretty undignified about a man of thirty-odd running up debts and expecting his family automatically to stump up for them), he had made the worst of things by entering into a detailed bargain of self-interest with someone he disliked and despised. He may even have chosen his wife on the basis of preferring someone who would wreak most damage on the Fearing family’s self-esteem. When the whole bargain had gone disastrously wrong he had – again, in one of those acts of unchecked impulse and self-indulgence – killed her.

And then there was his relationship with me. Could that have been something very different from what I had seen it as at the time? I faced this possibility with reluctance. It was the most painful thing of all. There had never seemed to me, not then nor since, the slightest cloud of anything – how was one to put it? – anything dubious or dirty in his love for me, in our mutual delight in each other. Yet apparently his ‘favourite form of sinning is with one who’s just beginning’ as Leporello sings at Sadler’s Wells. His preference was for working-class girls, but still … could his attitude to me have been entirely untainted by sex, by lust, call it what you will? Could I be entirely happy knowing the sort of girls, still children, whom he must have gone in search of if he really did frequent the fleshpots of Shanghai or Cairo? Could it not be said, viewed at its worst, that I flirted with him, and he with me? The only difference being that my flirtatiousness was untainted with sex, and that his was not.

A sudden stab of resentment flowed through me: why had he not written to me, as he so easily could? Why had he not wanted to reassure me that he was still alive? Of course there were plenty of reasons, including his liability for
prosecution, even possibly for hanging. But could one of them be that, by the time, in his negligent way, he had got around to considering it, I was more or less grown up? Of no interest to him any more?

And then again that preference for
working-class
girls: if he had felt it, should he not have mastered it, as many sexual proclivities have to be mastered? But he was obviously not the man to do that, or even attempt it. He was an upper-class exploiter of the unprotected, and one of the worst and most blatant kind. And in this as in other exploits of his, the family picked up the bill and bought the silence of the girls and their families.

My uncle Frank was an amoral, self-indulgent, exploitative cad, a typical leisure-class bounder. And my love for him had left me emotionally ruined. But I put that last thought behind me: I had done too much with my life – far more than many emotionally fulfilled people – to worry about emotional damage.

When we finally got to the Bank I sent the flunkey in to fetch Ed. When he finally jumped into the cab, his whole body showed his excitement. He was full of the wonders of his day, and he went on and on about them as we began the ride to Marylebone.

‘That foreign business section fascinates me,’ he said, among much else. ‘That’s going to take off as things return to normal in Europe. That’s where the future lies. One of the blokes there was saying that people shouldn’t write Germany off. He says the potential there is fantastic …’

I let him go on. Eventually he remembered his manners enough to stop talking about the Bank and inquire about my day. I had my approach prepared.

‘Oh, much more interesting than I expected,’ I said. ‘In the delegation I was receiving there happened to be your grandfather’s sister-in-law – sister of his first wife, that is.’

Did I imagine it, or was there a flicker of worry in his eyes?

‘Didn’t know anything about a first wife.’

‘Oh, she was dead by the time he married your grandmother,’ I said. I don’t think I imagined his relief. Ed’s thoughts were becoming, or had always been, a mite dynastic, for all his naive front and puppyish air of careless blundering. ‘So there’s no question of his children being illegitimate.’

‘That’s a relief,’ he said, more casually. ‘Australians are always calling people bastards, but it’s better not to be one.’

‘You mentioned a photograph of your grandfather’s wedding day,’ I went on.

‘That’s right. On the sideboard back home.’

‘Was his bride
much
younger than himself?’

‘Hell, yes. Hardly more than a girl. These days I reckon he’d get called a cradle-snatcher, or a dirty old man. If you can believe my dad, he had to be forced to actually marry her – a real shotgun affair. With her family holding the shotgun.’

‘Yes, I don’t think my uncle was a man of conscience,’ I said sadly.

I put the subject aside as distasteful, and let Ed get back to talking about banking. He was still so much of a boy that I was loath to distrust him. Who but a boy would tell me things I was bound to know about every department in a bank I owned and had run? Who but a boy would lay down the law about things I inevitably knew a hundred times more about than he did? There was a delicious naivete about him that was delightful.

‘I really fell for the place,’ he said. ‘And by the end of the day I felt I was beginning to understand the system. Do you think it’s in the blood?’

‘Could be. Let’s hope you’ve missed out on
some of the other things that could be there, too.’

‘It set me wondering: maybe that’s where my future lies. It’s not often that I’ve found anything so fascinating from the moment I started to go into it. Do you think I should be considering aiming for a job in a bank?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘It could be arranged. We have excellent relations with Coutts and Barings, and with most of the big outfits. They might be willing to give you a start. It would be better not to think in terms of Fearing’s. It might alarm Digby. And the age of nepotism is over.’

‘That would be beaut,’ he said.

Again I thought I detected a dying fall, a note of disappointment, in his voice. I felt my mouth setting itself into a firm line. I am too old to be taken in a second time by male charm.

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A Mansion and its Murder
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ROGUE’S GALLERY

 A S
HORT
S
TORY
C
OLLECTION

How far would a child go to rid himself of a despised parent? Or a man of the cloth to be elected pope? From murderous ministers and conniving cardinals to the dark imagination of a schoolboy and the suspicions of an ageing Mr Mozart, this unique collection of Robert Barnard’s short stories takes you on a trail of murder, mystery and intrigue with some of his finest – and darkest – literary creations.

Including the prizewinning ‘Rogue’s Gallery’ and ‘Sins of Scarlet’, this eclectic collection proves that, whether reimagining the life of cultural icons or spying opportunity for morbid crimes amidst events grand and domestic, novelist Robert Barnard is the master of the short story mystery.