Fete Fatale (22 page)

Today, however, the first image to come up on the screen seized my mind. It was the five-forty news, and as usual the first item was
the miners' strike—for the country was going through one of its regular large-scale industrial upheavals. There was uproar coming from the set, as there had been the night before, and would be the night after: there were pictures of running battles, as overweight thugs hurled whatever came to hand at the police, and police did thorough jobs with their truncheons whenever they thought (wrongly) that they were out of sight of a television camera. It was a depressing spectacle, and I was about to switch off when the picture changed to one of an official of the South Yorkshire Miners' Executive—a white collar spokesman, though he didn't in fact wear a white collar, or a tie. He immediately launched into the familiar routine: ‘Our members, subjected to extreme police violence and intimidation, launched a limited retaliatory action . . . reminiscent of a Fascist dictatorship . . . police state . . . rights of the working people of this country to pursue traditional trade union picketing in a peaceful manner . . . '

It was done with a Pecksniffian relish, a delighted going-through-the-motions, that did not want or expect to be believed. And the person going through the motions was Mary Morse's brother John. No doubt about it. The beard did not disguise the sly, resentful face; the relish might have been directed, through the camera, at Mary, at her dead mother, and at the whole edifice of Morsism.

No question now why Mary wanted to keep quiet about her younger brother. Not bankruptcy or lunacy, but militant trade unionism, more shameful than either, and more hideously culpable in Hexton's eyes, because embraced quite voluntarily. I resolved on the morrow to spread myself through town, asking everyone: ‘Did you see Mary's brother on the telly last night? Wasn't he good?'

Or would I, perhaps, have something still more pressing to do on the morrow?

I fed Jasper, got something—anything—marked ‘For One' out of the freezer, then settled down with a little notebook on the sofa. Only by writing things down could I bring some sort of order to the confusion. Because, though I was learning things, though I was remembering things, still the various pieces did not seem to be fitting into the same jigsaw. I had gone at the case with too many preconceptions. On the one hand there was the jigsaw labelled
‘Hexton—' the public and private faces of the town, its dated customs, its mealy-mouthed morality, its collapsing series of façades. On the other hand, there seemed to be another jigsaw . . .

I took my pen, and on a blank sheet of paper wrote:

Change

Jasper was restive, and managing to throw balls for himself. He had jumped over and across me several times before I had thought through the implications of that one word. When I had, I pondered again, and wrote down the word:

Priest

This provoked less thought, and I just added ‘check' beside it, before writing:

Hexton

After a time I wrote ‘check too' by this word, and wrote a last entry that I thought rather interesting:

Nonsense language?

It was not, I had to conclude, much. It was certainly not, in police language, a ‘case'. Nevertheless, I was sure that it was in some sense the answer. I went into the kitchen to peel some potatoes, and to heat up the frozen ‘For One' dish. It turned out to be a peculiarly nasty braised something-or-other that I had made long ago, before I knew better than to try out
The Times'
s cookery correspondent's recipes. It didn't matter. After the first mouthful I didn't really notice what I was eating. I was too preoccupied with thinking the thing through, with filling in the areas around the few clues and indications I had gathered together in my mind. When I had finished my meal, and washed out the taste with a glass of wine, I got on the phone to the Superintendent.

The Superintendent, though I haven't mentioned it, had been in constant touch with me over the case, ringing me once and
sometimes twice a day. I haven't mentioned it because he rarely told me anything of any great moment. I was, after all, a suspect, and would remain one until somebody was arrested. So I heard how many tourists the police had interviewed, how they were attempting to establish the precise doings and whereabouts of many people (including, no doubt, me, though he didn't say so) at the relevant period of the afternoon, how the army had put the drunken lout who threw Marcus's body into the river on a charge, and so on. I never got any sense that he was any forrader, and I don't think he did either.

‘I sometimes think,' he had said to me the day before, ‘that this murder was done on the spur of the moment, and it was pure luck that there was no one around to see it.'

‘That's what Father Battersby thinks,' I said.

‘That sort of murder is the very devil to solve, especially if the chap keeps his head afterwards.'

‘Or her head,' I had said.

Now I got on to him and explained some of the things I had been thinking of, the way some little, unnoticed things had begun to form a pattern in my mind. He was sympathetic, but quiet—very quiet. I presumed he was unimpressed.

‘What you have there is a motive, not a case,' he said.

‘I realize that. I was hoping that establishing the motive might be the first step to establishing the case.'

‘Certainly there are things there we could check up on—things we would want to check up on before we did anything at all in the way of confrontation. Basically, what we would be depending on would be the suspect breaking down. A chancy thing, that. The suspect clearly hasn't broken down so far.'

‘What I was wondering,' I said, ‘was whether I might not be more likely to effect the breaking-down than you. The personal touch, rather than the majesty of the law.'

Well, we talked about this for some time, and the Super did not greatly like it, but as he said: he could not dictate to me who I could see and who I could not see. And as I said, I had a fair bit to do before I would be ready. Finally he said he would have a man keeping an eye on me all the next day, and he would call for a second, to police both front and back doors, any time I should go into a house other than my own. I said that was all right by me. I
had not, to tell you the truth, given much thought to my own safety, probably because I was still in the numbness of the newly-bereaved, taking each day as it came. ‘Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life' is no doubt a fine inspirational text for some, but not for those for whom the rest of their lives yawns empty and lonely compared with what had gone before. I was not very interested in the rest of my life, so I didn't greatly care about my own safety.

But I did very much want to get the murderer of Marcus.

The next day I took Jasper for his walk very early on. We went to the meadows—the first time I had been there since the day of the fête. There was nobody around on them, except the police constable who was keeping an eye on me from a distance. Jasper was delighted with his company, and kept running up to him, wagging his tail, and trying to persuade him to throw balls. The young man looked embarrassed, as if he were a spy whose cover had been blown.

If he has an early walk, Jasper is usually all right until tea-time. I didn't know how long things were likely to take that day. When I got in I had a cup of coffee, did some checking in Marcus's records, and planned things out. It should look as like a normal day as possible, I thought. I put some library books in my shopping-bag and sallied forth.

People were getting used to seeing me in the streets by now. They had decided it was all right just to nod and pass on. When I went into the shops, though, the other shoppers felt trapped. Even if it was only a supermarket, they felt our trolleys might meet round a corner and they be compelled to make some unorthodox gesture. That morning I went into Mr Hussein's to get some of his pâté, and said brightly to the other waiting souls:

‘Did you see Mary Morse's brother on television last night?'

No, they all nodded dumbly.

‘Oh yes. The NUM spokesman for the miners at Scunthorpe. He was
so
articulate. Mary must be awfully proud.'

And I smiled wickedly.
She's
back to her normal bitch form, the other shoppers thought, or some Hexton formulation that meant the same thing. But I'm sure they went away and passed it on. In Hexton that is the sort of thing that is bound to be passed on.

Then I went to the library. It is a rather damp, dreary building on the outskirts of the old town, and a general air of Mary Morse hangs over it. Since the sort of middle-brow, middle-class, middle-IQ novel that is approved of here is not produced much these days, they will buy almost anything you specially order, but they do so with an air of ‘Are you
sure
this is the sort of thing you want to read?' The librarians are scraps of gentility who look as if they had been personally screened by Thyrza Primp, as very probably they had. They made no comment on my un-Hexton reappearance in the first week of widowhood, merely compressing their lips and handing me my cards. They noticed me, though—noticed that I didn't do my usual thing of flipping through the books on the ‘Recently Returned' trolley, in the faint hope of finding a vintage Christie I hadn't read, or the new Fay Weldon. Instead I went straight along to the super-dreary reference section—roped off, for some reason, from the rest—and settled myself down at a table. ‘What on earth is she doing?' I could almost hear them asking each other. The reference library is quite unfrequented as a rule, like the mausoleum of a once-proud family that has died out. I was rather surprised to find that it had what I wanted. ‘She's at the dictionaries!' I could imagine the librarians saying in their bewilderment. ‘The foreign dictionaries! Do you think she's doing crosswords to while away the time?' When I left I just grabbed a volume from the shelves to take out. The librarians looked at me through narrowed slits of eyes, and when I got outside I found out why. The book was called
It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet
.

The policeman was loitering around in a conspicuous fashion when I came out into the street again. He followed me at a respectful distance as I made my way through town again, and up to Mrs Nielson's. As usual, I heard Gustave's staccato yap, and Gwen Nielson calming him down: ‘
There's
a marvellous watch-dog! There's a clever fellow! Will my boy go into the kitchen while Mumsie sees who it is?'

When she came to the door she smiled deprecatingly as the hail of barks continued from inside the house.

‘Sorry about him. He'll be all right when he knows it's you. Come in. Is it too late for morning coffee?'

‘Actually, I've had more than my fair share of morning coffee and afternoon tea recently. I just wanted a bit of help, and I don't need anything to go with it.'

‘Right. Here—Gustave, you daft animal. Got who it is? Right? Now, out you go and have a sniff around the garden!'

And she heaved him out of the back door and led me through into the sitting-room.

‘Well, now: how are you getting on?'

‘Not bad, not bad. I'm finding out a variety of delectable little secrets, some of which I may tell you, some of which I cannot. Did you know, for example, that one of Mary's brothers is helping to organize the miners' strike?'

‘No!'

‘But he is! No great credit to my detective ability that I found it out. He happened to be on television a day or two after I had studied his picture in Mary's sitting-room. I expect most of Hexton's forgotten what he looks like by now. Imagine—a Marxist Morse! Worse than a blasphemous Bishop! No wonder they've kept quiet about him, and Mary has more or less turned his picture to the wall.'

‘I presume you're telling everyone?'

‘What do you think? About some of the other things I have to be a little more circumspect . . . But that wasn't really what I came to talk about today. I have found out one or two things, things that I think are relevant, and what I'm trying to do now is recreate what Marcus saw and heard during the last hour or two of his life. Now, you remember when he came along to talk to me by my stall, just before we two went off for lunch?'

‘Yes. We were waiting for Mr Horsforth to turn up.'

‘That's it. Hexton's Godot he was, wasn't he? Now, it occurs to me that what Marcus saw when he was standing by my stall wasn't necessarily what I saw. He was much taller than I, after all, and I was hemmed in behind my stall, looking straight over to you, and the people at stalls on either side of you. Now Marcus was much freer, and could look all around. I thought that you, being opposite,
might have seen things that I
wouldn't
have seen, but that Marcus
would.'

‘Well, of course I could see the stalls on your side of the aisle—would you call it an aisle? There was Mrs Slackbridge on the one side, Mr Turnhill on the other. Those you would have seen yourself. Then, further down—'

‘Yes?'

‘On one side there was Mrs Fox with the clothing exchange, on the other, Howard Culpepper with the toys.'

‘That's right, though in fact I didn't notice Howard until very late in the day.'

‘Does one ever? He had a pile of toys and jigsaws and games, and they cost practically nothing, and the children were supposed to be able to bring their old ones along and swap them, though hardly any of them did, that I saw.'

‘He didn't do good business?'

‘I don't think so. Not having any children, he doesn't seem to have much of a touch with them. Talks down rather, and puts on false ho-ho chuckles. He didn't seem to go down well at all. I really don't know how people get chosen for these jobs. Look at me: I can tell a runny jam from a firm one, but I don't even like the stuff, and I couldn't for the life of me
make
a jar.'